Mawlamyine, Mon State, Myanmar

🇲🇲 Mawlamyine (also Mawlamyaing), formerly Moulmein, is the fourth-largest city in Myanmar (Burma), 300 km (190 mi) south east of Yangon and 70 km (43 mi) south of Thaton, at the mouth of Thanlwin (Salween) River. The city is the capital and largest city of Mon State and the main trading centre and seaport in south eastern Myanmar.

Mawlamyine is in the Salween River delta, where the mouth of the Salween is sheltered by Bilugyun Island as it enters the Gulf of Martaban and the Andaman Sea. It is flanked by low hills dotted with ancient pagodas to the east and west.

Economy Mawlamyine is famous for its tropical fruits and for its cuisine as indicated in the popular Burmese expression, "Mandalay for the speaking, Yangon for the bragging, and Mawlamyine for the eating". (မန္တလေးစကား ရန်ကုန်အကြွား မော်လမြိုင်အစား) Among its tropical fruits, Mawlamyine pomelo, durian and rambutan are traded countrywide. Mawlamyine had several sawmills and rice mills as teak and rice were transported down the Salween. It was once a busy shipbuilding centre and remains an important port. At least one major British shipping line had some of their ships built here. The teak "country-built" ships generally had a longer service life than those constructed from European hardwoods. The city had a solar-powered plant for extracting salt from seawater and a diesel electric plant. On the night of 1 December 2008, a fire that started from a floating restaurant destroyed the larger of city's two markets called the lower bazaar.

Industry The city has two industrial zones. Of two, the newly opened Kyauktan industrial zone features a variety of different business enterprises, including zinc, barbed wire, ready-mix cement, food and drink production, textiles, gold purification, ice factories, shoe production facilities, furniture enterprise, plastic enterprises, cool seafood storage and car accessory businesses.

As a cross-border investment, the state-of-the-art combined-cycle gas power plant in Mawlamyine was constructed by Singapore's United Overseas Bank (UOB) backed Singapore company Asiatech Energy. The Mawlamyine power plant brings a sustainable supply of power to residents and businesses in Mon State.

In July 2017, to make the country's oil and gas industry more efficient, the Myanmar Investment Commission (MIC) granted an approval to a subsidiary of Singapore-based firm to construct an offshore supply base in the 46 acres of river front land of Mawlamyine. It would provide a wide range of services to the operators of oil and gas fields in the waters off the coast in the Bay of Bengal.

Transport hub Mawlamyine is the western terminus and an important part of the East-West Economic Corridor. The 1450-kilometre east–west economic corridor links the South China Sea at Da Nang to Mawlamyine through Laos and Thailand. By using the East-West Economic Corridor, the travel time between Bangkok and Yangon is just three days, compared with the two to three weeks needed for conventional marine transportation via the Straits of Malacca. Japan's Nippon Express started land transportation services between Thailand and Myanmar in 2016.