Borobudur celebrates restoration anniversary

Borobudur celebrates restoration anniversary

Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Magelang, Central Java

To gaze at the elegant Borobudur Temple from the Central Java
town of Magelang makes one wonder of the glorious past.

Located some 40 kilometers north of Yogyakarta, it took years
to make the temple look the way it does today.

Head of Borobudur Conservation and Study Agency Dukut Santoso
said the temple was a ruin when it was first discovered during
Dutch colonial times. A Dutch scientist, Van Erp, started to
carry out piecemeal restoration work in 1907 to 1911.

But the work did not stop the temple's destruction, caused by
natural factors. When it was raining, water poured heavily
through the cracks of the temple's walls. And as the temple did
not stand vertically upright, large logs were placed around its
walls to prevent it from collapsing. The floors, especially in
the northern part, were also in poor shape.

"At the same time, the stone corrosion, both biologically (due
to microorganisms) and physically (due to the heat of the sun,
the rain and cold) continued unabated. That was why, in 1969
Borobudur was declared as being in a dangerous condition and in
need of restoration," Dukut said.

With the help of international funding and technical
assistance through the United Nations Educational, Science and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Indonesian government started
to conduct research on all aspects of the temple's damage,
including biological and physical observations and mapping of the
temple.

A number of foreign experts and scientists from France,
Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands, as well as
Indonesians, took part in the research, which was completed in
1975. Then, the most extensive and complex restoration work --
dismantling the mantle stones and rebuilding them in their
original layout, was started.

"You can imagine how complicated the work was, especially as
they dealt with some five million pieces," Dukut said. He added
that IBM and Gadjah Mada University's computer center were
invited to register the dismantled pieces and reconstruct the
temple with computer assistance.

Piece by piece, block by block, area by area, the stones on
the outer part of the temple's walls and floors were dismantled,
numbered, registered, placed in pallets and then taken to the
buffer storage area before being sent to the workshop for further
analysis.

In the workshop, every piece was treated according to the
damage it had sustained. Cracked stones were reassembled, while
damaged stones attacked by microorganism were cleaned and
preserved using carefully selected techniques and materials. The
main purpose of the treatment was to restore the stones, ready to
be returned to where they belonged at the temple.

"Each had its own medical record, just like a patient in a
clinic," recalled Dukut, who claims to have been involved in
Borobudur restoration activities since 1971.

Restored stones were then kept at the final storage site
before being returned to the temple.

Not every part of the temple was dismantled: only parts of the
second floor, known as the Rupadhatu floor. This, according to
Dukut, comprised four subfloors and five balustrades containing a
total of about five million individual stone pieces.

Besides the conservation work on the stones, other supporting
work waited until all the stones had been dismantled. In order to
leave the temple's structure stronger and better drained, a
series of works was also carried out to its interior.

The supporting works included the provision of a concrete ring
to every balustrade in the restored area, providing drainage
channels from the concrete ring to the slope of the hill where
the temple was located and providing filter layers at the ends of
the drainage channels.

Waterproof layers were installed on the inside of the
structure to protect the temple's reliefs from rainwater. For the
same reason, a tin plate was also placed at the bottom of every
balustrade.

"Now you can no longer see water pouring from the junctions of
stones on the temple's walls when it rains," Dukut said. He added
all the additional construction was invisible as it was done
inside the mantle stones.

At present, he said, the temple was also armed with a
monitoring system connected to a computer network to monitor land
movement and water circulation on the hill. Another concrete ring
was also built around the temple yard to prevent the temple and
the hill from collapsing.

Dukut said the restoration work at Borobudur was completed in
1982. Subsequently, then president Soeharto officially
inaugurated the completion of the restoration the following year,
which means this year is being celebrated as the 20th anniversary
of the completion of the temple's restoration.

This year is considered crucial for the temple as it was once
predicted that after 20 years the temple would have subsided by
as much as four centimeters (cm), not to mention the continuous
corrosion of the stones due to natural factors.

"We have carried out some advanced research on the matter in
the last three years and have discovered that the temple has
subsided by only 1.7 cm so far. It also shows such a process
seems to have stopped," Dukut claimed.

The research, aimed to coincide with the temple restoration's
20th anniversary, has been carried out in cooperation with Gadjah
Mada University's school of technical engineering and the
University of Canberra, Australia.

"Gadjah Mada assisted with the geotechnical and mathematical
research while the University of Canberra provided us with global
positioning system (GPS) assistance to study the vertical and
horizontal movement of the temple," Dukut said.

He added his office would present the research results, along
with an assessment of previous restoration activities, to the
upcoming Borobudur Experts Meeting scheduled for July 4 through
July 8, which will be attended by a number of foreign delegates
and UNESCO's director general.