As Myanmar opens up to modern world, historic buildings are at risk

They had paid more than $2,000 each to attend panels with titles like "Futurescape in Myanmar" and "Opportunities in Hotels and Resorts." The seminar's sponsors, which included a prominent local construction firm, handed out business cards and glossy brochures highlighting the shining new condos and shopping malls they hope to build.

Thant Myint-U stood out amid the suits. Dressed in sandals and a traditional sarong, the academic-turned-preservationist stepped to the lectern and asked the financiers and developers who had come to take advantage of Myanmar's future to pause for a moment and consider the past.

Decades of self-imposed isolation and international sanctions against this longtime pariah state have left Myanmar in limbo, with three-quarters of the population still without electricity. But the lack of Western investment had an unexpected benefit for preservationists: Much of Yangon was left an architectural time capsule.




Thant Myint-U flashed through a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the scores of Victorian, Art Deco and neoclassical buildings that still line downtown Yangon's noisy streets. These relics tell the story of Myanmar's modern history, he said, of its decades under British colonial rule and fight for independence.




Now, as Myanmar's former military leaders open up to countries that once banned investment here, such buildings are at risk.




Hundreds of colonial-era structures have been destroyed in recent years to make way for modern ones like the Centrepoint tower. Completed last year, the glassy 25-story skyscraper looms over a historic block that includes the dilapidated 100-year-old Supreme Court building and City Hall, which, with its white paint and intricately tiered roof, draws easy comparisons to a wedding cake.




The condition of many older buildings makes them targets for tear-down. The Corinthian columns have crumbled at the building that once housed Sofaer's department store, and mildew has sprouted from its domed tower. Other once-grand buildings have been subdivided into crowded apartments, with residents stringing laundry across staircases.




Thant Myint-U, 47, is worried that Yangon could lose even more of its cultural heritage and become just another Southeast Asian metropolis crowded with soulless office buildings and boxy apartment towers.




"Are we going to destroy this heritage in the next few years, or are we going to incorporate it into a modern fabric?" he asked the investors, each word chiseled with perfect pronunciation. "If there is a will, we still have the critical window to get things right."




The Cambridge-educated scholar has written extensively about Myanmar's history. Now he is trying to shape it.




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Thant Myint-U was born in Myanmar, also known as Burma, but grew up far from here in a sprawling home on the banks of the Hudson River in New York City. The estate in an upscale neighborhood was the official residence of U Thant, a former secretary-general of the United Nations and Thant Myint-U's grandfather.




The compound was "a small slice of Burma," Thant Myint-U remembers, a gathering place for expatriates with a Buddhist altar on the first floor and a kitchen that smelled of curry.




In the summer, Thant Myint-U and his family would travel to Yangon, the British-built city also known as Rangoon, to visit relatives and make offerings at temples. Because of his pedigree, the visits weren't always easy.




U Thant had been a close advisor to the first prime minister of independent Burma, who was overthrown in a 1962 coup. Despite his position as the country's top diplomat, U Thant was distrusted by the military leaders, and when he died of cancer in 1974, they decreed that he be buried without an official ceremony.




After a junta took power in 1988, Thant Myint-U stopped his trips to Myanmar. By then he was a student who was working with the country's political exiles to call for international sanctions. In 2006, after a stint with the United Nations, he wrote a bestselling book that told the story of Myanmar from the days of its earliest empires to its modern period of self-imposed isolation.




The book mentions some of the buildings that Thant Myint-U's nonprofit, the Yangon Heritage Trust, is now working to protect. One is the Pegu Club, a teak-built mansion that served as an all-white gentlemen's club for officers in the British army. There's also the Secretariat, a sprawling Victorian marvel that was the site of the assassination of Gen. Aung San, the architect of Myanmar's independence and father of current opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.




Drawn back to Myanmar to do aid work in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, the 2008 storm that took more than 100,000 lives, Thant Myint-U took on new roles when the country's military leaders finally started to loosen their grip on power in 2010.




Over the last year, his organization has surveyed and collected the stories of hundreds of structures in Yangon: banks, schools, theaters and a large collection of government-owned buildings that were abandoned in 2005 when Myanmar's leaders abruptly moved the country's administrative capital away from Yangon.







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