Bagan’s Conservation History and the Adopt-a-Pagoda Program

This chapter provides a detailed account of different phases of conservation and the marks they left and continue to leave on Bagan. Conservation phases discussed are determined on the basis of different actors involved in conservation interventions that were carried out at Bagan over specific time periods. Changes in actors such as donors and executers of conservation activities were often related to changes in the country’s governance or to other significant events that had tremendous effects on on-site activities, such as the 1975 earthquake. In this book, conservation is understood as a meaning-making practice that expresses the significance of a place through materiality and working towards a specific physical condition. The investigation into conservation at Bagan therefore includes not only professional conservation interventions but also other activities, infrastructure measures, and construction that were not necessarily aimed at Bagan’s conservation in a purely professional sense. However, this chapter also contains critical reflections of how developments in global professional conservation practice have played out in Bagan’s conservation history. A key insight from this chapter, is the long missing detailed account and spatial analysis of the Adopt-a-Pagoda Program, which is contrasted with the other conservation phases throughout Bagan’s history. The comprehensive analysis of this mass production of quasi-historical monuments integrated with major infrastructural developments provides for architectural and archaeological evidence that forms part of the counternarrative that this book aims at constructing.