3-052-367 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Affairs in Burmah: Thyetmyo, the frontier town, 1880. Town '... where the special Ambassadors from the King of Burmah have been waiting permission, hitherto refused, to enter the British territory and to reopen diplomatic negotiations...Thyetmyo has been, since 1854, the most advanced inland station of British troops in the occupation of our Burmese dominions...Thyetmyo is a very ancient native town, founded about two thousand years ago, and was at first inhabited by the Pyoos, one of the three races, Theks, Karens, and Pyoos, of whom the Burmese nation is compounded. But when Buddhist missionaries had converted the heathen populations of Eastern Asia to that philosophical religion, every town and province of Indo-China received a classical Pali name. Thyetmyo is a corruption of the epithet "town of slaughter," from a legend of one of its early princes who killed all his own sons lest they should grow up to dethrone him. The native town has now dwindled to a village of bamboo huts, with the Barracks erected for the accommodation of British soldiery. The river, which formerly was close to their cantonments, has altered its course within the last twenty years, and is a mile distant from them'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.