04-04-2025
- General
- National Geographic
Centuries of history and culture reduced to rubble after Myanmar earthquake
A photographer captured this damaged pagoda on April 2, 2025 in the ancient city of Ava, Myanmar. Pagodas serve as Buddhist temples and sacred buildings throughout Myanmar.
Photograph by Myo Kyaw Soe Xinhua, eyevine, Redux
Myanmar's temples, mosques, monasteries, and nunneries are far more than just places of worship, experts emphasize. Each plays crucial and varied roles in Myanmar society, from offering primary education, to dispensing medicine, caring for the elderly, and housing orphans and people displaced by the war.
'The damage to religious sites exacerbates the vulnerability already felt by communities,' explains Maitrii Aung-Thwin, associate professor of Myanmar and Southeast Asian History at National University of Singapore.
Monasteries and nunneries are vital to Myanmar Buddhists, who visit them to make offerings and thus earn merit. 'These offerings could be anything from donating a daily alms meal to ordaining as a monk or a nun,' explains MK Long, an expert in Buddhism in Myanmar at Dartmouth University. 'In Buddhist cosmology, earning merit is understood to positively affect your circumstances in this life and future lives.'
Here are some of the religious and cultural damaged across Myanmar — and what their loss means for the community.
