Videos of UNESCO World Heritage Site Bagan in Myanmar reduced to rubble AI-generated
The clips purporting to show destruction in Bagan after the 7.7 earthquake on March 28 are AI-generated
CLAIM
Videos circulated on TikTok claim to show Myanmar’s ancient city and UNESCO World Heritage Site Bagan reduced to rubble after the devastating earthquake that struck on Friday, March 28.
BACKGROUND
A powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck near Myanmar’s second-largest city, Mandalay, at a depth of only 10 km on Friday, March 28, causing major devastation across the country. By Monday, over 1,700 people were confirmed killed in the tremor by Myanmar’s junta government.
The earthquake was felt hundreds of kilometres away in China and Thailand. An under-construction high-rise collapsed in Bangkok killing at least 18 workers with 78 more unaccounted for, according to the Bangkok Post.
Amid a flood of images and videos showing the damage wrought by the earthquake, a number of aerial videos claiming to be from scenes in Myanmar were widely circulated on social media.
A TikTok account named Lee Media with over 63,000 followers shared a flurry of videos from earthquake scenes, many of them authentic. Amid them, it also published a series of short aerial videos purporting to show widespread damage in Bagan, which is home to one of the largest concentrations of Buddhist temples in the world.
With Bagan located approximately 150 km southwest of Mandalay and the last major earthquake in 2016 causing considerable damage to its monuments, The Guardian on Friday wrote that the fate of the site remained unknown. As videos by local news outlets showing temples collapsed by the earthquake in Mandalay the aerial footage claiming to be from Bagan warrants a second look.
The five-second clip featuring the image above was viewed over 430,000 times on TikTok at time of writing and had around 7,700 likes. Another video apparently from the same scene had over 68,000 views and over 1,000 likes on TikTok.
METHOD
Lee Media with the TikTok handle lee.media7 describes itself as sharing “random videos” in its avatar. It published numerous copies of videos from the earthquake, some of which were verified as authentic. However, it also shared a number of clips that appeared highly polished and were all five seconds long — an unusually short length for aerial videos that usually last longer due to the drone typically capturing much longer footage.
Even by Monday — four days after the earthquake — there was little information reported on Bagan despite it being a major landmark, raising doubts about the authenticity of the footage.
A closer look at the clips showed figures moving on the ground that in both videos suddenly disappeared without any trace — one just as a truck approaches, and the other amid people milling about.
The videos also show debris and rubble surrounding the pagodas and lining dirt tracks, suggesting there were structures such as houses built around the monuments. However, images of the vast Bagan Plains, such as on Wikipedia, show no such structures surrounding the monuments. They only show the pagodas.
Finally, both clips have a logo appear in the bottom right for AI Wan — an AI video generator.
RATING
The clips purporting to show destruction in Bagan after the 7.7 earthquake on March 28, 2025, are AI-generated.
SOURCES
Polanco, A. (2009) Balloon over Bagan. Available. [online] flickr. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitsuga/140366293/sizes/o/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].
Purcell, J. (2022) Thousands of Buddhist temples filled this sacred skyline. [online] National Geographic news. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/buddhist-temples-bagan-kingdom-myanmar-burma [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].
Rushby, K. (2025). Fears for Bagan’s towering Buddhist temples after Myanmar earthquake. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/28/fears-for-fate-of-bagans-towering-buddhist-temples-after-myanmar-earthquake [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].
TikTok (2025) Available at: @lee.media7 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].
TikTok (2025) Available at: @lee.media7 [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].