How it began
An indigenous oil industry existed at Yenangyaung, in central Burma, for centuries. Oil was first collected from seepages and soaks, and later wells were dug by hand. In 1755 the travelers George Baker and John North found about 200 families there who were chiefly employed in getting earth-oil out of pits. Under the kings of Ava, the rights to produce oil were held by a group of hereditary owners, usually counted as 24, in a system called twinzayo. Historians of the field note that this trade predates the 1859 Drake well in Pennsylvania that is often cited as the birth of the oil industry.
How it works
A digger was lowered on a rope to the bottom of a square shaft about four feet across and loosened the ground with an iron-tipped pole. Spoil was raised in a basket. Hard layers were broken by dropping a large iron weight from the surface. Oily vapors meant the digger could stay down only about 30 seconds, so wells were sited on slopes where men could run downhill with the hauling rope and pull him out quickly. A well could take up to two years to dig. Oil was raised the same way, in iron pots or lacquer-sealed baskets, over a wooden cylinder set on two posts.
How it spread
Crude from Yenangyaung supplied riverine Burma, where it was used to preserve wooden houses and monasteries, to caulk boats and as a cheap, smoky lamp fuel. In 1795-96 Michael Symes saw the creek crowded with boats and thousands of earthen jars waiting to be loaded, and reported that the wells supplied the whole kingdom and parts of India. In 1797 Hiram Cox counted 180 wells in one area and 340 in another. A small refinery using Yenangyaung crude opened at Rangoon in 1858 and exported products to Europe and India.
What changed first
The geologist Thomas Oldham estimated in 1855 that about 200 productive wells yielded roughly 7,470 tonnes of oil a year. Fritz Noetling recorded in the late 1880s that about 150 bullock carts a day, each with a dozen jars, carried oil to the river. By 1896 diggers wore a helmet fed with air pumped by hand through a hose, which let them work for up to an hour and reach depths of at least 400 feet.
What lasted
The Burmah Oil Company, founded in 1886, took concessions around the hand-dug fields and began drilling with a cable-tool rig in January 1888. The British administration protected the rights of the hereditary owners in specified reserves, and hand digging continued alongside the company's rigs. Yenangyaung production peaked at 15,953 barrels a day in 1918, and in the first decade of the twentieth century the Burma fields were the only major oil producer in the British Empire.
