About the time when Symes visited Pegu, active exertions were being made to conciliate the Peguers, or Taliens, as the Burmans always called them; and we may well agree with the energetic traveller, that “no act of the Burman government is more likely to reconcile the Peguers to the Burman yoke than the restoration of their ancient place of abode, and the preservation and embellishment of the temple of Shoemadoo.”[199] The government were fully sensible of this, and the commands of his Burman majesty went forth, that the governor of Rangoon should transfer the provincial seat of government to the imperial city of Pegu. Notwithstanding these commands, the superior position of Rangoon will ever cause it to remain the more considerable of the two. Even to this day, as it was at the period of Symes’s visit in 1795, the city of Pegu is chiefly inhabited by Râhwans, or priests, _attachés_ of the provincial government, and poor Peguese families, who greedily availed themselves of the king’s permission to colonise their deserted, though once magnificent metropolis. Symes estimates the population as not exceeding seven thousand. Melancholy fate of the once proud and glorious capital! Modern Pegu is built on the ruins of the ancient city, and occupies about half its area. “It is fenced round by a stockade from ten to twelve feet high; on the north and east side it borders on the old wall. The plane of the town is not yet filled with houses, but a number of new ones are building. There is one main street running east and west, crossed at right angles by two smaller streets not yet finished. At each extremity of the principal street there is a gate in the stockade, which is shut early in the evening; and after that time, entrance during the night is confined to a wicket. Each of these gates is defended by a wretched piece of ordnance, and a few musketeers, who never post sentinels, and are usually asleep in an adjoining shed. There are two inferior gates on the north and south sides of the stockade.”[200]