personShway Yoe
A colonial officer writing under a Burmese pen name
1,851 – 1,935 · The Burman: His Life and Notions, 1882
What it is
The Scottish administrator who wrote the fullest English description of Burmese tattooing, under a Burmese pen name, in 1882.
The long version
James George Scott went to Burma as a journalist, stayed as an administrator, and published The Burman: His Life and Notions as "Shway Yoe" — a Burmese name, on a book about Burmese life, by a man who then spent decades extending British rule over the Shan States and compiling the Gazetteer of Upper Burma that this site also quotes.
The chapter on tattooing is the best single source on the htoe kwin in English. It is also written by the administration. Both of those are true at once, and this site cites the detail while naming the hand.
Inference — the pen name is the thing to keep in view. A book that speaks as a Burman, written by the officer annexing the Shan States, is the whole problem of the colonial record in one byline.
Connected to
- Htoe kwin What he described.
- Who wrote it down And the problem with it.
Named here by
- Htoe kwin Who wrote it down, and what that costs the record.
- Mandalay The observer.
- Who wrote it down The clearest case.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States — scanned by the Internet Archive
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there