A bomb exploded in Rangoon yesterday morning, but like most acts of defiance in Burma it was more of a symbol than a serious act of rebellion. It happened in the mid-morning by a bus stop close to the golden spire of the Sule pagoda — a loud bang, a rattling of windows and an immediate influx of police carrying rifles.

Half a dozen people were treated for what were described as minor injuries; a set of floodlights next to the site of the explosion had to be repaired. Within a few hours, however, the police had dispersed, the broken glass had been cleared up and the centre of Rangoon had returned to normal — which, in Burma these days, means helpless, miserable tension.

Exactly one year earlier these streets were the stage for an extraordinary drama — the biggest demonstrations in 20 years against one of the most stubborn and brutal military regimes in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and believers marched in the biggest cities of Burma, peacefully demanding justice, relief from soaring prices and democratic reform. Students armed with digital cameras e-mailed images of the so-called Saffron Revolution across the world.

Then the inevitable crackdown began. Dozens of demonstrators were killed by police batons and army bullets; thousands were locked up. Twelve months later the opposition is scattered, its leaders imprisoned and its power broken. And yet, for all the hopelessness, flickers of resistance — and hope — can still be made out.

Across the country, and principally in the cities of Rangoon, Mandalay and Sittwe, monks and lay activists are using mobile telephones and the internet to keep the spirit of opposition alive. Mass demonstrations, of the kind that so shook the Government a year ago, are almost out of the question — any public display of opposition would end in long imprisonment. Instead tiny, loosely linked groups of activists secretly perpetrate small, symbolic acts of defiance in anticipation of the moment when the opportunity to take to the streets will represent itself again.

“It is impossible for us to demonstrate openly now because the security is too much,” Min Tun, the abbot of a monastery in Mandalay, told The Times this week. “But there will be opportunities and there will be demonstrations in the future. The Saffron Revolution is not finished.”

The Venerable Min Tun (like the other Burmese activists in this report, his name has been changed) presents another example of the kind of action by which the Saffron revolutionaries sustain their morale. It is a simple sketch of a human hand inside a circle — it might represent a friendly wave, the raised palm of the Buddha or the hand of a traffic policeman. This is the symbol of the “stop campaign”, an emblem of peaceful resistance to the military regime.

The stop sign has been printed on pamphlets scattered in the streets of Mandalay by night and sprayed on walls, above splashes of red paint that symbolise the blood shed by the regime. A young man named Lu Kar explained how he used a tiny stamp to imprint the symbol on the banknotes in the shop where he works.

“The stop sign means stop torture, stop violence, stop injustice, and there are many people like me, making this mark on the banknotes,” he said. “Eventually, in a few months or a year, people will look at their money and start to notice.”

Increased oppression has forced the anti-junta resistance to extremes of ingenuity, and even wit. Stray dogs have been set loose with signs round their necks bearing the names of Senior General Than Shwe and his junta. Poets have published acrostic verses whose first letters spell out insulting messages about the generals.

Mr Kar distributes Burmese translations of the work of Gene Sharp, a US political scientist who has written about the practical art of overthrowing dictatorships peacefully. And someone, somewhere — nobody knows who — decided that peaceful means were not enough and planted yesterday’s small but noisy bomb close to the Sule pagoda, which was the focus of the demonstrations last year when a Japanese photographer and at least one Burmese demonstrator were shot dead in the clampdown.

It is hard to imagine that life in Burma could have become worse than it was then, but it undoubtedly has. The September 2007 uprising originated in much smaller demonstrations against a sudden rise in prices caused by the decision of the junta to remove subsidies on food in August of that year. The sudden economic hardship that this caused added to long-running resentment about the refusal of the junta to acknowledge the results of a general election in 1990, won by the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent most of the intervening years under house arrest.

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