was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Yandabo at the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War. After the first Anglo-Burmese war, the British made it their capital between 1826 and 1852, building government offices, churches and a massive prison. They started business enterprises and the country's first newspaper, The Maulmain Chronicle. Between 1826 and 1862, colonial Mawlamyine was the center of British Burma and the first port city that became a strategically important area and a geographical nodal point for the newly occupied British territory in Southeast Asia. Ever since the first British occupation in 1824, the growth and prosperity of Mawlamyine had steadily increased due to timber trade. Nevertheless, the decline in prosperity of Mawlamyine began when the supply of marketable timber from Salween Valley started to decrease in the 1890s. During British colonial times, Germany, Siam, Persia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden opened and maintained consulates in Mawlamyine led by either consuls or vice-consuls while Italy and the United States placed consular agencies in Mawlamyine. German explorer Johann Wilhelm Helfer's landing at Moulmein shore on 8 February 1837 made him as the first German to arrive Burma in the history. Mawlamyine was the setting of George Orwell's famous 1936 memoir Shooting an Elephant. The essay opens with the striking words: "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me." During colonial times, Moulmein had a substantial Anglo-Burmese population. An area of the city was known as "Little England" due to the large Anglo-Burmese community, many of them running rubber plantations. This has since dwindled to a handful of families as most have left for the UK or Australia. It was probably best known to English speakers through the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay: "By the old Moulmein pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me". During WWII, the city and the Tanintharyi Region were the first objectives during the Japanese invasion of Burma. "The old Moulmein pagoda" - Kyaik Than Lan The "old Moulmein pagoda" Kipling cites is thought to be the Kyaik Than Lan (also spelled Kyaikthanlan) pagoda in Mawlamyine. It stands on a ridge, giving a panoramic view of the city, and is surrounded by 34 smaller temples. Among its sacred treasures is