"From the north there is a long avenue-like approach to Möngnai. The walls of the ancient city still exist in a very dilapidated state. They are about 20 feet high and machicolated. The city was about 1,000 yards square, and there remain signs of extensive suburbs. Everything, however, has been destroyed. Of ten thousand houses only three hundred (mostly recently built) remain; out of one hundred and twenty monasteries only three are left standing. The Sawbwa himself lives in a bamboo house, instead of the former teak-wood _haw_ (palace). The interior of the city walls is all jungle-grown."
It is as well to put on record some description of the condition in which the British found the Shan States. A few years hence we shall be denounced as the ruthless destroyers of a country which we had found wealthy and prosperous.
The Sawbwa of Möngnai came in unpretentious fashion to see Mr. Scott the day after his arrival. His superiority in breeding and character to most of the chiefs was marked, He made no difficulty about accepting British supremacy, and proffered all his influence to induce the other chiefs to follow his example. The typical character of the Shans as a race of traders came out in his request that his submission to British authority should be made known in Moulmein. In former times there was a good trade in timber with the Moulmein merchants. When they were informed of the establishment of peace this trade he anticipated would revive.
It remained to induce the Limbin Prince to submit and to accompany Mr. Scott to Fort Stedman. This was not a question of very high diplomacy, but it required some skill, tact, and patience to induce the Prince to make a voluntary surrender. It would have been very easy to have arrested and removed him by force. Such action, however, would have been distasteful to the Shan chiefs and might have rendered it more difficult to dispose of other pretenders still remaining in the Northern States. The Prince showed himself to be a poor creature, whose chief characteristic was an immeasurable conceit. He was, after all, only the illegitimate son of the Ein-she-min, or War Prince, who was the brother of King Mindon. But Burmans and Shans, like some other people, if a man is a prince, do not ask too curiously what sort of a prince he may be. When he left Möngnai, mounted on an elephant, with his gong beating, great numbers of people knelt down by the roadside as he passed, and similar respect was shown to him at other places. Notwithstanding his conceit, he did not put a very high price on his submission. This descendant of kings, who had left his refuge in British Burma to become the head of a great Shan Confederacy to be formed on the model of the German Empire, was glad to barter his lofty ambition for a stipend of £16 sterling a month and a house at Rangoon, or Moulmein, or elsewhere.