Yangon’s Burmese name translates as end of strife
Myanmar’s largest city kept the national capital until the mid-2000s and still holds Southeast Asia’s densest cluster of colonial buildings around the ancient Sule Pagoda. Founded by the Mon as Dagon, it was enlarged and renamed Yangon—“enemies run out”—by King Alaungpaya in 1755.
Yangon, English Rangoon from a Rakhine-influenced romanisation, is capital of Yangon Region and Myanmar’s biggest city. It remained the national capital until 2005–2006, when the military government moved administration to Naypyidaw. The colonial commercial core around Sule Pagoda—reputed more than two thousand years old—preserves the region’s largest stock of colonial-era buildings, even as infrastructure, especially rail, lags peers such as Bangkok or Jakarta.
Burmese yan (“enemies”) and koun (“run out of”) combine as “End of Strife.” Mon founders established Dagon in the early eleventh century (about 1028–1043); from the fourteenth century it thrived as a pilgrimage pagoda town. In 1755 Konbaung founder Alaungpaya captured Dagon, expanded settlements, and coined Yangon. The East India Company opened a factory in the 1790s. Britain seized the city and the southern Burmese provinces during the 1852 Anglo-Burmese conflict, then made Yangon the commercial and political hub of colonial Burma.
After 1857 the British exiled the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, to Yangon. Colonial boosters dubbed it “garden city of the East.” Before World War II roughly 55 percent of a 500,000 population was Indian or South Asian, only about a third Bamar. Post–World War I, Rangoon University students powered independence strikes in 1920, 1936, and 1938—politics radiating from a port whose very name promised the end of conflict. Colonial parks, lakes, and wooden houses once earned it the nickname “garden city of the East.”
Source: Yangon
