Thandwe

Thandwe, long known to outsiders as Sandoway, stands on a river in southern Arakan, behind the Bay of Bengal coast. The Arakan Mountains rise to its east, separating its river valleys from the plains of Burma. It was an old seat of authority in a coastal province whose traditions remembered the name Dwarawadi. Buddhist pagodas on hills around the town mark a religious landscape shaped by successive local rulers.

In the late fourteenth century Sandoway was one of the southern Arakanese centres whose rulers contested the authority of the northern kingdom. The division did not last: King Man Khari of Arakan brought Sandoway under his control in 1437. Thereafter it formed part of the kingdom ruled from Mrauk U, whose territory stretched along the coast behind the mountain barrier. Burmese conquest ended that kingdom in 1784, and the First Anglo-Burmese War brought Arakan under British rule in 1826.