Word: naypyidaw
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Burma's New City Your recent article on the building of a new capital city in Burma [June 2] intrigued me. Amazingly, Naypyidaw, a new city of one million, was built from scratch in just three years. Now that Cyclone Nargis has made many tens of thousands of people homeless, I will watch and hope that the Burmese government puts as much effort into creating new cities for these people as they did in creating a city for themselves. Jeremy Stern, LONDON...
Three years after the first wave of government employees moved here, Naypyidaw remains under construction. Workers toil in the searing heat, mostly without modern equipment like cranes and bulldozers. So far, their efforts have produced, among other things, a massive zoo, five police stations and three golf courses. (Burma's generals are notoriously fond of the sport.) Government housing is provided in bright-hued blocks reminiscent of a down-market Florida retirement community, color-coded by residents' occupation: blue buildings are for the Ministry of Health, green for the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation...
...attraction of life in Naypyidaw is its 24-hour electricity supply in a country plagued by power shortages. But that's not enough to entice civil servants to bring their relatives here. Asked why her family stayed in the old capital, a 12-year-old girl visiting her father answers in impressive English, "Rangoon is better; here is bad," earning her a slap on the head from her anxious mother...
Despite the considerable landscaping effort at Naypyidaw's Natural Herbal Park and Water Fountain Garden, no people loll in these public green spaces. I see none of the country's omnipresent Buddhist monks in the new capital, even at the local pagoda. The instigators of last year's democracy protests, which soldiers broke up with gunfire, presumably aren't welcome in a city dedicated to a surreal sense of order...
...build a golden temple for their Abode of Kings. That's because the top brass is bunkered in another, faraway part of the city, an isolation that could help explain the junta's underwhelming reaction to Cyclone Nargis, which left an estimated 134,000 people dead or missing. A Naypyidaw map vividly sums up the willful seclusion of Burma's leaders: the space where the generals' lavish homes should be is completely blank...