The golden Shwedagon Pagoda and colonial streets
Yangon was the capital of Myanmar until 2005 and remains its largest city. Its great landmark is the Shwedagon Pagoda, a gilded stupa about a hundred metres high that has been a place of Buddhist pilgrimage for many centuries; it is especially atmospheric at dusk. Downtown, the grid of streets laid out in the British era holds one of Asia's largest collections of colonial architecture, alongside teashops, the Sule Pagoda and the Bogyoke Aung San Market, with the Kandawgyi Lake nearby.