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.