Harmonising history with modernity is crucial to preserving Yangon’s stunning architectural past.
For the discerning visitor to British-ruled Yangon, the capital of what was then called Burma, deciding where to stay was a simple affair. The Strand Hotel, built in 1901 by the Armenian Sarkies Brothers, commanded a proud vista of the city’s waterfront, in the heart of the commercial district. With its marble floors, glass-panelled doors and liveried waiters, the Strand was widely regarded as the “the finest hostelry East of Suez” – a place where the likes of Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell and Noël Coward sipped gin and rubbed shoulders with the cream of Yangon society.
After the onset of military rule, the hotel was nationalised and fell into disrepair, but was rescued in the early 1990s by a $12m-refurbishment that returned it to its original state. Today, the Strand gleams amid the bustle of modern Yangon, a tiny enclave of high-tea hospitality and colonial chic.
Across the city, hundreds more colonial-era buildings remain standing, looming out of the dirt and noise like proud totems of a bygone era. Unlike many other Southeast Asian cities, where history has been covered with ugly urban sprawl, Myanmar’s decades of isolation have allowed Yangon to preserve a rich bounty of colonial architecture – the largest of any city in Southeast Asia.
“Yangon is a city that has been stuck in time,” says Ian Morley, an urban historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “It’s been trapped in a bubble.”
Today, visitors to Yangon marvel at the crumbling colonial buildings dotted across the downtown, and the small architectural details – the hundreds of spires, domes and towers – that lend the city a satisfying sense of aesthetic unity.
But all this might be about to change. While the Strand was thrown a lifeline, many of its colonial siblings are in sorry shape, derelict and on the verge of collapse after years of neglect. And as the country’s isolation draws to an end, bringing an expected influx of foreign investment, Yangon has found itself in the grip of a “culture of demolition” fuelled by spiking real estate prices and the lure of easy profits. “Every year that nothing is done,” Morley says, “there are more and more buildings being lost.”
When it was laid out by British planners in 1852, Yangon’s downtown grid stood in stark contrast to the chaotic districts to the north: a cartographic expression, so the British thought, of the order and prosperity of colonial rule. And prosperous the city became: plugged into the Empire’s trade networks, Yangon grew rapidly in the late 19th century, from a population of around 63,000 in the 1860s to more than 400,000 by 1931.
Many of the city’s neoclassical Beaux Arts masterpieces were erected in the first decades of the 20th century.
The best preserved of these are clustered around what was once Fytche Square, now Maha Bandoola Garden: the City Hall, an impressive edifice combining a garden-variety colonial style with Burmese idioms, and the nearby High Court, a crimson-bricked building topped with a six-story clock tower. However, the jewel in the crown of colonial Yangon was – and remains – the Secretariat Building.
“Every year that nothing is done, there are more and more buildings being lost.”
Occupying an entire city block, this sprawling complex, a riot of turrets, domes and shaded walkways set amid lush tropical gardens, was built in the late 1800s as the seat of the colonial government, an icon of imperial prowess as imposing as anything in London or Calcutta.
It was here that General Aung San, the hero of Burmese independence, was assassinated along with most of his senior colleagues on July 19, 1947.
After Myanmar gained its independence in 1948, most of these old buildings were used as government offices. In 2005, however, when the capital was shifted north to Naypyidaw, the offices were vacated, causing many to fall into further disrepair.
The Secretariat has since stood empty, its brick-work discolouring and its windows opening onto musty, unlit passages.
Weeds sprout from its towers and turrets, while a clock mounted on the east side of the building came to a stop years ago, frozen at twenty past one. The complex is now only inhabited by a squad of police, who bathe in the old cisterns on the grounds and hang their laundry from the old office windows.
In 1999, the Yangon city authorities placed 189 buildings on a heritage list, but preserving old buildings is not the government’s top priority, given the constant challenges of ethnic insurgency, political reform and gradual economic opening.
“I think the government has taken a policy to maintain these old buildings, but the main thing is that they don’t have the funding to do these things, and don’t pay attention enough to do this,” says Aung Soe Min, the owner of the Pansodan Gallery in central Yangon.
“These buildings are important for the image of Yangon,” he adds, “because these are the only things that [let you] see how the city experienced different eras.”
Another hurdle is popular attitudes. Soe, a Yangon resident, says many of the city’s inhabitants are more focused on development than historical preservation.
“Most people, they are really well-dressed and they might have a really good hand-phone and good shoes,” he says, as we stroll past the Immigration Building, formerly the Rowe and Co. department store – once one of Asia’s largest. “They’re only thinking about money. They don’t care about anything like this.”
This is only compounded by the fact that many of the city’s old apartment blocks have become dangerously unsafe. In March 2010, a 15-year-old girl was killed when an old building collapsed downtown, spurring calls for pre-emptive demolitions.
With developers now lining up to develop central Yangon, Morley says it’s hard to be optimistic. The cityscape has already grown taller and more “disjointed” as old buildings have been replaced by skyscrapers, hotels and apartment blocks, an almost inevitable process that has disfigured cities across the region.
“Development will destroy the cultural heritage of the city,” he says, “and the quality that it has today will be replaced by the kind of international face that you find almost anywhere in Southeast Asia.”
But if the current reforms bring threats in the form of rampant development, they also offer the hope that rising numbers of foreign visitors will encourage the government to kick-start preservation efforts.
Indeed, a number of old buildings downtown have been given facelifts as of late, and the state-run New Light of Myanmar recently opined that “big cities are the image and glory of the nation”. But beyond a few basic repairs and a fresh coat of paint, it’s still uncertain where the fate of Britain’s colonial relics will rate for a country still emerging from a haze of isolation and economic backwardness.
“There are changes definitely occurring in Myanmar,” Morley says, “but nobody’s really sure yet where conservation and preservation of buildings fits in with that picture.”
[Published in the Southeast Asia Globe, April 2012]
