"Cambria","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Many of these damaged
pagodas underwent restorations in the 1990s by the
military government, which sought to
make Bagan an international tourist destination. However, the restoration
efforts instead drew widespread condemnation from art historians and
preservationists worldwide. Critics are aghast that the restorations paid
little attention to original architectural styles, and used modern materials,
and that the government has also established a
golf course, a paved highway, and
built a 61-meter (200-foot) watchtower. Although the government believed that
the ancient capital's hundreds of (un restored) temples and large corpus of
stone inscriptions were more than sufficient to win the designation of UNESCO
World Heritage Site,
the city has
not been so designated, allegedly mainly on account of the restorations.
Bagan today is a main
tourist destination in the country's nascent tourism industry, which has long
been the target of various boycott campaigns. The majority of over 300,000
international tourists to the country in 2011 are believed to have also visited
Bagan. Several Burmese publications note that the city's small tourism
infrastructure will have to expand rapidly even to meet a modest pickup in tourism
in the following years
