NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar – The road leading to Myanmar’s giant Parliament building is 20 lanes wide, well suited for military processions but eerily empty the rest of the time. A half-hour drive away, down this city’s manicured avenues, is another immense edifice, still under construction: a military museum that will serve as a shrine to the country’s generals and admirals. Across the way is a military training academy; farther down the road, rows of barracks and a vast parade ground.

Six years after Myanmar inaugurated Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW) as its new capital, the city remains austere and often lifeless, a costly monument to military rulers who no longer rule, since the junta handed over authority in March to the country’s first civilian government in almost 50 years.

Attempts have been made to make the city more people-friendly. There is a theme park dedicated to uplifting “patriotic spirit” and a large fountain where civil servants can watch pulsing jets of water accompanied by Western pop songs with Burmese lyrics.

Most evenings, though, a tomb like silence descends on Naypyidaw.

“We are so bored here,” said U Aung Myint, 20, a government employee who visited the fountain on a recent Saturday evening. “This is the only place to come at night.”

On the outskirts of town, a warren of karaoke bars and a few nightclubs have sprouted up, but their clientele is mainly senior officers and officials.

The country, once known as Burma, has a long tradition of building new capitals, said Thant Myint-U, a Burmese historian. There is also a long history of resentment from those forced to live in them. Mandalay, the largest city in the northern reaches of the country, was built by King Mindon in the late 1850s; his ministers and courtiers fought the project “tooth and nail,” Thant Myint-U said.

“Myanmar has always been a very difficult country to govern, messy and often violent, and many kings in the past have wanted to set up the capital as the antithesis of the natural and perhaps inevitable anarchy,” he wrote in an email. Each new capital, he said, was a “single place of order in a country where a more general order was impossible.”

Building a new city amid the sugar-cane fields and rice paddies was a huge expense for Myanmar, one of Asia’s poorest countries. The military junta never revealed the project’s price tag, but Sean Turnell, a leading expert on the Burmese economy, estimates it at $3 billion to $4 billion. Only part of that was cash spending, Turnell said, because soldiers were used for construction labour, and various business conglomerates did much of the work in exchange for government concessions, notably logging rights to large areas of virgin forest in other parts of the country.

The grandiose boulevards of Naypyidaw, lined with flowers and shrubbery, are a jarring contrast to the subsistence living seen in the rest of the country.

Decades of isolation and economic mismanagement under military rule left Myanmar much poorer than its dynamic neighbours to the east and north. The generals and their business associates got rich, building mansions and importing fancy cars, but the rest of the population missed the economic boom that helped create a middle class in places like China, Thailand and Malaysia.

The new civilian government in Myanmar, led by President Thein Sein, wants to liberalize the economy, but change may take years to trickle down to the destitute. And meanwhile, Maung Maung said, “People are getting poorer and poorer.”

The contrasts between the neighbouring towns are striking. Pyinmana’s sidewalks are broken, its narrow streets are dusty tracks and its telephone and power lines are a hopeless tangle. Traffic there is barely contained chaos. Young men play guitar on street corners for passers-by.