CLOSEUP
Nay Pyi Taw
82
FAHTHAI
O
n November 11, 2005, at 11am on the 11th
day of the 11th month – 1,100 military trucks
carrying 11 battalions and staff members of 11
government ministries rolled out of Yangon en
route to a virtual ghost city that had been rising
out of scrubland in what amounted to the middle of nowhere.
Built in secrecy (reportedly after astrological consultations)
and greeted by surprise and much skepticism, Nay Pyi Taw –
literally “Royal City of the Sun’’ – was proclaimed the country’s
new capital a year later. Yangon, Myanmar’s great primate city
and the seat of political power for the previous 144 years, had
been abandoned by the then ruling military regime.
Early and even more recent visitors have called Nay Pyi Taw
sterile, weird, surreal, a ghost capital; descriptions not unlike
those of other built-from-scratch cities like Brasilia, Ottawa
and Canberra. If Myanmar is, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote,
“quite unlike any land you know about’’, there’s no question
that Nay Pyi Taw is totally unlike any other place you’ll see in
this richly hued, exotic, sometimes chaotic country.
Built on an area of 7,054km
2
– 40 times the size of
Washington, DC – its neatly laid-out zones are connected by
multi-lane highways that are virtually free of traffic. The same
goes for the supersized railway station and international airport;
plans call for the latter to handle up to 10.5 million passengers
a year. Units in Nay Pyi Taw’s hundreds of orderly apartment
blocks are assigned according to rank and colour-coded – for
example, green for employees of the Ministry of Agriculture.
The city boasts 24-hour electricity and an air-conditioned
enclosure for penguins.
As you might expect, Nay Pyi Taw is drawing growing
numbers of business people, both local and foreign, as well
as diplomats and international agency officials, though many
maintain permanent bases in Yangon. This may start to
change as Myanmar this year assumes the chairmanship of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and opens its
doors even wider to the outside world.
TIME OUT
The view from
Siam Lotus
Restaurant is one
of the city's best
E X P L O R E
FOR ART'S SAKE
Buddhist murals
adorn the interior
of Uppatasanti
Pagoda
