A Trail Through Vintage Yangon

EXPLORING MYANMAR’S PAST THROUGH ARCHITECTURAL RELICS

- Kalpana Sunder

It reminds me of Kolkata in the sixties. The streets are lined with grand fin-de-siècle buildings in a variety of styles: pastel stucco facades, and red brick buildings with wrought iron balconies covered with grime and mildew, plants sprouting from their bricks. Some lie under scaffolding, others are covered with blue tarpaulin. To stroll through the streets of Yangon (erstwhile Rangoon), is to turn back the pages of its history. The phantoms of the past seem to linger around every corner.

Myanmar’s largest city was laid out by British military engineers Alexander Fraser and William Montgomerie in 1852, as a garden city in a geometric grid around the Sule Pagoda. Because of the dictatorship that lasted until very recently, and the country’s forced isolation, many colonial buildings remain intact, showcasing a wealth of architectural styles from art deco, to Queen Anne, to neoclassical with Asian motifs and influences.

I’m on a heritage walk through the port city’s downtown area with Wai Linn of Yangon Walks. “British rule till 1948 gave rise to many grand edifices that mixed colonial styles of architecture with local materials, like Burmese teak,” Wai says. “Today, Yangon has the densest concentration of colonial era buildings in Asia.”

The city had a multicultural merchant population—Armenians, Jews, Indians, English, Scots—and they have all have left their mark on its urban fabric. “The best materials from across the world, like marble from Italy and iron columns from Manchester, were imported to construct buildings,” Wai adds.