The BBC’s Top Gear team marvelled at the city’s desolate boulevards when they visited last year as part of a special episode filmed in the country, kicking a football around, staging a drag-race down the vast, empty roads, and joking about the difficulties of navigating the capital’s non-existent morning rush hour.īut to focus on Naypyidaw’s wide, empty streets is to risk missing the ubiquitous street cleaners which are their only pedestrians, walking in pairs in their neon-green vests, sweeping the already pristine streets for hours each day.
In recent years, the city’s bizarre urban plan and strange emptiness has become something of an international curiousity. It is rumoured to have cost up to $4bn to construct, in a country that spends just 0.4% of its GDP on healthcare for its people – by far the lowest in the world. Built from scratch in the middle of rice paddies and sugar-cane fields, Naypyidaw (often translated as “Seat of the King”) was unveiled as Burma’s new capital in November 2005, by the then military regime. Welcome to one of the world’s most peculiar capital cities. Road sweepers in a residential area for civil servants. Many of the restaurants have free, fast Wi-Fi. Unlike in much of the country, there is reliable electricity here. There is a safari park, a zoo complete with air-conditioned penguin habitat, and at least four golf courses. The streets – clearly designed for cars and motorcades, not pedestrians nor leisurely strolls – have up to 20 lanes and stretch as far as the eye can see (the rumour is these grandiose boulevards were built to enable aircraft to land on them in the event of anti-government protests or other “disturbances”). The scale of this surreal city is difficult to describe: it extends an estimated 4,800 square kilometres, six times the size of New York City. Meticulously landscaped roundabouts boast large sculptures of flowers.
The roads are newly paved and lined with flowers and carefully pruned shrubbery.
On either side of the street, a seemingly endless series of giant detached buildings, villa-style hotels and shopping malls look like they have fallen from the sky, all painted in soft pastel colours: light pink, baby blue, beige. Driving through Naypyidaw, the purpose-built capital of Burma, it could be easy to forget that you’re in the middle of one of south-east Asia’s poorest countries.
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