BUILDING A NEW CAPITAL in the middle of nowhere is actually a fairly normal idea. Brasilia and Washington, D.C., were laid out that way; Kazakhstan is finishing Astana now. But Naypyidaw is anything but normal.

Getting there was the easy part. A Rangoon travel agent looked at me funny but sold me a plane ticket, and no one asked any questions when I boarded a late-afternoon Air Mandalay flight full of colonels and businessmen. At the small Naypyidaw airport, I glommed on to some surprised Thai businessmen, sharing a taxi to their hotel. The hotel zone consisted of a handful of sprawling luxury-bungalow compounds along the airport road, near nothing. All night, I kept jumping out of bed, startled. The geckos on the walls made a sound just like keys tapping on glass.

In the morning, I took the Naypyidaw visitor's tour—meaning I hired a taxi. No tourists come here, and the few Burmese businessmen who have to visit the capital leave as fast as they can. Among foreigners, only diplomats and people like Alan Rabinowitz have a reason to go. Almost nothing was as rumor had it. In 2007, The Economist posited a "remote mountain fastness"; Time and The Washington Post described a "jungle." Instead daylight revealed a flat plain covered with rice paddies. Only half finished, Naypyidaw was a brown, barren, and superheated Lego city, a cross between Pyongyang and a gated community outside Phoenix. Rebar poked out everywhere, and women carried firewood on their heads past just-finished office parks. Spread across miles of empty landscape, it was a field of pre-ruins, a folly as ambitious in its way as the pagodas at Bagan.

There was no traffic. I saw one restaurant in the entire city. There were no crowds, no history, no neighborhoods, and so few schools and shops that many bureaucrats have left their families behind in Rangoon. (Even some top leaders have quietly moved back to Rangoon or to the cooler British hill station near Mandalay, Pyin-U-Lwin.) The population—which the junta claims numbers a million—is almost all government workers, sorted by their ministries into housing blocks and carried to work each morning together in the backs of army trucks.

Naypyidaw is really an open-air prison, where functionaries twirl their fingers at make-work jobs and generals loot the budget. Although U.S. and EU economic sanctions have driven out many international companies, Chevron still does business here, and Naypyidaw is buzzing with deals on oil, natural gas, gems, timber, and hydropower—deals made largely with Burma's needy neighbors, China, India, and Thailand. In my hotel, the Thai businessmen had been discussing drilling technology. No wonder: Many of the lights in Bangkok are powered by natural gas from Burma, and according to The New York Times, the Thais pour $1.2 billion into Burmese accounts each year. As yet another Western diplomat explained it, the revenues from oil and gas exports are paid in dollars, which the junta converts to Burmese kyat at an official rate of six to the dollar. In Rangoon, I was routinely getting 1,100 kyat to the dollar. So where did the other 99 percent of the oil and gas billions go? Take a guess.

After a while my driver turned around and looked at me pointedly. "Want see?" he said.

He didn't wait for an answer, veering down a broad avenue through rolling country. This was the civil-admin section, the zone that the Savoy diplomat had claimed I would never enter. One by one came the gleaming ministries, mile after mile of countryside dotted with occasional buildings, all new, all labeled, with color-coded roofs. The Ministry of Progress of Border Areas (black roof) is in charge of the military's endless war on the tribal people. The Ministry of Health (blue) oversees the worst health system in Southeast Asia. The Ministry of Home Affairs (pink) is in charge of catching journalists on tourist visas. I didn't see an education ministry or a ministry of justice: The junta does not bother to operate a court system.

The one thing they did have in Naypyidaw was emergency services. In the middle of wilderness, I saw a brand-new fire station. Miles away, amid more emptiness, a police station, bearing the Orwellian slogan MAY WE HELP YOU? One of the tallest buildings in Naypyidaw is an eight-bay firehouse with a watchtower. With its strong concrete and inland location, Naypyidaw never felt the cyclone's winds. Three hundred miles down in the Irrawaddy Delta, however, where damage was worst, the generals had not bothered to build rescue squads or sheltering police stations. No, we will not help you. When Nargis hit, the military put its head in the sand.