According to Burmese chronicles, King Pyinbya fortified the city of Bagan around this year, beginning its transformation into the capital of the Pagan Kingdom. Over the following centuries, Bagan's rulers built thousands of temples across the Irrawaddy plain, creating one of the world's greatest concentrations of Buddhist architecture.
The dating of Bagan's founding rests on traditional Burmese royal chronicles rather than contemporary inscriptions, and scholars treat the exact year cautiously. What is certain is that by the 11th and 12th centuries, under kings like Anawrahta and Kyanzittha, Bagan had become the glittering capital of the first unified Burmese kingdom.
At its height, more than 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas, and monasteries covered the 26-square-mile plain beside the Irrawaddy River, built by a wealthy and devout population competing to earn religious merit through construction. Roughly 2,200 survive today, their red-brick spires rising from the dry central plain in one of Southeast Asia's most extraordinary landscapes.
Bagan's political power collapsed after Mongol incursions in the 13th century, but the temples remained sites of pilgrimage and reconstruction for centuries afterward. Today the site draws comparisons to Angkor Wat as a testament to the ambitions of a vanished Buddhist kingdom.