Akyab

Akyab, now called Sittwe, occupies an estuarial island at the confluence of the Kaladan, Mayu, and Lay Mro rivers. These waterways descend from the hills of western Burma and spread into channels before reaching the Bay of Bengal. The island setting provides a sheltered harbor and access to a broad deltaic hinterland, but it also makes the settlement dependent on shifting channels, tides, and monsoon floods. The river-and-sea junction was the best link between inland Arakan and ocean shipping.

The name Sittwe is associated with the Arakanese phrase “the place where the war meets.” In 1784 an expedition sent by the Burmese king Bodawpaya met the forces of the kingdom of Mrauk U at the mouth of the Kaladan. The Arakanese defenders, perhaps three thousand strong, were crushed by a much larger army, opening the road to Mrauk U and ending Arakanese independence. When the British arrived decades later, the site was still a small fishing village rather than a major city. British forces stormed its defenses in 1825 during the First Anglo-Burmese War. Disease devastated the troops, but in 1826 the British selected the port as the administrative seat of Arakan, partly because Mrauk U appeared even less healthy. They renamed the station Akyab after a nearby hill and pagoda. Colonial engineers, Arakanese leaders, and immigrant merchants turned the village into a planned port town, which exported rice from the fertile Kaladan valley and became a regional maritime center.

Four stupas along the ridge above the city (Akyattaw, Thingyittawdhat, Letyatalundaw, and Letwetalundaw) are associated by local tradition with relics of the Buddha and with a religious landscape older than the colonial port. Their presence shows that the headland was significant in Arakanese Buddhist geography even while the commercial town remained small.