Yangon: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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In 1852 the British took lower Burma, levelled what was left of the old town and had an army engineer, Lieutenant Alexander Fraser, lay out a grid on the river bank — streets numbered east to west, named avenues running north, and the whole thing measured out from an existing pagoda they left standing in the middle of it. Rangoon became the second port of British India and was built accordingly, and the result is the largest surviving ensemble of colonial-era buildings in Southeast Asia: somewhere near two hundred listed structures inside a square mile, most of them still occupied and most of them unrestored. Two hours. Go before ten or after four; there is no shade on Strand Road, and read the paragraph about safety in the guide before you plan anything in this country.

A short history of Yangon

Around the Shwedagon Pagoda, which according to tradition is very ancient, a town called Dagon grew up. In 1755 King Alaungpaya captured it and named it Yangon, "end of strife". In 1852 the British captured it, replanned it on a grid of streets, and it became the capital of British Burma. The city had a Jewish community of Baghdadi origin, and the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue that they built in 1896 still stands. In 1948 Burma became independent. In 2006 the government moved to the new capital, Naypyidaw, and in 2008 Cyclone Nargis struck the city and its surroundings.

The ten best sights in Yangon

1
Shwedagon Pagoda
Ninety-nine metres of real gold plate. 20,000 kyat for foreigners, open 04:00–22:00; barefoot from the bottom of the stairs. Verified 10/2026
2
Shwedagon southern stairway
The main covered stair, lined with stalls selling gold leaf and flowers; four stairways, one per direction
3
Sule Pagoda
The British laid their street grid around it in 1852 and measured the city from it; it stands in a roundabout
4
Botataung Pagoda
Flattened by a bomb in 1943 and rebuilt hollow — you walk inside the stupa through a mirrored maze
5
Chaukhtatgyi reclining Buddha
Sixty-six metres long, in a tin shed; the soles of the feet carry the 108 auspicious signs
6
Ngahtatgyi Buddha
A fourteen-metre seated Buddha in a five-storey hall across the road, and nobody is ever in it
7
Kyauk Taw Gyi Pagoda
A Buddha carved from a single block of marble hauled from Mandalay in 2000; thirteen kilometres north
8
Kaba Aye Pagoda
Built in 1952 for the Sixth Buddhist Council; the cave hall beside it was dug to hold two thousand monks
9
Kyaikkasan Pagoda
An ancient stupa in a big open field east of the centre, and the field is the point — it is where rallies were held
10
The Secretariat
Aung San and six ministers were shot here on 19 July 1947; that date is Martyrs’ Day

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Tours in Yangon →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Yangon:

Free walking tours in Yangon

The colonial grid

Sule Pagoda · The pagoda was already here — tradition puts it at over two thousand years old and it holds a hair relic — and when Fraser drew the grid in 1852 he refused to move it and used it as the origin point instead, so for a century every distance in Rangoon was measured from this stupa. It now stands in the middle of a traffic circle with the City Hall on one side and a mosque on the other. It was the gathering point of the 1988 uprising and again of the monks’ marches in September 2007.
City Hall · Finished in 1936 and the building is an argument in stone: the frame is a standard British municipal block, and onto it the Burmese architect U Tin added tiered pyatthat roofs, peacock reliefs and naga stair rails — a deliberate statement that this was a Burmese city, made at the point when the independence movement was becoming impossible to ignore. The green paint is modern. It still houses the city government and you cannot go in.
The High Court · Red brick and a clock tower, completed in 1911, and the most intact colonial façade left in the city. It is worth knowing what the courts here were: by the 1920s the Rangoon bar was one of the busiest in the Empire, and Burmese lawyers trained in it — including most of the independence generation. The building has been largely empty since the courts moved, which is why it has survived unaltered while the blocks around it were subdivided.
The Secretariat · A city block of Victorian brick finished in 1902 as the Ministers’ Building, from which all of British Burma was administered. On the morning of 19 July 1947, five months before independence, gunmen walked into the council chamber on the first floor and shot Aung San — then thirty-two and the man who had negotiated independence — along with six cabinet colleagues and two others. The date is Martyrs’ Day and it is a public holiday. The building stood locked and decaying for decades and parts of it have only recently been opened.
Pansodan Street · Walk it from the river northwards and you pass, in four blocks, the headquarters buildings of the companies that ran the colonial economy — rice mills, shipping, banks, the Irrawaddy Flotilla. Look up: the ground floors have been hacked about but the upper storeys still carry the original company names in stone. On the pavement are the second-hand book tables, which are not a tourist attraction but the actual used-book trade of the city, strong on Penguin paperbacks and old engineering manuals.
The Strand Hotel · Opened in 1901 by the Sarkies brothers, Armenians from Isfahan who also built Raffles in Singapore and the Eastern & Oriental in Penang — the same three-hotel chain across the Empire, and this was the one for people arriving by ship. Kipling never stayed here, whatever the brochures say; he was in Burma for three days in 1889, ten years before it opened. The lobby is open and costs nothing, and the bar is the only place downtown where the 1901 interior is still complete.

Shwedagon hill

The Shwedagon is not a building you visit so much as a place the city is arranged around: a ninety-nine-metre gilded stupa on a hill, visible from most of Yangon, and the single most important Buddhist site in the country. The legend makes it two and a half thousand years old and says it holds eight hairs of the Buddha, given to two merchant brothers from this coast; archaeologists date the structure that is there to the Mon period, somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, and it has been enlarged by successive monarchs since. Everything in this walk is on or around that hill. Two hours, and you are barefoot from the bottom of the stairs, so wear something you can slip off. Go at five: the gold changes colour as the light drops and the platform fills with people who have come to pray rather than to look.

The southern stairway · Four covered stairways climb the hill, one from each direction, and each is a corridor of stalls selling gold leaf, flowers, candles and small Buddha images. The southern one is the ceremonial entrance and the longest. You take your shoes off at the bottom, not the top, and the rule is enforced — in 1885 the British refusal to remove boots on this platform was one of the public grievances that ran into the Third Anglo-Burmese War, so this particular piece of etiquette has a history.
The main platform · The stupa is solid brick covered in genuine gold — plates, not paint, donated and replaced continually, and in the fifteenth century Queen Shin Sawbu gave her own body weight in gold to gild it. The crown above the bell is set with several thousand diamonds and rubies and the very tip carries a single large diamond, and the whole umbrella was lowered and remade in the twentieth century. Around the platform are sixty-four smaller stupas and eight planetary posts, one for each day of the Burmese eight-day week; people pray at the post for the day they were born, which is why the crowd distributes itself unevenly.
The west gate · On 26 August 1988, at the western entrance to this pagoda, Aung San Suu Kyi — who had come back to Rangoon that April to nurse her dying mother and had no political career at all — made her first public speech, to a crowd estimated at several hundred thousand. Three weeks later the army took power and killed somewhere in the thousands. She spent fifteen of the next twenty-one years under house arrest. This is also where the student strikes of 1920 and 1936 held their meetings, and where the monks assembled in 2007.
Maha Wizaya and the Martyrs’ Mausoleum · The mausoleum on the hill beside the pagoda holds Aung San and the ministers killed with him in 1947, and it has its own second history: on 9 October 1983 three North Korean agents detonated bombs here during a visit by the South Korean president, killing twenty-one people including four South Korean cabinet ministers. The president was late and survived. Burma broke off relations with North Korea over it, and the site was closed to the public for twenty-nine years.
Chaukhtatgyi reclining Buddha · Sixty-six metres long, lying in what is essentially a very large corrugated-iron shed, and the thing to walk down to is the soles of the feet: they are divided into a grid of 108 panels, each carved with one of the auspicious signs of a Buddha — animals, palaces, mountains, implements — which is a complete iconographic system you can read in one place. The first version was built in 1907 and judged ugly; it was demolished and rebuilt from 1966, and the glass eyes were made in a factory in Germany.
Kandawgyi Lake · Not a natural lake: the British dug it in 1882 as a reservoir to supply the city with clean water, and the name means great royal lake, which it was never royal enough to be. The wooden boardwalk around the eastern side gives the reflection shot of the Shwedagon that everybody takes, and the concrete barge in the middle is the Karaweik, built in 1972 as a replica of a royal vessel and permanently aground. Most of the big trees here went in Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.

Downtown, the river and the four faiths

Rangoon was a migrant city for most of its history — the British brought labour and capital from India on a scale that made Indians the majority of the population by the 1930s, and Chinese, Armenian, Jewish and Muslim communities settled in the same few streets. The result is that within four blocks of Sule Pagoda there is a synagogue, a cathedral, a Sunni mosque, an Armenian church and a Chinese quarter, all of them still standing and most still in use by communities that are a fraction of their former size. This walk is those streets and the river they were built for. Two hours. Chinatown only starts working after six, so begin at four and end there.

Maha Bandula Park · The square between the City Hall, the High Court and the cathedral, and the pillar in the middle is the Independence Monument, put up in 1948. It replaced a statue of Queen Victoria on the same spot — the swap is as literal a piece of decolonisation as a city can perform. The park is named after the general who commanded the Burmese army against the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War and was killed by a mortar shell in 1825.
St Mary’s Cathedral · Built between 1899 and 1911 and the largest brick building in the country — the brick was chosen because it was local and because stone had to be shipped. It is the seat of the Catholic archbishop and it is still full on a Sunday: Myanmar has a Christian minority of several per cent, overwhelmingly among the Kachin, Chin and Karen rather than the Bamar majority, which is a fact with heavy political consequences in the current war. Pope Francis said Mass in Yangon in 2017.
Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue · Built in 1896 on the site of an 1854 wooden synagogue, for a community of Baghdadi Jews who came as traders with the British and Bene Israel from Bombay who came as soldiers and clerks. By the 1930s there were around 2,500 Jews in Rangoon, a Jewish mayor had served the city, and there were two synagogues. Almost all left after the 1942 Japanese invasion and the 1962 nationalisations, and about twenty Jews remain in Myanmar; one family keeps this building, which has 126 silver Torah cases and a daily minyan only on the high holidays. Knock and someone will let you in.
The Bengali Sunni Jameh Mosque · One street from the synagogue and two from Sule Pagoda, a mosque built in the 1850s by Bengali Muslims brought in with the colonial administration. Standing between these three buildings is the single most useful thing a visitor can do in Yangon, because it makes a point the current politics denies: Muslims have lived in this city since it was founded, they built a third of its downtown, and the official line that Islam is foreign to Burma is contradicted by four streets of nineteenth-century evidence. Friday prayer fills the road.
Botataung Pagoda · The name means a thousand military officers, for the guard of honour that is said to have escorted the Buddha’s hair relics ashore here. On 8 November 1943 an Allied bomb aimed at the wharves next door scored a direct hit and destroyed the stupa completely; clearing the rubble, workers found the original relic chamber with a hair and two body relics inside. When it was rebuilt between 1948 and 1953 it was deliberately made hollow, so you walk inside the stupa through a mirrored, gold-lined corridor — the only major Burmese pagoda you can enter.
Chinatown and 19th Street · Latha township was the Chinese quarter from the 1850s, settled mostly by Hokkien and Cantonese who came through Penang and Singapore rather than directly from China, and the two communities built separate temples two streets apart. Nineteenth Street is the eating street: two hundred metres of charcoal grills where you pick raw skewers off a tray and are charged by the stick, with Myanmar beer in bottles and plastic stools out in the road. It does not open until about six and it is at its best at nine.

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Getting to Yangon and getting around

Yangon International Airport · Fifteen kilometres north; taxis are fixed-price from the desk and there is no train to it
Yangon Central Railway Station · Also the start of the Circular Railway — a 46-kilometre loop of 39 stations that takes three hours
Aung Mingalar Bus Terminal · Seventeen kilometres out and the only long-distance terminal; allow an hour to reach it
Pansodan–Dala Ferry · Ten minutes across the river for a few hundred kyat, and the other bank is a different country
Botahtaung Jetty · The working cargo wharf beside the pagoda; river boats to the delta still load here
Thanlyin Bridge · The crossing east to Thanlyin and the Kyauktan river pagoda; nine kilometres from downtown

Cheap eats in Yangon

Read this first. Myanmar has been in a civil war since the army seized power on 1 February 2021, and most Western governments advise against all travel to the country or against all but essential travel. Fighting is mainly outside Yangon but conscription was reintroduced in 2024, communications and electricity are unreliable, and international bank cards generally do not work anywhere — you bring clean, unfolded US dollars in cash and change them locally. A powerful earthquake struck central Myanmar in March 2025. None of this is a reason to pretend the country is ordinary, and all of it is a reason to check your own government’s advice before booking anything. What follows is written on the assumption that you have done that. The food, meanwhile, is the least known great cuisine in Asia: oilier and more sour than Thai, built on fermented things, and eaten in curry shops where you pay for one dish and everything else on the table is unlimited.

Mohinga · The national breakfast, under a dollar; sold from shoulder baskets and gone by nine
Lahpet thoke — tea leaf salad · A dollar and a half; Myanmar is one of the only countries that eats tea rather than only drinking it
The curry shop · Pick one curry and the rest of the table is free: soup, rice, salad, pickles and refills. Three dollars
The tea shop · A few cents a cup; order by a code for strength and sweetness, and nobody hurries you out
Shan noodles · A dollar; order them dry rather than in soup and you get the real version
19th Street barbecue · Pick skewers off the tray and pay by the stick; two hundred metres of grills, from six in the evening
Samusa thoke · Samosas torn up into a salad with chickpea curry, onion and mint; a dollar, and a Yangon invention
Ohn no khao swè · Wheat noodles in coconut chicken broth; richer than mohinga and eaten at lunch. Two dollars
Theingyi Zei food rows · The cooked-food lanes at the medicine market; the cheapest real lunch in the centre
Thanaka and betel · Not food: the yellow face paste is ground bark sold in logs here, and the red spit is betel

Museums in Yangon

There is no good museum of Burmese history in Yangon, and the reason is political: the national narrative has been rewritten by each government since 1948 and the state museums present the current version. What the city does have is buildings that are themselves the document — a house where an assassination happened, a house where a family lived, and a very large museum built to make an argument about opium. Read them as primary sources and the gaps become the information.

The Secretariat · The 1947 assassination room; parts of the building opened to visitors only recently
Bogyoke Aung San Museum · His own house on the hill, kept as it was in 1947; small, quiet and almost empty
National Museum of Myanmar · Five floors, badly lit, and worth it for the Lion Throne alone
Drug Elimination Museum · Three enormous floors built by the state in 2001; strange, nearly empty, and revealing
Gems Museum · Rubies, jade and sapphires upstairs; the trade in them downstairs, and both are the same story
Taukkyan War Cemetery · Twenty-nine kilometres north; 6,374 graves and a memorial to 27,000 with no known grave
Yangon University · The campus where four generations of protest began; closed to undergraduates for two decades after 1988

Holy places in Yangon

Myanmar is about ninety per cent Theravada Buddhist and the monkhood is both enormous and politically consequential — monks led the 1920 strikes, the 1988 uprising and the 2007 marches, and in other periods monastic nationalism has driven violence against Muslims. Downtown Yangon holds a synagogue, a cathedral, a Sunni mosque, an Armenian church and Chinese temples within a few streets, all built by migrant communities the British brought and most now a fraction of their old size. Barefoot at every pagoda from the bottom of the stairs; shoulders and knees covered; do not pose in front of a Buddha image with your back to it.

Shwedagon Pagoda · 20,000 kyat for foreigners and open from four in the morning to ten at night; five in the afternoon is the hour
Botataung Pagoda · The only major Burmese pagoda you can walk inside; bombed in 1943 and rebuilt hollow
Sule Pagoda · In a traffic circle, and the city was measured from it; the rallying point of 1988 and 2007
Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue · 1896; about twenty Jews remain in the country and one family keeps the building open
St Mary’s Cathedral · The largest brick building in the country, 1899–1911, and still full on Sundays
Armenian Church · 1862, the oldest church in Yangon, and its congregation has effectively gone
Kaba Aye Pagoda · Built 1952 for the Sixth Buddhist Council; the artificial cave beside it was dug for two thousand monks
Kyauktan Ye Le Pagoda · On a mid-river island twenty-four kilometres out; two minutes by boat and the water reaches the walls

Nature and day trips near Yangon

Yangon sits on a low ridge between two tidal rivers at the top of the Irrawaddy delta, and the whole city is only a few metres above sea level. It used to be the greenest city in Southeast Asia — the British planted rain trees along every avenue — and then Cyclone Nargis came up the delta in May 2008, killed somewhere near 138,000 people and took most of the big trees in Yangon with it. What is left is two British reservoirs that became parks, one fenced reserve to the north, and the rivers. The rivers are tidal and they are brown, and that is not pollution but delta silt.

Kandawgyi Lake · The 1882 reservoir with the boardwalk; the Shwedagon reflection is from the eastern side at dusk
Inya Lake · The bigger reservoir, 1883; the students swim here and the lakeside houses are the city’s richest
People’s Park · Opened 1996 on what had been a closed military zone; now the main public lawn of the city
Hlawga National Park · Thirty kilometres north: deer, gaur and a reservoir inside a fence; a local Sunday rather than a wilderness
Twante and the canal · Twenty-five kilometres west through a canal the British cut in 1883; a pottery town on the delta
Yangon Zoological Gardens · 1906, the oldest zoo in Myanmar; come for the rain trees rather than the enclosures

Things to do in Yangon with kids

Yangon is heavy going with children: the heat is severe from March to May, the pavements are broken and often absent, and the main sights are religious and require bare feet and quiet. The things that do work are all about movement — a ferry, a circular train, a boat to an island pagoda — and the barbecue street at night, which a child will remember longer than the Shwedagon. Check your own government’s travel advice before planning a family trip to this country at all.

The Circular Railway · A 46-kilometre loop of 39 stations for a few hundred kyat; three hours, or get off halfway
The Dala ferry · Ten minutes across the river and back, for almost nothing; the boat itself is the outing
Kyauktan Ye Le Pagoda · A two-minute boat to a pagoda on an island, and you can feed the catfish from the jetty
19th Street · Pick your own skewers off the tray; loud, cheap and the thing a child will actually remember
People’s Park · Grass, fountains and a playground beside the Shwedagon; the one place to let a child run
Hlawga National Park · Thirty kilometres north; a mini-zoo and a safari buggy among the deer, and local families

Nightlife in Yangon

Yangon’s night is short and it has got shorter: a curfew has been in force in parts of the country since 2021, power cuts are routine and a lot of the bars that opened during the brief liberal decade after 2011 have closed. What remains is genuinely good and genuinely early — the barbecue street, a tea shop at eleven at night, and the hotel bars. Myanmar beer is cheap, the rum is from Mandalay, and nobody should be surprised when the lights go out mid-conversation; the generator takes about thirty seconds.

19th Street · The barbecue street, from six until about eleven; grills, plastic stools and beer towers
Chinatown after dark · The whole of Latha turns into pavement tables; walk Maha Bandula Road west from Sule
The Strand bar · The one 1901 interior still intact downtown; expensive by local standards and worth one drink
Sule Pagoda Road at night · Tea shops that stay open past eleven; the real late-night institution of this city
Myanmar Plaza · Six kilometres north; the rooftop bars and the reliable air conditioning are both there
Kandawgyi at night · The boardwalk is lit and the pagoda is floodlit across the water; quiet, and free

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Frequently asked questions about Yangon

What is there to see in Yangon?

The top sights in Yangon are Shwedagon Pagoda, Shwedagon southern stairway and Sule Pagoda. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Yangon?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Yangon without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Yangon?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Yangon, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The colonial grid.

How do you get to Yangon and get around?

The main ways are Yangon International Airport, Yangon Central Railway Station and Aung Mingalar Bus Terminal. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Yangon, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Yangon that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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