A 'Bizarre' New Capital City

"The outside world has got its first glimpse of the secret capital Burma is building deep in the jungle...what they found was a planned city on a large scale...According to reports, the city is spread out so that buildings are divided by huge empty spaces. All the hotels are grouped together in a single area called the "hotel zone". Across an expanse of empty land, apartment blocks are being built for bureaucrats who are being forced to move to the new city...Most bizarre of all is the "military zone", said by reporters who were in the city yesterday to be a fortress. The roads have been made extra wide so they can double as military runways. There are anti-aircraft guns and missile silos."

"An Indian journalist who managed to get inside Naypyidaw ahead of other foreigners last month, Siddharth Varadarajan, has another theory. The city, he wrote in Himal South Asian magazine, 'will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual - let alone political - impression. 'Naypyidaw... is the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative 'colour revolution' - not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography.'"