Borobudur

Borobudur is a Mahayana Buddhist monument on the Kedu Plain of Central Java, in Indonesia, about 40 kilometres north-west of Yogyakarta and between two pairs of volcanoes. It was built in the late eighth and early ninth centuries under the Sailendra dynasty. Its nine stacked platforms, crowned by a great central stupa and lined with thousands of carved panels, make it the world's largest Buddhist temple, and with Bagan and Angkor Wat it ranks among the great monuments of South-east Asia.

No record survives of who ordered Borobudur or why. Scholars have dated it by comparing the style of its reliefs and inscriptions with royal charters of the period. The architectural historian Jacques Dumarçay proposed five building stages, starting under the Sailendras around 780 and finished around 833 under the rival Sanjaya line, who shared power in central Java; other scholars give dates from about 760 to 830. Two inscriptions of 824 and 842 mention a sacred building that may be Borobudur, and from them the epigraphist J. G. de Casparis suggested its original name was Bhumi Sambhara Bhudhara, a Sanskrit phrase for a mountain of accumulated virtues. Hindu and Buddhist monuments rose side by side on the plain at this time, including the Hindu complex of Prambanan, and a charter of 779 records a Hindu king granting land to Buddhists.

The monument has six square platforms topped by three circular ones and a central dome. Pilgrims climbed through galleries lined with 1,460 narrative panels, out of 2,672 reliefs in total, which portray Buddhist teaching alongside scenes of courtly, village and market life in ancient Java. There were originally 504 Buddha statues, including 72 seated inside perforated stupas around the summit. The design blends Buddhist ideas of the path to enlightenment with older Indonesian traditions of ancestor veneration.

Why and when worship ended is unknown. Between 928 and 1006, after volcanic eruptions, King Mpu Sindok shifted the Mataram kingdom's capital to East Java, and many sources treat that period as the most likely time of abandonment. A court poem of 1365, written in the age of Majapahit, still refers to a Buddhist sanctuary at Budur. After most Javanese converted to Islam in the fifteenth century the monument was overgrown and covered by volcanic ash, though it was never wholly forgotten: Javanese chronicles connected it with misfortune, including the death of a crown prince of Yogyakarta in 1757.

During the British occupation of Java from 1811 to 1816, the lieutenant-governor Thomas Stamford Raffles heard of the ruin in 1814 and sent the Dutch engineer Hermann Cornelius, whose 200 men spent two months clearing it. Under the Dutch East Indies the whole complex was uncovered by 1835, and the first monograph appeared in 1873. The site was treated as a quarry for souvenirs: in 1896 King Chulalongkorn of Siam was allowed to take away eight cartloads of sculpture, and many Buddha heads ended up in museums abroad. In 1885 Jan Willem IJzerman found that the base hid a buried foot carved with further reliefs.

The Dutch army engineer Theodoor van Erp restored the monument between 1907 and 1911, but drainage problems were left unsolved and the walls soon began to sag. After the Second World War and the Indonesian revolution, parts of the structure were close to collapse. Indonesia sought UNESCO's help in 1965, and between 1975 and 1982 the Indonesian government and UNESCO dismantled the five square platforms, catalogued more than a million stones, built in new drainage and reassembled the monument at a cost of about US$6.9 million.

UNESCO listed Borobudur, together with the nearby temples of Mendut and Pawon, as a World Heritage Site in 1991. Today it is Indonesia's most visited monument and again a place of pilgrimage, where Buddhists mark Vesak each year. It has also faced repeated threats: in January 1985 bombs planted by an Islamist group badly damaged nine stupas; ash from Mount Merapi in 2010 clogged the drainage system and led to the dismantling of more than 55,000 blocks for repair; and wear from visitors' feet has forced the covering of the main stairways. Earthquakes, erosion and vandalism remain UNESCO's chief concerns.