In recent years, the city's bizarre emptiness has become something of an international curiosity. The BBC's team marvelled at the city's desolate boulevards when they visited last year as part of a special episode filmed in the country (see , page 36). The show's controversial presenters staged a drag-race down the vast, empty roads and joked about the difficulties of navigating the capital's non-existent morning rush hour.

But Naypyidaw's wide, empty streets do have some pedestrians: the ubiquitous street cleaners, who walk in pairs in their neon-green vests, sweeping the already pristine streets for hours each day. And the small army of labourers, piling bricks with bare hands as the city's construction continues.

Although a nominally civilian government has ruled Myanmar since 2011, locals are wary of speaking to us. Those who do plead for their real names not to be used.

"It's not safe," says one 26-year-old man who moved to Naypyidaw two years ago from his small town in Kayin State, in the south of the country. "The government has changed, but it's still the same.

"This city is mainly for government staff, government buildings," laments the man, sitting in the shopping mall where he works. "It's not very interesting here. Most people are not that happy; they are just living here because they can earn money, because they can work here."

The strength of executive power feels ever-present in Naypyidaw, where the government is based. According to Reporters Without Borders, a local photojournalist and a writer for a religious magazine were sentenced in 2006 to three years in prison, merely for taking photos of the city.

Naypyidaw's origins are shrouded in rumour and speculation. Some describe it as a vanity project of Than Shwe, the former military leader of the country. Many believe the "audacious" name given to the city reflects "illusions of grandeur or … perhaps another sign of [Than Shwe's] possible dementia", according to one 2006 United States government diplomatic cable, released by WikiLeaks.

Other theories suggest the increasingly paranoid junta wanted to move the capital (formerly Yangon) away from the sea, fearing an amphibious US invasion.

Instead, the seat of military and political power now sits closer to the restive regions where separatist movements and ethnic groups are pushing for greater rights for bitterly oppressed minorities, including the Karen and Rohingya.

The regime, and Than Shwe, pitched the move to Naypyidaw as akin to building a Canberra or Brasilia, an administrative capital away from the traffic jams and overpopulation of Yangon. Few people bought this story.

"By withdrawing from the major city, Yangon, Than Shwe and the leadership … sheltered themselves from any popular uprising," writes activist Benedict Rogers in his book .

Naypyidaw's complex of monumental parliament buildings has a moat running around it. Military guards, however, prevent visitors from getting close enough to scrutinise any of the buildings. There are also rumours of a vast network of tunnels under the city - with photos apparently having emerged of North Korean technicians advising the government on how to build them.

from Yangon runs more than 300km north through fields and softly rolling hills. On a Sunday, it is almost entirely empty, silent apart from the occasional car or lorry carrying dozens of packed-in passengers, like a makeshift minibus. Along the side of the road, signs remind drivers to stay alert and abide by speed limits. "Life is a Journey. Complete it," urges one.

Although the highway is virtually empty, and travellers say it is the best road in the country, it has been plagued by reports of fatal accidents. Some have dubbed it "Death Highway", and critics say the road to the new capital was rushed, with little funding invested in safety measures.

In Yangon, foreign aid workers laugh when asked whether they would be willing to relocate to Naypyidaw. Instead, they make the five-hour trip by car. Others take a plane. With flights costing as much as US$350 per round trip, it's hard not to wonder whether the commute is a good use of development money.

"It's a challenge," admits one British NGO worker in Yangon; she and two colleagues had flown up to Naypyidaw the previous morning for a meeting, flying back again that evening. "It's quite bizarre and it's quite empty. It's a strange place, yes, but the capital's there so you have to go."

"I came back just last night. I'm going again tomorrow," adds a top foreign aid official in Yangon. "I go once a week and spend two nights there - ask my wife and kids what they think."

Sitting under cafe umbrellas, outside one of Naypyidaw's giant shopping malls, a pair of United Nations consultants are chatting over their laptops. It's their first visit to Myanmar and they're cursing their luck at having been sent here instead of Yangon.

"The hotels are really funny, they feel cheap - kind of beautiful on the outside and not so good on the inside, with everything falling apart and no hot water, mouldy, smelly," says one of the consultants, who also asks to remain anonymous because of her work with the government.

"We didn't really know what to expect when we came here; we thought Burma was still quite underdeveloped, so we didn't really expect these huge roads," she adds. "It's super-deserted, like a ghost town … I just feel so awkward here."

Naypyidaw is laid out in large unwieldy zones dedicated to properties such as hotels; government buildings; officials' residences; the military compound (ringed by imposing metal fences and soldiers) - meaning there is no typical city centre. This, too, was perhaps intentional: there is no natural public place in which to congregate.

One Indian journalist who visited the city described it as "dictatorship by cartography". Indeed, an authoritarian feel seems hard-wired into the Naypyidaw's very design.

Stories of people being forced to move here - or forced to move away - have tarnished the carefully calculated triumph of this purpose-built capital since its earliest days. The Myanmar regime "threatened to impose harsh prison sentences on, or deny pensions to, civil servants who refused to relocate; there have been reports of several arrests", revealed a 2006 US diplomatic cable, published by WikiLeaks.

No one knows exactly when work started on the city, as it was all done in secret. But looking at the sheer scale of the venture, it's hard to imagine that it took less than a decade.

"The area around Naypyidaw was depopulated in order to seal the huge compound off from the outside world," said a local Thai newspaper at the time. "Entire villages disappeared from the map, their inhabitants driven off land their families had farmed for centuries. Hundreds - perhaps thousands - joined Myanmar's abused army of 'internally displaced persons'. Able-bodied villagers, however, were 'enlisted' to help build the new capital."

The city's planners included a number of leisure facilities in their designs to "soften up" the capital. In addition to the zoo and golf courses, there's a gargantuan, 67-hectare meticulously manicured park, and an eco-resort with water slides, a spa and a beach on the shores of a man-made lake just outside the city.

Few of Naypyidaw's low-income residents can afford to enjoy these attractions. This is, after all, one of the world's poorest countries, where two out of five children below the age of five are undernourished.

On Sunday afternoon, half a dozen people stand in the middle of a golf course dressed in matching blue polo shirts, practising their putts on perfectly manicured grass. Behind them, a golden pagoda glints in the sunshine.

Take a wrong turn at the foot of the Yepyar Golf Course, however, and you will find yourself on a muddy, unpaved road scattered with rubbish. A small child walks barefoot by a tiny stall, the street's only shop, which stocks every variety of chewy candy, but no real food or water.

Look closely at the golden Uppatasanti Pagoda and you'll see it's a replica of the ancient Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. Very little here is more than a decade old.

Down one street stands a mammoth gem and jewellery showroom, where an expansive hall is packed with 40 gleaming high-end stalls. There are dozens of people working here, but no customers. It's completely silent.

In the nearby hotel zone, you can eat lunch or drink a martini at Café Flight, a restaurant built inside a salvaged airplane that was brought here as an attraction for hungry visitors. It is empty apart from a solitary couple. Lunch costs US$5 - more than twice what many workers in the country will earn in a day.

In the city's residential zones, rooftops are colour-coded according to where people work in the ministry zone. Many rank-and-file government workers live in dormitories and military-style barracks while top officials reside in opulent mansions. It is rumoured that opposition politicians have smaller lodgings than the ruling party honchos - a petty touch, perhaps, but entirely in keeping with this monument to hierarchy.

Naypyidaw has joined the global summit circuit, hosting events and meetings with world leaders and experts. US President Barack Obama was in town last year; British leader David Cameron came in 2012. That same year, after winning her historic seat in parliament, Aung San Suu Kyi, the thorn in the side of the regime, also relocated to Naypyidaw. Officials of her National League for Democracy party say she rented a house in the suburbs - a far cry from the iconic lakeside villa in Yangon where she was kept under house arrest on and off for 15 years.

Naypyidaw, too, is a long way from the shining emblem of the "new Myanmar" that the government has been trying to push. With its sparkling new international airport, the city feels like an extreme test of the "if you build it, they will come" theory.

But so far, with the government already having moved at least one of its investment agencies back to Yangon, it's looking like a spectacular failure.

Guardian News & Media