Yangon/Rangoon

The history of the city of Yangon travels on two tracks. One is religious. The other is economic. Even when Yangon may have seemed to be a city of politics after the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1886) and again after independence (1948) up until the capital officially moved to Naypyidaw (2005), religious or economic factors were never far from the surface. One could argue that without either the religious or the economic element, Yangon never could have become a teeming metropolis and the largest city of Myanmar. Another way to say this is that, though neither religion nor the economy comprised Yangon’s character alone, they were both absolutely necessary to provide it with the importance and personality that Yangon carries today.

In the political sphere, the citizens of Myanmar have witnessed and taken part in an expanding and deepening process of democratization and political liberalization in the past few years. In the economic sphere, changes are also underway that indicate a growth of economic liberalism. One part of that process is a slowly increasing financialization as indicated by the new Yangon Stock Exchange (YSX) set to begin trading operations in late 2015. This paper will analyze what this new stock exchange means for the citizens of Myanmar by placing it within a regional comparative analysis of stock markets across Southeast Asia, including the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HoSE), the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), the Lao Securities Exchange (LSX), and the Cambodia Securities Exchange (CSX). The main argument is that despite calculable risks in terms of business transparency and national politics, the potentialities for a successful YSX are in place. The main socioeconomic conditions that warrant investment, both from the domestic as well as international perspective are 1) the depth and diversity of Myanmar’s adult population size, 2) Myanmar’s rallying industrial sector, 3) Burmese businesses’ current lack of bank financing, and 4) Burmese citizens’ little-to-no holdings in financial assets as compared to other non-financial wealth holdings. The YSX will not be an overnight success for either domestic Burmese investors or for domestic Burmese enterprises seeking new avenues to finance growth and project investment. However, the systemic socioeconomic conditions are in place for the Yangon Stock Exchange to parallel more closely the experience of the Vietnamese HoSE and HNX than that of the other Indochinese exchanges of LSX and CSX.

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but also aware of the social and economic possibilities in this grey zone between two oppressive regimes.

For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have historically settled in the city—Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka—and conflated this diverse population with the state actions of the People’s Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network.

By foregrounding place and everyday practice, this ethnography interrogates the problematic application of the concepts of ethnicity, territory, nation and citizenship in a country where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence. In this first study in English of the Sino-Burmese, the key question is how this community has made a place for itself by navigating through multiple political, economic and social forces at multiple scales.

In 2010, the tectonic plates beneath the junta-controlled Myanmar started to shift. As the military regime began to loosen its reigns on power it auctioned off 80% of the country’s state-owned assets and earmarked hundreds of buildings in downtown Yangon for demolition and redevelopment. This opaque but surely profitable fire sale would profoundly reshape the country’s economic landscape and the lives of those who had long called the former colonial capital of Yangon home. Elizabeth Rush, a westerner who has been reporting on South East Asia for years, made good use of strange days just before Myanmar’s awakening to venture into the lost world of downtown Yangon, but it was not the large edifices of Empire that attracted her attention. Rather, she focused on the shop houses and private residences that line the alleyways and it is here, in these forgotten and secluded spaces, that the city’s real secrets have been kept. After all, it was not – in the bad old days of the Burmese regime – just those who were overtly political who had to succumb to the silence. In a world where anyone accused or perceived of being on the wrong side of the regime could end up in prison with no legal recourse, people turned inwards by necessity. Only behind closed doors was it safe to indulge in private obsessions and the day-to-day worries of making ends meet. Still Lifes from a Vanishing City celebrates and preserves the interior lives diligently maintained despite the dictatorship’s powerfully effacing reach.

The significance of Burma to the history of global and Indian migration can be understood by the fact that it was the destination accounting for the largest mobility of Indian migrants during the century 1830s-1930s. This article is an attempt to complicate the parameters which have conventionally defined the characteristics of Indian migration during the colonial period. Broadly, it is also attempted to challenge and deconstruct the Eurocentric perceptions on non-European migrations in the global migration framework, by focussing on the quality, quantity, stimulating agency and nature of the colonial Indian migration. To do so, the article delves into analysing the content, pattern, nature and functioning of the informally regulated maistry system, which mediated the recruitment of Indian labour and their supervision in Burma through networks of “kin-intermediary” called maistry.

Keyword : Colonial India; Indian labour; Indian migration; Burma; Rangoon; Maistry system

A comparison of two similar types of back alley spaces: Back Drainage Space (BDS) in Yangon and Back-lane in Singapore, is conducted to find out if there are any relationships between their spatial development and lessons that can be learned from the precedent case in Singapore. Commonalities and differences of the back alley are identified by comparing the historical urban context of their formation and development in British colonial cities. The findings suggest that the back alley spaces in both cities, despite divergent circumstances and development after independence, possess common traits as interstitial space between public and private, with a unique way of spatial management based on informal, mutual agreement, which suggests some useful ideas when considering the role of these spaces in the redevelopment of Yangon in the near future.

Yangon, centre économique du Myanmar, connaît un développement urbain sans précédent, concomitant à la démocratisation de son régime et à la libéralisation de son économie. Ce développement n'est pas encore maîtrisé par les autorités gouvernementales et municipales qui tentent aujourd'hui de légiférer avec l'appui d'experts internationaux et d'organisations birmanes afin de conserver le patrimoine
historique de la ville ainsi que sa perspective urbaine. Les défis urbains demeurent importants dans le domaine foncier, dans la distribution en eau et en électricité, dans le développement du réseau routier et dans l'accès aux services et aux espaces verts. La multiplicité des acteurs, nationaux et internationaux, et des modèles rend peu évidente l'élaboration du schéma directeur de la ville, métropole régionale en devenir.


Yangon, economic center of Burma, knows an unprecedented phase of urban development as concomitant with the democratization of its political regime and with the liberalization of its economy. This new development is not yet under control of the national and municipal governments which today try to legislate with the help of international experts and of Burmese non-governmental organizations to protect the town's cultural heritage and its historical urban perspective. Urban challenges remain important in real estate management, in water and electricity supplies, and in access to
public services and open areas and parks. The plethora of national and international stakeholders and of urban models makes the elaboration of the city’s master plan difficult. Nevertheless, Yangon is slowly becoming a regional metropolis.

Cities around the world face the challenge of understanding why, how and where they are growing; an understanding that is crucial if they are to realise opportunities to steer this growth in ways that promote sustainable and equitable urban development. Being able to measure, visualise and analyse these often complex patterns of growth is essential to effective policy design and implementation. It is within this context that the IGC Myanmar office has collaborated with LSE Cities on this first step towards developing a more in-depth research programme on urban development in Yangon. It has resulted in the creation of a comparative information base that will provide a strong empirical foundation for subsequent analytics and policy research. This will in turn inform strategic spatial development in the Yangon metropolitan region in the future. Over the past decade, LSE Cities has developed a research methodology known as Urban Growth Analytics that provides a framework for this type o...

Cities around the world face the challenge of understanding why, how and where they are growing; an understanding that is crucial if they are to realise opportunities to steer this growth in ways that promote sustainable and equitable urban development. Being able to measure, visualise and analyse these often complex patterns of growth is essential to effective policy design and implementation. It is within this context that the IGC Myanmar office has collaborated with LSE Cities on this first step towards developing a more in-depth research programme on urban development in Yangon. It has resulted in the creation of a comparative information base that will provide a strong empirical foundation for subsequent analytics and policy research. This will in turn inform strategic spatial development in the Yangon metropolitan region in the future. Over the past decade, LSE Cities has developed a research methodology known as Urban Growth Analytics that provides a framework for this type o...

We provide estimates of GDP growth in Greater Yangon between 1992 and 2013 by exploiting nightlights data. Subnational estimates were derived by calculating the elasticity of luminosity with respect to GDP for Myanmar as a whole using time series luminosity and GDP data and then converting observed luminosity values for Yangon in GDP by applying the national level elasticity estimates. The results suggest that Yangon's GDP grew at an average annual rate of 4.45 percent between 1992 and 2013 and by 11.17 percent per annum during the reform period beginning in 2008. This method may be useful for monitoring urban economic growth in other low and middle income countries.