Pansodan Street, financial and commercial center of British Rangoon, has many imposing buildings. This one (believed to date from 1906; details can be difficult to trace in Myanmar) was home to China Mutual Insurance Co.; tenants now include a small art gallery.YANGON—The colonial buildings of this once-grand city are scattered about like tombstones in a neglected cemetery—unnoticed, and often unwanted, relics of a lost era.
Yangon is home to one of the largest collections of undisturbed colonial architecture in the world, with some neighborhoods left almost exactly as they were when the country gained independence from Britain some 60 years ago. But the buildings, already crumbling after years of neglect under a repressive military regime, face an increasingly uncertain future.
A government decision to move Myanmar's capital from Yangon to a remote redoubt named Naypyitaw in 2005 has left several of the most important buildings almost totally abandoned, accelerating their deterioration. Meantime, resurgent investment from China and other Asian neighbors is triggering interest in development—including the possibility of building shopping malls and apartment blocks where old structures now stand.
Buildings at risk include Secretariat, one of Southeast Asia's most important modern historical sites. It was here that Aung San, Myanmar's main independence hero, and father of famed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, was assassinated by political rivals in July 1947, setting off a series of events that culminated in a military takeover in 1962.
Although Secretariat, with its gaudy red-and-yellow exterior and turrets, was ridiculed by residents when it opened in 1905, it became a hive of government ministries and, ultimately, a regional landmark. Today, inhabited only by a few camped-out soldiers, the dilapidated structure is hidden from the public behind a forest of trees and chain-link fence. Photographing the building is prohibited. Some residents believe it is already beyond repair.
A couple of blocks away, the multistory Railway Headquarters (1896), also of bright red brick, was built with rows of ornate windows framed with filigreed railings and matching awnings. Today, the awnings are collapsing and some windows are bricked in, while others are covered in reed mats or sacks. Weeds grow from walls and spill over ledges. The grounds are littered with metal—scraps and what look like pieces of equipment—nearly hidden by brush and vines.
Preserving Yangon's historic buildings rates low among social priorities in Myanmar, which consistently ranks as one of the poorest and most-corrupt nations in the world. The government is accused of widespread human-rights abuses, including the imprisonment of political opponents such as Ms. Suu Kyi. Some foreigners refuse on principle to visit Myanmar, which is open to tourists, because of the regime's track record.
Still, historians are hopeful that at least some of Yangon's buildings will be preserved.
"It's very hard to go around what was once the British Empire and see so many buildings intact," says Ian Morley, an urban historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who calls the city's center possibly "the last example of a colonial core" still intact in Asia.
"I don't mean to come off as a raving colonialist," he says. But "we need to be aware of where we come from," and the threats upon Yangon's surviving buildings "are very, very great."
Myanmar's recent repressive history is one of the main reasons its colonial buildings are still standing. The military restricted access to the outside world after it came to power nearly 50 years ago, and in more recent years, U.S. and European sanctions prevented many Western companies from investing there. As a result, Yangon never went through the frenzied development that remade Bangkok, Beijing and other Asian cities.
New development is still minimal. But parts of Myanmar's economy have picked up in recent years, spurring construction. Trade between China and Myanmar quadrupled in recent years, reaching more than $2.6 billion in 2008. While much of that money is being spent in other parts of the country, a handful of new apartment blocks have popped up around Yangon or are under construction. Crews are finishing work on a tower of 20 stories or more in the center of downtown that was started, but left unfinished, years ago.
"You'll probably see a lot more apartments," says Brian Agland, Myanmar country director for the international relief agency CARE in Yangon. As for the older buildings, "you're starting to see a lot more decay" as the government spends more time in Naypyitaw.
Myanmar officials have made promises in the past to preserve Yangon's colonial remains. The regime established a list of protected "heritage" sites in the late 1990s that grew to include roughly 200 buildings, including Secretariat as well as churches, schools and residences—largely in recognition of their potential as tourist draws. Local residents, though, say the government has for the most part ignored its list, sprucing up a few buildings while leaving most others to rot.
During a recent visit, residents pointed to a block they said was supposed to be protected but now is surrounded by fences and signs promoting a future shopping mall. When asked about the site, a resident said she was told the historic buildings there were "accidentally damaged" and therefore no longer subject to protection.
Attempts to contact Myanmar authorities over several weeks to discuss their plans for Yangon's buildings were unsuccessful. The regime rarely speaks to foreign journalists.
Architectural historians who have studied the city say that lower-level government employees have expressed enthusiasm for working with outsiders to save the buildings, but calls to more senior officials typically go unanswered. Even basic information—such as when structures were built—is difficult to obtain. In some cases, records were destroyed.
Myanmar's government has "pretty much villainized the buildings as colonial eyesores, as hateful reminders of the past," says one academic who has researched Yangon's architecture and, like many experts on the country, requests anonymity when discussing the regime.
Some Yangon residents say they believe the government truly does want to renovate the buildings, preferably with help from foreign investors, turning them into hotels or other businesses. But Myanmar's tourism industry has struggled in recent years. And many of the buildings are in such disrepair that they would be far cheaper to rip down than rebuild. Some are empty, roofless shells, home to buckling staircases and sprouting trees. Open sewers feed into some courtyards.
It's also hard, if not impossible, to persuade locals to restore buildings on their own, in part because they lack financing in Myanmar's cash-starved economy. Plus, some residents view the buildings as uncomfortable eyesores and prefer the advantages of newer buildings with modern amenities.
The preservationists who do follow the buildings have focused their energies on publicizing them to foreign visitors in the hopes that international attention will spur Myanmar officials. Historians are also encouraging the many foreign institutions in Myanmar—especially international aid agencies—to take over and repair historic structures.
The group CARE, for instance, moved into a two-story, early-1900s house in Yangon's Embassy District two years ago and restored some of the interior and two damaged verandas. "I just thought it had potential," says Mr. Agland, the CARE country director. Now "we have big meetings out on the verandas."
Other buildings that have been saved include the Strand hotel, built in 1901 by Armenian brothers whose chain included the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore. With teak-framed windows, tiled floors and vaulted ceilings, it was for many decades a required stop for wealthy European travelers in Asia. But by the 1970s, guests described a building filled with rats and bats, with faucets that issued murky brown water. Refurbished with the help of foreign investors in the early 1990s at a cost of several million dollars, it has since hosted the likes of Mick Jagger.
But such high-cost projects are risky. A Strand official says the hotel has barely broken even in recent years, since international sanctions were imposed. And while there's talk that Secretariat or the Railway Headquarters will be similarly restored with money from China or Singapore, few locals believe it will happen anytime soon, if ever.
Built on an early Buddhist pilgrimmage site near a hilltop shrine called Shwedagon, Yangon was little more than a small town until the mid-19th century. The British seized the area in the 1850s as Britain conquered what was known as Burma, and expanded the city—which they called Rangoon—to become a strategic river port.
Led by a superintendent who had worked on city planning in Singapore and an army engineer, Lieutenant A. Fraser, the British laid out the city on a grid and drained swampy areas. Population tripled to about 135,000 in the early 1880s, and by the early 1900s, Rangoon was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the British Empire, with streetcars, gaslights and public gardens. It boomed further over the next several decades with exports of rice, teak and other goods.
In the city's heyday, engineers added entire neighborhoods of European-style buildings, blending Victorian architecture with more exotic flourishes from West Bengal and other parts of the empire. Wealthy traders built teak mansions topped with elaborate cupolas. Along Pansodan Street downtown, businessmen created a miniature version of lower Manhattan, with banks, insurance companies and trading houses graced by thick columns, pillars and arches. Later buildings incorporated Art Deco designs.
The Rowe & Co. department store (1910), for example, became known as one of the ritziest shopping centers in Southeast Asia, with its patterns of red and yellow brick, topped with a tower reminiscent of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Although still used today—as an immigration office—many of the windows are knocked out or covered with tarps, and dark black stains cover the exterior.
Many of the grandiose British buildings confused or annoyed local residents. A famous local joke held that Rangoon's High Court (1911), with a clock tower rising above the nearby shophouses and plenty of the city's ubiquitous bright red brick, was designed by "a convict with a grudge against the judge." The building remains in relatively good shape, as it is still used for some court proceedings, and during a recent visit workers were seen repainting parts of the exterior.
In one case—the Rangoon City Hall (1936)—a Burmese architect (with Western training) was called in to make the building more suitable to local tastes. He visited the ancient city of Bagan and other sites around the country to study pagodas and monasteries, elements of which he added to the city-hall design. The cream-colored building includes Burmese spires and mannered Asian arches, creating a unique West-meets-East mix, like a British ministry doubling as a Buddhist temple.
Myanmar entered a period of tumult after independence in the 1940s, and new development came to a virtual standstill after the military took over. There was a brief flurry of new construction—including several high-rise towers—in the 1990s, when the junta liberalized Myanmar's economy to attract more foreign capital. But the miniboom ended abruptly with the 1997 Asian financial crisis and tough economic sanctions from the U.S. and Europe.
It's still possible the recent increase in Asian investment in Myanmar could help save some of Yangon's buildings, if companies decide to make use of them. Some of the surge in foreign-aid money that followed Cyclone Nargis in 2008 went to fix up houses like the one CARE now uses.
For now, residents are skeptical. One bookshop owner in central Yangon says he doubts officials "will do their job" and protect buildings on the government's own heritage list. And without proper restoration, says another Yangon resident, "they will soon disappear."
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