A Kenyan journalist notes that “Naypyidaw in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is the world’s weirdest capital. It is virtually a ‘ghost city’ with empty 20-lane highways. It’s geographically over 10 times larger than Cairo, Egypt, yet Cairo has 24 times more people.” The military regime that runs Myanmar spent billions of dollars to construct this ghost town even though Myanmar is one of the world’s 30 poorest countries and Myanmar has one of the world’s worst healthcare systems.
Naypyidaw officially replaced Yangon as the capital in 2006….moving the capital 250 miles to the north, creating one of the world’s strangest capital cities.
Unlike other countries that have switched over a long period, this was announced, without warning, in November 2005, when the ministers were ordered immediately to head to what was then a small town near Pyinmana, and the new capital was named Naypyidaw, meaning ‘Abode of Kings’, at a cost of $4 billion.
Naypyidaw is six times the size of New York City, has enormous highways that are 20 lanes wide, a zoo, golf courses, and, unlike a lot of the country, it has an electric grid that is constant and rarely cuts out. However, the one thing that it is lacking is people, and where this city can easily contain millions, it only houses a fraction of that.
Its huge roads see barely any traffic, and rather than the buzz of a busy city, it’s largely quiet, which naturally leaves you asking how it happened and why….
The former capital of Yangon was a major city of 6 million people. It used to be called Rangoon, which is how it is referred to in American and British movies and novels.
But Yangon was full of people who yearned for democracy, making Myanmar’s military government hate it. Yangon had
a couple of major issues for the regime: firstly, as a coastal city, it was vulnerable, and secondly, it had been the hotbed for 1988’s uprising and again was home to mass protests a year later in 2007. In contrast, Naypyidaw was surrounded by jungle and farmland, isolated and a long way from a huge number of people. The city’s layout has governmental buildings set up miles apart, roads so big that protests couldn’t concentrate anywhere, and the grid structure meant that if they did, they could be quelled easily.
There are even rumors that the roads were designed to be so wide that they could be used for aircraft to take off, in the event that there was any attempt at a coup within the country, but even more worrying were some rumors that the military elite in the country had been guided by astrology.
The country is currently in the midst of a civil war that has been ongoing since 2021, but as it stands, the city is a capital in name only, lacking culture and spontaneity, with many of the houses empty, and some that aren’t, only occupied by civil servants who are forced to live there.
