1927
A view of the Secretariat from Neruda’s old apartment on Dalhousie Street
This 1927 apartment building (partially renovated in 2013) was home to the great Chilean poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pablo Neruda. He worked in Rangoon from 1927-28 at the Chilean consulate to Burma. Here, he fell in love with a Burmese woman called Josie Bliss, who poetry critics would later identify as his most important muse. As Neruda describes her, Bliss was an incredibly jealous woman and used to brandish a knife at him when she suspected his infidelity. Though he left Rangoon to escape her, he returned after World War Two to try and find her. Unable to track her down, he assumed she must have disappeared during the war. The memory of Josie Bliss would haunt Neruda's poetry throughout his life.
"I lived in Burma, amid cupolas, of powerful metal, and thickets where the tiger burned its rings of bloody gold. From my windows on Dalhousie street the indefinable odor, moss in the pagodas, perfumes and excrement, pollen, gunpowder, of a world saturated with human moisture, rose up to me" ~ Pablo Neruda