YANGON, Myanmar — The once-grand colonial building of marble floors and iron fretwork, an elegant outpost of Britain's trading empire, is now a wreck. Moss encrusts the walls, rainwater drips down rusted steel beams, flimsy lights glow yellow in dark interiors. A century-old birdcage elevator lies idle, stuck on the first floor. It hasn't moved in more than 60 years.
The occupants are no longer the merchants who sold teak, oil and rice around the world, but lowly lawyers and petty traders who pay minimal rent – $20 a month for an office cubicle with no air-conditioning in sweltering heat – and a few families who live for free in dank rooms.
Named the Balthazar Building after the well-to-do Armenian merchants who financed its construction at the turn of the 20th century, the edifice is one of hundreds that made this city, formerly Rangoon, a place of British ostentation in the tropics.
Now the race is on to salvage banks flanked by Corinthian pillars, courthouses adorned with limestone lions, and shipping headquarters decorated with dark wood and brass fixtures before they collapse of decay.
The conservation of the buildings, laid out on a grid of broad avenues designed by British engineers, would make the city a star attraction of Southeast Asia, says Thant Myint-U, the head of the Yangon Heritage Trust.
"The future is all about cities," said Thant Myint-U, who is trying to convince the government that the old has value and must be preserved. "Having a beautiful downtown will bring investment and give us an advantage over cities like Chennai and Kuala Lumpur."
During the colonial period, Rangoon served as the capital of Burma. (The place names used by the British were retained until 1989 when the ruling junta changed the city to Yangon and the country to Myanmar.) The city had its own particular ethos. Students who had studied at Oxford and Cambridge made it the crucible of Burmese nationalism, reading Karl Marx and listening to jazz.
The port was one of the busiest in the region, the gateway for hundreds of thousands of Indians, who in the 1920s and '30s were the largest ethnic group in the city. Gandhi visited. The British actor John Gielgud came in 1945 to perform Hamlet at the Empire Theater to audiences reclaiming the city after a brutal Japanese occupation during World War II.
In his 1934 novel, "Burmese Days," George Orwell had his leading female character, the young husband-hunting Elizabeth Lackersteen arrive by ship at the Rangoon docks, although Orwell refrained from describing the city, reserving his acidity about British rule for smaller towns in Burma.
Not everyone admired the colonial cityscape as much as those who want to preserve it today.
"It was built by a people who refused compromise with the East, and has wide, straight, shadeless streets, with much solid bank-architecture of vaguely Grecian inspiration," Norman Lewis, the British travel writer, said in his 1952 account of Burma, "Golden Earth." "There is much facade and presence, little pretense at comfort and no surrender to the climate."
The Burmese economy was nationalized soon after World War II, and under the military government that took power in 1962 the buildings of the empire were allowed to rot. Economic sanctions by the West crippled the flow of supplies – oil, glass, fixtures – needed for maintenance.
In 2005, the government moved to a new capital, Naypyidaw, leaving empty many buildings that had at least been occupied, if not maintained.
Among the abandoned structures, the Secretariat, a vast Victorian-era complex arranged around lush gardens that had served as the heart of the government, fell on hard times. The red domed buildings now need an estimated $100 million in repairs.
In November, Thant Myint-U showed President Barack Obama, who visited Myanmar for an Asian summit, around the Secretariat.
"We discussed the need for an overall vision and plan for the city," he said of the president's tour.
The Trust has won some victories. The group objected to plans for a major new building of more than 20 stories in the historic downtown area. The government ruled in favor of the Trust, and now there is an informal agreement that new structures downtown will not rise higher than six stories.
But government works in strange ways in Myanmar: Many decisions are made on an ad hoc basis, and developers are looking for cheap insider deals as the economy goes through a rough transition. There is no legal framework for protection of the buildings, and no discussion of how to protect the people who have been living in hallways, towers and hidden back rooms.
The Trust hopes to change that with a master plan that would sort out legal ownership, designate renovation projects and deal with traffic and sanitation by the end of 2015, said Thant Myint-U, the grandson of U Thant, former U.N. secretary-general, and a historian who has written books on Myanmar.
At the heart of the plan will be the idea that downtown Yangon should retain its vibrancy rather than become another sanitized zone that appeals to well-to-do tourists impressed by expensive hotels and tony cafes, Thant Myint-U said. To preserve a sense of authenticity, he said, there will be efforts to keep residents in some of the buildings, perhaps with subsidized rents, and to limit the number of big, impersonal international hotels that attract foreign visitors but are off-limits to most locals.
The distinctive charm of the teetering colonial-era buildings lies in the street life around them: the bookstalls along Pansodan Street with paperbacks laid out on the sidewalk and vendors overseeing their wares from little plastic stools; the makeshift food booths selling small snakes in screw-top jars, watermelons the size of several footballs, bright orange papayas and emerald green limes.
In the Balthazar Building, the decrepit lobby serves as the kitchen for Daw Than Hla, a 63-year-old widow.
In the early evening, as the office workers head home, she lights a brazier in an alcove beside the elevator and tosses sliced onions in oil, the aromas adding a decidedly domestic touch to the crumbling marble and iron décor as she prepares dinner.
"I've lived here for 40 years," she said, pointing to small rooms where her daughter, son and grandchild sleep. "My husband worked in the fisheries department and when he died they allowed me to stay."
In one of the cubicles on the third floor, Aung Ning Tun, a lawyer, said he would be reluctant to leave, even if offered modern office space elsewhere. "It's very hot in the building, and it badly needs renovation, but it is very convenient to the courts," he said.
In the parts of the city outside the historic zone, the skyline has changed little, though life has become more hectic after decades of somnolence under the military dictatorship. Migrants from the countryside squeeze into crowded apartments; hundreds of thousands more cars, a product of the growing economy, create some of the worst gridlock in Southeast Asia. Some historic buildings have been demolished, including the grandiose 1895 government house resplendent with turrets and gables, and the house where the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lived in the late 1920s.
Neruda served briefly as his country's consul in Rangoon, an unpaid posting that left him poor but led to a passionate love affair with a Burmese muse he called Josie Bliss. He wrote a poem during his stay, "Rangoon 1927," that includes these lines:
Supreme light that opened over my hair
a world at its zenith, it entered my eyes
and ran through my veins
into every corner of my body,
until granting me the sovereignty
of an excessive, exiled love.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/racing-to-save-myanmars-architectural-past/
No comments:
Post a Comment