History
Mawlamyine was the first capital of British Burma between 1826 and 1852 after the Tanintharyi (Tenassarim) coast, along with Arakan, was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Yandabo at the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War.
It is probably best known to English speakers through the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay:
- "By the old Moulmein pagoda
- Lookin' lazy at the sea
- There's a Burma girl a-settin'
- and I know she thinks o' me".
Mawlamyine is also the setting of George Orwell's famous 1936 memoir Shooting an Elephant. The essay opens with the striking words:
- In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
During colonial times, Moulmein had a substantial Anglo-Burmese population; an area of the city was known as 'Little England' due to the large Anglo-Burmese community, many of them engaged in the running of rubber plantations; however nowadays this has dwindled to all but a handful of families as most have left for the UK or Australia.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)