LIKE AN ASIAN HAVANA, Rangoon is filled with rounded and rusting cars older than I am, and billboards denouncing foreigners. It is a low, humid dump, more Shanghai than Shanghai, stained with mold, clouded overhead by knots of electrical wires, and stuttering and sputtering from the private generators crowded everywhere. (The electric grid can black out half a dozen times a day.) Bicycle rickshaws are loaded up like SUVs, monks and palm readers rule the streets, and laborers sweat all day for pennies. Authenticity is in oversupply here. It's Asia before the microchip.

I spent my first morning, April 17, at the nation's most important temple, Shwedagon, a 320-foot-high gold-leafed pagoda that dates back more than a thousand years. It was packed with Buddhist pilgrims for the Thingyan festival, held during the hottest, driest time of year, when people appease the Naga water spirits by shooting squirt guns and launching water balloons in all directions. It was a holiday, and the weeks ahead looked soporific. The forecast was for scorching, humid days with a bit of isolated rain, or what the government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, called "generally fair." The only event on the horizon was a vote on May 10, what Human Rights Watch called a "sham referendum" to enshrine military rule. The New Light urged everyone to vote yes.

Amid thousands at Shwedagon that morning, I saw just one other foreigner. Thailand received almost 14 million visitors in 2006; Burma had just under 300,000. There is a nominal boycott on tourism here, but the real problem is the lack of infrastructure, the limited beaches, and the high costs that scare off many backpackers. The most frequent visitors, other Asians and European retirees, make a circuit through the "Land of Gold," as Burma is known, from Shwedagon to the ruins of Bagan, a complex of ancient shrines and pagodas grander than Cambodia's Angkor Wat. They pass through the palaces of Mandalay, the last royal capital, and then head into hill country to take in lakes, forests, and minority ethnic cultures—Chins and Kachins, Karens and Karennis—whose homelands touch on the frontiers of India, China, and Thailand. This Burma is as fetching as it is poor, a backward land that is therefore picturesque and old-fashioned, amid a barefoot poverty that remains nevertheless communal and dignified.

I was equipped with a two-week ticket and a tourist visa that allowed me to slip into this rivulet of foreigners circling through Burma. But I had a very different itinerary, through a different country. I was headed north, to the mysterious new capital, Naypyidaw, a place unmentioned by Lonely Planet. In 2006, the junta—led by General Than Shwe and his 47 cabinet members and "chiefs of state"— announced that all the government ministries of Rangoon were decamping to a location 250 miles north, where a city had been built, from scratch, in the middle of nothing, without warning. I wanted to see the generals' lair.

It is the military that has trapped this nation in a regressive time sink. A kleptocratic clique of officers presides over 428,000 green-clad soldiers, the second-largest army in Southeast Asia after Vietnam's. The Tatmadaw, as the army is known, is a cult, really. It was founded by Burma's independence leader, General Aung San, who fought the British, danced with the Japanese, and was murdered in a hail of bullets by his own officers in 1947, just months before British colonial rule ended, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi. A military coup in 1962 led to decades of isolation and xenophobia; since 1992, the dictatorship has been in the hands of General Shwe, a reclusive, frog-faced 75-year-old with a chest full of medals and an astrologer at his right hand.

The junta has tried to erase history. In 1989 they changed the capital's name to Yangon and the country's to the Union of Myanmar, though I've found that most people continue to say Burma, either because it implies opposition or it's quicker. They rebranded themselves as the State Peace and Development Council. Burma's clocks run half an hour out of step with its neighbors, there are eight days in the week, and, according to The New Light, we're living in both 2008 and the year 1370 of an ancient Burmese dynasty.

Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi grew up, went to Oxford, married, and returned permanently to Burma in 1988. Now 63, she is an apostle of nonviolence and democracy, known within her country simply as "the Lady." In 1990, her pro-democracy party won the only free elections in Burmese history; she won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, but the junta locked her inside her elegant lakeside house in Rangoon. After 18 years of intermittent imprisonment and release, she is still there—on May 27, the junta extended her house arrest for another year.

Sometimes it feels like all of Burma has been locked in with her. A censorship board controls radio, books, magazines, and television, cellular phones cost $2,500, and the Internet is simply turned off during a crisis. Even in calm times, most e-mail accounts are blocked by a firewall (although bright kids in cybercafés proxy-tunnel to servers in Germany). The day before Nargis struck, as the storm began to nip at Rangoon's roofs, starlets paraded across the screen of my hotel room's TV set, lip-syncing pro-government ballads.

There is only room for good news in this official Burma. Even disaster reports from a cyclone barely reach the ears of top leaders. "In Burmese culture, you don't tell each other truth if it will hurt," Ma Thanegi, a noted Rangoon painter and former assistant to Aung San Suu Kyi, told me. "That is the worst part of our culture. No argument if it hurts feelings. Objective criticism does not exist. Any criticism must be based on hatred or jealousy."

Thanegi did a year in jail herself for opposing the government. As recently as 2004, Than Shwe conducted a messy purge of the military ranks, arresting hundreds of his own men. Even the country's cadre of perhaps 400,000 Theravada Buddhist monks is not immune. Last September, during what became known as the Saffron Revolution, thousands of them led pro-democracy protests across Burma, beginning in the town of Pakokku. By the time the military snuffed out the unrest, on September 27, in Rangoon, at least 31 people had died. I was headed to Pakokku, too.