Forty-four hardwood steps lie between Yangon’s bustling streets and one of the world’s sleepiest stock exchanges. A thin film of dust on each step muffles the sound of your shoes as you patter up to the first floor, but only slightly: the silence as you approach the trading floor is deafening, broken only by the faint honking of traffic on Sule Pagoda Road.
Once inside, past a door beseeching ‘Strict silence!’ in Burmese, the look and feel of a lending library continues. Ten similarly diminutive women sit in a row behind 10 brown desks, looking like ducks in a shooting gallery. Upon entering, each stirs, clucks a little ("A visitor!") and looks at the chief duck for direction, who turns to the one phone in the room and dials a number – presumably to the only working landline in the whole of Myanmar.
Seconds later, a tall, flustered-looking man with a shock of spiky black hair enters. "Why you here? What you?" he asks, speaking English through a thick accent and a big facial twitch. "Journalist," is the only reply that springs to mind. "Here to write a story about the Myanmar Stock Exchange."
