Yangon
— — gold the dusk keeps catching.
Not only on a wall.
“Yangon sits along a wide bend of the Yangon River, and the city is held in place by Shwedagon Pagoda, a gilded stupa on a low hill that has been gold-leafed and rebuilt for centuries. The light off it at dusk reaches blocks away. Down at street level, teak shophouses and tea stalls hold the older shape of the city.
Yangon, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Yangon sits in Lower Myanmar at the confluence of the Yangon and Bago rivers, about 30 kilometres north of the Andaman Sea. With a population above 5 million, it remains the country's largest city and commercial centre, though the administrative capital moved to Naypyidaw in 2005. The city was laid out under British colonial rule in the 1850s on a tight grid south of Shwedagon Pagoda, and the colonial-era core still stands largely intact along Pansodan and Strand roads.
Shwedagon Pagoda rises about 99 metres from its hilltop on Singuttara, plated with hundreds of gold leaves that are renewed in cycles by donations from the public. The crown holds thousands of diamonds and a single 76-carat stone at the very tip. At dusk the gilding catches the last sun and seems to hold light after the surrounding city has gone blue. Burmese Buddhists circumambulate the platform barefoot, clockwise, from the day-of-week corner that matches their birth.
Yangon holds one of the largest collections of late-Victorian and Edwardian colonial architecture in Southeast Asia. The 1905 Secretariat building, the Strand Hotel from 1901, and dozens of teak-fronted shophouses line the downtown grid. Many were neglected for decades and are now being slowly restored under the Yangon Heritage Trust, which has catalogued more than 180 protected structures. The brick and stucco facades, weathered by monsoon and river damp, give the streets a particular grey-green tone.