Who ruled Yangon?

Yangon, long known in English as Rangoon, stands on the east bank of the Yangon River near where it meets the sea, at the eastern edge of the Irrawaddy delta in southern Myanmar. For centuries it was a small pilgrimage town clustered around the gilded Shwedagon Pagoda on a hill above the river. Its growth into a major port and capital came only under British rule after 1852, and it remained Myanmar's capital until the government moved to Naypyidaw in 2005 and 2006.

The delta was the home of the Mon people, who built kingdoms in Lower Burma from the first millennium CE. Mon legend dates the Shwedagon to the lifetime of the Buddha, when two merchant brothers are said to have enshrined eight of his hairs there; archaeologists place its founding much later, between the 6th and 10th centuries CE. The settlement around it, called Dagon, is recorded from about the 11th century. It was a minor town of the Pagan Kingdom and later of the Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy, based at nearby Bago (Pegu), whose rulers greatly enlarged the stupa in the 15th century. The maps label the area by its distant overlords, but Dagon's importance in this period was religious rather than political.

In 1755 Alaungpaya, founder of the Konbaung dynasty, captured Dagon during his conquest of the Mon kingdom and renamed it Yangon, meaning "end of strife". It became the main port of Burma, though still a modest town of wooden houses.

British forces seized Yangon during the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824 to 1826) and handed it back, then took it again in 1852, when they annexed Lower Burma. Military engineers laid out a new city of straight streets on a grid between the river and the pagoda hill, and Rangoon became the capital of British Burma in 1862. After the conquest of Upper Burma in 1885 it was the capital of the whole country, governed as a province of British India until 1937. Rice exports through the port made it one of the busiest in Asia. Immigration from India was so large that by the 1920s Indians formed more than half of the city's population. The university became a centre of nationalist politics, where student strikes in 1920 and 1936 helped shape leaders such as Aung San.

Japanese forces occupied the city from March 1942 until May 1945, during the Second World War, and bombing caused heavy damage. On 4 January 1948 Rangoon became the capital of an independent Union of Burma.

After General Ne Win's coup of 1962, the city's Indian population largely left, and the economy stagnated under isolationist military rule. Rangoon was the centre of the 1988 uprising, during which Aung San Suu Kyi addressed a huge crowd at the Shwedagon in August; the army crushed the movement in September. In 1989 the junta changed the English names of the country and city to Myanmar and Yangon. Monks led protests through the streets in 2007, and Cyclone Nargis struck the city and the delta in May 2008, killing well over 100,000 people across the region.

In November 2005 the military began moving ministries to Naypyidaw, about 320 kilometres to the north. Yangon nonetheless remains the largest city and commercial centre of Myanmar, with a population of more than five million, and was again the scene of mass protests after the army seized power in February 2021.