Myanmar Is Restoring Temples to Rebuild its Heritage
Now Myanmar’s new civilian government is planning a fresh World Heritage bid for Bagan, and experts say
that because the 2016 earthquake destroyed some of the military’s clumsiest restoration work, the new bid stands a better chance of succeeding.
Some community groups in Bagan, however, fear that a World Heritage designation would exacerbate existing restrictions on where
and how they can build homes or operate businesses in New Bagan, a district on the city’s dusty outskirts where people were forced to resettle in 1990 after the military government evicted them from a monument zone downtown.
In the 1990s, the military government abandoned its World Heritage bid because it feared its "really horrible" restoration work would face harsh scrutiny from international experts, said Pierre Pichard, a longtime consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization who first visited Bagan in 1975.
Hotels are still being built in the monument zone,
and local elites see a potential World Heritage designation as a source of high-end tourism revenue, not a tool for curbing the city’s glaring social inequality, said U Khin Maung, the chairman of the Bagan Development Committee and a tour guide in the monument zone.
Instead of leaving the monument zone free of development, the military government allowed for the construction there of several high-end hotels, including one on the site of a former school, said U Aung Shwe, the second secretary at the Bagan Development Committee, a nongovernmental organization
that provides free ambulance, funeral and firefighting services for many of the city’s poorest residents.
Myanmar plans to submit a World Heritage bid to Unesco for the temples of Bagan,
which were clumsily restored after one earthquake and since damaged by another.