She is known in Burma as "The Lady." Aung San Suu Kyi won 82% of the vote in the country's last democratic elections in 1990. For that crime the military junta has imprisoned her in her family's crumbling mansion for almost 17 years.
The heavily guarded compound on University Avenue, on the south shore of Rangoon's Inya Lake, is surrounded by soldiers and coils of barbed wire and has become a prison where the sickly 61-year-old widow has been held in virtual solitary confinement for 11 of the last 17 years.
She has not seen her sons Kim and Alexander for years and, fearing she would be exiled, was unable to attend the funeral of her husband, Oxford academic Michael Aris, in Britain in 1999.
Ms. Suu Kyi, who has high blood pressure, is allowed to see her doctor only once every two months (the medical visits used to be monthly but the military cut back on them two years ago).
The only other people she sees are a live-in maid who shares her imprisonment and her jailers.
Burma's generals regularly replace the soldiers who guard her, for fear she might gain too much influence over them.
Like South Africa's Nelson Mandela, who was jailed for 27 years, Ms. Suu Kyi is regarded as a symbol of heroic peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.
Drive slowly past the lakeside compound and your taxi driver is likely to tell you, "In our hearts we are with her," or, "She is always with us."
Despite years in detention and forced isolation, "The Lady" still has the power to encourage her followers and to enrage Burma's rulers.
She is a last lingering hope in the dark reality that is Burma.
Last weekend, as a prelude to the 17th anniversary of her election victory, the generals extended her detention order for yet another year.
The move came in spite of an unprecedented appeal by 59 current and former world leaders for her release.
Kjell Magne Bondevik, a former Norwegian prime minister, managed to collect the signatures of two former Canadian prime ministers, Kim Campbell and Brian Mulroney, three past U.S. presidents and 15 Asian former presidents and prime ministers in a call "for the immediate release of the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate."
"Aung San Suu Kyi is not calling for revolution in Burma, but rather peaceful, non-violent dialogue, between the military, National League for Democracy [her party] and Burma's ethnic groups," the letter said.
The plea was ignored by the junta, which is better known for repression, secrecy and xenophobic paranoia than diplomatic dexterity.
When news of Ms. Suu Kyi's continued imprisonment broke, Germany, as current president of the 27-member European Union, issued a statement complaining, "All international appeals have once more gone unheard. Myanmar demonstrated persistent unwillingness to engage all political and ethnic forces of the country in a genuine dialogue to bring about true national reconciliation and the establishment of democracy."
On Thursday, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Burma's detention of Ms. Suu Kyi to be "arbitrary" and in contravention of three provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
But in Asia's heart of darkness, international complaints account for little.
Burma remains riddled with poverty and privation. For 45 years it has been a state under siege by its own military.
The general elections in 1990, which overwhelmingly supported Ms. Suu Kyi and her demands for democracy, have been ignored. Opposition parties have been outlawed, their leaders jailed or placed under house arrest or silenced through murder or fear.
The tales of horror that leak out are reminiscent of those that emerged from Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields.
Over 45 years of military rule more than 1 million half-starved and frightened refugees have moved to neighbouring Thailand, Bangladesh and India. They tell stories of mass murder, rape, torture and religious persecution.
More than 100,000 Muslims from Burma's northwestern state of Arakan have taken refuge in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on earth. Another 150,000 ethnic Karen have crossed the border into Thailand to avoid a war of extermination that has raged in the jungles of eastern Burma for nearly 60 years. About 2,000 Naga tribes people in the north have fled to India and more than 30,000 people from the northeastern state of Kachin now live in China.
Elsewhere, the military has destroyed more than 3,000 villages and forced 600,000 people from their homes into the jungles of eastern Burma.
The generals dismiss international objections to their atrocities, saying it's an internal affair and should be of no interest to the rest of the world.
Yet Burma now has more than 1,100 political prisoners in addition to Ms. Suu Kyi. Its army uses rape as a weapon of war and forcibly recruits up to 70,000 child soldiers, more than any other country.
Nearly five decades of disastrous mismanagement, in which the military experimented with "Burmese Socialism" while pillaging the country's resources, have turned Burma into an economic disaster zone.
Once of the richest countries in Southeast Asia, it is now one of the world's poorest. Nearly half the children under five are malnourished, says Save the Children, and up to 150,000 youngsters die each year from preventable diseases such as malaria and diarrhea.
Yet the military enjoys power and privilege, creating a statewithin- a-state in which servicemen and their dependents benefit from special schools, hospitals, stores and subsidized housing.
The generals have grown rich while relentlessly tightening their grip on the country and auctioning off its natural resources.
They supplement their income by churning out huge quantities of methamphetamines for the illegal drug trade and are the world's second-largest producers of opium, after Afghanistan.
The discovery of offshore gas fields near Arakan in 2000 will soon generate between US$800- million and US$3-billion a year in new revenues for the junta, which has engaged in such bizarre behaviour as secretly moving the nation's capital, now known as Naypyidaw (Seat of Kings), to a remote rural area north of Rangoon, simply on the advice of an astrologer.
Since 1990, Burma has spent US$3-billion on Chinese weapons even though it faces no obvious external threat.
Shunned by most of the world, the resource-rich nation still does business with China, North and South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and India. Just last month, Russia announced it will supply Burma with its first nuclear reactor in a scheme to build a nuclear research centre.
Beijing is the junta's staunchest ally and has invested in natural gas research, oil exploration and hydroelectric projects in Burma. It has also won long-term energy contracts from the generals and the right to use a crucial naval base on the Andaman Sea.
China put down its own prodemocracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, a year after Burma's military crushed the protests led by Ms. Suu Kyi. Clearly, China's communist leaders have no ideological interest in encouraging Burma's rulers to reform.
In the face of the junta's reliance on force and terror and the opportunism of its neighbours, Ms. Suu Kyi's continued imprisonment is proof of her political clout.
Though silent and ailing, she remains dangerous as the only person who can unite a broad array of forces against the generals.