Yangon’s first official book market opened up on Thein Phyu Street this past Saturday, although according to the giant hanging banner, the market is officially known as the ‘Yangon Books Street’ and not, well, a market.
Some of the stalls, it also turns out, are opened as subsidiaries of ‘proper’ brick-and-mortar book shops. Others, though, had migrated over from Pansodan Road — also known as Yangon’s unofficial second-hand book market.
Although most of the available titles were in Myanmar, the market was nonetheless a new and interesting spot for tourists and families.
Virginia Jeffries, an American tourist who had heard about the market from a friend, told Coconuts Yangon, “The variety was amazing…I found a Burmese biography of the artist Andy Warhol. He’s from my hometown — all the way in Pittsburgh, USA — so I felt like I found a little bit of home here in Yangon.”
Additionally, while most vendors we talked had nothing bad to say about the establishment of the market (yet), no one was singing its praises either.
After all, as it stands, there’s not really anything that distinguishes this new market/street from Pansodan Road, although the government is trying to change that.
“They’re arresting us over on Pansodan,” one vendor who didn’t want to be named told Coconuts Yangon.
Considering that roughly half of the stalls at the new market weren’t ones that were originally set up on Pansodan, it remains to be seen what policies the government will establish regarding the Pansodan book stalls. After all, the Strand Road night market was originally touted to be a compromise between clearing the streets of downtown while still enabling vendors to make a living, but that hasn’t gone down too well, to say the least.
In fact, the vendor we spoke to also admitted that because the market is only open on the weekends, she still plans to set up shop at her old location.
“On weekdays we still operate there [on Pansodan]. We set up our stalls quickly and when they [the YCDC] come, we quickly pack everything up,” she confessed, proving that markets may come and go, but the tenacity of Yangon’s street vendors remains resolute.
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