Myanmar's $4BN Mega Ghost City

at the heart of Southeast Asia there's a city too strange to believe huge 20 Lane highways completely empty massive temples no one in sight it's four times the size of London six times the size of New York but apparently nobody is living here two years ago we mentioned this city in a video it was viewed by 46 million people all of them stunned to hear about the strangest capital on earth now we've decided to take a deep dive into the city of Napier dog we hope you're ready for a crazy video because the more you know about this city the stranger the story gets [Music] Napier is the capital city of Myanmar it's a forested country in Southeast Asia with 50 million inhabitants remember that video we spoke about that almost got as many views as myanmar's current population you might know the country by a different name especially if you were around before 1989. back then Myanmar was called Burma and this is actually pretty controversial the name was changed to Myanmar by a military dictatorship that forced its way into Power way back in the 1960s a lot of people didn't think this regime had the right to change the country's name but the United Nations call the country Myanmar so that's the name we'll be rolling with too now let's talk about Napier doll the strangest capital on Earth here's a satellite image of the city it has a total area give or take of 7 000 square kilometers as we mentioned earlier that's several times bigger than London or New York a similar sized city but still a bit smaller is Shanghai but there's a major difference between napuda and Shanghai shanghai's population is 26 million whereas napuda has less than a million current inhabitants it makes the place feel like a ghost town a ghost Mega City something straight out of a post-apocalyptic film the roads are vast with 20 lanes in some places but completely empty of vehicles a truck might occasionally trundle through but it will usually have the entire road to itself the parks and Gardens are the same so are the malls the golf course the zoo even the city's most famous landmark the upatasanti Pagoda is deserted there's an airport with space for several million passengers but on a busy day there are rarely more than a couple hundred people there are also dozens of extravagant luxury hotels but the pools are deserted and most rooms have never even been used in fact the only people you're likely to see are gardeners and street cleaners this is the big difference between Napier and a post-apocalyptic City the capital is maintained to Immaculate standards by an army of workers there are workers in the shops as well in 2015 two Guardian journalists paid a visit to the city and described a jewelry store there are dozens of people working here but no customers it's completely silent the population has risen a bit since 2015. back then Napier doll was even more of a ghost City with less than 400 000 citizens but it's still Eerie to think about and this Capital gets stranger yet there's one other place where you're likely to see some people the city is home to myanmar's Parliament a sprawling complex of extravagant and identical looking buildings surrounded by fences and moats it's hard to get close to this complex there are soldiers posted all around it but who are they really expected to stop when there's nobody else around there are rumors that these high security buildings are connected to a network of underground tunnels that stretch beneath the city supposedly these tunnels were designed with the help of North Korean technicians these rumors are almost impossible to prove but considering how strange nipida is it wouldn't really come as a big surprise as well as this ministry Zone the city also has a military zone a hotel Zone a residential Zone and several others in the residential Zone the roofs of the buildings are color-coded depending on the jobs of the people who live there blue roofs are for workers from the Ministry of Health Green roots are for workers from the Ministry of Agriculture but of course most homes are empty these City zones are large clumsy and disorganized without a logical structure or order it's as though these different parts of the city have been thrown together without any proper thought it's impossible to find a city center in Napier it's like moving through a random maze the setup of the roads doesn't help either they are strangely arranged and hard to navigate look at this 20-lane highway inside the ministry Zone which randomly connects to a much smaller road if there were genuinely 20 lanes of traffic here it would instantly lead to gridlock the planning just doesn't make any sense there are roundabouts too so vast and bizarre that it hurts your brain to look at them you won't find roundabouts that look like this anywhere else in the entire world again it's lucky that these roads aren't actually full of cars these roundabouts would surely be gridlocked this one is particularly strange and sits in the middle of a 16 Lane highway but for some reason they decided to build another road to bypass the roundabout only to then intersect a highway at 90 degree angle I don't know about you but to me a 90 degree turn on a 16 Lane Highway doesn't seem like a good idea further east there's this other massive 16 Lane Highway that runs for miles in an almost perfectly straight line from the air it looks quite a bit like an airplane Runway this of course could be a coincidence but strangely enough is also located directly between a military base and the military zone some of these roads are very dangerous to drive on there's a stretch of highway running south from Napier dot which is widely known as death Highway the road has been plagued by fatal collisions since it opened in 2010. along the side of death Highway there's a famous sign inexplicably written in English a warning or a dark joke for some drivers this sign is the last thing they see before crashing there are other unusual details in napuda like the seemingly impressive UPA tasanti Pagoda which is actually just a replica of a building in the old capital Yangon the Pagoda is meant to be a Buddhist Monument but when it was officially opened no monks were allowed near it just politicians and military leaders everywhere you turn in myanmar's capital there's something that doesn't make sense and all of this leaves us asking why was Napier doll built in the first place [Music] Years Ago by the same controversial military dictatorship that changed the name of Burma to Myanmar when we say controversial we're being generous this military dictatorship was violent and wildly unpopular in the 1960s when the regime seized power through a military coup some students held a protest at Yangon University the regime responded by sending a battalion of soldiers the death count isn't known but hundreds of students were shot they also refused to hold elections at least they refused until 1990. even then the election didn't mean anything when the military only won 10 of the seats out of a possible 492 they canceled the election and arrested opposition politicians that's the kind of regime we're dealing with here a brutal violent dictatorship and these are also the people who ordered the construction of Napier no one knows exactly when they started the construction was a military secret but satellite images suggested that they started at some point in 2002. the city was unveiled three years later along with the name Napier dog which roughly translates as home of Kings clearly these military leaders felt sure of their own self-worth in total the city cost 4 billion dollars to build that might be less than you'd expect for a city of this size but it's still a lot for a country whose GDP at the time was less than 10 billion US dollars were there better ways to spend that money parts of Myanmar are impoverished without access to schooling and health care so yeah there were much better ways to spend that money but the military regime really didn't care this makes it even worse that the city is now a strange ghostly Mega City it wasn't just a lot of money it was a waste of a lot of money at least that's what it feels like when you see these images but what if the government wanted a ghostly Mega City if you thought this story was strange already it's about to get even stranger before napidot myanmar's Capital was a coastal city called Yangon this urban center was home to more than 7 million inhabitants and it was originally named as the national capital when Myanmar was part of the British Empire back in 1852 more than 150 years later myanmar's dictatorship decided Yangon no longer was fit for its purpose the official reason was simple Yangon was overcrowded its population outgrowing its infrastructure the regime was hoping to start again in a brand new city with more space and better urban planning but was the official reason the real reason why the military built Napier dog a lot of people don't think so the truth they say is far more strange most experts think that the regime was nervous about yangon's increasingly bloated population if a wide-scale Revolt broke out in the city the government knew it would be hard to defend against so many civilians at once the student protests at Yangon University weren't the only demonstrations they dealt with and it was starting to feel like a matter of time before one of these protests broke out into something bigger supposedly the regime was also nervous about a naval attack from the Bay of Bengal by the United States of America this attack was unlikely but not completely out of the question the US government did not like the regime in their official documents they still called the country Burma instead of accepting the new name Myanmar they'd also intervened in Southeast Asia in the past most notably in Vietnam so the military regime decided to move the capital city to a quiet Inland region here it would be a lot less vulnerable to popular protests and significantly harder for the United States to attack they positioned their City between two chains of mountains the Bago Yoma and the Shan Yoma which formed natural defensive barriers deep within the city they built that heavily guarded government complex complete with fences and soldiers some kind of river or moat and not to mention those secret underground tunnels and maybe just maybe they left the rest of the city relatively empty on purpose with no one around there was much less chance of a popular Uprising threatening the regime's position even if the city filled up over time and the number of people has been rising very slowly the wide roads would make it easy for the Army to defend against any protests some people even think that the 20 Lane highways are secret military runways a plane could touch down in different corners of the city ready to defend against violent protests in a way that wouldn't have ever been possible on the tight little streets of Yangon the theories don't stop there maybe the city is organized in such a confusing style to make it harder for protesters to navigate maybe the streets are kept so clean to make it harder for protesters to build barricades even the death Highway between Yangon and nipidot could be a deliberate defensive measure the entire city isn't really a city it's a vast military Fortress just to reiterate none of this has ever been confirmed by myanmar's military dictatorship maybe the official explanation is true and they really did move for administrative reasons to avoid the traffic in the overcrowded streets of Yangon but surely a city as strange as this one can't have such a simple explanation right yeah in 2015 the regime agreed to hold another democratic election this time even though they lost again they accepted the election's results for a period of time the situation in Myanmar seemed to soften but in 2021 the military launched another coup seizing control and throwing the country into a period of disarray a civil war has been raging ever since with battles between both sides but this conflict is centered around the city of Yangon the most populated part of the country that's where people are protesting that's where the battles are taking place meanwhile right at the center of the country nebula is sitting empty and unbothered with the military leaders tucked away safe from all the action a coincidence maybe or a fortress who knows let us know why you think this city was built in the comments down below thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: MegaBuilds

Views: 2,597,337

Keywords: top luxury, megaprojects, construction, most useless megaprojects, useless megaprojects, useless megaprojects in the world, naypyidaw city, naypyidaw, naypyidaw ghost city, ghost city, ghost city myanmar, myanmar, myanmar capital city, strangest cities in the world, strangest city, abandoned city, abandoned city myanmar, abandoned, burma, myanmar new capital, nay pyi taw, myanmar capital, ghost town, 20 lane road myanmar, naypyidaw highway, burma ghost city, empty road myanmar

Id: ZOFcGHmBB4s

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023