Myanmar: the golden pagodas of ancient Burma

So, Myanmar or Burma? Officially, it's Myanmar, since the ruling military decided to change the country's name in 1989. However, even though the name Myanmar has been recognised by the United Nations since 2001, Aung San Suu Kyi, a famous opponent of the regime and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, says she "prefers the name Burma, because the name Myanmar was decreed authoritatively without consulting the people". And that's it. And it's the same for a number of cities, including Rangoon, renamed Yangon, or Pagan, now spelt Bagan...

 

Aung San Suu Kyi. "The Lady", as we say here. She is omnipresent when, by chance, you manage to lift the opaque veil that shrouds conversations, preferably outside a public place. A lady, almost a queen, whose house is always on show - especially the surrounding wall and the roof - on the other side of Lake Inya, along the road from the airport to the historic centre of Yangon.

The city centre! On my first city tour, I was immediately struck by the facades of ex-colonial buildings - once undoubtedly magnificent - where rebellious shrubs now grow. But there are also a host of leprous walls, dripping from successive monsoons, avenues as straight as an I, streets just as steep - but even more chaotic - hen-cage buildings whose balconies are bursting at the seams with washing to be dried... It's easy to see why Yangon, the former capital abandoned by the military junta in 2005 in favour of Nayptidaw, a city created from scratch 320 km further north, doesn't at first glance invite poetic digression. To put it bluntly: Yangon is ugly, very ugly indeed. We'll come back to our very first impression much later.

 

Fortunately, as a counterpoint to this monumental mishmash, five million people live in this capital that seems to have been frozen in time. Yangon is neither Bangkok nor New York, and its inhabitants are busy in the shadow of its countless pagodas, including Shwedagon, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in the world. One of the most moving too, with a golden dome rising 98 metres above its base and visible from all over the city. It has been standing for a very long time, even if, contrary to the legend that it was built over 2,500 years ago, during the Buddha's lifetime, archaeologists are more inclined to believe that the first stone was laid between the 6th and 10th centuries. All the same, it has been destroyed, rebuilt, shaken by earthquakes, plundered by the Portuguese, desecrated by the British, ravaged by fire, the scene of an attack by North Korea and, more recently, the witness of social events that have made the front pages of every newspaper in the world... As you can see, it has been an eventful life, the sequences of which the untrained eye is unable to detect today.

 

Inevitably, once you've made the journey to Myanmar, you climb up to the country's most sacred site in the semi-darkness of covered staircases - there's one at each point of the compass, but there's also a lift for the sake of modernity - to reach a gigantic white marble esplanade, dazzling in the sun and burning under feet that would be sacrilegious not to be barefoot. But the real surprise is that the enormous stupa, entirely solid and covered in 700 kg of gold, is topped by a globe, gold of course, but also set with 4,000 precious stones and extended by a weathervane encrusted with 1,100 diamonds and a thousand other jewels. Everywhere you look, kiosks, multicoloured Buddha statues, oratories, pavilions, temples, bell towers, fountains... all dripping with gold.

 

And then there's the crowd... A relaxed crowd - because people are relaxed in a pagoda; they pray, of course, but they also laugh a lot, they sleep, they chat, they even picnic - a throng of faithful who have come on pilgrimage from the farthest reaches of the country or, more simply, from Yangon. Not to mention the countless religious, also very much at ease, who dot the place with their robes, saffron for the men and young girls, pink for the nuns and little girls. It's not uncommon to sit in the shade of a pavilion, tired of so much decorum, and for one of them to come and talk to a foreigner in English. What are they talking about? Myanmar, France, customs and differences... You can feel that you'd like to talk about something else, but you prefer to keep to yourself. You never know, the bad memories left by one of the world's most repressive regimes are never far away. Then evening falls, and the spotlight takes over. Simply magical.

 

The light rises slowly, floor by floor, until it reaches the spire, which throws all its lights into the Burmese night. In fact, it's the spire alone that lights up like this. Apart from a few hotel bars and a handful of stalls in Chinatown, almost everything closes at 10pm. There's no doubt that Yangon is one of the capitals that goes to bed the earliest... So you have to do the same, go to bed very early to get up at the crack of dawn.

 

We wake up early and set off for the Bogyoke Aung San market, also known as Scott Market after its British founder. You can find everything under the roof of this large market, which was founded in 1928 and has retained its true colonial character. Multicoloured fruit and vegetables, meat of course, but above all a bevy of small shops - 2,000 in all: more or less happy souvenirs, longis - those squares of small-checked cloth worn by most men - everyday objects made of tin, handicrafts, flip-flops, T-shirts and... antiques, fake or real, on which we'll linger. The fake ones in particular, because the real ones, although they can be traded without any problems, are banned from export. This market is the first real opportunity to meet the Burmese people, whose reputation for civility, kindness and positive curiosity about foreigners is well established.

 

Outside, it's the same story, as the Bogyoke market adjoins the colonial quarter, built in a grid pattern by the British, which, while not giving it the tortuous charm of almost all old towns, makes it extremely easy to find your way around. Overcrowded buses are overtaken by bicycle taxis, while in the shade of a teak tree, a rickety table with a landline telephone quickly turns a friendly person into a telephone operator.Myanmar is South-East Asia, of course, but it's South-East Asia as it was in the 1970s.

 

And then there are the buildings, the majority of which are fairly run-down. But there are also the others, those that have been restored or rehabilitated, and which give an idea of what the splendour of Yangon might have been when it was called Rangoon and gave itself Edwardian or Victorian airs. In a very small area, more or less well maintained, more or less well rehabilitated, there is the town hall, the high court building, the headquarters of the Myanmar Port Authority, the court, the British embassy and the Australian embassy. And above all, the famous Strand Hotel, a legendary landmark built in 1901, one of the largest hotels in the whole region, now back in the form of a real palace with its sobritish English bar and tea room with rattan armchairs and ceiling fans. A nostalgic delight.

 

As a result, we've been reconciled with Yangon, a play that has the knack of missing its opening act and the talent to attack the second act in style by opening the curtain on lakes in the middle of the city, lakes Inya and Kandawghi for example. Then it's all stilt walks, exuberant parks, relaxing teahouses and plush residential areas... A real gentle way of life accentuated by a feeling of real security. Because, with the exception of the potholed pavements, you walk normally in Yangon; you don't feel attacked. In fact, you are not. Not by anything or anyone.

 

And then there are the protective domes of the pagodas, all those other pagodas, everywhere, in every district. In particular, there's the superb Botataung, one of only three religious buildings to retain Buddha's hair, which you can walk through in a veritable labyrinth of gold leaf. From floor to ceiling. You walk through gold. You're almost capsized. So, the tone is set by the capital of a country where religious fervour is no mystery. But it's in Bagan, an hour's flight to the north, that you realise that this fervour is not new.

 

Bagan, then. That's more than 2,230 temples, stupas and monasteries built between the 11th and 13th centuries on the banks of the Irrawaddy and spread over a 42km2 plain. The result is a veritable forest of red-brick domes, ranging from the smallest monument of around ten metres to the enormous sixty-metre temple dripping with gold. Although they are isolated from each other, they are close enough, sometimes barely a hundred metres apart, to give the site a surreal unity. Seen from the sky, i.e. from the top of a dominant pagoda or, better still, from the gondola of a hot-air balloon, the site, which some compare to Angkor, the other wonder of South-East Asia, is grandiose, sublime, magical.

 

The question that keeps coming up is a simple one: why all this? In fact, not much is known about the origins of Bagan. But we do know that it was under the reign of Anawrahta, in the 11th century, that the greatest buildings were constructed, including the Shwezigon pagoda. His successors continued his work, stopping only when the city fell in 1287, when it had 12,000 pagodas.

 

We won't list all the monuments and stupas to visit or climb here - there are so many that you'll have plenty of time to pick out some of the most famous with a specialist guide. But what we will say is that after climbing all those steep steps, after walking through kilometres of corridors, dozens of halls housing Buddha statues, after admiring the magnificent frescoes by flashlight, after escaping the harassing insistence of the temple merchants for the thousandth time, you should get on a bike, alone or in a group, and wander along the red dirt paths that criss-cross the site. There, the magic of the place takes on its full dimension: the silence, the whisper of the wind in the thorn trees, hundreds of turtle-doves singing their joyful bird songs, less imposing temples that have the merit of meditating in absolute solitude... A divine universe mixed with humanity and work in the fields, brought to life by placid teams of zebus.

 

Because on the fringes of the historic site, there are also villages. Villages as they used to be, with young and old living together, animals living alongside people, perfectly tended straw huts and impeccably swept dirt courtyards. As everywhere else, foreigners are greeted with a broad smile and a slight nod. And always.

 

A stone's throw away, you can stop off at New Bagan - Old Bagan, the historic old Bagan being reserved only for a few luxury hotels - created from scratch on the orders of the ruling military, to visit a lacquerware workshop, an age-old speciality of this region. You'll find traditional objects, dishes and boxes of impeccable quality, as well as much more contemporary items, such as rings, necklaces and bracelets that would make any Parisian woman green with envy.

 

Then there's the Irrawaddy, or Ayeyarwady to use another transcription, which sometimes rolls its yellow waters under apocalyptic monsoon skies, and sometimes sparkles under a blazing sun. It all depends on the season and the time of day. It's a beautiful river with deep waters, a communication route that you won't want to miss on a mini day cruise. On its banks, you can also see the Asia of yesteryear: ox carts, farmers at work, fishermen with their nets...

 

But this Asia, made up of bucolic eternity and an original way of life, can be found in a third place, always programmed by the agencies when visiting Myanmar: a short hour's flight and the calm waters of Lake Inlé will in turn enter the bags of beautiful memories.

 

Lake Inle is around twenty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide, surrounded by hills rising to 1,500 metres, on whose slopes a German and a Frenchman grow vines. But it's obviously not for their wineries that you come to Inle Lake. Nor is it for its clear, shallow waters, no more than five or six metres deep. No, that's not it. The main reason for coming to the Shan Plateau is to discover the culture of the "sons of the lake", in other words the Intha ethnic group who settled here, forced and coerced by a shady king who deported them in the 12th century.

 

Far from giving up, the Inthas decided not to invest in the shores of the lake, but in the lake itself. The environment forced them to do things their own way, and at the same time they developed a highly original culture, creating lakeside villages - which can be visited today - and inventing a method of floating market gardening.

 

Principle: we create strips about 10 metres long and two metres wide using a kind of floating hyacinth compost, add a little soil and pull the whole thing out over the waters of the lake. Then bamboo stakes are used to secure it in place and this miraculous soil is cultivated from flat-bottomed boats. The result is miraculous, since the Inthas cover practically all Myanmar's tomato needs.

 

Villages, monasteries, schools, grocery shops... everything is perched on stilts. Including the craftsmen's workshops, which, like everything else, are reached exclusively by flat-bottomed boats carrying five or six people. In order to live virtually self-sufficiently, the Inthas have had to create their own clothes, their own tools, their own jewellery... As a result, they have become masters of their craft, and today you can discover workshops that look as if they came straight out of the 19th century countryside, so rudimentary are the tools. There are no motorised machines, just spinning wheels, weaving looms, bamboo bellows and muscles for iron, wood chisels and planes for boats...

 

Despite the harshness of their tasks, these high places exude a kind of plenitude that has long since disappeared from the industrialised world. Outside, boats head for the market - also on the water - while fishermen, manoeuvring their pirogues in a way that is unique in the world, standing upright and using their right foot, set off to cast their nets. And it's like this every day. Except perhaps in October, when four Buddhas, deformed by successive layers of gold leaf applied by the faithful, are paraded from village to village with great fanfare. Then everything comes to a halt, except for the boats loaded with tourists who have chosen the best time to visit Myanmar. It lasts 18 days, and the few luxury hotels on the shores of the lake are fully booked. The spectacle is unique, and it is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful popular events in South-East Asia. One of the most authentic, too. So it's best to hurry.