Pathein

Pathein stands on the westernmost arm of the Ayeyarwady, far enough up the river for seagoing ships to reach it, and the site has been a port for a very long time. It belonged to the Mon kingdoms of Lower Burma before the Bagan empire reached the delta, though its early history is thinly documented. The name is thought to come from the city's Old Mon name, with a rival explanation deriving it from the archaic Burmese word for Muslims and the Arab and Indian traders of the port; the English form, Bassein, is a colonial corruption of it. The Portuguese, who called the place Cosmim, traded here in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Pathein sent rice and forest goods across the Bay of Bengal.

The city that exists now was made by rice. After Britain annexed Lower Burma in 1852, the colonial government and migrant labourers cleared the delta's mangrove and swamp on an enormous scale, turning it into one of the world's great rice-exporting regions. Pathein became its milling and shipping centre, with steam mills along the river, a mixed population of Bamar, Karen, Chinese and Indian families, and a busy trade with Rangoon downstream. Karen Baptist churches and schools date from the same period.

The Second World War, the Japanese occupation and the post-independence insurgencies hit the delta hard, and the rice trade never regained its colonial scale. In May 2008 Cyclone Nargis struck the delta and killed around 138,000 people, mostly in the townships south and east of the city; Pathein itself was less badly damaged than the coastal villages and became a base for relief work. It remains the capital of the Ayeyarwady Region and the delta's largest city.

The parasol is the city's emblem. Pathein htee are made in family workshops from split bamboo, cotton or silk, treated to shed water and painted by hand with flowers, birds and figures; they are sold across Myanmar and used at weddings, in processions and by monks. The craft has been handed down through generations and shares the streets with pottery, weaving and boat-building.

Religious life is mixed to an unusual degree. The Shwemokhtaw Pagoda dominates the centre, monks collect alms along the riverfront at dawn, and the Buddhist calendar sets the festivals — Thingyan in April, Thadingyut and Tazaungdaing at the end of the rains. At the same time the delta has a large Karen population, about a fifth of the region, with Baptist churches, mission schools and choirs in the city and the towns around it, and a long-established Muslim community with mosques near the market.

Delta manners are those of Myanmar generally: quiet speech, deference to age and to monks, shoes removed at thresholds, modest dress. The rhythm is set by the river and the rice calendar, and pagoda festivals bring villages into town by boat. People are used to outsiders passing through on the way to the beaches, and politics is a subject residents cannot safely discuss.

About 170,000 people live in Pathein, one of Myanmar's larger cities and the centre of a region of some six million, most of them in villages along the creeks. Rice dominates the economy — milling, storage, trading and transport — alongside fishing, shrimp and fish-paste production, boat-building, the parasol workshops and the trade that passes through to the coast. The university, hospitals and regional government offices are the other large employers.

The day starts before dawn at the market and the jetties and slows in the afternoon heat. Most people live in single-storey houses of timber, brick and corrugated iron among monasteries and schools, and move by motorcycle, trishaw or boat. Electricity supply is intermittent, and generators are common in shops and hotels.

The delta's exposure to weather shapes everything: monsoon flooding is routine, and the memory of Nargis is close, with mangrove replanting and cyclone shelters among the responses since. Since the 2021 coup the wider crisis has reached everyday life here too — rising prices, fuel shortages, restricted internet, checkpoints and the fear of conscription — and many young people have left for Yangon, Thailand or work at sea.

Pathein eats from the river and the paddy. Freshwater fish and prawns come in daily and are cooked as curries heavy with turmeric and onion, in sour soups with tamarind or roselle leaf, fried whole, or pounded into ngapi, the fermented fish and shrimp paste that the delta makes in quantity and sends across the country. Rice is the centre of every meal, served with several small dishes, a chilli relish and a plate of raw vegetables.

Mohinga, the fish and rice-noodle soup eaten for breakfast across Myanmar, is at home here in a region of rivers and fish, thickened with banana stem and lemongrass and finished with fritters, coriander and lime. Noodle salads, ohn-no khao swè with coconut milk, and fried snacks from the market stalls fill out the day, with tea-leaf salad, lahpet thoke, on most tables.

The sweet the city is famous for is Pathein halawa, a dense, chewy pudding of glutinous rice flour cooked slowly with coconut, butter, milk and sugar, sometimes with poppy seed, and sold in slabs to take away — a delta speciality since the 1930s. Coconut, sticky rice and palm sugar make the rest of the sweets, fresh toddy palm juice is drunk in the villages, and the teashops supply strong tea with condensed milk from early morning until dark.