Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
north of the old colonial centre. At the same time, the city's demographic make-up changed
substantially,withmanyBurmeseofIndiandescent,plusthecity'soncesizeableJewishcom-
munity and other ethnic groups, leaving following independence and later during Ne Win's
isolationist rule of the 1960s. Many of the city's old colonial street names were changed,
while in 1989 the country's military rulers changed the city's name from Rangoon back to
Yangon
, although the change was not recognized by many local and international organiza-
tions, and the old name continues sporadically in circulation right up to the present.
Yangonbecameamajorhotbedof
pro-democracyprotests
,particularlyduringthepopular
uprisings of 1974, 1988 and 2007. Further carnage ensued in 2008, when
Cyclone Nargis
devastated Yangon's industrial infrastructure - although human casualties were mercifully
few. The city suffered a significant symbolic blow in 2005 with the founding of a new
Burmese capital at Naypyitaw, but despite being stripped of capital-city status and losing a
few ministerial privileges en route, Yangon remains very much the economic, cultural and
political heart of the country, with a population now well over four million spreading over an
area of over sixty square kilometres.
Downtown Yangon
The old colonial-era city - or
downtownYangon
as it's now generally known - remains the
heart of modern Yangon and far and away its most absorbing district. Laid out by the British
in the 1850s, downtown comprises a geometrical gridiron of streets, almost 5km wide and
1km deep, although the original design has proved hopelessly insufficient to deal with the
sheer weight of twenty-first-century vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and regularly descends
into gridlock, on both the roads and pavements.
Rapid development notwithstanding, downtown remains one of Asia's great colonial-era
cityscapes, with streets full of Neoclassical public buildings in various states of monsoon-
stained,tropical-overloaddecay.Superimposedontheold-worldfabricthebustlingstreetlife
of Yangon goes on unabated, with roads and pavements crammed full of more food stalls,
street hawkers, traffic, touts, shoppers and red-robed monks than you'd believe possible -
this is very much a place where it pays to go slow and savour the detail. It's also the place
where you'll get the best sense of Yangon's multicultural heritage, with a dense confusion
of
thanaka
-smeared Burmese, bearded Muslims, dark-skinned Tamils and pale Chinese, all
navigating their way slowly between innumerable street-side stalls and pavement cafés.
