Edward Bosc Sladen

Sir Edward Bosc Sladen (20 November 1827 – 4 January 1890) was a British army officer who worked in India.

Life and Career

Son of East India Company employee, Dr. Ramsey Sladen and his second wide Emma (the daughter of Colonel Paul Bosc) Edward was born in Madras. He attended Oswestry School in Shropsire and joined the East India Company on 14 April 1849. He was posted in the 1st Madras fusiliers as a second lieutenant in September 1850. After seeing action in the second Burmese war at Pegu in December 1852 and again in January 1853, he became an assistant commissioner in Tenasserim (now known as the Tanintharyi Region) and was severely wounded in 1856-57 while fighting insurgent Karens and Shans in the Yunzalin District. He then moved back to mainland India and joined in the recapture of Lucknow from Indian soldiers in March 1858. He also took part in the Oudh campaign with Sir James Hope Grant and Sir Alfred Hastings Horsford.^[1]

Mission to China

He then joined the Indian staff corps after the Madras fusiliers became a queen's regiment. In 1866 he was made chief commissioner in Mandalay. In one incident he saved the Europeans in the region from insurgents. In 1868 he headed a political mission to the Chinese frontier. This expedition started on 13 January from Mandalay through Bhamo to Moulmein and then to Yunnan and returned only in September. The mission collected a lot of information on the route. This was published as the Official Narrative of the Expedition to China via Bhamo. He also wrote on the geography of the region in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (Volume 15).^[1] In 1868, during a visit to Tengyue (known as Momien in the Shan language) in modern day Yunnan Province, China, Sladen procured a woodblock printed edition of the Chinese history of the town, which was brought back to England and deposited at the British Museum, along with a number of artefacts from SW China and Burma.^[2][3]

Personal life

He was knighted on 26 November 1886 and retired on 14 April 1887, dying in London three years later.^[1] In 1861, Sladen married Sophia Catherine, daughter of Richard Pryce Harrison, a Bengal civil servant. She died in 1865 and he married Kate, daughter of Robert Russell Carew of Hertfordshire in 1880.^[1]

Books authored

• Anderson, John; Sladen, Edward Bosc; Browne, Horace Albert (1876). Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875, Under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne. Macmillan and Company. 
• Edward Bosc Sladen (1870). Official Narrative of the Expedition to Explore the Trade Routes to China Via Bhamo. Rangoon. 

References