Scotland's colonial-era link with Burma is being revived via the export of architectural skills.
A blueprint for the conservation of the country's largest British-built building has been produced by leading Edinburgh-based historic buildings architect Simpson & Brown.
James Simpson and John Sanders have produced a first draft of a comprehensive conservation plan for the Yangon Heritage Trust (YHT) for the Secretariat in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), a vast and dilapidated former government building in the heart of the port city.
The building, completed in 1905, was the seat of Burma's military government following the country's independence, but has been abandoned since 2005 when the junta decamped to Naypyidaw, a new capital in the country's jungle interior. The Secretariat has added significance as the scene of the assassination by Burmese paramilitaries in 1947 of the anti-British independence campaigner General Aung San, along with his cabinet. He was the father of Nobel Peace Prize-winning democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, whose influence has accelerated the country's openness to inward investment.
Simpson has worked on colonial-era building projects in India since 2004. He said he hoped that the Burmese project - a partnership between the YHT and Anawmar Group, the prospective owner of the building - could serve as a model for the conservation of Burma's rich but threatened Raj-era heritage. Current plans for the Secretariat include a proposal for an art gallery and offices.
Burma attracted a disproportionately large number of Scots in the British colonial era, as administrators and traders. The country's main river transport company, The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company was effectively a Scottish enterprise, run by Paddy Henderson & Company from Glasgow.
The conservation blueprint drawn up by Simpson and colleague Sanders also notes that the ironwork in the Secretariat's elaborate staircases, gates and railings was made by W Macfarlane's Saracen foundry in Glasgow's Possilpark, and that much of the ironwork bears a "Lanarkshire" stamp.
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