If you arrive before dawn and are lucky enough to pick a morning when the mist stays in the valleys, you will see an astounding sunrise right behind the conical peak of Gunung Merapi whose smoke plume stands out against the pale pink sky. You will be mesmerised by the ever-changing colours of the stone and the surrounding landscape of mist-filled rice paddy and palm groves. One of life’s most memorable experiences.

Borobudur was constructed around 800AD during the brief (200 years) period of Buddhist ascendancy in Java. It therefore predates most of the perhaps more famous Khmer temples at Angkor by several centuries. Little is known about who built Borobudur, or of its intended purpose, since no written records have survived. But its construction period coincided with the peak of the Sailendra dynasty in Central Java when it was under the influence of the Buddhist Sumatran-based Empire of Srivijaya.

Unlike most temples of this era, which are built on flat ground, Borobudur was built around a bedrock hill 265m above sea level. It consists of six square terraces topped by three circular ones, and was originally decorated with over two thousand relief panels and over five hundred Buddha images. At the top, a large solid stupa sits in splendour, surrounded by seventy-two smaller and perforated stupa, each one of which contained a Buddha. Exactly how the temple was used is unclear, but it was certainly a place for Buddhist pilgrimage and instruction. Starting at the eastern stairway, the clockwise circumambulation and ascent of the terraces takes the pilgrim through three levels of Buddhist cosmology; the world of desires, the world of forms, and the formless world. During this five kilometre journey 1,460 narrative relief panels instruct the pilgrim on the essentials of Buddhist doctrine.

Evidence of abandonment is uncertain; it may have been essentially abandoned as early as the tenth century, and was certainly becoming little but a memory by the time Islam swept across Java in the fourteenth. For hundreds of years it lay hidden under layers of volcanic ash and jungle growth until Sir Stamford Raffles rediscovered it in 1814. Several restorations have attempted to preserve the monument, the most ambitious of which took place in the seventies and eighties under the auspices of the Suharto government and UNESCO, costing US$25 million. It was then named as a World Heritage Site.