Yangon is a lively city, the sidewalks are full of people, but also of improvised stalls and markets, the street is the natural extension of the house and shops, as often happens in Southeast Asia. The city was born in the eighteenth century around the Shwedagon pagoda, with the name of Yangon. The British, during the colonial domination, renamed it Rangoon. In 1989 the military junta, which ruled Myanmar, transformed it back into Yangon. In 1995 the same junta moved the country's capital to Nam Pyi Taw, a ghost town, a desert cathedral, in central Burma.
