A Fitness Instructor Accidentally Caught Myanmar's Coup While Filming Her Dance Routine

Myanmar’s military has crushed the country’s young democracy by staging a coup and seizing power from its elected leaders. Fitness instructor Khing Hnin Wai certainly knows this now, but she didn’t when she unwittingly filmed a video of herself dancing as a convoy headed down the deserted streets of the country’s capital to take over its parliament.

In a post on Facebook, Khing wrote that, “Before I heard the news (of the coup) in the morning, the video I made for the aerobic dance competition has become an unforgettable memory.”

Some people have expressed doubts about the video’s authenticity, since why, you might ask, are the streets so bizarrely deserted? That’s just Naypyidaw, a spooky shell of a city declared the capital by the Tatmadaw in 2005, which was in power at the time, and is again now. The BBC confirmed that Khing’s video is real, citing as proof that she’s been filming videos on the same empty roundabout for the better part of a year now.

“I wasn’t dancing to mock or ridicule any organization or to be silly… I was dancing for a fitness dance competition,” she wrote.