Yangon

Yangon began as Dagon, a small Mon settlement around the hill where the Shwedagon Pagoda stood, its origins lost in legend and its stupa enlarged by successive rulers. In 1755 the Konbaung king Alaungpaya took the town in his campaign against the Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy and renamed it Yangon, "end of strife". It grew as a river port, with trade and a mixed population of Burmese, Mon, Armenian, Indian and Chinese merchants, but it remained secondary to the royal capitals upriver.

The British occupied the town in the First Anglo-Burmese War and took it permanently in 1852, in the second; the military engineers Fraser and Montgomerie then laid out a new grid between the Yangon River and the ridge, with wide avenues, a port and a railway. As Rangoon it became the capital of British Burma and one of the busiest ports in Asia, with a population in which immigrants from India were for a time the largest group, and it acquired the brick and stucco offices, banks, churches, mosques and synagogue that still line the centre. Japanese occupation and Allied bombing in the Second World War damaged the city heavily.

Independence came in 1948, and in July 1947 the assassination of Aung San and eight of his ministers took place inside the Secretariat. After 1962 the country's isolation slowed construction and left the old downtown largely intact, though decayed. Uprisings centred on the city in 1988 and again in 2007, Cyclone Nargis struck the delta and the city in 2008, and in 2005 the government moved the capital to Naypyidaw. After the coup of February 2021 Yangon saw mass protests that were put down with lethal force, and much of the international business arrival of the 2010s has since withdrawn.

Yangon is the country's most mixed city and knows it. Within a few downtown blocks stand Buddhist pagodas, Sunni mosques, Hindu temples, Chinese clan houses, Baptist and Catholic churches and a synagogue, the legacy of a port that drew traders and labourers from across the Bay of Bengal and southern China. Burmese is the common language, but Hokkien, Cantonese, Tamil, Hindi and Urdu are heard, and the food, festivals and family names of the city reflect the same mixture.

Buddhist practice sets the shape of the year. Monks collect alms at dawn, families make merit at the Shwedagon on sabbath days and full moons, and the great festivals — Thingyan's water throwing in April, the lights of Thadingyut in October and Tazaungdaing in November — are observed across the city. Astrology, nat spirit shrines and offerings sit comfortably alongside temple Buddhism.

Culturally the city has long been the country's most outward-looking: its university produced the politics of the independence movement and of later uprisings, its publishers and bookstalls on Pansodan Street kept a literary tradition alive under censorship, and its music, film and art scenes are the largest in Myanmar. Manners are gentle and indirect, voices are kept low, disagreements are avoided in public, and politeness towards elders and monks is expected. The younger generation that filled the streets in 2021 gave the city a reputation for defiance it has not lost.

Around five million people live in Yangon Region's urban area, making it several times larger than any other city in the country. The old downtown is densely packed into shophouses, where families live above shops on floors reached by narrow stairs and send down baskets on strings for deliveries. Most residents, though, live in the outer townships — North and South Dagon, Hlaing Tharyar, Shwepyithar and others — built up from resettlement schemes and industrial estates, and commute long distances by bus.

The economy is trade, services and manufacturing: the port on the Yangon River, garment factories in the industrial zones, banks and offices downtown, wholesale markets and a very large informal sector of stalls, workshops and street vendors. Since 2021 many foreign firms have left, the kyat has weakened sharply, and jobs and incomes have become less secure.

Days begin early, with alms rounds, mohinga stalls and markets before the heat. Offices and shops keep to the middle of the day; teashops fill in the late afternoon, and street food and grills take over in the evening. Long power cuts are part of the routine, with generators and batteries running shops and homes, and internet restrictions and rising prices shape what people can do. Flooding in the monsoon and heavy traffic are the everyday frustrations.

Mohinga is the city's breakfast and the country's best-known dish: rice noodles in a fish soup thickened with toasted rice flour and chopped banana stem, finished with boiled egg, coriander, lime and crisp fritters. It is sold from pavement stalls, carried through the streets on shoulder poles and eaten early. Ohn no khauk swe, wheat noodles in a coconut-milk chicken broth, is the lunchtime counterpart, and laphet thoke, a salad of fermented tea leaves with fried beans, peanuts, sesame and garlic, appears at almost every meal.

The Indian inheritance is strong. Dan bauk, the local biryani, is cooked in vast pans in the Muslim-run shops of the downtown streets; palata, a flaky griddle bread, is eaten with pea curry; samosas are chopped into a soupy salad called samusa thoke. Chinese food is equally embedded, from noodle soups and roast duck to the evening grills of 19th Street, where skewers of meat, fish, vegetables and offal are picked from trays and cooked over charcoal.

Burmese curries, or hin, are cooked slowly in oil until it separates, and come with rice, a clear soup, boiled vegetables and a pungent relish based on ngapi, fermented fish or shrimp paste. Sweet milk tea in the teashops is the everyday drink, with plain green tea served free alongside; falooda, a milky drink with jelly and ice cream, is a hot-season favourite, and street stalls sell coconut rice, sticky rice sweets and mont lin ma yar, small rice-flour dumplings cooked in a dimpled pan.