Pyin U Lwin history · History of Pyin U Lwin
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History of Pyin U Lwin
History of Pyin U Lwin
The British 'discovered' Pyin U Lwin after the capture of Mandalay at the end of the Third Burmese War. An early Englishman described it thus: "Pyin-u-lwin, a charmingly situated village of some five and twenty houses, with a market-place and a gambling ring, won our hearts. ... I inspected a curious magnetic rock in the neighbouring jungle. Some years afterwards it was described as a new discovery by a geologist of note. It has been lost again, but will doubtless be found some day." (Herbert White, "A Civil Servant in Burma"). The British soon established a military post there and the village was renamed Maymyo (May Town) after the commander of the post, Colonel May, a veteran of the Indian Mutiny. Within a few years, after it was connected to Mandalay by rail, it became the summer residence of the British Government in Burma (the civil service would move, almost to the man, from Rangoon to Maymyo). A little later, it was made the headquarters of the Burma Division, a largely Gurkha and Indian division, and the remanents of that division forms the core of the 'Nepali' population of Pyin U Lwin. White goes on to describe it as "Without pretension to the picturesque, it is a place of great charm and quiet beauty, with no palm trees and few pagodas, conspicuously un-Oriental, more like a corner of Surrey than of Burma." While the Surrey analogy will seem a stretch to anyone who has visited Surrey, Pyin U Lwin still seems less like Burma than almost anywhere else in the country.
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Pyin U Lwin Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
