Capitals have moved before, but rarely so mysteriously. When Myanmar's military government began streaming out of the country's longtime capital city of Yangon on the morning of Nov. 6, headed for a fortified but unfinished compound in jungle-clad mountains 400 km to the north, people scratched their heads. The junta has been both scorned and secretive for years, but hardly enough to explain this sudden relocation.
Myanmarese and foreign observers alike had questions: Why would the junta move? Why would it move now, with facilities at the new site still so primitive that government bureaucrats couldn't even receive faxes? And why would it go to such a forbidding place, deep in the hinterlands? Two weeks later, no one is much the wiser.
Usually, when a government moves, there are good and obvious reasons why. In 1923, Turkey's Kemal Ataturk established his capital in Ankara, rather than Istanbul, to symbolize the distance between the modern, secular state he envisioned and the ailing Ottoman regime he had defeated. After World War II, Germany had little choice but to find new headquarters, since Berlin was an occupied, partitioned, bombed-out wreck. The Cold War kept the government in Bonn longer than expected, but by 1999 most German ministries were back in Berlin.