[5] The Mon name which was previously used for Mawlamyine, Moulmein (မတ်မလီု; [mòt məlɜ̀m]) means "damaged eye" or "one-eyed man.

[10] According to Kalyani Inscriptions erected by King Dhammazedi of Hanthawaddy Pegu in 1479, Mawlamyine was mentioned among the ‘32 myo’ or thirty-two Mon cities within the Martaban division.

In 1760, General Minkhaung Nawrahta of the Royal Burmese Army repaired Mawlamyine on his way back from Burmese–Siamese War in Ayutthaya (former capital of Thailand).

Mawlamyine was the first capital of British Burma between 1826 and 1852 after the Tanintharyi (Tenassarim) coast, along with Arakan, was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Yandabo at the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War.

[14] After the first Anglo-Burmese war, the British made it their capital between 1826 and 1852, building government offices, churches and a massive prison.In 1829, the Moulmein Bar Association was founded by the Barristers in Mawlamyine.

Nevertheless, the decline in prosperity of Mawlamyine began when the supply of marketable timber from Salween Valley started to decrease in the 1890s.

[23] The story, which is most likely a mixture of fact and fiction,[23] opens with the striking words: During colonial times, Moulmein had a substantial Anglo-Burmese population.

It was probably best known to English speakers through the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay: During WWII, the city and the Tanintharyi Region were the first objectives during the Japanese invasion of Burma.

Between June and August when the surface westerly winds are strongest and supersaturated air is advected onto the nearby mountains, Mawlamyine averages around 1,100 millimetres or 43 inches of rain per month.

The city is connected to Pa-an in Kayin State in the north-east and Dawei and Myeik in Tanintharyi Division in the south by road.

[34][35] In Mawlamyine, motorcycles and tuk-tuk (Thone Bee in Burmese) motorized tricycles cumulatively registered for use as taxis.

[38] The 1880 handbook of British-India Steam Navigation Company listed: In 1894, the journey between Barr Street Jetty of Rangoon to the Main Wharf of Moulmein took about nine hours at a fare of 10 Rupees for second class.

[42] Nowadays, although much diminished from its past prominence, water-based transport still plays an important role in connecting between Mawlamyine and the immediate upstream towns.

[14] 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.

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.

[76][77] 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.

The 1450-kilometre east–west economic corridor links the South China Sea at Da Nang to Mawlamyine through Laos and Thailand.

[79] 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.

Buddhist cultural dominance is as old as Mawlamyine, but the British annexation and American missionaries in the early 19th century introduced Christianity.

[81]The First Baptist Church in Mawlamyine was constructed in 1827 by the legendary Adoniram Judson, the first Caucasian Protestant missionary sent from North America to Myanmar.

Its Marine Science Laboratory in Setse, a coastal town about 83 km south of Mawlamyine, was the first of its kind in Myanmar.