Myanmar is home to Bagan, an archaeological zone with thousands of Buddhist temples and monuments.
Bagan lies on a plain beside the Irrawaddy River in central Myanmar. It was the capital of the Pagan Kingdom from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, when rulers and wealthy patrons built a dense landscape of religious structures.
More than 2,000 temples, pagodas and monasteries survive in the wider archaeological zone, although the original number was much higher. Earthquakes, weather and centuries of change affected the monuments, with major damage occurring during the 2016 earthquake.
Bagan is sometimes called a single temple, but it is a large historic landscape. UNESCO added the Bagan Archaeological Area and Monuments to its World Heritage List in 2019.