11 The Nagas: An Introduction he entry of t he Nagas into the writen history of the world can be dated to 24th February 1826. On that day representa- tives of the Kingdom of Burma and the British military signed the Treaty of Yandabo, in which Burma renounced all claims to Assam and Manipur. The westward policy of expansion pursued by Burma – at that time the most pow- erful kingdom in Southeast Asia – had begun in the 1780s when Burmese troops occupied the independent Kingdom of Arakan and reached for the irst t ime the eastern border of the British Indian Empire, which corresponds fairly exactly with the present-day borders of Bangladesh and North Ben- gal. In 1817 the Burmese invaded Assam and in 1819 the in- dependent Kingdom of Manipur. In 1823 they also annexed the Kingdom of Cachar, a strategic area for invading Bengal. In March of the following year, Britain officially declared war on Burma, a war which ended two years later with the aforementioned Treaty of Yandabo. Gradually Britain occu- pied the whole of Assam and intensi ied its diplomatic and military relations with Manipur, which was intended to have a key position in monitoring and if need be defending the border between Burma and the British sphere of inluence. British India had reached the foot of the Naga Hills – the southeastern foothills of the Himalayas in the present bor- der triangle of India, Burma and China, which at that time was covered in jungle. he irst Nagas with whom the British came in contact were the Tengima (Hutton 1914: 476). Persistent raids were be- ing carried out by Naga groups on the new British subjects he Nagas: An Introduction ê Fig. 1. Konyak girl from Shiong village. (CFH 1936) in Michael Oppitz, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen, and Marion Wettstein (eds.) Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck: 11-29.