by Hla Min
Updated : May 2025
Based in part on the compilation of Sayagyi Minthuwun (Eminent Scholar & Laureate Poet)
မြန်မာ့ ပထမဆုံး စံပြ ပုဂ္ဂိုလ်ကျော်များ•
Outstanding Burmese noted for being First in their field
၁။ ပထမဆုံးသမ္မတ=စဝ်ရွှေသိုက် ။
Sao Shwe Thaik served as the first President of the Union of Burma. He was succeeded by Dr. Ba U and Mahn Win Maung. Coup D’etat took place in March 1962 before Sama Duwa Sinwa Naung could take office.
၂။ ပထမဆုံး၀န်ကြီးချုပ်=ဦးနု ။
U Nu served as the first Prime Minister of the Union of Burma. He was also the last Prime Minister before the fateful Coup D’etat on March 2, 1962.
၃။ ပထမဆုံး အနောက်တိုင်း ဆေးဒေါက်တာ=ရှောလူး ။
Dr. Shaw Loo was the first doctor to study medicine in the West.
၄။ ပထမဆုံး အင်္ဂလိပ် မြန်မာ အဘိဓာန် ရေးသားသူများ= မက္ခရာမင်းသားနှင့် မစ္စတာလိန်း
ဒေါက်တာ{ဆင်မြူရယ်}ဂျွန်ဆင်၏ အင်္ဂလိပ်အဘိဓာန်ကို ပြန်ဆို ။
Mekkhaya Mintha (Prince) & Mr. Lane translated Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary into Burmese.
၅။ ပထမဆုံး သိပ္ပံစာပေ ပြုစုသူ= ယောမင်းကြီး ဦးဘိုးလှိုင် ။
Yaw Mingyi U Pho Hlaing was the first Burmese author to write about Science and Technology.
၆။ ပထမဆုံး အမျိုးသားကောလိပ်မှ ဘွဲ့ရသူ=ဆရာကြီး ဦးရာဇာတ် ။
Saygyi U Razak (Arzani) was one of the first to graduate from Ah Myo Tha College (National College). He served as Principal of the National School in Mandalay. He was Minister of Education in Bogyoke Aung San’s Cabinet.
၇။ ပထမဆုံးအင်ဂျင်နီယာ=ဖန်ချက်၀န် ဦးရွှေအိုး ။
Phan Chet Wun U Shwe Oh was the first Burmese engineer.
၈။ ပထမဆုံး နိုင်ငံရေးသမားအကျဉ်းကျခံရသူ=ဆရာတော်ဦးဥတ္တမ ။
Sayadaw U Ottama was the first Political Prisoner in Burma. “U Ottama Pan Chan” is named in his honor.
Note: Sayadaw U Wisara was another famous Political Prisoner. “U Wisara Kyauk Taing” was erected in his honor.
၉။ ပထမဆုံး လူမှု၀န်ထမ်းအမျိုးသမီး=ဖွားဦးဇွန်း{မန္တလေးမြို့သူ}
Phwa Oo Zun (Mandalay native) was the first Burmese female to provide Social Service for the public. She established the Home for the Aged. Details can be found in Ludu Daw Ah Mar’s book “Mandalay Thar & Mandalay Thu”.
၁၀။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်သရုပ်ဆောင်=ဦးညီပု ။
U Nyi Pu (brother of A1 U Tin Nwe, U Maung Maung Soe / U Tin Pe & A1 U Tin Maung) was the first leading male actor in a Burmese movie. He founded Maha Weikzahto Film. The four brothers and their extended families founded several film companies.
၁၁။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်တည်ထောင်သူနှင့်ဒါရိုက်တာ=လန်ဒန်အတ်ဦးအုန်းမောင် ။
London Art U Ohn Maung founded a company to produce Burmese films and served as a Director.
၁၂။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ထူးချွန်ဆုရမင်းသား=ကျော်စ်ိုး ။
Kyaw Soe won the inaugural award for Best Male Actor.
Note: The awards are known as “Shwe Sin Yoke Su”. The winners prefix their names with “Academy”.
၁၃။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ထူးချွန်ဆုရမင်းသမီး=ကြည်ကြည်ဌေး ။
Kyi Kyi Htay won the inaugural award for the Best Female Actor. She won the award several more times.
၁၄။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ထူးချွန်ဆုရကလေးသရုပ်ဆောင်=အောင်ထွန်းလေး ။
Aung Tun Lay won the inaugural award for the Best Child Actor.
၅။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ထူးချွန်ဆုရဇာတ်ပို့ဆုအမျိုးသား=ဦးကျောက်လုံး ။
U Kyauk Lone (father of Ko Sway Tin) won the inaugural award for the Best Male Supporting Actor.
၁၆။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ထူးချွန်ဆုရဇာတ်ပို့ဆုအမျိုးသမီး=ဒေါ်မေနွဲ့။
Daw May Nwe won the inaugural award for the Best Female Supporting Actor.
၁၇။ ပထမဆုံး ရုပ်ရှင်ဆုရဒါရိုက်တာ=ဦးသုခ ။
U Thu Kha won the inaugural award for the Best Director.
Note: U Thu Kha also wrote, acted and sang.
၁၈ ပထမဆုံး နိုင်ငံခြားရောက်ဆိုင်းဆရာ =စိန်ဗေဒါ ။
Sein Beda was the first Saing Saya to perform overseas.
၁၉။ ပထမဆုံး ကာလပေါ်၀တ္ထုရေးစာရေးဆရာ=ဂျိမ်း{စ်}လှကျော်
{မောင်ရင်မောင် မမယ်မ၀တ္ထု}
James Hla Kyaw wrote the first Burmese novel “Maung Yin Maung Ma Mae Ma”.
၂၀။ ပထမဆုံး သတင်းစာဆရာမ=အင်ဒီပင်းအင့်ဒေါ်စန်း ။
Independent Daw San was the first Burmese female Journalist.
၂၁။ ပထမဆုံး ရန်ကုန်တက္ကသိုလ်အင်္ဂလိပ်စာ ကထိက=ဒေါက်တာဘမော်။
Dr. Ba Maw was the first Burmese lecturer at the Department of English at the University of Rangoon.
Note: He later became Adhipati during the Japanese Occupation.
၂၂။ ပထမဆုံး ရန်ကုန်တက္ကသိုလ်ကျောင်းအုပ်ကြီး=ပါမောက္ခ
ဦးဖေမောင်တင် ။
Professor U Pe Maung Tin was the first Principal of the University of Rangoon.
Note: He was Professor of Oriental Studies (including Pali). He proposed to have a separate Department for Burmese. The early graduates ICS U Sein Tin (Theikpan Maung Wa), U Thein Han (Zawgyi) and U Wun (Minthuwun) founded the “Khit San Sar Pay” movement.
၂၃။ ပထမဆုံး စတီရီယိုအဆိုတော်=တက္ကသိုလ်ထွန်းနောင် ။
Tekkatho Tun Naung (BDS, Luyechun) was the first vocalist of the Stereo Khit.
၂၄။ ပထမဆုံး လေသူရဲ=မီးပုံးပျံဦးကျော်ရင် ။
Mee Bone Byan U Kyaw Yin (father of Cartoonist U Kyaw San [Ka Sa]) was the first aerial acrobat to perform stunts from a Hot Air Balloon.
၂၅။ ပထမဆုံး စက်ရုပ်တီထွင်သူ=ဦးကြည် ။
U Kyi constructed the first robot.
၂၆။ ပထမဆုံး နယ်လှည့်ဇာတ်သဘင်=ဂရိတ်ဦးဖိုးစိန် ။
Great Po Sein founded the first Nei Hlei Zat Tha Bin (roving troupe for performing plays).
၂၇။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာလူမျိုး=ဟိုက်ကုတ်တရား၀န်ကြီးချုပ်
ဒေါက်တာမြဆာဘူး{၁၈၉၀.၁၉၆၉}{ပြင်သစ်နှင့်ဂျာမနီပြန်}
Dr. Mya Sir Bu (1890 – 1969), who studied in France and Germany, served as the first Burmese Chief Justice of High Court.
၂၉။ ပထမဆုံး ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူးချုပ်နှင့် အဏုမြူစွမ်းအင်ဦးစီးဌာန
တည်ထောင်သူ=ဒေါက်တာတင်လှိုင်
Dr. Tin Hlaing founded the Department of Atomic Energy and served as the first Director General.
၃၀။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာကာတွန်းဆရာ=
U Ba Galay (U Shwe Ta Lay) was the first Burmese Cartoonist.
၃၁။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ သမိုင်းကော်မရှင်ဥက္ကဋ္ဌ=စည်သူဦးကောင်း
Sithu U Kaung served as the first President of Burmese History Commission.
Note: The History Commission was later merged with the Burmese Language Commission.
၃၂။ ပထမဆုံး ကွန်ပျူတာတက္ကသိုလ် ပါမောက္ခချုပ်=ဒေါက်တာတင်မောင် ။
Dr. Tin Maung served as the first Rector of ICST (Institute of Computer Science and Technology).
Note: Dr Chit Swe founded UCC (Universities’ Computer Center) with the help of Saya U Soe Paing, Saya U Myo Min and Saya U Ko Ko Lay (GBNF) and served as the Founding Director of UCC. Dr. Chit Swe, who retired as Rector of Rangoon Arts and Science University, was succeeded by Dr. Tin Maung. During Dr. Tin Maung’s tenure, DCS (Department of Computer Science) and IST were established.
၃၃။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာနိုင်ငံလုံးဆိုင်ရာကျောင်းသားများသမဂ္ဂ{ဗ.က.သ}
ဥက္ကဋ္ဌ=ဦးရာရှစ် ။
U Raschid (also known as M. A. Raschid, father of Saya Bilal Raschid) served as the first President of Ba Ka Tha (All Burma Students’ Union).
Note: He served as a Minister in the AFPFL Government.
၃၄။ ပထမဆုံး ကျားကစားနည်းစာအုပ်ရေးသူ=စာရေးဆရာ
ချစ်ဦးညို{၁၉၂၄_၁၉၈၇)
Chit Oo Nyo, a prolific writer, wrote the first book to play “Kyar” (Checkers).
၃၅။ ပထမဆုံး လူမှုထူးချွန်ဆုပထမအဆင့်ကိုရရှိသူအမျိုးသမီး=
ဟာဂျီမ ပျဉ်းမနား ဒေါ်ပု ။
Hajeema Pyinmana Daw Pu was the first female to win Lu Hmu Htoo Chun Su Pathama Sint (First Class for Distinguished Social Service).
Note: She donated for the founding of some hospitals. She is the mother-in-law of Saya U Ba Than Haq (Retired Professor of Geology & Pro-Rector of RASU)
၃၆။ ပထမဆုံး ဖလောရင့် နိုက်တင်ဂေးဆုရရှိသူ =ဗိုလ်မှူးဒေါ်ခင်အုန်းမြ
{ခ}စာရေးဆရာမကြီး မြမာလာ ။
Bohmu (Major) Daw Khin Ohn Mya (also known as writer Mya Marlar) was the first recipient of the Florence Nightingale Award.
၃၇။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာခန္ဓာကိုအလှူရှင်=ဦး၀င်းမြင့်{မန္တလေး}
U Win Myint (Mandalay) was the first Burmese to donate his body.
၃၈။ ပထမဆုံး ကုလသမဂ္ဂအတွင်းရေးမှူး=ဦးသန့် ။
U Thant succeeded Daj Hammerjold as UNSG (United Nations Secretary General). He was the Third UNSG and the first UNSG from Asia.
၃၉။ ပထမဆုံး မြန်မာနိုဘယ်လ်ဆုရှင်=ဒေါ်အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည် ။
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was the first Burmese to receive the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize.
ဆရာ မင်းသု၀ဏ်စီစဉ်သည်
Compiled by Saya Minthuwun (U Wun, Retired Professor of Burmese; Head of the Translation Department; Compiler of the Myanmar Abhidan; Co-compiler of the Japanese-Burmese Dictionary; Visiting Professor of Burma at Osaka University at the invitation of Professor Harada (“Chit Mann Nwe”); Laureate Poet …). Saya is the father of U Htin Kyaw (former President of Myanmar).
ဗဟုသုတ မှတ်စု
————————————————
*** Some more interesting facts about the pioneers and/or record holders:
Sayagyi Dr. Chit Swe founded UCC (Universities’ Computer Center) with the help of Saya U Soe Paing, Saya U Myo Min, and Saya U Ko Ko Lay (GBNF). They also led TOSS (Team Of System Specialists), which helped with the computerization of various government departments and organizations,
Sayagyi was succeeded by Saya Dr. Tin Maung (GBNF) as Director of UCC. During Saya Dr. Tin Maung’s tenure, DCS (Department of Computer Science) and ICST (Institute of Computer Science and Technology) were opened. Saya served as the Rector of ICST.
*** Some more interesting facts about the pioneers and/or record holders:
Sayagyi Dr. Chit Swe founded UCC (Universities’ Computer Center) with the help of Saya U Soe Paing, Saya U Myo Min, and Saya U Ko Ko Lay (GBNF). They also led TOSS (Team Of System Specialists), which helped with the computerization of various government departments and organizations,
Sayagyi was succeeded by Saya Dr. Tin Maung (GBNF) as Director of UCC. During Saya Dr. Tin Maung’s tenure, DCS (Department of Computer Science) and ICST (Institute of Computer Science and Technology) were opened. Saya served as the Rector of ICST.
Saya U Soe Paing wrote “Computer Ah Sa UCC Ga” in a computer magazine in Myanmar. It was re-posed in “Mandalay Gazette”, a publication based in Los Angeles.
m Mee Bone Byan U Kyaw Yin is the father of “Ka Sa” (Cartoonist U Kyaw San). We learned about U Kyaw Yin in a middle school text book.
U Nyi Pu founded his own film company called “Weikkzado Films”. His elder brother U Tin Nwe and his youngest brother U Tin Maung founded “A1 Film”. His younger brother U Maung Maung Soe founded “Maung Maung Soe Film”.
British Burma U Nay Win and U Kyaw Zaw were some of the scholars who studied cinematography in US.
Dr. Tun Naung (DDS, Luyechun) often played the mandolin placed on his back. Other Stereo musicians included Accordion Ohn Kyaw, Min Min Latt, and former BBS “Local Talent” stars.
Sayagyi U Pe Maung Tin served as the first Principal of Rangoon University. Sayagyi earlier proposed the founding of “Burmese Department” at Rangoon University. He served as the first Professor. Three of his students : Sayagyi U Thein Han (“Zawgyi”), Sayagyi U Wun (“Minthuwun”), and ICS U Sein Tin (“Theikpan Maung Wa”) founded the “Khit San Sar Pay” movement.
Sayadaw U Vicittacara is the first Burmese to appear in the “Guiness Book of World Records” for his phenomenal memory. Sayadaw recited 8000+ pages of Tipitaka : Vinaya (Monastic rules of conduct), Sutta (Discourses), and Abhidhamma (Ultimate Reality) atthe Sixth Buddhist Council held at KabaAye in the 50’s.
Lexicographers include (1) Judson and his team (2) U Tun Nyein (3) Dr. Ba Han (4) U Hoke Sein (Pali, English, Burmese).
Sao Shwe Thaik (Yawnshwe Saophalong/Sawbwa) is the first President of the “Union of Burma”. He was succeeded by Dr. Ba U and Mahn Win Maung. Sama Duwa Sinawa Naung was to be the 4th President, but a 17-man Revolutionary Council staged a coup d’etat on March 2, 1962. Sao Shwe Thaik lost his son in the [supposedly] bloodless coup.
BMRI (Burma Medical Research Institute) was founded by Dr. Mya Tu. His successors include Dr. Aung Than Ba Tu, Dr. Khin Maung Tin, Dr. Daw May May Yi, Dr. Myint Lwin …
Details of the early and/or prominent doctors/educators can be added by Saya Dr. Thane Oke Kyaw Myint.
Dr. Freddie Ba Hli (Sc.D) was the first Director General of UBARI (Union of Burma Applied Research Institute). Saya also taught part-time at the Electrical Engineering Department. Saya later served as a Board Member for UCC.
Sayagyi U Ba Hli was the first native Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Rangoon University. He also taught Civil Engineering courses. Sayagyi proposed the “Twinning Program” with prestigious universities in US and UK.
Before becoming the 3rd Secretary General of United Nations, U Thant was the Permanent Representative of the Burmese Mission to the UN. He was preceded and succeeded by Mr. James Barrington.
U Thant was the unanimous choice following the Soviet Union’s veto of Dr. Ralph Bunche (prominent Black diplomat) and the USA’s veto of the “Trioka” proposed by USSR.
U Nu was the first, third and last Prime Minister of the “Union of Burma”. Dawei U Ba Swe was Prime Minister for some time after U Nu’s first term. There was also a soft Coup in 1958.
Saya Dr. Maung Maung Kha (Physics), Saya Dr. Hla Myint (Economics), Saya Dr. Tha Hla (Geology), … replaced the non-Burmese [mostly British and some Indian] professors from Rangoon University.
Prominent cartoonists include U Ba Gyan, U Heng Soon, U Pe Thein, U Aung Shein, U Kyaw San, U Sein, U Ba Htwe, …
Cartoons are displayed along U Ba Gyan Street during the Tazaungdaing Festival.
There have been adaptations as well as “direct translation” of works from English to Burmese.
Saya Shwe Oo Daung’s U San Shar & U Thein Maung are the [Burmanized] counterparts of Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson.
U Zaw Weik was the first Burmese to compete in Olympics. He was a member of the British India team.
U Aung Gyi (flyweight) was the first Burmese weight lifter to set/break an Olympic record.
Ko Tun Mra won 100 meters relay Gold); Ko Kyaw Mra won 110 meter hurdles Silver and Ko Soe Mra won Pole vault Gold) at the 2nd SEAP Games held in Rangoon, Burma. Their younger brothers Ko Win Mra, Ko Maung Maung Mra and Ko Aung Mra also won medals for Pole Vault.
Ko Kyaw Mra became National Coach for Track & Field.
Young alumni (including U Wynn Htain Oo (M72) and U Tin Latt (M85) founded RIT-YIT-YTU Alumni Association (also known as RITAA). Since there was a length limitation for naming, BIT (which was technically a renaming of the “Faculty of Engineering” of the University of Rangoon) was left out of the name. Under the then New Education System, RIT became an autonomous Institute in 1964.
HlaMin 