Page 65 - The Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma)

Downtown Yangon Yangon and around 63
Pansodan Street 1

The southern end of Pansodan Street was once the city’s most prestigious address, and
today the street is still lined with a veritable beauty parade of fine old colonial edifices.
The following account is ordered from north to south.

Government Telegraph Office and around
Starting from the junction with Mahabandoola Road, the first major building is the
Government Telegraph Office – a red-brick colossus with paired white Ionic columns
above its entrance, although the whole thing’s looking a bit run-down, with a
crumbling upper storey and a radio mast plonked unceremoniously on the roof.
Past here, the road continues along the back of the Supreme Court, the pavement
below usually dotted with pavement booksellers seated behind piles of dog-eared old
books and magazines. At the southern end of the block a few buildings have been
impressively restored and converted into a cluster of upmarket restaurants and shops,
including the fine Rangoon Tea House (see p.93).
Sofaer’s Building and Rander House
On the east side of Pansodan Street at the junction with Merchant Street is the chintzy
Sofaer’s Building, built in 1906 by the Baghdad-born, Rangoon-educated Jewish
brothers Isaac and Meyer Sofaer. This was once the epicentre of city life, home to the
city’s Reuters telegram office and shops selling German beer, Scottish whisky, Egyptian
cigarettes and English sweets. The ground floor has now been taken over and largely
renovated by the KBZ Bank and the excellent Gekko restaurant (see p.92) – the latter
with original Manchester-manufactured floor tiles and Lanarkshire steel beams
preserved in situ – although the upper two floors could use some TLC.
Opposite stands Rander House of 1936 (now home to the Internal Revenue
Department), commissioned by a consortium of Indian traders from the town of
Rander in Gujarat, although the building’s eye-catching Art Deco design gives no hint
of its subcontinental origins.

Southern Pansodan Street
Further down Pansodan Street (on the left) is the large and rather plain Inland Water
Transport office (1933), its corniche decorated with seashells. This was formerly the
headquarters of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, a Scottish-owned enterprise which

YANGON’S COLONIAL HERITAGE
Downtown Yangon boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of colonial architecture,
and is the last major city in Myanmar to preserve its original nineteenth-century core at least
partially intact, with (in places, at least) entire streets still lined with their original buildings.
Decades of neglect have taken a serious toll, however, with historic buildings subdivided into
shops, flats or just abandoned to squatters, as well as being disfigured with adverts, satellite
dishes, radio masts and mass air-conditioning units. Many structures are now in an advanced
state of disrepair, while other landmark buildings once occupied by various ministries have all
been left empty since the government upped sticks and moved to naypyitaw in 2005.
the scale of the preservation required is immense (the cost of restoring the landmark
Secretariat building alone has been estimated at $100m-plus, for example), while the urgent
need for land and new buildings in downtown means that many colonial-era structures face
an uncertain future. the establishment in 2012 of the Yangon Heritage Trust
(Wyangonheritagetrust.org) by influential authors and historian Dr thant Myint-U is a major
step in the right direction, with the aim of establishing a citywide plan for the conservation of
historically significant buildings, although how much can be saved in this rapidly developing
city remains to be seen. the trust also runs excellent downtown walking tours (see p.87).

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