Dust permeates the landscape, settling on the buildings, trees and people, and yet dust somehow gives Myanmar’s Bagan, an abandoned city of pagodas, an ethereal expression.

Lying 145km southwest of Mandalay in Myanmar is Bagan, a square of land filled with thousands of centuries-old pagodas, once the seat of a powerful royal capital and the setting for invasions. These days, tourists outnumber the locals and the crumbling pagodas.

Only the swirling dust on these plains have remained the same, day and night, for all seasons.

Imagine a ring of distant hills encircling almost 26sq km of land. Then, imagine 2,217 pagodas, some ruined, some intact, with many still marked by their rising spires standing erect like an army of quiet sentinels waiting patiently for their general to arrive. And then imagine the dust.

It’s everywhere. That fine film that even a whisper of a breeze can lift and gently layer onto your skin and, like a delicate skein, wound around you till you are entrapped, head to toe. On a particularly hot, dry day, it leaves a fine grit in your mouth. This was what struck me most when we arrived in Bagan.

It was October, and the advent of cooler days was already evidenced by the crisper air in the mornings and evenings. Still, the dust persisted, a swirling presence beneath the torpor of the remaining hot afternoons.

Strangely enough, the dust grew on us. Instead of detracting, it began defining and making unique every scene we saw in Bagan.

The dust rose behind every passing bullock cart, every car and even every bicycle that traversed its winding paths around the pagodas. The dust layered every ruin and every leaf on every tree that could survive in this inhospitable land. The dust covered our hands, our shoes, our watches, our backpacks, our cameras, our guidebooks and every centimetre of our exposed skin.

But most of all, the dust created a setting in which the pagodas’ holiness found a perennially ethereal expression.

That such an inhospitable landscape would be forever preserved may have been in the minds of its creators who leaped into a fervour of pagoda-building between the 11th and 13th century when Buddhism began a tight embrace of the Myanmar people and persists till today.

Now, almost 90% of the nation’s population of 54 million is Buddhist, with about a million monks scattered throughout the innumerable monasteries which dot both rural and urban terrain.

Little is known of the origins of Bagan, although legend has it that it grew out of a coming together of 19 villages. Its history had little significance until King Anawrahta (1044-1077) ascended the throne.

A fearsome warrior, he conquered the Mon kingdom of Thaton in the south and brought back to his capital the deposed King Manuha together with his vast entourage of architects, artists, artisans, craftsmen of every description and monks who knew the Pali scripture of Theravada Buddhism.

From hereon, the conqueror became the conquered. The monks shaped many aspects of life through their teachings. From them, the Myanmar people received their alphabet, religion and scriptures.

It also marked the beginning of a period of spectacular architectural and artistic pursuits lasting for at least 290 years. This saw a city and its surroundings engulfed with thousands of splendid monuments of all shapes and sizes, their inner walls covered with beautiful frescoes.

Our guide and interpreter, U Win quoted a popular saying in Bagan which says that you cannot move a hand or a foot without touching a sacred thing.

This may not be true today as so many of the structures have become hoary, weather-beaten ruins.

However, in its heyday, with more than 5,000 pagodas and monasteries crowded into this tiny square of land on the east bank of the Ayerwaddy, it may have held more than a grain of truth.

Certainly, what began as one man’s vision — to build a closed area where every which way one turned, one is engulfed by large and small pagodas and temples and effected by a heightened sense of prayer and meditation — was spectacularly realised.

This vision was followed by almost three centuries of building fervour, after which a series of events not only marked its end, but led to the abandonment of Bagan as a seat of power.

In 1284, attacks by the Chinese, in a bid to avenge the murder of its ambassador, precipitated the defensive but ruinous manoeuvres of the Burmese king who pulled down 1,000 arched temples, 1,000 smaller ones and 4,000 square temples to strengthen fortifications.

This same king eventually fled south when he discovered a damning prophecy under one of the desecrated shrines.

More than 720 years have elapsed since royalty took to its heels, leaving Bagan in the dust. With the city devoid of its status as a capital, the people, largely descendants of a community which served the pagodas, monasteries and the royalty, were left to eke out a living. They attempted to cultivate hardy crops such as sesame and millet on the dusty fields, increasingly courting poverty.

Myanmar, a country which has seen radical political changes in the last four decades, is still struggling to define itself as a nation. In its midst, Bagan continued to be left on its own until 1990 when the government, recognising the need to preserve the pagodas, instituted a people-relocation programme to a planned township called New Bagan.

New laws were also introduced to save the precarious landscape from deforestation. Anyone caught cutting down a tree could be jailed for three years or levied with a hefty fine.

The notion of prayer, meditation and peace was envisioned by its creators, but the latter remains elusive to many of the people we met.

“Peace is for the rich, not for the poor,” said U Mya Hlaing Ho, our porter who is also a temple care-taker and lacquerware maker.

In 1996 when it was “Visit Myanmar Year”, a large influx of tourists demonstrated that tourism could be a new source of income for the local people. Not only could they function as tourist guides, they also found an audience who was interested in buying the fine crafts which sprung from their lineage as royal artists and craftsmen. But even with the new-found means to earn FEs (foreign exchange), there is an overarching sense of despair over their increasingly impoverished circumstances.

U Mya spoke glumly of a five-star resort and the viewing tower situated right in the heart of the pagoda area. He is not alone in his worry that tourists will only be allowed to view the landscape from the tower and denied access to other places to which he and fellow guides would normally show the tourists and earn that much-needed extra income.

He prayed that this would not happen, as he already had a “miserable life”.

It didn’t seem much to ask for, and amidst the thousands of pagodas and temples where prayers have been said for the last 800 years, you would think that despite their dusty layers, someone would heed these voices and grant them what they so fervently pray for.