BAGAN, Burma -- The vendor watched as members of an increasingly rare species -- tourists -- walked through a dirt parking lot toward Pyathat Gyi Temple, one of more than 2,000 religious monuments on a riverside plain in central Burma.
They did not stop to buy her palm-sugar candies, which she covers with a plastic tarp to keep flies away, or any of the hats or T-shirts for sale at nearby carts and stalls. It was nearly dusk, and she had yet to make the day's first sale.
"It used to be crowded here, before the earthquake," the vendor, Daw Soe Moe Thue, said, referring to a 6.8-magnitude quake last year. It damaged 389 of Bagan's monuments and broke Pyathat Gyi's spire as if it were one of her candies.
"Now, no one."
Many of Bagan's monuments were restored by Burma's former military government in the 1990s, after a previous earthquake, in a way that international experts criticized as heavy-handed. The government abandoned an effort at the time to seek United Nations World Heritage status for the complex.
Now the new civilian government of the country that's also known as Myanmar is planning a fresh World Heritage bid for Bagan, and experts say that because the 2016 earthquake destroyed some of the military's clumsiest restoration work, the new bid stands a better chance of succeeding.
But people in Bagan say they worry that officials with ties to wealthy developers, using the United Nations as a cover, could interfere with religious life or push zoning changes that would further impoverish people who were once evicted by the military to make way for luxury hotels.
Not rebuilding the temple spires, they say, would make the monuments less attractive and depress domestic tourism.
"World heritage? No one cares about that," Soe Moe Thue said. "We just need to survive."
Bagan's monument complex is a crown jewel in a tourism sector that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has grown rapidly since Burma, a majority Buddhist country, began a rocky transition toward democracy in 2011.
But even though some of the monuments were built in the 11th century, tourists often regard the complex as flawed because the military's 1990s-era renovations -- marked in cherry red bricks -- are seen as detracting from its authenticity as an ancient site.
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 UNESCO who first visited Bagan in 1975.
But the 2016 earthquake, he said, could offer the new government a fresh start with UNESCO because it destroyed much of the military's worst construction work, particularly the temple spires that it built in the 1990s.
"It came at the right moment," he said of the earthquake during a recent trip to Bagan.
Daw Ohnmar Myo, UNESCO's Burma project officer, said the government plans to submit a World Heritage bid for the site by February and that the complex could be officially inscribed by 2019.
UNESCO consultants are developing a detailed conservation plan for Ananda Ok Kyaung, an 18th century monastery in Bagan that experts say was severely damaged in the earthquake. A careful restoration there could become a blueprint, they say, for a wider conservation program if the World Heritage bid is approved.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma's governing National League for Democracy political party, has said that any conservation work in Bagan should have support from local people and avoid altering monuments, according to reports in Burma's news media.
To help rally support for its UNESCO bid, the government plans to abolish military-era laws that prevented Bagan residents from opening small guesthouses, said Aung Aung Kyaw, the director of Bagan's archaeology department. And to comply with UNESCO recommendations, he said, the government will allow rebuilding work at only five of the 89 sites in the monument complex that were either moderately or heavily damaged by the earthquake.
"If we don't protect our cultural heritage, we can't pass it on to the next generation," he said.
Some community groups in Bagan fear that a World Heritage designation would exacerbate existing restrictions on where 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.
Instead of leaving the monument zone free of development, the military government allowed for the construction of several high-end hotels, including one on the site of a former school, said Aung Shwe, the second secretary at the Bagan Development Committee, a nongovernmental organization that provides free ambulance, funeral and firefighting services for many of the city's poorest residents.
Hotels are still being built in the monument zone, 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 Khin Maung, the chairman of the Bagan Development Committee and a tour guide in the monument zone.
"The new government should take care of its people, not squeeze our necks," he said.
There is also deep concern about the archaeology department's decision not to rebuild many damaged temple spires.
"In our Buddhist tradition, not having a top on a temple is like having a person without a head," said Thay Zaniya, a monk who lives in a monastery beside the Sulamani Temple, a popular monument where the archaeology department says a spire that fell in the earthquake will not be replaced. "It's a disgraceful sight."
Thay Zaniya said he had reluctantly accepted the department's decision because UNESCO had warned that rebuilding the spire could expose the temple to damage during Bagan's next earthquake.
But Kyaing, the caretaker of Dhammayazika pagoda, another popular monument in Bagan, said the price of accepting UNESCO's advice would be shirking his religious duty.
Such a trade, he said, was unacceptable.
"We need to rebuild our pagoda so that the next generation will know what it looks like," he said on a balmy evening outside the pagoda, as birds swooped overhead. "If we don't, we would lose our heritage."
SundayMonday on 05/14/2017