Borobudur

Borobudur is a ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in the Kedu Plain of Central Java, raised under the Sailendra dynasty. Its nine platforms climb to a central dome ringed by seventy-two Buddha statues inside perforated stupas; among its 2,672 relief panels, 1,460 narrative scenes guide pilgrims upward toward enlightenment.

Inscriptions of 824 and 842 record the inauguration and endowment of the sanctuary, which fused the Buddhist path to nirvana with older Javanese ancestor veneration. By the fourteenth century, as the courts of Java turned to Islam, the temple was abandoned and slowly buried under volcanic ash and jungle.

The court poet Mpu Prapanca still mentioned a holy place at Budur in 1365. In 1814 the British administrator Thomas Stamford Raffles, told of its location by local people, ordered the site cleared and surveyed.