Some people began to feel that the rate of change was not fast enough and the reforms not expansive enough. However, to prepare the new land for cultivation, farmers were forced to borrow money from Indian moneylenders called chettiars at high interest rates and were often foreclosed on and evicted losing land and livestock. Moreover the Burmese, like all the other peoples of India, remain under the rule of the British Empire for purely military considerations. The Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) had left the kingdom of Ava (Upper Burma; see Alaungpaya dynasty) independent of British India, and, under the rule of King Mindon (1853–78), who built his capital at Mandalay, steamers bringing British residents and private traders up the Irrawaddy River from Rangoon (Yangon) were welcomed. The movement became known as Htaung thoun ya byei ayeidawbon (the '1300 Revolution' named after the Burmese calendar year), and 20 December, the day the first martyr Aung Kyaw fell, commemorated by students as 'Bo Aung Kyaw Day'. After Burma's defeat of the Kingdom of Arakan in 1784–1785, in 1823, Burmese forces again crossed the frontier and the British responded with a large seaborne expedition that took Rangoon without a fight in 1824. When George Orwell arrived in Burma in 1924, the Irrawaddy Delta was leading Burma's exports of over 3 million tons of rice - half the world's supply. Find more information about: OCLC Number: 841657494: But rationales aside, the fact remains that the archives of the British colonial rule in Burma remain largely untapped and the violence of the British efforts to annex Burma and to maintain rule there, is only recently becoming researched and documented. By 1945, British troops had regained control over most of the colony. By some estimates more than 10,000 peasants were killed during it. [citation needed]. They came away from this experience with the belief that the Burmese situation could be improved through reform. With the Indian merchants travelling along the coasts and along rivers (especially the Irrawaddy River) through the country, where the majority of Burmese lived, Indian cultural influences filtered into the country and still exist there today. It was a myth, resembling the monomanie du Mékong from which the French suffered. When the British conquered Pegu (now Bago) in 1852, they did so, according to one rather biased report, “in what may be called dashing style, while exposed to the fierce rays of a burning sun”. After the Suez canal opened in 1868, and travel was shorter and easier, more married English men and their families became more common and more British women arrived and married the single English men. With this quickly growing economy, came industrialisation to a certain degree, with a railway being built throughout the valley of the Irawaddy, and hundreds of steamboats travelling along it. Charles' George Orwell Links – Biographies, Essays, Novels, Reviews, Images. This prompted the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. Certainly external strategic considerations, prompted by French expansionism in the region, played a part...Certainly also there was a persistent commercial illusion of a practical trade route along which British goods might flow through Upper Burma to the imagined markets of Chinese Yunnan. Rangoon, having been the capital of British Lower Burma, became the capital of the province. As Rudyard Kipling recalled after his one visit to Rangoon in 1889 as a young newspaperman, the club was “full of men on their way up or down”. 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