Myanmar’s ‘long-necked’ women hope bring back tourism — in pictures

Mu Htwe sells handicrafts. Several Kayan tribeswoman have returned to their remote native Panpet area in Kayah state, Myanmar, with an entrepreneurial plan to reverse the flow of departures.

A Kayan tribesgirl wearing a stack of bronze neck coils. Once the preserve of intrepid travellers as it languished under junta rule, Myanmar is now a tourist draw.

Arrivals have doubled in the past five years and numbers were expected to surge under a new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party.

From as young as five years old, Kayan girls are given up to 10 neck rings to wear, they then add a new one approximately every year until adulthood.

A grown woman can wear as many as 25 rings, weighing a total of five kilos.

Mu Par and her neighbours from Panpet’s cluster of five hamlets grouped together to build a market. hey share the profits from the 5,000 kyat (Dh15.60) visitor entrance fee.

“If we can get many tourists here, we want all the Kayan girls in Thailand to come back,” she said.

The women can remove their rings with the help of a specialist and their shoulders and collarbones can eventually return to normal, depending on the age at which they are taken off.

For years, Kayan women and girls have been driven across the border by poverty and conflict to earn money posing in holidaymakers’ pictures in purpose-built Thai villages which are decried by campaigners as “human zoos”. All photos by Phyo Hein Kyaw / AFP Photo