Yangon

• 1. Introduction

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  Yangon carries a name that translates, from the Burmese, as "End of Strife." There is something quietly ironic in that etymology, because this city of over five million people has been at the center of nearly every upheaval in modern Burmese history: colonial conquest, world war, military dictatorship, cyclone, and mass protest. It began as a Mon settlement called Dagon in the early 11th century and grew into a pilgrimage town, a colonial capital, a garden city that rivaled London for its public services, and then, over decades of military rule, a place where the infrastructure quietly collapsed while the colonial buildings slowly decayed.

  Today Yangon holds the largest concentration of colonial-era architecture in all of Southeast Asia, yet most of those buildings are described in the same breath as "decaying." The city remains Myanmar's commercial heart even after the military relocated the national capital to a purpose-built city in the north. And it remains the place where, again and again, the people of Myanmar have taken to the streets when they could no longer stay silent. What made this city the engine of a nation? And what does it look like to live inside a metropolis that has been, in many ways, frozen in place?

• 2. From Dagon to Rangoon

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  Princess Maha Dewi governed the settlement then called Dagon from 1364 to 1392, making her one of the earliest documented rulers of what would become Yangon. Her grandniece, Shin Saw Pu, went further still, becoming the only female queen regnant in Burmese history. Queen Saw Pu built a palace beside the Shwedagon Pagoda in 1460 and spent her final years there, dying in 1471. The city those two women helped shape was already centered on a religious site reputed to be over 2,000 years old.

  In 1755, King Alaungpaya, the founder of the Konbaung dynasty, captured Dagon, expanded its boundaries, and gave it the name Yangon. The East India Company arrived in the 1790s and opened a trading factory. By 1823, the city held an estimated population of around 30,000 people. The British took it briefly during the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26, then gave it back. A fire destroyed much of it in 1841. Then, in 1852, the Second Anglo-Burmese War brought permanent British control and a total transformation.

  Army engineer Lieutenant Alexander Fraser drew up the plans for a new city on a grid, bounded by the Pazundaung Creek to the east and the Yangon River to the south and west. The British moved the capital of Burma from Moulmein to Yangon. By the 1890s, prosperous residential suburbs were growing north of Royal Lake and Inya Lake. Hospitals like Rangoon General Hospital and colleges including Rangoon University followed. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British sent Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, to live out his exile in Yangon. The city the colonizers had built was being used to contain the ghosts of an older empire.

• 3. Garden City, Contested City

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  By the early 20th century, colonial Yangon was known as "the garden city of the East," with spacious parks, lakes, and a mix of modern buildings and traditional wooden architecture. Its public services and infrastructure were, by the accounts of the time, comparable to those of London. Before World War II, the city had roughly half a million residents. Of those, about 55 percent were Indian or South Asian. Only about a third of the population was Bamar. Karens, Chinese, Anglo-Burmese, and others made up the rest.

  That demographic reality was inseparable from the political one. Yangon had become the center of Burma's independence movement. Students at Rangoon University led the way, and three nationwide strikes against British rule broke out in 1920, 1936, and 1938, all of them beginning in Yangon. When Japanese forces occupied the city from 1942 to 1945, it suffered heavy damage. The Allies retook it in May 1945. On the 4th of January 1948, Yangon became the capital of the newly independent Union of Burma.

  Independence set off waves of demographic change. Many South Asians and Anglo-Burmese left in the years following 1948. Ne Win's government in the 1960s pushed more South Asians out through explicitly xenophobic policies. The majority-Bamar character of the city today is, in part, the product of those forced departures. The Anglo-Burmese have effectively vanished from the city, having emigrated or intermarried with other Burmese groups.

• 4. Decades of Protest

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  Yangon was the location of major anti-government protests in 1974, 1988, and 2007, and each time the city's streets saw bloodshed. The 8888 Uprising of 1988 resulted in the deaths of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of civilians, many of them killed in Yangon as hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets. The Saffron Revolution of 2007 saw mass shootings in the city, and the source documents that the Burmese government used crematoria in Yangon to erase evidence of violence against monks, unarmed protesters, journalists, and students.

  On the 7th of May 2005, a series of coordinated bombings struck Yangon, killing eleven people and injuring 162 others. In November 2005, just months later, the military government announced that Naypyidaw, 320 km north of the city, would be the new administrative capital and began relocating government functions there. The official reason was never clearly stated, but one effect was the departure of many civil servants from Yangon.

  In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck. The city had few human casualties from the storm itself, but three-quarters of Yangon's industrial infrastructure was destroyed or damaged, with losses estimated at US$800 million. Then came the 2021 coup and the COVID-19 pandemic, arriving in close succession. The city was once again the site of mass protests. Lockdowns and curfews followed, and the city's economy slowed significantly. The pattern is familiar: Yangon absorbs each blow, and its people return to the streets.

• 5. The Colonial Skyline

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  Downtown Yangon's streets are described as leafy avenues lined with fin-de-siecle architecture, centered around the Sule Pagoda. Most of the buildings in the central commercial core are four-story mixed-use structures with 14-foot ceilings, a height that allowed builders to insert mezzanines. Despite their condition, these buildings remain the most sought-after and most expensive real estate in the city.

  In 1996, the Yangon City Development Committee placed around 200 notable colonial-period buildings on a heritage list, prohibiting their modification or demolition without approval. In 2012, the city went further and imposed a 50-year moratorium on the demolition of any building older than 50 years. An NGO called the Yangon Heritage Trust, founded by Thant Myint-U, has worked to attract investment for renovation and to create designated heritage areas downtown.

  Above those heritage buildings, the city's skyline is deliberately constrained. No building in Yangon may exceed 75 percent of the height above sea level of the Shwedagon Pagoda, which rises about 160 meters. In 2015, a luxury housing project was cancelled specifically because of its proximity to the pagoda, with critics arguing it could cause structural damage to the sacred site. Outside the low-rise downtown, the most common residential building type across the city is the eight-story walk-up apartment, a form shaped almost entirely by a municipal code that, until February 2008, required elevators only in buildings taller than 75 feet.

• 6. Infrastructure and Its Absence

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  Yangon's 6,000-kilometer road network carries over 4.4 million bus passengers every day across more than 300 public and private bus lines. All buses and 80 percent of taxis run on compressed natural gas, following a 2005 government decree. Yet the roads themselves are described as largely inadequate: many are too narrow and in poor condition for the city's growing vehicle population.

  Car ownership tells its own story. As of July 2008, a 1986-87 Nissan Sunny Super Saloon and a 1988 Toyota Corolla SE Limited cost the equivalent of roughly US$20,000 and US$29,000 respectively, because the government limits car imports to a few thousand vehicles per year for a country of over 50 million people. A sports utility vehicle that might import for around US$50,000 sells for US$250,000 on the legal market. Illegal unregistered cars are typically about half the price of registered ones.

  Rail fares a little better as a concept than in practice. The Yangon Circular Railway runs a 45.9-kilometer network of 39 stations selling about 150,000 tickets daily, connecting the city's satellite towns to the center. In 2017, the Japanese government provided more than US$200 million to help develop and maintain that commuter line and upgrade its carriages and signalling. Meanwhile, telecommunications remained stunted for decades. As recently as 2007, the estimated telephone penetration rate in Yangon was about 6 percent, and the official waiting time for a new telephone line was 3.6 years. A proposed Mass Rapid Transit system was due to begin construction in 2022 with completion targeted for 2027.

• 7. Economy of Extremes

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  Yangon represents roughly one fifth of Myanmar's entire national economy. According to official statistics for fiscal year 2010-2011, the economy of Yangon Region was valued at 8.93 trillion kyats, about 23 percent of national GDP. Thilawa Port, the country's largest and busiest, handles most of Myanmar's legal imports and exports. Bayinnaung Market is the largest wholesale center in the country for rice, beans, pulses, and other agricultural goods.

  At least 14 light industrial zones ring the city, employing over 150,000 workers in some 4,300 factories as of early 2010. The garment industry alone exported US$292 million in the 2008-2009 fiscal year. More than 80 percent of factory workers operate on a day-to-day contract basis, most of them young women between 15 and 27 who have come in from the countryside. Power shortages severely limit factory hours: in 2008, Yangon's factories needed about 120 megawatts of power, but the entire city received only about 250 megawatts of the 530 megawatts it actually needed.

  Health care operates under similarly stark constraints. A 2007 estimate put the military government's spending on health care at 0.4 percent of the national budget, against 40 to 60 percent on defense. By the government's own accounting, it spent the equivalent of US$0.85 per person on health. Although care is nominally free, patients pay for medicine and treatment even in public hospitals. Wealthier residents bypass the system entirely, traveling to Bangkok or Singapore for treatment, a pattern that concentrates what medical expertise remains in the country in just two cities: Yangon and Mandalay.

• 8. Sacred Ground

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  The Shwedagon Pagoda governs Yangon in ways that go beyond the building-height restriction. The 150-acre Kandawgyi Lake, surrounded by the 110-acre Kandawgyi Nature Park and the Yangon Zoological Gardens, lies to the south-east of the gilded stupa and is the most popular recreational area in the city. The 130-acre People's Square and Park to the west of the pagoda was once the parading ground on national days when Yangon was the capital. The Shwedagon Pagoda Festival, held each March during the dry season, draws thousands of pilgrims from across the country.

  The city has hosted the South East Asian Games twice, in 1961 and 1969. First-class cricket was played in Yangon in January 1927, when the touring Marylebone Cricket Club played matches against Burma and the Rangoon Gymkhana at the BAA Ground and the Gymkhana Ground. Those matches mark the only time first-class cricket has ever been played in Burma, and after independence the sport all but disappeared. A concrete skatepark built at Thakin Mya Park by the German non-profit Make Life Skate Life was completed in 2015 and is free to all.

  Nick Drake, the English singer-songwriter, was born in Yangon, as was Annabella Lwin, the lead vocalist of the new wave band Bow Wow Wow. The city where pilgrims have gathered for over two millennia around the Shwedagon Pagoda is also the city where the modern independence movement was born and where its most violent suppressions took place. Those layers, ancient and recent, sacred and contested, are not separate histories. They share the same streets.