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Hand Poke EN ไทย

placeMandalay

The last royal capital, and Shway Yoe's beat

21.9588, 96.0891 · OpenStreetMap

What it is

Upper Burma's capital until 1885, and the centre of the country whose men were, in Shway Yoe's account, all tattooed.

The long version

The contrast in his chapter is between town and country: the "puny Rangoonites" who skip the tattoo and are ashamed of it, and the taw-tha of the small towns and villages, not one of whom is without the dark blue tracery.

Inference — he is describing the beginning of the end and does not know it. Colonial rule reached the towns first, and the custom went from the towns first.

Connected to

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultcitedThe Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
text_thinferencewritten in Thai by this project, not machine-translated

Sources

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

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