Borobudur - Promoting Bali

Forty kilometres west of Yogya, surrounded on three sides by volcanoes and on the fourth by jagged limestone cliffs, is the largest monument in the southern hemisphere. This is the temple of Borobudur , the number one tourist attraction in Java and the greatest single piece of classical architecture in the entire archipelago. The temple is actually a colossal multi-tiered Buddhist stupa lying at the western end of a four-kilometre-long chain of temples (one of which, the nearby Candi Mendut , is also worth visiting), built in the ninth century by the Saliendra dynasty. At 34.5m tall, however, and covering an area of some 200 square metres, Borobudur is on a different scale altogether, dwarfing all the other candi in the chain.

The world's largest Buddhist stupa was actually built on Hindu foundations , which began life in 775 AD as a large step pyramid. Just fifteen years later, however, the construction was abandoned as the Buddhist Saliendras drove the Sanjayas eastwards. The Saliendras then appropriated the pyramid as the foundation for their own temple, beginning in around 790 AD and completing the work approximately seventy years later. Over 1.6 million blocks of a local volcanic rock (called andesite) were used in Borobudur's construction, joined together without mortar. Sculpted reliefs adorned the lower galleries, covered with stucco and painted. Unfortunately, the pyramid foundation proved to be inherently unstable, cracks appeared, and the hill became totally waterlogged. After about a century, the Saliendras abandoned the site and for almost a thousand years Borobudur lay neglected. The English "rediscovered" it in 1815, but nothing much was done until 1973, when UNESCO began to take the temple apart, block by block, in order to replace the waterlogged hill with a concrete substitute. The project took eleven years and cost US$21million.