Borobudur Temple
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- In 1885 engineers found that the base hides an older foot carved with 160 reliefs on karma, later encased behind a new stone skirt for reasons still debated.
- Some of the hidden reliefs carry short inscriptions that seem to be instructions to the sculptors about which scenes to carve.
- The builders worked in the tala, a unit based on the length of a human face, and a ratio of 4:6:9 recurs throughout the monument.
- Borobudur and the smaller temples of Pawon and Mendut stand on a single straight east-west line, which some scholars link to an ancient pilgrimage ritual.
- Stormwater drains through 100 spouts at the corners of the terraces, each carved as a different giant or makara sea monster.
- On the lower balustrades the Buddhas' hand gestures change with the direction they face, so each side of the monument shows a different mudra.
- Of the original 504 Buddha statues, more than 300 are damaged, most of them headless, and 43 are missing entirely; many heads ended up in Western museums.
- In 1896 King Chulalongkorn of Siam was allowed to carry home eight cartloads of Borobudur sculpture, some now in the National Museum in Bangkok.
- During the 1975 to 1982 restoration over a million stones were taken down, catalogued and cleaned, then reset like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
- A relief of an eighth-century outrigger ship inspired a full-size replica that sailed from Indonesia to Africa in 2004.
Why it is worth it
Borobudur was assembled from an estimated two million stone blocks without any mortar — the blocks are cut and interlocked so precisely that the structure holds together on fit alone, carrying 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues up a stepped pyramid nine centuries before anyone had a name for engineering tolerances. Walking it as intended means circling clockwise, level by level, reading the reliefs in sequence like turning the pages of a stone book that narrates the path toward enlightenment as you climb.
And then it disappeared. As Hindu-Buddhist power in Java faded and Islam spread through the archipelago from the 14th century on, the temple was abandoned, and ash from eruptions of nearby Mount Merapi combined with jungle growth to bury it almost entirely. It survived in local memory mostly as rumour rather than a place anyone visited.
Its return to the world came down to one report reaching one curious administrator: in 1814, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles — the British governor running Java during a brief period of British control — heard talk of a "mountain of Buddhist sculptures in stone" near the village of Bumisegoro and sent a Dutch engineer, H.C. Cornelius, to check. Cornelius brought 200 men and spent two months hacking away vegetation and ash before the scale of what was underneath became clear; full excavation wasn't finished until 1835.
Getting there
10 km from Mertoyudan. Adisutjipto International Airport (JOG) is about 32 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Borobudur, also transcribed Barabudur, is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Magelang Regency, near the town of Muntilan, northwest of the city of Yogyakarta, in Central Java, Indonesia.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-7.60793, 110.20384per Wikidata