Yangon’s most charming street
- Bogalay Zay Street, Lower Middle Block
- 24/7
Authentic streetscape
This is probably Yangon’s most charming street, with ample colourful classic examples of colonial shop house architecture; shops on the ground floor and residential upper floors. This is one of the few streets in the city where the new café’s and galleries left the streetscape intact and many of the striking façades have been lovingly renovated.
The street became my religion. The Burmese street, the Chinese quarter with its open-air theatres and paper dragons and splendid lanterns and the Hindu street, the humblest of them.
Writers and poets
Overlooking the Secretariat, Bogalayzay was prime real estate in the old days. Place of the choice for the intelligentsia and writers like the Ibrahim’s who lived at the corner and poet Pablo Nureado who, before served as Chile’s honorary consul in colonial Yangon and was completely captivated by Myanmar’s bustling capital. In his words: ‘After all, I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonizers, but rather with the ancient spirit of that world, with that large, hapless human family”.
Royal Hotel
On the corner of Bogalay Zay and Merchant Street is Gamonepwint, one of Yangon’s more modern department stores. This used to be the Royal Hotel, one of the city’s finest hotels in the old days. The original façade is still there.