On a steeple chase

BAGAN, MYANMAR — My body was already a waterfall, and it was only 10:15 a.m. in the oven of Bagan, former imperial capital of Myanmar. Standing on the pedals of my rented one-speed girl's bike with a leopard-print seat, I dripped up an incline, passed a couple of bullocks on death's door pulling an ancient wooden cart and then swerved off the asphalt into sand as an air-conditioned bus filled with grinning foreign tourists blew by.

The backdraft stirred up a storm of dry-season dust, and as it settled, I could make out a surreal spectacle from the top of the rise: a sea of otherworldly steeples dancing in the heat waves -- some conical, others topped with doughnut-shaped rings, some with glinting golden umbrellas, some sculpted into immense bells. Despite the heat, it was not a mirage. The sci-fi skyline is the legacy of a mysterious building boom that turned this central Burmese savanna astride the Irrawaddy River into one of Asia's most sprawling but least-known extravaganzas of religious architecture.

Angkor Wat, the famed Cambodian monument that has a shared Hindu and Buddhist past, contains 200 temples. Bagan, formerly known as Pagan, boasts 2,217 Buddhist temples and monuments, and once had more than 4,000 sites. Strewn across a couple of dozen square miles, this forest of brick and stone towers was triggered by a templemania that reigned from the 11th to 13th centuries, when Bagan was the capital of the Burmese empire. Sacred edifices went up by the hundreds, housing giant Buddhas and wall and ceiling murals the likes of which would not be seen until the Sistine Chapel.

I rode through the maze of devotion, hoping to understand the compulsion behind the building spree. On my journey, I would also encounter more recent construction, part of a controversial restoration campaign by the military government of Myanmar, known as Burma until the regime renamed it in 1989. The rehab is designed to fuel tourism, particularly from China.

UNESCO and archeological experts have denounced the government's rebuilding of ancient sites, and the construction of a mammoth 197-foot viewing tower that has been open for two years and an upscale resort in the middle of Bagan's antiquities.