1857
A Burmese in London c. 1857
Maung Shwe Too travelled to Calcutta around 1855, in his own words, "in search of knowledge". There, he spent some time at a Christian missionary school learning the English language. Then, wanting to see the West for himself, he took a job as an ordinary sailor on a British merchant ship and arrived in the United Kingdom in 1857.
In London, this intrepid young man found his way to the Home for Asiatics, where he lived for more than three years, with a mixed group of Bengalis, Siamese, Suratis, Chinese, Malays and others, studying at an Anglican college in Islington, north London.
He experienced London at the height of Queen Victoria's empire: during the days of the Indian Mutiny and the Second Opium War (against China), and also when Charles Dickens was giving public readings from his first books and when Charles Darwin was giving lectures on his theory of evolution. He was also there during "The Great Stink", a summer when the smells and diseases from human excrement were so terrible that a modern sewer system was conceived and introduced.
After a couple of years (teaching) in India, he returned home to Burma in the mid-1860s and set up his own school in Rangoon. He later wrote several books, under the name William Shway Too Sandys, including a translation of Aesops Fables.
While there may have been even earlier travellers to the West whose names and stories are now lost, Maung Shwe Too's search for knowledge made him a Burmese pioneer for his era.
This portrait of Maung Shwe Too and the image of him pictured, far left, with a group of lascars (sailors from India or Southeast Asia) come from The Asiatic in England by Joseph Salter, published in 1873.
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