Look, there’s a violence to beauty this complete, this unrelenting. You stand there among these temples (thousands of them, no bullshit, actual thousands) rising out of the dust like broken teeth in some ancient god’s jaw, and the whole damned thing refuses to comfort you with meaning. It just is. Stupas and pagodas crumbling in real time, brick by sunbaked brick, while hot air balloons drift overhead carrying tourists with their phones out, trying to capture something that doesn’t give a fuck about being captured.
This is what happens when empires build monuments to their own impermanence and then, surprise, turn out to be impermanent. The Bagan kingdom lasted a couple centuries (11th to 13th if you’re keeping score) and they spent that whole time stacking bricks toward heaven, temple after temple after temple, like some obsessive compulsive divinity reaching for something they couldn’t name. Marco Polo supposedly called it one of the finest sights in the world, but Marco Polo said that about half of Asia, so who the fuck knows.
What gets you isn’t the grandeur of the Bagan temples. Grandeur’s cheap, any dictator with a construction budget can pull off grandeur. What gets you is the erosion, the way these structures are simultaneously there and not there, how they hold the light at dawn like they’re remembering what it meant to be new, then turn to shadow and dust by noon. The earthquakes keep coming, including a bad one in 2016 that damaged hundreds of temples, because that’s what earthquakes fucking do. This is Myanmar, where nothing stays intact, where history keeps punching you in the face and asking if you’ve had enough yet.
The monks in their robes moving through the ruins understand something the balloons don’t. They’re not here for the vista, they’re here because this is where you go when you want to remember that everything (the sacred, the profane, the stone, the faith) all of it crumbles at exactly the same rate. That’s not pessimism, that’s physics. And somehow, in the wreckage, there’s something worth seeing. Not Instagram worth. Worth worth.