Myanmar Is Restoring Temples to Rebuild its Heritage<br />Now Myanmar’s new civilian government is planning a fresh World Heritage bid for Bagan, and experts say<br />that because the 2016 earthquake destroyed some of the military’s clumsiest restoration work, the new bid stands a better chance of succeeding.<br />Some community groups in Bagan, however, fear that a World Heritage designation would exacerbate existing restrictions on where<br />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.<br />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<br />and Cultural Organization who first visited Bagan in 1975.<br />Hotels are still being built in the monument zone,<br />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.<br />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<br />that provides free ambulance, funeral and firefighting services for many of the city’s poorest residents.<br />Myanmar plans to submit a World Heritage bid to Unesco for the temples of Bagan,<br />which were clumsily restored after one earthquake and since damaged by another.
