Rising through the mist of the forest at dawn, with spires reaching more than 200ft, few sights on earth have impressed travellers like the temples and pagodas of Bagan. “Jerusalem, Rome, Kiev, Benares,” wrote the Scottish journalist and colonial administrator James George Scott in 1910, “none of them can boast the multitude of temples, and the lavishness of design and ornament”.
Lying close to the major Sagaing fault line in the centre of Myanmar, the 2,200 11th-century Buddhist monuments have long been susceptible to seismic events. “The last earthquake in 2016 caused considerable damage to key monuments,” said Dr Stephen Murphy, a senior lecturer in Asian art at Soas University of London. He added that it was unclear whether Friday’s earthquake had caused a similar scale of damage.
