Episode notes
In 1757 a crown prince of the Yogyakarta Sultanate uncovered a stupa in a jungle-covered hill in central Java and pitied the statue inside as a knight captured in a cage. The place was locally taboo, and the story goes that he fell ill the next day and died. That hill was Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Built in the 8th and 9th centuries under the Buddhist Sailendra dynasty, with a Hindu Sanjaya king granting land to fund it, the Mahayana temple sits on the Kedu Plain between the volcanoes Sindoro, Sumbing, Merbabu, and Merapi. Builders capped a natural hill with about 55,000 cubic meters of andesite, locked together without mortar, in nine platforms shaped like a mandala, with 2,672 relief panels and more than 500 Buddha statues.
Between 928 and 1006 AD power shifted to East Java, volcanic ash buried the region, and by the 15th century the population had largely converted to Islam. A rebel who used the ruins as a stronghold in 1709 was captured and executed. Stamford Raffles sent Hermann Cornelius and 200 laborers to expose the site in 1814, the King of Siam carried off eight cartloads of sculpture in 1896, and Theodoor van Erp's restoration of 1907 to 1911 used concrete that leached salts into the stone. UNESCO's 1975 to 1982 project dismantled and reset more than a million stones.
- The tala, a unit based on a human face or hand span, and the 4:6:9 ratio found in a 1977 survey
- Why the familiar three-realm reading of the temple rests on an early 20th century Dutch proposal with no proof on the monument
- Jan Willem IJzerman's 1885 discovery of 160 buried karma panels behind the base, and the structural and symbolic theories for hiding them
- How visitor numbers grew from about 260,000 in 1974 to 2.5 million a year, wearing down the 2,033 stone stairs
- The 1985 bombs that damaged nine stupas and the 2010 Merapi ash that clogged the new drainage system