Page 70 - The Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma)

68 Yangon and around Downtown Yangon
1 can’t fail to see the fine old Yangon Railway Building at the junction with Sule Pagoda
Road, another of the city’s colonial landmarks currently under restoration.

Holy Trinity Cathedral
Corner of Bogyoke Aung San and Shwedagon Pagoda roads • Daily 10am–5pm • Free
The Holy Trinity Cathedral is one of the largest of the many colonial-era churches which
still dot Yangon, and Myanmar’s principal Anglican cathedral. The foundation stone
was laid by the Viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin, in 1886, although a lack of funds
meant that it took eight years to complete, didn’t acquire its spire until 1913 and had
the indignity of being converted by the Japanese into a brewery during World War II.
Designed by Madras-based architect Robert Chisholm in High Gothic style, the
cathedral’s soaring spire and strident red-painted, white-trimmed brick exterior are
hard to miss, even if it does looks more like a giant piece of Lego than a place of
worship. The whitewashed interior beneath a dark wooden roof is contrastingly plain,
bar some fine stained-glass windows. A moving little Forces Chapel commemorates the
many British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Burma Campaign of
1942–45, while in the southwest corner of the grounds stands a memorial to the troops
of many different Commonwealth countries killed in the vicious World War II battles
at Kohima and elsewhere.

Yangon General Hospital
West of the cathedral, the rambling buildings of the Yangon General Hospital of 1899
are another of the city’s British-era landmarks and scene of a particularly vicious
massacre on August 10, 1988, when soldiers fired into the hospital, killing injured
patients (who were assumed to have taken part in anti-government protests) along with
doctors and nurses. Two weeks later, Aung San Suu Kyi made her first ever public
speech in the hospital grounds.

Sri Kali
Anawrahta Rd • Daily 6–11.30am & 4–8pm • Free
Originally constructed by Tamil immigrants in 1871, the colourful Sri Kali temple
is where the area’s sizeable local Indian population come to pay their respects to the
fearsome mother goddess Kali, whose black image sits in the temple’s inner shrine,
surrounded by shrines to Shiva, Ganesh, Laxmi and Karthik. Shiva and Parvati sit
in a subsidiary shrine outside, with Shiva’s bull Nandi carefully looking on.

Theingyi Zei Market
• In the block between Anawrahta and Mahabandoola roads, bounded by 25th St to the west and Kon Zay Dan St to the
east • Daily 8am–5pm
A world away from the clean, calm and carefully manicured Bogyoke Market,
Theingyi Zei is what a proper Burmese bazaar looks like, filling almost an entire city
block with a chaotic crush of stalls, shoppers, sacks, boxes, bicycles, piles of rubbish
and the occasional rat. The market’s rather curious name (zei means “market”, while
theingyi means “great ordination hall”) derives from its location on the site of a former
pagoda, although it was originally known as the Surati Bara Bazaar – the “Great Surat
Bazaar” – after the town in Gujarat from where many of Rangoon’s Indian population
originally arrived, and who first purchased the land from the British in 1854.
The market is divided between two parallel buildings separated by one of Yangon’s
biggest and busiest vegetable markets, which runs along 26th Street between
Anawrahta and Mahabandoola roads. The western of the two buildings is insanely

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