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In Mawlamyine — known for its Buddhist pagodas and fleeting mentions, by its old name of Moulmein, in a Rudyard Kipling poem and a George Orwell essay — the protests began a week after the coup.

Farmers and politicians in Chaungzon township, just outside the southern town of Moulmein, worry that erosion in the area is being exacerbated by the ships that dredge its bed for sand each night.

From there, they started off for Moulmein, now known as Mawlamyine, a major city about 185 miles from Rangoon.

In the 1920s a young would-be poet, an ex-Etonian named Eric Blair, arrived as a Burma Police recruit and was posted to several places, culminating in Moulmein.

Kipling never visited Mandalay, having imagined it from a brief sojourn in a city called Moulmein, now Mawlamyine, several hundred miles to the south.