event_note History Timeline
1927
A view of the Secretariat from Neruda’s old apartment on Dalhousie Street
The 1927 building (partially renovated in 2013) was home in the late 1920s to the great Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. It's where he had his torrid affair with "Josie Bliss". There are two places in downtown Yangon linked to winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: this building and the Guardian Magazine building (where Rabindranath Tagore visited in 1924). "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 ("The Traveller" 1927)