Naypyidaw: the capital built in the jungle

Built from near nothing starting in 2005 in great secrecy by the military government, Naypyidaw remains one of the world's most unusual and least-populated capitals relative to its size.

A car is indispensable: the distances between buildings are enormous.

The Uppatasanti Pagoda, an almost identical replica of the famous Shwedagon in Yangon, dominates the skyline of the new capital with its golden dome.

The Parliament of Myanmar, a complex of monumental buildings built on a scale disproportionate to the number of residents in the city, reflects the ambitions of the original urban project.

Continuing, one observes the twenty-lane highways that are almost always empty, built for a city that never reached the population foreseen by the original plans.

In the evening, the city's safari zoo, among the largest in Southeast Asia, also hosts a rare population of giant pandas donated by China.

The Burmese military government relocated the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw in 2005 with very little public notice, according to some analyses also out of fear of popular uprisings similar to those that had occurred in the old capital.

The very wide highways of Naypyidaw, built for traffic that never materialized, are sometimes used by local residents for impromptu street racing on weekends.