On 24 January 1938, Henry Balfour and J. H. Hutton were the discussants of a very interesting paper entitled ‘Through the Unexplored Mountains of the Assam–Burma Border’ and presented to the Royal Geographical Society by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, who had returned from a year's fieldwork in the Naga Hills. The paper soon appeared in the Society's Geographical Journal. It described a two-week expedition carried out in the ‘unadministered’ and unmapped Assam territory of the Kalyo-Kengyo Nagas in 1936, where Fürer-Haimendorf had the privilege of accompanying the deputy commissioner, J. P. Mills, on what Balfour, introducing the paper, described as ‘one of the unfortunately necessary punitive expeditions into a portion of the Hills never visited before by Europeans’ (Balfour, in Balfour and Hutton 1938: 216) (see Map 3.1). Known as the ‘Pangsha Expedition,’ its objective was to punish Pangsha Village, where villagers had been reported to have captured slaves from the Political Control Area (Chang territory) to trade into Burma; they were also accused of taking heads. The expedition was remarkable in many ways.

For Fürer-Haimendorf, the expedition was a remarkable opportunity to venture into an area where ‘no survey party had ever penetrated’ (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1938: 207) and to reveal the ‘complete mystery [that] has […] veiled the Kalyo-Kengyos, of whom little more was known than their existence and the fact that they live in houses with slate roofs’ (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1938: 202). En route, and on the return journey, the expedition met tribes that ‘have been visited only occasionally by punitive expeditions and survey parties’ (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1938: 202), including the Yimchunger, one of whose villages (Sanghpur) was also visited during the tour.

In the paper, Fürer-Haimendorf refers to J. H. Hutton's Diaries of Two Tours in the Unadministered Area East of Naga Hills (1929) – tours undertaken in early 1921) – and that Hutton was one of the discussants of the paper. Hutton had been a political officer and deputy commissioner in the Assam Naga Hills (1909–35), where his duties included acting as a local magistrate, settling disputes, and as taxation officer.