Yangon City - Myanmar

The city is an amalgamation of British, Burmese, Chinese and Indian influences, and is known for its colonial architecture, which although decaying, remains an almost unique example of a 19th-century British colonial capital. New high-rise buildings were constructed from the 1990s as the government began to allow private investment. However, Yangon continues to be a city of the past, as seen by its longyi-wearing pedestrians, its street vendors and its pungent smells.

People
Since the 17th century, Yangon has been a cosmopolitan city with a polyglot mixture of peoples. Portuguese fortune hunters, Dutch businessmen, Englishmen of all sorts, Chinese seeking refuge from the upheavals in the Yunnan, and many many Indians who arrived in several waves during colonial times. Most of these people are now gone and Yangon is now a predominantly Bamar city with a large Indian minority and a growing Chinese minority. Still, there are traces of the old Yangon still visible, whether it is in the crowded Indian dominated parts of Anwaratha Street, or in the occasional Anglo-Burmese or Anglo-Indian who walks up and says hello. In some ways, the biggest change in modern Yangon is the loss of the Indians, who arrived with the British as soldiers and labourers (though Indian traders have always been a part of the Burmese landscape) and then left in two large waves of migration (during the Japanese occupation and again, in 1963, when they were forced to leave by Ne Win's government). Ethnic groups such as the Shan and Kayen are also present. Kabya, or persons of mixed heritage, are common in Yangon.