Myanmar's Colonial Treasures Threatened

[SoCalDem]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704140104575058462450749870.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn
By A Wall Street Journal reporter

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.

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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."

[mahina]

1. Interesting. Still, if the admin. there cares so little for their people, it's hard to imagine

they would care much about their architectural assets.