salay

In Yangon centre, city blocks are lined with spectacular, though now crumbling, buildings from British colonial times. Built to serve every possible purpose from Court House and Port Authority to banks, merchant houses and the very grand Rowe and Company, colonial emporium, and considered the Harrods of the East, this style of architecture pops up in other towns and cities.

Three days sailing up river is Salay, a river village of 11,000 with dusty roads, bamboo fences , pagodas and bullock carts and a settlement history that goes back a thousand years.
Looming tall amongst the stilted bamboo houses are buildings like this one. Not however built by the British but by local farmers who owned huge tracts of land around the town of Chauk north of Salay on which oil was discovered by Scottish company Burmah Oil Company in the 1920s.
Back in the twenties more oil had been discovered in Myanmar than in the Middle East and Salay farmers became very wealthy as the land was bought for oil production.
Very taken by the administrative buildings in Chauk the farmers returned to rural Salay building three story ‘mansions’ as family homes.

Now very few are lived in, the majority storage warehouses for beans, kapok and highly coloured quilts, mattresses and tea cosies! made by tailors and seamstresses pedalling away on ancient Singer sewing machines in open fronted rooms at street level.