Luxury second home accommodation at Maymyo for the senior generals of the Burmese junta. Maymyo is a hill station outside Mandalay,
named after a British officer, Colonel May, who commanded a British army detachment there in the colonial period.
Pictures of the new administrative capital outside Pyinmana are hard to come by - cameras are banned.

     Here?s a question to stump contestants at a typical Chiang Mai pub quiz night: what national capital has no foreign embassies, appears in no guide books and is actually off limits to foreigners? One clue: if there were direct flights it would be only about an hour from Chiang Mai.
     If you answered Pyinmana, Burma, you?re warm, but not quite there. Naypyidaw is the name of the place. It translates as ?Royal City?, and it?s the grandiose title given by Burma?s regime to its new administrative capital, just 13km northwest of Pyinmana. The rundown provincial city of 100,000 inhabitants was relatively unknown until the generals announced they were moving their power base to the area from Rangoon.
     It?s the kind of place that might be invoked in a quiz night joke ? ?First prize: one week in Pyinmana. Second prize: two weeks.? Marriages were reported to have been put to a severe test when civil servants announced to their wives that they would have to move there from Rangoon. The aging supremo, Senior General Than Shwe, his wife, the tenacious bon vivant, and their three daughters are said to have refused point blank to set up home in Pyinmana. Than Shwe uncharacteristically bowed to the pressure and built a mansion for them and the families of other senior generals in a theme park-like setting in Maymyo, a former British colonial hill station near Mandalay. Mandalay?s airport was given a much-needed face lift, and direct flights were introduced to Pyinmana.
     The area around Naypyidaw was depopulated in order to seal the huge compound off from the outside world. Entire villages disappeared from the map, their inhabitants driven off land their families had farmed for centuries. Hundreds ? perhaps thousands ? joined Burma?s abused army of ?internally displaced persons?. Able-bodied villagers, however, were ?enlisted? to help build the new capital.
     A new hydro-electric power station was constructed ? a project again involving the destruction of several villages ? in order to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding Pyinmana. Pyinmana?s small airfield was enlarged and modernised to take inter-city jets, a railway line was diverted and new roads driven into the area.
     So why is the cash-strapped regime going to the extraordinary expense and inconvenience of moving from Rangoon, which has served quite well as Burma?s capital since the end of the British colonial period, to a jungle outpost 320km to the north? Three possible reasons have been hypothesised, each quite outlandish: The government wants to be closer to Burma?s hotbed ethnic areas, in order to control more rigidly the escalating agitation for greater rights and autonomy.
     Than Shwe and his junta fear an outside seaborne invasion by the United States, interpreting the anti-regime rhetoric coming from Washington as direct threats of intervention.
     Than Shwe had a dream in which he was told to move his capital from Rangoon. Wild as this theory seems, the old man is known to be getting more irrational with advancing age, relying increasingly on soothsayers and omens to dictate national policies.
     The United States has laughingly dismissed the regime?s fears of an Iraq-like invasion. Burma takes the possibility so seriously, however, that much of the new capital has been built underground, and a new army command centre has been created in readiness a few kilometres away.
     Washington has refused to move its embassy to Naypyidaw, and other Western countries are also reluctant to close down their offices in Rangoon and make the trek north. ?This is sheer madness,? said one western diplomat. ?We shall be reduced to diplomacy by telex and telephone.?
     He?s being somewhat optimistic, though. Telex and telephone communications with the new capital are still very patchy, while mobile phones are outlawed.
     Although new guesthouses and hotels are springing up in Pyinmana to take an anticipated flood of visitors, foreigners are still treated with suspicion. One inquisitive westerner who arrived in Pyinmana recently found no guesthouse or hotel willing to rent him a room and when he made his bed in a monastery compound local police detained him in the middle of the night and virtually ran him out of town. Two Burmese journalists were summarily arrested for filming in the area from a bus and were later sentenced to three years imprisonment for unauthorised use of a video camera. So if you are tempted to include Pyinmana in a tour of Burma leave your camera behind.
     It?s not that Pyinmana has much to offer the camera-toting visitor. It built what wealth it has on the logging business and a sugarcane refinery. The dusty (and, in the rainy season, muddy) city has little of cultural interest, accommodation until now ranged from basic to fleapit and most of the eating places featured food poisoning on the menu. This is all set to change with the construction of 10 new hotels, some of them in the luxury class. But they are going up in a specially designated zone and guests will be subject to close observation by Burma?s plain-clothes security men.
     Significantly, the generals decided to set up home not in Pyinmana, but in Maymyo, a pleasant little town in the hills above Mandalay. There they built a vast compound of luxurious homes in verdant gardens, a golf course, sports centre and even an artificial beach. They also instructed architects to create a theme park containing reproductions of Burma?s main architectural treasures, including Rangoon?s Shwedagon temple compound and the temples of Bagan, as well as a full-scale model of the Than Shwe?s favourite beach resort.
     Larger-than-life concrete statues of three famous Burmese kings were also added to the huge parade ground in Naypyidaw, where Than Shwe officiated at an Armed Forces Day march past in April. ?The man is living in a glorious past of his own creation,? said a western diplomat who attended the ceremony. ?He seems blind to present-day reality and the catastrophe the future certainly holds for him and his regime.?