Pyi Taw Pyan

Pyi Taw Pyan (Burmese: ပြည်တော်ပြန်) was a Burmese Lethwei fighter, well-known during the British rule in Burma.[1][2] He became champion and owner of U Ba's cup in 1931.

In this Burmese name, the given name is Pyi Taw Pyan. There is no family name.
Pyi Taw Pyan
Pyi Taw Pyan in 1932
Native nameပြည်တော်ပြန်
NationalityBurmese
Weight64 kg (141 lb; 10.1 st)
DivisionLightweight
StyleLethwei
Fighting out ofKyauktalone village, Hpa-an, Karen State
RankFirst class
Years active1920s-1940s

Lethwei career

In 1931, Pyi Taw Pyan was a contender and winner[3] of Minister of Home Affairs U Ba's cup and medal. He reached the semi-finals together with La Yaung, "The Flying Indian" Kular Pyan and Ba Aye.[4]

He entered the tournament again in 1932[5][6] to defend his honour. During the tournament, in an out-of-bracket match, he challenged a rival fighter to a fight until death without referees. Pyi Taw Pyan had learned that Kyar Aye Sein had won his quarter-final match by striking his downed opponent. Highly frowned upon, it prompted Pyi Taw Pyan to immediately storm the ring and challenge Kyar Aye Sein.[7] The match was held the next day and converted to a gambling match where 30 Kyats was up for grabs for the winner. After an initial 4 rounds of fighting, Kyar Aye Sein's stalling was becoming so apparent that the referee stopped the match and announced Pyi Taw Pyan as the winner. The total match time was 60 minutes. Since tensions rose and Kyar Aye Sein started throwing tantrums, the ringside officials agreed to split the wager where Pyi Taw Pyan was awarded 20 Kyats and his opponent 10 Kyats.[8] Pyi Taw Pyan eventually lost to Phyu Lay Gyi in the semi-finals of the tournament.[9]

On January 25, 1933, Pyi Taw Pyan fought B.A Sein at King Carnival Stadium along Dalhousie Street in Yangon. After B.A Sein gave up in round four due to a lack of stamina, Pyi Taw Pyan called out English boxing champion George Goudie,[1] title holder and lightweight champion of Burma.[10][11] On that same evening Kyar Aye Sein offered a challenge to Kid D'Silva, featherweight champion of India and Burma.[12] The sport of professional boxing enjoyed a short revival at this time, with George Goudie and Kid D'Silva at the forefront.[13]

In 1935 Pyi Taw Pyan fought Htee Latt. After the fight, Pyi Taw Pyan experienced a case of hematemesis, attributed to the wearing of talismans and charms by Htee Latt during the fight. On May 2, 1935, first class boxers Min Khaung and Htee Latt fought in celebration of King George’s 25 years of reign. Min Khaung recalled the fight that Htee Latt had fought against Pyi Taw Pyan and thus insisted his opponent remove his charms before their fight.[14]

His last recorded fight happened shortly before the invasion of the Japanese in 1941. He fought Min Khaung at Kandawgyi Lake which has been a popular area for lethwei fights up until this day.[15]

Titles and accomplishments

Lethwei record
Professional Lethwei record (Incomplete)
8 fights, 5 wins (5 (T)KOs), 1 losses, 2 draws
Date Result OpponentEventLocation MethodRoundTime
1941-04-27DrawBritish rule in Burma Min KhaungKandawgyi LakeRangoon, BurmaDraw
1933-01-25WinBritish Raj B.A. SeinKing Carnival StadiumRangoon, BurmaTKO4
1932-12-31LossBritish Raj Phyu Lay Gyi (Hnit Char)U Ba's Championship semi-finalRangoon, BurmaKO
1932-12-28DrawBritish Raj Kyar Aye Sein (Pegu)Hare Krishna Pilay HallRangoon, BurmaDraw460:00
Initial victory for Pyi Taw Pyan for stalling, but overturned by ringside judges.
1932-12-27WinBritish Raj Doe Phyu KalayU Ba's Championship quarter-finalRangoon, BurmaKO
1932-12-24WinBritish Raj Phyu Lay Gyi (Hnit Char)Hare Krishna Pilay HallRangoon, BurmaKO2
1931-10-19WinBritish Raj Ba AyeU Ba's Championship finalBurmaKO
Wins Chief Justice U Ba's Championship Cup and Medal (first class)
1931-10-18WinBritish Raj La YaungU Ba's Championship semi-finalBurmaKO

References
  1. "ကင်းကာနီဘယ်ပျော်ပွဲဝင်းကြီး၊ မြန်မာလက်ဝှေ့ပွဲကြီး။" [Light of Burma]. မြန်မာ့အလင်း (in Burmese). Ministry of Information. 26 January 1933. p. 20.
  2. Ba Nyein, Kyar (1 March 1968). "စစ်ကြိုနှင့်စစ်ပြီးခေတ်" [Forward]. ရှေ့သို့ (in Burmese). Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  3. "လွန်ခဲ့သောနှစ်က ပြည်ထဲရေးဝန်ကြီး ဦးဘ၏ ရွှေတံဆိပ်နှင့် ဖလားကို ရသွားသော ချန်ပီယံများ" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 26 December 1932. p. 18.
  4. "အထက်ပါပုံမှာ။ တနင်္ဂနွေနေ့တွင် တရားဝန်ကြီးဦးဘဖလားအတွက်ပဌမတန်း၌ယှဉ် ပြိုင်ထိုးမည့်သူများဖြစ်သည်(လက်ဝဲဘက်မှ)ပြည်ထော်ပျံ၊ လရောင်၊ကုလားပျံ ။ဘဧ၊" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 17 October 1931.
  5. "ပြည်ထဲရေးဝန်ကြီး ဦးဘ အမှူးပြုသော လက်ဝှေ့ပွဲကြီး။" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 23 December 1932. p. 22.
  6. "ပြည်ထဲရေးဝန်ကြီး ဦးဘ ကြီးမှူးသော လက်ဝှေ့ပွဲကြီး။" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 24 December 1932.
  7. "ဝန်ထောက်ဦးဘရီက ကြာဧစိန်အား ပေါ်စကို အကွဲထိုးနိုင်၍ ဆုငွေ ၁၀ိ ချီးမြှင့်ခြင်း။" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 28 December 1932. p. 13-14.
  8. "ကြာဧစိန်သည် ပေါ်စကို နိုင်သော်လည်း ပြည်တော်ပြန်၏ အထိုးကိုမူ မရှုမလှခံသွားရခြင်း။" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 29 December 1932. p. 17.
  9. "ဗလစိန်ချမ်ပီယန်ရွှေတံဆိပ်ရသွားပြီ။" [The Sun]. သူရိယသတင်းစာ (in Burmese). Ba Pe. 3 January 1933.
  10. "Singapore Boxers' Fortunes In Rangoon". The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser. 10 May 1934. p. 15. Retrieved 23 July 2022. The fight between George Goudie, lightweight champion of Burma, and Joe Diamond of Singapore did not materialise
  11. "Boxing in Rangoon; Diamond Disposes Of Kid D'Silva". Malaya Tribune. 12 May 1934. p. 18. Retrieved 23 July 2022.
  12. "Lost Every Round; Guillermo Disappoints In Rangoon". The Straits Times. 28 April 1933. p. 15. Retrieved 23 July 2022.
  13. "Weekly Sporting Notes; Singapore Boxers For Rangoon". The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser. 20 December 1933. p. 15. Retrieved 23 July 2022.
  14. "မတစ်ထောင်-တစ်ကောင်ဖွား၊ ကျားဆိုမှကျား မြန်မာလက်ဝှေ့ကျော်များ တန်ခွန်စိုက် ရွှေတံဆိပ်လုသည့်ပွဲကြီးစပြီဖြစ်ခြင်း။" [Light of Burma]. မြန်မာ့အလင်း (in Burmese). Ministry of Information. 4 May 1935. p. 19.
  15. "ကန်တော်ကြီးလက်ဝှေ့ပွဲ" [Light of Burma]. မြန်မာ့အလင်း (in Burmese). Ministry of Information. 29 April 1941. p. 104.
  16. Win, Khin Khin (July 2022). ကျွန်မချစ်သော မြန်မာ့ရိုးရာလက်ဝှေ့ နှင့် သုတရသဆောင်းပါးများ [My favorite Burmese traditional boxing and martial arts articles] (in Burmese). Lin Thant Literature. pp. 107–108.
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