Burma returns to market

  Along the Rangoon River, where tigers and elephants once roamed, two 12-year-old boys dig through heaps of brick and debris, looking for metal to sell. ÒMoney,Ó says one, thrusting a fistful of antique reinforcing bar at me. The other stoops to the ground and hits the ReBar with a small hammer, breaking apart the mortar that once held the slender rod in its place. Almost overnight, a colonial-era wall, dividing the river from the city, was demolished. Those who need money the most have come to pick through the rubble at dawn. When the Myanmar Port Authority announced unprecedented dredging of the Rangoon River in early 2011, a contract to widen the Strand Road quickly followed. It was a vital link connecting timber farmed upcountry to waterways that carry the wood away, and has long facilitated the export of this precious resource. The road was built by the British nearly 150 years ago, and is the city grid’s southern anchor – a line laid down along a faraway river to make ‘order’ seem part of nature. It was the last land stop for the colony’s exotic exports. Today, the road is too old and too narrow to bear the weight of Burma’s predicted export upswing. Thus the multi-million-dollar upgrade, adding as many as 10ÊadditionalÊlanes in high-traffic areas. Soon the number of boats docking in Rangoon (now Yangon) will treble. Individual cargo limits will rise from 15,000Êtons to 35,000 tons of deadweight per vessel. With the dredging, the port of Rangoon, the link between upper Burma and the lower Irrawaddy regions, will become vital once again. In the 1920s and 1930s Rangoon was the second busiest immigration port in the world, trailing only New York City. Indian, Bengali, Armenian and European workers and merchants arrived in astounding numbers, hoping to […]