He was born Htee Moo Kee on 20 January 1927, in Hpapun country of what is now Karen State. Bo is an honorific. In the last years of the Japanese occupation he fought with Karen who had joined the British, Force 136, in the eastern Dawna hills. That is the same war as Grandfather Longlegs. It is not the same life.
After 1949 he rose in the Karen revolution. From Manerplaw, the “victory field” on the Thai-Burma border, he chaired the Karen National Union from 1976 until he stood down in 2000. The KNLA under that leadership was among the strongest ethnic armies facing Rangoon in the 1970s and 1980s. In late 1994 a Buddhist breakaway, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, led Burmese troops into Manerplaw. The fall of that headquarters was the great setback of the postwar Karen war. He was a Seventh-day Adventist. Ashley South and others have written that a Christian S’gaw elite long dominated the KNU while many villagers and fighters were Buddhist. That tension is part of his time. It is not a verdict on a village.
In 2004 he travelled to Yangon for talks, his first visit to the capital in fifty years. He died in a Mae Sot hospital on 24 December 2006, aged seventy-nine. Associated Press and Reuters reported heart disease and diabetes. He was the father of Nerdah Mya. That lineage matters to the border country around Mu Aye Pu. He had been dead for years before later development drawings used the family name.
At the village itself the public picture is a painting. Burma Link photographed it in January 2018, hung outside the meeting hall: Saw Bo U Gyi, Mahn Ba Zan, and General Bo Mya. Three names of the revolution, on a hall by the river. That is how this landing remembers him. It does not make Mu Aye Pu his house. See History.