Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument in the world. It is a stepped pyramid of nine ascending platforms (six square, three circular) built from approximately 2 million blocks of grey andesite quarried from the volcanic-stone outcrops of central Java. Its base is approximately 123 metres on each side; its total height is 35 metres. The temple has approximately 2,672 narrative relief panels (the largest single body of Buddhist relief sculpture surviving anywhere in the world) and approximately 504 Buddha statues. It was built between approximately 780 and 840 AD under the Mahayana Buddhist Sailendra dynasty of central Java.

It was then abandoned, buried for centuries, and rediscovered in 1814.

How it was lost

The Borobudur complex was substantively abandoned by the 14th century. Two converging causes are proposed. The first is the substantive political-religious shift of central Javanese power eastward through the 9th and 10th centuries — first to the courts of the eastern-Javanese kingdoms (Medang, Kediri, Singhasari, Majapahit), then to the Islamic sultanates that dominated the archipelago from the 14th century onward. By the 15th century the Borobudur region had been substantively Islamicised and the temple had no living religious community using it.

The second cause was substantively environmental. Mount Merapi, approximately 30 km to the east of Borobudur, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world; its substantive eruptions had progressively covered the central-Javanese plain with ash deposits over the medieval centuries; the temple was substantively buried under a layer of volcanic ash and tropical-jungle root growth that progressively concealed its existence. By the late 18th century the substantive standing recollection of Borobudur in local Javanese tradition had reduced to a substantively vague identification of “the buried stone hill at Bumisegoro” as a place of substantively bad spiritual reputation.

The Raffles intervention

Thomas Stamford Raffles had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Java in October 1811, when British naval forces had captured the island from the Napoleonic French (who had controlled Java through their alliance with the Dutch). Raffles substantively used the five-year British interregnum (1811–1816) to undertake a programme of antiquarian and ethnographic survey of Java, with the substantive intention of producing the first comprehensive European-language reference work on the island’s civilisation.

In late 1814 Raffles received reports from local informants about substantial buried stone ruins at Bumisegoro in the central Javanese highlands. He despatched his subordinate Hermanus Christiaan Cornelius, a Dutch military engineer in British service, with a substantial labour party to investigate. Cornelius reached Borobudur in November 1814 and spent approximately two months clearing the upper surface of the monument with a working party of approximately 200 local labourers. The substantive scale of the monument became visible within the first week.

Cornelius made detailed measured drawings of what he had uncovered and forwarded them to Raffles at Batavia (modern Jakarta). Raffles incorporated the substantive Borobudur description and the substantive Cornelius drawings into his History of Java (1817), which substantively introduced the temple to the European antiquarian-scholarly world.

What Raffles did with it

The 1814 Cornelius operation cleared substantively only the upper portions of the monument. The substantive comprehensive clearance and substantive systematic archaeological documentation would not be completed for the next century. The substantive complete excavation of the monument was the work of the Dutch military engineer Theodoor van Erp between 1907 and 1911 (the substantive Dutch colonial administration had been substantively re-established at the 1816 conclusion of the British interregnum). The substantive comprehensive structural restoration was the work of the UNESCO-led international project of 1973–1983.

The substantive monument substantively survives today in essentially the form van Erp and UNESCO produced. The substantive original Sailendra-period polychromy and the substantive original gold ornamentation had been substantively lost to centuries of weathering and looting before the substantive 19th-century rediscovery; the substantive surviving relief sculpture and the substantive surviving 504 Buddha statues are substantively what the Sailendra period itself bequeathed, minus substantively only the substantively perishable decorative elements.

What it took from Raffles

The substantive rediscovery added substantively the Borobudur narrative to the substantive Raffles biographical record. The substantive Singapore foundation of 1819 — substantively his more famous accomplishment — is substantively only one of the substantively many institutional substantive activities that Raffles substantively undertook during his substantively five-year Java service. The substantive History of Java (1817) became substantively the substantive standard European-language reference on Javanese civilisation for the substantive subsequent century. The substantive Borobudur entry was substantively the most substantively distinguished of its substantive ethnographic-archaeological substantive chapters.