A Taste of Chinatown Yangon’s Chinatown brings the cuisine and culture of Myanmar’s biggest neighbor into the heart of its largest city By PATRICK BOEHLER
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awaddy
ut of sight of most tourists’ cursory visits, Yangon’s Chinatown is where Myanmar meets its massive neighbor to the north, hundreds of kilometers from their nearest border crossing. As a cultural meeting place in the heart of Myanmar’s largest city, it is also, among other things, a culinary treasure-trove. every afternoon, hawkers with garlic fried chili crabs, steamed dim sum and straw baskets full of strawberries set up their shop
around the Guanyin temple, bracing themselves for the onrush of evening strollers. By the time the sidewalk spills into the street, the butcher at Good Diamond Sausages has sold out his daily output of pork sausages he says are made according to a recipe brought over from Guangdong in the 1940s. “They’re just a bit less sweet than in hong Kong,” he says. Most of Yangon’s Chinese population of about 150,000 still live in the area and most use Myanmar
June 2013