Myanmar: Bagan 2

Bagan lies in upper Myanmar, and is about a hour's flight from the capital city Yangon.  But it is a world's apart from Yangon.  The road from the airport was a long dusty road with few vehicles and no street lamps.  While residents in Yangon were dressed in western clothes generally, the traditional longyi ( a type of sarong) was seen on both males and females.  While some wore slippers (easy to slip on and off, especially because temples must be entered with the bare feet), many walked without any shoes.  It was amazing to see elderly men walking on the hot mud roads without any shoes, but they saunter on oblivious to the curious stares of the tourists.

Bagan was where I learnt that shoes/slippers/socks are not allowed into places of worship and the areas around them.  For analogy, shoes must be removed from the point of entering the 表参道, and the  表参道, especially for large grand shrines, are usually quite a walk away from the main prayer halls.  But shoes must come off, and it was a lot of ouching and moaning as I walked the ground, unfamiliar with the sensation of not having shoes on my feet.  Obviously, after each visit, it became a vigourous scrubbing of the blackened soles of my feet.  Walking barefooted on any surface exposed to the elements is no joke, be they marble (slippery and prone to inducing falls after rain), mud, concrete or asphalt.

Bagan is also where the Nats (spirits) are enshrined.  It is rather difficult for me to understand the concept of Nat worship, much less explain it, but I wonder if an appropriate analogy such as Shintoism and Buddhism can be drawn here.  Unfortunately, a day trip to Mount Popa, considered perhaps as a sacred area for Nat worship was out of the question.  There are 37 Nats, and their images are enshrined together in the compound of the Shwezigon Pagoda.

Two major architectures can be observed in Bagan: the squarish Mon temple, and the Bagan style temples. 

55 kings were believed to have made Bagan their capital between AD 107 and 1369, before the capital moved to other cities subsequently as the Bagan dynasty ended,