Even before you arrive in Naypyidaw, it is obvious that the world’s newest capital is a place like no other in Burma. It is not just the isolation, in a jungle 200 miles from the sea; it’s not just the active discouragement of foreigners, which is circumvented easily enough. It is the road leading into it.

Ten lanes wide, cut flat and straight through hills and forests, it is the grandest and fastest stretch of road in a country where potholed tracks qualify as major highways. Occasionally, a cement lorry rumbles by. From time to time a rickety open-backed minibus drives past. But otherwise the traffic consists of sputtering motorbikes, horse-drawn carts and lines of women carrying baskets on their heads.

The broad roads, grandiose public buildings and shopping centres are meant as a model of the advanced Asian city — but many of them stand empty and unused. Unknown millions have been lavished on its construction in a country where most people live on less than 50p a day.

Its inaccessible location is intended to protect the junta of Senior General Than Shwe — but many believe that the Government’s increased isolation is hastening its downfall.

Who will win? Can the world help?

What can the world do about the situation in Burma? Will it make any difference? Who, if anyone, can really have an influence?

Multimedia

• In pictures: Burma violence

• Video: protests in Rangoon

BACKGROUND

• Burmese bloggers defy the censors

• After 45 years, is this the end?

• How monks became threat to regime survival

• World split over response to Burma crisis

• Burma: a travellers' guide

Multimedia

• Pictures: Naypyidaw, the new capital city of Burma

I am the first Western journalist to visit the capital since the junta’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests last month. Foreigners should have permission to visit and travel agents refuse to sell train tickets to Pyinmana, the closest town. But no one stopped me getting off the train. After assurances that I would be staying for one night only, a slightly puzzled policeman noted my passport details and showed me to a minibus.

The port of Rangoon was Burma’s capital since the British conquest of the country in 1885, and remains its greatest city — a seething stew of extreme poverty, lively commerce and rich culture. So it came as a surprise in 2005 when the junta announced the new capital and the relocation of all government functions.

Over months, long convoys made the ten-hour journey along the rutted roads to Naypyidaw, carrying entire government departments and their civil servants. “I miss Rangoon,” said an employee of the Planning and Economic Development Ministry. “I miss my life there, my parents and friends — my environment.”

In structure, Naypyidaw is hardly a city at all but rather a series of distantly spaced zones, carefully dispersed to isolate the different parts of the city from one another. The hotel zone is where foreigners stay, in places with names such as the Royal Kumudra, the Golden Myanmar and the Aureum Palace. For $70 (£35) a night I enjoyed foreign cable TV and airconditioning in a self-contained bungalow. I saw not a single other guest.

The civilian heart is a town of white, blue and pink four-storey flats. Red engines stand beneath the tower of the fire station. Police stations bear a friendly English motto: “May I help you?” A shopping complex contains scores of commercial premises, all unfinished or unoccupied.

Not all of Naypyidaw is a building site. The city hall has high white walls and curving tiled roofs, like the palace of Ming the Merciless. North of here, close to a giant roundabout fountain, are the identical ministry buildings. The one I entered had manual typewriters instead of computers and the silvery-blue glass at the front was already showing cracks. The first sign of life comes at the city’s market and bus station, the only place in Naypyidaw where human reality impinges upon General Than Shwe’s sterile folly.

The telephone directory is 12 pages long, compared with 470 for Rangoon, but according to the Government almost a million people live here.

Members of Burma’s Muslim minority are excluded, and despite several shiny new Buddhist pagodas there are almost none of the monks who turned against the Government last month.

The most surprising thing is the absence of the armed forces. The generals live in yet another zone, where soldiers parade before titanic statues of Burma’s ancient kings.

The obvious question is: why? There are several theories, none more than informed speculation. The most plausible is that the generals are escaping from the increasingly clamorous people. Rangoon, after all, is a city of protest. By removing the Civil Service, it can at least avoid a repeat of the 1988 uprising, when government workers took to the streets alongside students.

“The move to Naypyidaw will be the undoing of the generals,” one foreign diplomat in Rangoon said. “Their isolation from the population makes them less intimidating for a start.”

Purpose-built for government

CANBERRA was built between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two biggest cities, to settle a long-running dispute over which of them should be the capital. The Australian Government moved there in 1927

BRASILIA, the capital of Brazil, was built between 1956 and 1960 and was one of the first cities built using the Athens Charter for urban planning

WASHINGTON DC was completed in 1800. The previous capital of the US was Philadelphia

ISLAMABAD was built during the 1960s and located in the mountains to make it less vulnerable to attack than the previous capital, Karachi

Source: Times archives

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