History of Mawlamyine

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