Myanmar

🇲🇲 Myanmar

Mandalay

Mandalay was the last royal capital of Burma before the British annexed it in 1885, and it remains Myanmar's cultural heartland — a city where monks outnumber tourists, where master craftsmen still carve Buddha images from Sagyin marble, and where traditional arts like marionette theatre, lacquerware and gold-leaf beating survive as living practices. The Royal Palace reconstructed after WWII bombing stands at the city centre, surrounded by a 3 km moat; at its corners, four ancient hilltop pagodas predicted the founding of the city in 1857. At U Bein Bridge, the 1.2 km teak structure that predates photography is the world's longest teak bridge. Cross the Irrawaddy River and Mingun's colossal unfinished stupa — the largest brick structure ever attempted — looms from the western bank. Mandalay is also the gateway to the ancient royal cities of Amarapura, Inwa (Ava) and Sagaing, all within 20 km and collectively forming one of Asia's great archaeological landscapes.

🇲🇲 Myanmar

Naypyidaw

Naypyidaw is one of the world's most unusual capitals — a purpose-built city constructed in secret by Myanmar's military government and revealed to a stunned world when it was declared the capital in 2005, replacing Yangon. Built in the geographic centre of Myanmar at enormous cost, Naypyidaw has a population officially quoted at 1 million but with the emptiness of a far smaller city — 20-lane highways connect isolated government compound to isolated government compound; the hotel zone has dozens of large hotels built for state visits that rarely materialised; and the Uppatasanti Pagoda is a near-exact replica of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, built to 98% of its dimensions. The military government's logic was partly strategic (harder to invade), partly symbolic (demonstrating state capacity) and possibly astrological (soothsayers reportedly advised the exact date and time of the transfer). Despite its oddness, Naypyidaw has genuine attractions: the National Museum of Myanmar is the most comprehensive in the country, the zoological garden has white elephants (considered sacred and politically significant in Burma), and the Naypyidaw Zoological Gardens and the Gems Museum give insight into Myanmar's extraordinary natural wealth. The city is rarely visited by independent travellers, which makes it the most unusual capital experience in Southeast Asia.

🇲🇲 Myanmar

Yangon

Yangon (ရန်ကုန်; population 7.4 million; the largest city and principal commercial port of Myanmar (Burma); the former capital (1948-2006) before the military junta relocated the capital to the purpose-built Naypyidaw in 2006; on the Yangon River, 25 km upstream from the Andaman Sea on the Gulf of Martaban; the most historically layered city in Southeast Asia in terms of the overlap between the British colonial heritage (1824-1948) and the living Theravada Buddhist tradition that is the oldest and most continuously practised form of Buddhism in the world) is defined above all by the Shwedagon Pagoda (ရွှေတိဂုံဘုရား — the "Golden Shwedagon"; 98 m tall; covered in 8,688 gold plates (the total gold weight on the stupa: approximately 60 tonnes); topped by the diamond orb (the "hti" — the umbrella-shaped crown encrusted with 5,451 diamonds, 2,317 rubies and sapphires, 1,065 golden bells and 420 silver bells) that is aligned to catch the first and last rays of the sun each day): the most sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar and one of the most sacred Buddhist sites in the world, believed by the Burmese Buddhist tradition to contain 8 hairs of the historical Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) enshrined in the original stupa 2,500 years ago (the archaeological evidence suggests the current structure dates from approximately the 6th century CE, with the major additions by the Mon, Bagan and Konbaung dynasty kings from the 11th century onward). Yangon is simultaneously the most atmospheric British colonial city in Southeast Asia: the 19th-century downtown core (the "Heritage Zone" around Strand Road, Maha Bandula Park, the City Hall and the Secretariat) contains the finest concentration of British colonial architecture in Asia outside of Kolkata — the red-brick Secretariat (1889-1905, designed by Henry Hoyne-Fox and E.W. Jacobsen in the Indo-Saracenic style — the building where General Aung San, the father of Burmese independence, was assassinated on July 19, 1947), the Strand Hotel (1901 — the most famous hotel in colonial Burma, built by the Sarkies Brothers (the Armenian hotel dynasty that also built Raffles in Singapore and the Eastern & Oriental in Penang)), the High Court (1911) and the dozens of Victorian commercial buildings along the downtown grid (the British-planned Yangon grid of 1852, with the streets named for British colonial functionaries and later renamed for Burmese historical figures after independence).