The Largest Buddhist Monument in the World Had Been Buried for a Thousand Years When Stamford Raffles Asked About It

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument in the world. Six concentric square terraces, topped by three circular terraces, topped by a central stupa, on the volcanic plain of central Java about 40 kilometres northwest of Yogyakarta. The base is 123 metres on each side; the total height is 35 metres from base to stupa peak; the total stone used in construction is about 55,000 cubic metres of grey andesite, all of it quarried from local volcanic deposits and carried to the site without wheeled transport.

It was built during the Sailendra dynasty rule of central Java, between about 780 and 833 AD — the same century that produced the Carolingian Renaissance in Western Europe and the Tang dynasty’s high cultural period in China. It was the largest single construction project anywhere in the world at the time of its completion. It was abandoned within three centuries.

Why it was abandoned

The abandonment is not fully understood. The standard explanation involves three factors. The central Javanese political centre shifted east in the early 10th century, leaving Borobudur outside the immediate cultural ambit of the successor Mataram dynasty. The conversion of the Javanese ruling class from Mahayana Buddhism to Hinduism, and later (15th century) to Islam, progressively eliminated the religious community that had maintained the monument. The volcanic activity of nearby Mount Merapi — particularly the major eruptions of around 1006 and 1257 (the latter the Samalas-triggered global cooling event) — buried the site under approximately 2 metres of ash and debris.

The vegetation followed. By around 1500 the monument was an overgrown jungle mound — the local Javanese term was gunung (mountain) — and the surviving Buddhist memory of it had largely faded. The 17th-century Dutch colonial administrators were aware of unusual stone formations in the central Javanese hinterland but did not investigate them.

What Raffles did

Thomas Stamford Raffles became Lieutenant-Governor of British-occupied Java in 1811, after the British East India Company’s brief seizure of the colony from the Dutch (the Dutch were then under Napoleonic French control). His five years in Java (1811–1816) were the most-productive period of British colonial-Indonesian scholarship. Raffles spent considerable personal effort cataloguing Javanese antiquities, manuscripts, flora, and fauna — partly as imperial intelligence-gathering, partly as serious personal interest.

In 1814, during a tour of central Java, Raffles heard from local informants in Magelang about a large overgrown stone mound at the village of Bumisegoro. He sent his Dutch engineer Hermann Cornelius — a holdover from the previous Dutch administration who had stayed on as a Raffles surveyor — to investigate.

Cornelius reached the site in late 1814 with a Javanese work crew of approximately 200. The initial survey took six weeks of progressive removal of vegetation and surface soil. By the end of the survey period the upper terraces had been partly exposed and the extent of the relief carvings was first becoming visible. Cornelius produced approximately 30 survey drawings and a textual description that Raffles published in his 1817 History of Java — the first scholarly publication of the monument’s existence.

The Cornelius survey did not restore the monument. The cleared portions were re-buried by vegetation within years; serious archaeological exploration of the site did not resume until the second half of the 19th century, after the Dutch had recovered the colony.

The Dutch restorations

The 19th-century Dutch-colonial work at Borobudur was largely extractive. Numbers of buddha statues and relief panels were removed from the site to European museum collections (the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Museum in London, and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden all hold significant Borobudur material acquired in this period). Smaller stupas and decorative elements were looted by private antiquities collectors.

The first systematic restoration was the work of the Dutch military engineer Theodoor van Erp between 1907 and 1911. Van Erp’s project rebuilt the upper three circular terraces and the central stupa, removed accumulated debris, and documented the surviving relief panels with photographic and drawing surveys. The Van Erp work established Borobudur as a recognisable Buddhist monument visible to Western tourist visitors for the first time since the 11th century.

The restoration was partial. The lower square terraces were structurally unstable — the weight of stone above them was crushing the lower walls — and Van Erp’s available resources had been insufficient for the structural-engineering work the lower terraces required.

The UNESCO restoration

The decisive intervention was the UNESCO Borobudur project of 1975–1982, funded by the Indonesian government with international contributions from approximately 27 countries at a cost of about 25 million 1975 US dollars (roughly 130 million 2025 dollars). The project disassembled the entire monument stone by stone (approximately 1.2 million individual stones), rebuilt the foundation engineering with reinforced-concrete drainage, treated each individual stone for the biological deterioration that the tropical Javanese climate had inflicted over a millennium, and reassembled the monument with seismic and water-management improvements.

The reassembly was complete in 1982. UNESCO World Heritage status followed in 1991. The result is the Borobudur that modern visitors see: a restored Buddhist monument visible from miles across the central Javanese plain, with annual visitor numbers in the millions, and with active Buddhist religious use restored after the long abandonment.

What the monument means

The iconographic programme of Borobudur is one of the achievements of Mahayana Buddhist art. The 2,672 relief panels depict the life of the Buddha (the lower 1,460 panels), the bodhisattva path (the middle 460 panels), and the cosmological vision of the Pure Land tradition (the upper 752 panels). The pilgrim’s path — still walked by modern Buddhist visitors — ascends the monument in a clockwise spiral, passing each relief panel in narrative order from the earthly birth of the Buddha at the base to the transcendent enlightenment at the central stupa.

The whole functions as a three-dimensional Buddhist sutra — a walking meditation through the Mahayana path. The design is attributed to the Sailendra dynasty’s state patronage of Mahayana scholarship; the named architect is Gunadharma, whose historical existence is attested in Javanese legendary tradition but not in any contemporary inscription.

The monument was built without mortar. The 55,000 cubic metres of andesite are held together by precision-cut stone joints, comparable to the Incan stonework the Spanish would encounter seven centuries later on the opposite side of the planet.

Raffles did not see the monument restored. The Cornelius survey of 1814 was the limit of the British-colonial work; the restoration to the modern condition was the work of three subsequent generations of Dutch and Indonesian engineers. The Raffles contribution was to write the first European account of the monument’s existence — enough that the site re-entered the scholarly consciousness, enough that the subsequent restoration work eventually became possible.