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 CHAPTER V

Conquest of Lower Burma

Before entering on the narrative of Lord Dalhousie's other great conquest, Burma, I may briefly refer to an intermediate episode. The next frontier annexation made by the new Governor-General, after the Punjab, was a small outlying tract of Sikkim. This was a punitive measure rendered necessary by the treacherous seizure, in 1849, of our frontier political officer, Dr. Campbell, and the distinguished botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, while travelling in Sikkim with the permission of the Raja. A military expedition thus became necessary, and a submontane strip of inconsiderable extent, together with certain hills, was exacted from the Raja by way of punishment and fine.

Lord Dalhousie's third extension of the British frontier belongs to a later period, and was on a more extensive scale. The first Burmese War in 1824-6 had given us, among other territories, the coast strip of Burma on the Eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal. Under the Treaty of Yandabu, which closed that war in 1826, British merchants