Travel and Tourism in Myanmar

Yangon: The Golden City and Its Crowning Glory

Yangon is not Myanmar's capital, having lost that status to the planned city of Naypyidaw in 2005, but it remains unmistakably the heart of the country. It is the largest city, the economic center, the main port, and the gateway through which most travelers enter Myanmar. It is also, for anyone who loves cities of history and atmosphere, one of the most fascinating urban environments in Southeast Asia. The combination of extraordinary Buddhist monuments, a largely intact grid of British colonial architecture, teeming street life, and the proximity to the Irrawaddy Delta gives Yangon a character entirely its own.

The city is built on a grid that dates largely from the British period, when Rangoon was rebuilt after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852 on a plan influenced by colonial town planning principles. The downtown core, situated on the peninsula between the Yangon and Bago rivers, is a grid of streets lined with colonial-era buildings that range from grand to modest, many of them now dramatically overgrown with fig trees and bougainvillea that have colonized the facades and window openings over decades of minimal maintenance. The effect is simultaneously ruinous and beautiful, a kind of tropical Gothic that photographers and architects find endlessly compelling. The downtown grid contains many of the city's most important historical buildings, including the Strand Hotel, built in 1901 by the Sarkies Brothers who also built Raffles in Singapore and the Eastern and Oriental in Penang, and now restored to something approaching its original splendor. The Strand is one of the great colonial hotels of Asia and remains a landmark of Yangon's downtown.

The beating heart of Yangon's spiritual life, and the site that every visitor to the city considers obligatory, is the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar and the greatest Buddhist monument in Southeast Asia. The pagoda stands atop Singuttara Hill, visible from most of central Yangon, and the approach to it from any of its four covered stairways is already an experience in itself, lined as they are with vendors selling flowers, candles, incense, and lacquerware, with monks processing in both directions, and with pilgrims of every age from across Myanmar and beyond who have come to worship at what may be the most revered Buddhist shrine in the world.

The great golden stupa at the center of the Shwedagon platform rises ninety-eight meters above the terrace, its profile a perfect tapering dome of the classical Burmese form, covered in gold leaf donated by centuries of kings and pilgrims. Tradition holds that the stupa was originally built to enshrine eight hairs of the Gautama Buddha, obtained by two merchant brothers from Okkalapa who encountered the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment and received the sacred relics as a gift. Modern scholarship suggests that the oldest parts of the structure date from around the sixth century, though the present form and scale reflect successive rebuildings and enlargements over more than a thousand years, with major reconstructions following earthquakes in 1564 and 1930. The pinnacle of the stupa, the hti or crown, is studded with 5,451 diamonds, 2,317 rubies, sapphires, and other precious stones, and topped with a single 76-carat diamond. At the base of the stupa, sixty tons of gold leaf have been applied in layer upon layer by devotees over the centuries. The financial value of the material in the Shwedagon Pagoda is incalculable, but its spiritual value to the Burmese people is beyond any monetary calculation.

The platform surrounding the stupa is an extraordinary complex of smaller shrines, meditation halls, pavilions, and subsidiary stupas, each representing the donations of individual donors or the commemoration of specific events. The arrangement of the platform reflects the cosmological map of the Buddhist universe, with specific shrines assigned to each day of the week and specific animals and planetary associations assigned to each shrine. Burmese Buddhists perform much of their devotional life according to the day of the week on which they were born, offering water poured over images, placing flowers, and lighting candles at the appropriate shrine. The practice is deeply personal and the sincerity of the devotees is palpable and affecting.

Visitors to the Shwedagon must remove their shoes and any socks before entering any of the covered stairways, as is the case at all Buddhist religious sites in Myanmar. The barefoot experience of walking the marble and tile platform of the Shwedagon, still warm from the day's heat even in the evening, is part of what makes the experience so different from visiting an archeological monument in the western mode. You are not in a museum. You are in a living, breathing, intensely active religious space, and the rules of that space, including the dress code of covered shoulders and knees, are worth observing with attention and respect. The golden light at sunset, when the dome seems to become its own source of radiance, and the quieter hours around dawn, when monks begin their circumambulations in the cool morning air, are the times when the Shwedagon is at its most transcendent.

Other religious monuments in Yangon deserve attention beyond the Shwedagon. The Botataung Pagoda near the waterfront is said to enshrine a hair relic of the Buddha and is unusual in allowing visitors to enter and walk inside the hollow golden stupa, where chambers display jade Buddha images and a collection of ex-votos donated by pilgrims. The Sule Pagoda stands at the center of downtown Yangon, literally in the middle of a traffic roundabout, its octagonal golden form a striking anomaly amid the colonial buildings surrounding it. Tradition holds that the Sule Pagoda is more than two thousand years old and predates the founding of the city itself.

Bogyoke Aung San Market, known to older residents and travelers by its former name of Scott Market, is the largest covered market in Southeast Asia and one of the most enjoyable shopping experiences in Myanmar. The market was built in 1926 and named for the Scottish administrator J.A. Scott, and it occupies a large block of downtown Yangon whose red-brick buildings are filled with hundreds of stalls selling gems, jade, lacquerware, silks, thanaka cosmetic powder, traditional Burmese crafts, antiques, and every imaginable category of souvenir and local product. The gem dealers in the central hall are particularly impressive, with trays of rubies, sapphires, jade, and pearls displayed alongside gem-set jewelry of every description. Negotiation is expected and the quality varies enormously, so buyers should exercise judgment, but for serious shoppers in precious stones and traditional crafts the market is a serious destination.

The Circular Railway, Yangon's suburban train loop, is one of the most enjoyable and affordable local experiences in any Asian city. The rickety old trains of the Circular Railway complete a roughly fifty-kilometer loop around the city taking about three hours, passing through neighborhoods that range from prosperous to working-class to semi-rural, stopping at stations that are themselves tiny ecosystems of vendors, commuters, and street life. The price for the full loop is negligible by any international standard, and the experience of sitting in an old wooden carriage with local commuters, watching the city unfold through the window, is a genuine immersion in ordinary Yangon life that no amount of tourist infrastructure can replicate.

The National Museum of Myanmar, housed in a large modern building near Bogyoke Market, contains among its collections the Regalia Lion Throne of the last Burmese kings, an extraordinary piece of royal furniture whose red lacquer and gilt work represents the height of traditional Burmese royal craftsmanship. The museum also has important collections of Buddhist art spanning the full range of Myanmar's history, and exhibits of traditional costumes, musical instruments, and the material culture of Myanmar's diverse ethnic groups.

Bagan: UNESCO World Heritage and the Greatest Temple Plains on Earth

No honest account of Bagan does justice to the experience of actually being there. The photographs, the descriptions, the superlatives accumulated over decades of travel writing, all of them are accurate as far as they go, but none of them fully conveys the sensation of standing on the plain in the early morning light with temples and pagodas visible in every direction as far as the eye can reach, the mist still clinging to the lower ground, the hot air balloons rising in slow clusters from the fields south of Nyaung-U, the bell of the nearest temple rung by a solitary monk beginning his morning prayers. Bagan is a place that changes people. Travelers who expected to spend two days and move on find themselves unable to leave after a week. It is one of those rare places in the world that demands more of you the longer you stay.

The historical statistics are staggering and bear repeating. During the Bagan Dynasty's golden age between the mid-eleventh and the late thirteenth centuries, successive kings of Bagan built more than ten thousand religious structures on the plains of the Irrawaddy: temples, pagodas, monasteries, libraries, and votive stupas of every imaginable size, shape, and style. The building program consumed the resources of the entire empire, with taxes levied in labor, materials, and money to fund construction projects that sometimes took decades to complete. The theological motivation behind this extraordinary expenditure was the Buddhist concept of merit, the idea that pious acts generate spiritual credit that improves one's position in future rebirths and ultimately accelerates one's progress toward enlightenment. Building a religious structure, endowing a monastery, or sponsoring a community of monks was among the most meritorious acts available to a Buddhist king, and the kings of Bagan competed with each other and with the piety of their predecessors in ever-more-ambitious construction projects.

Today, after the depredations of the Mongol invasion, centuries of neglect, the periodic plundering of building materials by later inhabitants, and the catastrophic earthquake of August 2016 that damaged or destroyed hundreds of structures and sent thousands of aftershocks through the plain, approximately 3,500 temples and pagodas remain standing in the Bagan archaeological zone. Even this diminished number is overwhelming. The UNESCO inscription of Bagan as a World Heritage Site in 2019 was accompanied by significant controversy about the Myanmar government's management of the site, including the construction of a new observation tower that many conservationists and heritage experts considered inappropriate, but the inscription was ultimately granted as recognition of the site's outstanding universal value.

The temples of Bagan fall into two broad architectural categories: solid stupas, which are sealed mounds of brick containing sacred relics or images, and hollow temples, which contain interior chambers decorated with murals and housing Buddha images and which were used for worship and meditation. The distinction is both architectural and theological: stupas are objects of veneration, circumambulated by worshippers as an act of merit, while temples are spaces of contemplation and practice. The greatest examples of both types survive on the Bagan plain and between them represent the full range of Myanmar's classical Buddhist architecture.

The Ananda Temple, built around 1105 during the reign of King Kyanzittha, is widely regarded as the most beautiful and best-preserved temple in all of Bagan, and many scholars consider it the finest example of classical Myanmar Buddhist architecture in existence. The temple takes a cruciform plan, with four porticoed entrances arranged on the cardinal points and a central mass rising in a succession of terraces to a golden spire visible from miles across the plain. Each of the four entrances leads to a long vaulted corridor that in turn opens onto the central chamber, where a standing Buddha image approximately ten meters tall faces each of the four directions. These four images are the great Ananda Buddhas, each carved in a slightly different style reflecting the distinct iconographic traditions that informed the temple's construction, and each regarded with deep veneration by pilgrims who come to Ananda from across Myanmar and beyond. The exterior of the temple is faced with glazed terracotta tiles in green and cream that survive in remarkable condition considering their age, and the carved stone reliefs depicting scenes from the Jataka tales, the stories of the Buddha's previous lives, that cover many of the exterior surfaces are among the finest examples of classical Myanmar stone carving.

The Shwezigon Pagoda, located not on the main Bagan plain but a short distance north near the market town of Nyaung-U, is arguably the most historically important single structure in Bagan. It was begun by King Anawrahta, the empire's founder, and completed by his son Kyanzittha, and it served as the prototype for the golden bell-shaped stupa form that became the standard model for Buddhist pagoda construction across Myanmar. The stupa is entirely clad in gold leaf and encircled by sixty-four plaques narrating the Jataka tales. At its base are four large standing Buddhas facing the cardinal directions, and the entire structure is surrounded by smaller shrines and image houses. The Shwezigon is the most sacred pagoda in Bagan and a major pilgrimage destination throughout the year. Unlike many Bagan monuments, the Shwezigon is an active place of worship rather than a historical monument, and the atmosphere around it is accordingly more animated and devotionally charged.

The Dhammayangyi Temple is the largest temple in Bagan and one of the most dramatically situated, visible from miles away as a massive dark-brick pyramid rising above the plain. It was built by King Narathu, who had seized the throne by murdering his father and elder brother and was himself assassinated before the temple was completed. According to tradition, the king demanded such perfection in the brickwork that no mortar should be visible between the laid courses, and masons whose work failed to meet this standard had their hands cut off. The story may be apocryphal but it reflects the very real quality of the Dhammayangyi's brickwork, which is indeed extraordinarily fine and tight-jointed. The temple's inner ambulatories were sealed with rubble fill, probably during the original construction, and remain closed to this day. The combination of its dark mass, its history of violence, and its blocked interior passages has given the Dhammayangyi a reputation as Bagan's most haunted monument, and it has a foreboding quality that distinguishes it from the more welcoming temples nearby.

The Htilominlo Temple, built in the thirteenth century by King Htilominlo who chose the name because the throne was decided for him at this spot by an auspicious tilting of a royal parasol, is an enormous three-story structure whose interior walls still preserve fragments of the original mural paintings that once covered every surface. The murals at Htilominlo, faded and fragmentary as they are, give a sense of what the interiors of Bagan's great temples must have looked like in their original state, when every surface was covered in vivid paintings depicting scenes from Buddhist scripture, the cosmological diagram of the Buddhist universe, and portraits of the royal donors and monks who commissioned the work.

The Thatbyinnyu Temple is the tallest structure in Bagan, rising to a height of sixty-one meters, and represents the most ambitious achievement of the Bagan builders in terms of sheer vertical ambition. It was built by King Alaungsithu in the twelfth century and is a more austere and fortress-like structure than the graceful Ananda, but its height and mass give it a presence on the plain that is impossible to overlook. The Sulamani Temple, also built by Alaungsithu, is sometimes called the crown jewel of Bagan's later period and preserves some of the finest surviving fresco painting from the classical era.

Beyond these major monuments, the Bagan plain is scattered with thousands of smaller temples and stupas that reward exploration by bicycle or electric scooter. The best experiences at Bagan are rarely the most famous monuments but the moments of discovery that occur when you turn down an unpaved track and find a small temple half-hidden by scrub vegetation, its interior still smelling of the incense lit by local villagers that morning, a single gilded Buddha in the dim interior regarding you with the serene indifference of the ancient. These experiences are available throughout the Bagan zone and they are, cumulatively, what makes Bagan the extraordinary place it is.

The single most spectacular experience at Bagan, and arguably the most spectacular sunrise experience available anywhere in Southeast Asia, is the hot air balloon flight over the plains at dawn. A cluster of balloon operators, most of them professionally run with excellent safety records, launch their craft each morning between November and February from fields south of Nyaung-U. The flights last approximately forty-five minutes to an hour and take passengers to altitudes of several hundred meters above the plain, from which the full scale of the Bagan archaeological zone becomes apparent for the first time. The experience of watching hundreds of temple towers emerge from the morning mist in every direction, with the silver thread of the Irrawaddy visible to the west and the first light catching the gilded spires below, is genuinely unlike anything else in the world. The balloon flights are expensive by Myanmar standards but represent extraordinary value by international comparison, and they should be booked well in advance during the peak season months of December and January.

The 2016 earthquake that struck Bagan in August caused significant damage to the monuments of the plain, toppling spires and pinnacles from dozens of structures and cracking the walls of many others. The Myanmar government's response to the earthquake damage, including the use of contractors without adequate heritage expertise and the application of Portland cement in some restorations, drew criticism from international conservation organizations. UNESCO and the government have since agreed on restoration guidelines, and the long process of repairing the damage continues. Visitors to Bagan today will notice scaffolding on some of the major monuments and missing spires on others, reminders of the earthquake's impact.

The town of Nyaung-U, just north of the main archaeological zone, functions as Bagan's market town and service center and is worth exploring in its own right. The Nyaung-U Market, held in a large covered structure near the bus station, is one of the most authentic and least touristic markets in Myanmar, a place where local farmers, traders, and craftspeople gather daily to buy and sell the full range of local produce, from fresh vegetables and fish paste to lacquerware, thanaka paste, and traditional cotton textiles. The market is not oriented toward tourists in the way that markets in Yangon and Mandalay inevitably are, and visiting it early in the morning gives a genuine glimpse into the daily commercial life of the region.

Other Destinations: From the Golden Rock to Remote Mrauk U

Myanmar's extraordinary diversity of landscapes, cultures, and historical sites extends far beyond the canonical circuit of Yangon, Bagan, Mandalay, and Inle Lake. For travelers who have time and the inclination to venture further, the rewards are proportional to the effort, and some of Myanmar's most remarkable experiences are found precisely in the places that receive fewer visitors.

Kyaiktiyo, known to international travelers as the Golden Rock, is one of the most extraordinary pilgrimage sites in all of Asia and one of the most genuinely astonishing spectacles that Myanmar offers. The Golden Rock itself is a large granite boulder, approximately five meters tall, covered in gold leaf applied by pilgrims over many generations, that appears to balance impossibly on the edge of a sheer cliff face above the valley of the Mon State. The boulder rests on a smaller flat rock at the summit of Mount Kyaiktiyo with only a tiny area of contact, and the physics of how it maintains its position against the forces of gravity has been the subject of both scientific curiosity and theological explanation. According to tradition, the boulder is held in place by a hair of the Buddha enshrined inside a small stupa on its summit, and the legend is sufficiently compelling to have made Kyaiktiyo one of the three most sacred Buddhist pilgrimage destinations in Myanmar, alongside the Shwedagon Pagoda and the Mahamuni Buddha Temple in Mandalay.

The approach to the Golden Rock from the nearest sizable town of Kinpun involves either a day's walk of about eleven kilometers up the mountain trail, a journey undertaken as an act of devotion by pilgrims throughout the year, or a hair-raising truck ride in the backs of purpose-built vehicles that navigate the steep and winding mountain road. The trucks carry passengers in tiered benches, ascending the switchbacks with startling speed and confidence. From the summit ridge, a short walk leads to the pagoda platform on which the Golden Rock sits, balanced at its impossible angle with the valleys and forests visible hundreds of meters below. The effect of seeing it for the first time is genuinely startling, one of those moments when the world refuses to conform to your expectations of it. The inner shrine area, where the rock and the small stupa on its summit can be approached most closely, is accessible only to men, a restriction that applies to some of Myanmar's most sacred inner shrines, and women worship from a platform a short distance away with an equally clear view of the rock.

The area around Hpa-An in Kayin State, easily accessible from Yangon by bus or train, offers some of the most dramatic karst scenery in Southeast Asia and a concentration of remarkable caves and pagodas that makes it one of Myanmar's most rewarding lesser-known destinations. The Kayin State is inhabited primarily by the Karen people, one of Myanmar's largest ethnic minorities, and the countryside around Hpa-An has a gentleness and fertility quite different from the dry dustiness of the central Myanmar plains. The Saddar Cave is a massive limestone cavern whose entrance is large enough to drive a boat into: visitors approach by boat through the flooded outer section of the cave, passing through chambers filled with thousands of stalactites and stalagmites and hundreds of Buddha images left by pilgrims over centuries, before emerging into the light at the back of the cave through a separate exit. The Kyauk Ka Lat Pagoda stands on a narrow pinnacle of limestone rising from a small lake near Hpa-An, its slender golden stupa perched on the summit of the rock like an ornament, creating one of the most dramatically situated religious structures in the country. The sunset view from the hilltops above Hpa-An, looking over a valley of rice paddies and karst formations with the ranges of the Karen highlands in the background, is among the finest in Myanmar.

Mrauk U, the former capital of the Arakan Kingdom in what is now Rakhine State, is the most remote of Myanmar's major archaeological sites and the one that rewards the effort of reaching it most generously. The town is accessible from Sittwe on the Rakhine coast by a river journey of several hours through the deltaic waterways of the Kaladan River, a journey that is itself an experience of considerable interest, passing through a landscape of paddy fields, fishing villages, and ancient waterways. The archaeological zone around Mrauk U contains hundreds of temples, stupas, and fortifications dating primarily from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when the Arakan Kingdom was a significant maritime power with diplomatic connections to Mughal India. The temples of Mrauk U are built in a distinctive style quite unlike the temples of Bagan, lower and more fortress-like in their architecture, as if the builders were uncertain whether they were constructing places of worship or places of defense. The Shitthaung Temple, the most important monument in the Mrauk U complex, is called the Temple of Eighty Thousand Images for the extraordinary density of Buddha images, carved relief panels, and votive stupas that cover its interior walls, corridors, and chambers. Exploring the Mrauk U complex, particularly in the early morning when the temples emerge from the hill mist and local farmers are crossing the fields on their way to work, gives a sense of archaeological discovery that is increasingly rare in Southeast Asia's better-known heritage sites.

The situation in Rakhine State since the 2017 Rohingya crisis and the subsequent 2021 military coup has made access to Mrauk U considerably more difficult and uncertain than it was during the better years of Myanmar's tourist opening. Travelers considering a visit should check the current security situation carefully and be aware that conditions can change rapidly.

Ngapali Beach on the Bay of Bengal coast is Myanmar's finest and most accessible beach destination, located about four hundred kilometers northwest of Yangon in Rakhine State and served by a small airport with flights from Yangon. The beach itself is a long crescent of white sand backed by palm trees, with clear water that is safe for swimming during the dry season, and the village of Ngapali is a simple fishing community that has acquired a modest but well-regarded collection of beach resorts over the years. The seafood at Ngapali, landed fresh daily by the local fishermen, is exceptional: grilled lobster, curried fish, and steamed crab are among the standard offerings at the restaurants that line the beach road, all of it sourced from the waters of the Bay of Bengal just beyond the sand. Ngapali is not a party beach and it lacks the infrastructure of the major Thai beach resorts, which is precisely its appeal for travelers who find the development and crowds of Thailand's coasts exhausting.

Hsipaw in the northern Shan State is a small market town on the Dokhtawady River that has become a significant trekking base and one of the most pleasant places in Myanmar to experience the slow pace of Shan town life. The town itself has a few colonial-era buildings, an excellent daily market, and a palace of the last Shan prince, Sao Kya Seng, who disappeared in 1962 following Ne Win's military coup and was never seen again, a story recounted in heartbreaking detail by his Austrian wife Inge Sargent in her memoir Twilight over Burma. Trekking from Hsipaw into the surrounding Shan hills brings travelers through villages of the Palaung, Lisu, and other hill peoples, through tea plantations that produce some of Myanmar's best tea, and through mountain landscapes of considerable beauty.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Myanmar has two sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, both of which are among the most significant and impressive heritage sites in all of Southeast Asia.

The Pyu Ancient Cities, inscribed in 2014, encompasses three of the most important archaeological sites associated with the Pyu civilization: Halin in the Sagaing Region, Beikthano in the Magway Region, and Sri Ksetra near Pyay in the Bago Region. The inscription recognized the Pyu city-states as evidence of one of the earliest sophisticated urban civilizations in Southeast Asia, with a culture that had extensive trade contacts with India and developed distinctive forms of Buddhist art and architecture between roughly the first and ninth centuries of the common era. Sri Ksetra is the most accessible and most impressive of the three sites, with well-preserved city walls enclosing an area several kilometers across, numerous brick stupas in varying states of preservation, and a small but excellent site museum. The Pyu sites are significantly less visited than Bagan and Mandalay and offer an experience of archaeological discovery largely free of the crowds that have made the more famous sites increasingly difficult to appreciate in isolation.

Bagan, inscribed in 2019, has already been described in detail earlier in this article. The UNESCO inscription recognized Bagan's outstanding universal value as the most concentrated and impressive collection of ancient Buddhist religious architecture in the world. The inscription was preceded by extensive negotiations between the Myanmar government and UNESCO over management plans, conservation standards, and the appropriate treatment of the still-inhabited areas within the archaeological zone.