Renaissance city Yangon

NOT to put too fine a point on it, but Yangon is a city that, on paper at least, should not work. It's dusty. Cars, dirt tracks and exhaust fumes throw a fine layer of ashy grey over everything. The roads are potholed and clogged with traffic jams. The noise is a constant assault - packed little public buses with no air-conditioning vie with ancient, spluttering cars. Every so often, someone leans casually out of the window and spits out a lurid stream stained red by betel-nut. The infrastructure is antiquated. The city's 15 power stations cannot keep up with the demand, so blackouts are common.

And yet...

There is something else, just below the surface, a steely resilience beneath the fine-boned posture of the gently smiling Myanmar. The word, incidentally, describes the country, the people and the language. There is an absolute resistance to any attempt to use "Myanmarese" or, worse, "Burmese" as an adjective.