town was transferred to the new site. By the time of the
Second War (1852), the town was about as populous as in
1794. After the annexation of Pegu, it was laid out by
Colonel Fraser on a definite and well-conceived plan
allowing for further expansion.
The present city stands on the Rangoon River, twenty- one miles from the sea. It is the fourth town in India, in point of population. In the last thirty or forty years, it has entirely changed its character. In 1881 the population was 134,176, the larger proportion consisting of Buddhists. In 1911 the inhabitants numbered 293,316, of whom 108,350 were Hindus, 97,467 Buddhists, and 54,634 Mahomedans. In 1921 the population had increased to 341,962. Rangoon is now a cosmopolitan city, full of men of strange races and many tongues. The business part of the town lies along the north side of the river, stretching from Kemmendine and Alon on the west to Pazundaung on the east. Here are great rice mills, timber and oil depots, warehouses of imported goods, wharves and jetties, banks, shops, printing presses, offices. On the opposite bank is the busy industrial suburb of Dalla, a place of note before Rangoon was founded. The prosperity of Rangoon is mainly due to British, and, to a minor extent, Indian, commercial enterprise. The Burmese have had no part in it. The principal public buildings, the Secretariat, the Law Courts, the General Hospital, the Railway Station, are all worthy of the great city which they adorn. The Jail, alas! is one of the most populous in the world. Among buildings deserving special mention is the Roman Catholic cathedral, designed and built by a priest who was an architect and builder of taste and skill. Less conspicuous, but still of sufficient dignity, is the Anglican cathedral.
On the only eminence in or near Rangoon, on a spacious platform, rises the golden splendour of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, famous among Buddhist shrines, covering relics of the four last Buddhas, the filter or water-strainer of
