On my first morning in Bagan, I watched the sun rise from one of those balloons; the next day I watched the balloons go by from the top of one of those big temples.
The Burmese City of Bagan was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan* in the 9th to 13th Centuries. The people of Pagan built several thousand Buddhist temples and monuments (“stupas”), some smallish and some reaching nearly 20 stories tall. The Mongols (a “horde” of them, no doubt) overran Pagan in the late 1200s. Happily, though, they left the Buddhist monuments largely intact, so thousands of them survive even today.
* As best I can tell, the Asian kingdom of “Pagan” has nothing to do with the “pagan” gods or practices of, e.g., the ancient Romans.