Myanmar: Gold Temples, Dirt Roads, and Aung San Suu Kyi

Yangon is what remains of the country’s former capital, formally moved north to the purpose-built city of Naypyidaw in 2006 by the military government in a decision whose strategic logic has been variously interpreted as fear of a coastal invasion, desire to control the administrative centre from a more geographically defensible position, or the consequence of a general’s belief in an astrologer’s advice. Naypyidaw has ten-lane motorways with almost no traffic on them and government ministries separated by enormous distances in a city built for a population that has not yet arrived. Yangon, stripped of its capital status but not of its people or its character, carries on. The colonial architecture of the British period, Edwardian buildings going slowly tropical in the heat and humidity, stands alongside gold pagodas and crumbling infrastructure and the particular energy of a city that has been neglected by its government for decades and is continuing anyway.

The Shwedagon Pagoda rises from its hill above the city in a way that photographs cannot prepare you for, not because photographs fail to capture the scale but because they fail to capture the quality of the light that comes off the gold at different times of day, a colour that shifts from harsh midday blaze to something almost amber in the late afternoon. The pagoda complex dates, in various iterations, to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, though local tradition claims it is 2,500 years old, which would predate Buddhism’s arrival in the country and is unlikely to be accurate but which nobody seems particularly invested in disputing. What it actually contains, according to the tradition, are eight hairs of the Gautama Buddha, brought by two merchant brothers who encountered the Buddha during his lifetime and were given the relics as a gift. The platform is approached barefoot, the tiles in the July heat conducting temperature in a way that makes the walk from shade to shade an exercise in rapid assessment and commitment.

I travelled to Bagan with Misa, a Japanese woman I had met first in Cambodia. Misa had the quality that some people have of making language feel easy: she spoke Japanese, English, and enough of several other languages to navigate situations that monolingualism would make difficult, and she picked up Burmese words with a facility that made me acutely aware of my own limitations in this area. The twelve-hour overnight bus across dirt roads was not comfortable. The bus had character in the way that vehicles have character when they are old and have been through things. We arrived at three in the morning to a hotel with no record of our reservation, the internet having been down for several days, which is less a technical problem than a reflection of a government that has historically been ambivalent about its population’s access to global communication networks.

Bagan is one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in Asia and one of the least visited, which is a function of Myanmar’s relative isolation and which gives it a quality that Angkor Wat, for example, no longer has. The plain of Bagan contains the remains of approximately four thousand religious structures built between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when the Pagan Empire was the dominant power of mainland Southeast Asia. At its height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bagan was a city of perhaps two hundred thousand people with temples and pagodas under construction continuously, funded by royal patronage and a government that understood monumental religious architecture as a form of political legitimacy. The Mongol invasion of 1287 effectively ended the empire, though whether the Mongols actually sacked the city or whether the empire had already been weakening when they arrived is a debate that historians have not fully resolved. What remains is the plain, with its brick towers rising from the scrub in every direction you look, the scale of the original ambition visible in the sheer density of what was built.

We hired a horse and cart for the day. The driver navigated the dirt paths between the temples with the economy of someone who knows the terrain precisely and has no interest in making the navigation look difficult. The sunrise Misa had woken me at five-thirty to see was worth it. I tried to capture it with my camera and produced photographs that give you a reasonable impression and fail to convey what it was like to stand in the cool of the early morning with four thousand temples on a plain catching the light at the same time.

What can I say about Myanmar as a whole? The people are warm and generous in ways that exist in tension with the system they are living under. The country is beautiful in ways that the government’s mismanagement has, accidentally, preserved: the infrastructure is too poor for mass tourism, which means the temples of Bagan are not yet crowded, the streets of Yangon are not yet sanitised for consumption. Tourism matters here in a way it matters in few other places, not as a development strategy but as a connection to the outside world and a demonstration to the population that the world knows they exist. Go. Look. Spend your money in small restaurants and local guesthouses rather than the military-owned hotels that the government prefers visitors to use. The people you meet will be among the best you encounter anywhere in Southeast Asia, and the country they are living in is one that deserves considerably more than it has been given by the people running it.