Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  A clearer understanding of Tibetan culture might also have answered one of the questions the government in Calcutta found most perplexing: the relationship between China and Tibet. Even as late as the 1890s there were few informed European views of contemporary Tibet, and opinion as to the status of the Chinese there was contradictory. Many of the observers were Christian missionaries who took a dim view of Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual practice they were attempting to subvert. As a teenage boy in the mid 1860s the US diplomat William Woodville Rockhill had read Évariste Huc’s account of his 1846 expedition to Lhasa and been inspired to learn Tibetan, the first American to do so, using inherited wealth to explore western China and eastern Tibet while working at the legation in Beijing. ‘Whenever China sees the necessity of doing so,’ he wrote in his account of those travels,

  it can effectually assert its supremacy in Tibet, for it is absurd to say that China is not the sovereign power there and that Chinese officials are only there to manage their own people, and are tolerated, as it were, in the country.

  Yet there were opposite views. General Sir Hamilton Bower had, as a young cavalry officer, performed a number of intelligence missions in Central Asia in the late 1880s and early 1890s. He had looked for the killer of a Scottish trader, Andrew Dalgleish, murdered on the road between Leh and Yarkand, and bought the ancient Sanskrit text, written on birch bark, that had galvanised interest in the lost Buddhist culture of the Silk Roads in eastern Turkestan. After that, Bower crossed Tibet from west to east, without attempting to visit Lhasa. ‘My own impression,’ he wrote in his account of that journey,

  is that the Chinese suzerainty is very shadowy, though the Tibetans in exclusiveness are quite willing to take shelter behind the Chinese in negotiations with foreign powers. If China really has power in Tibet, and if it is a part of China then by the treaty of Tien-tsin [Tianjin], Englishmen can go there on passport, but every one knows that the Chinese are not in a position to issue a passport which the Tibetans would consider valid.

  By 1858 and the end of the Indian rebellion, there were several reasons for Tibetans to mistrust and dislike the British. Tibet’s powerful monastic institutions dominated trade, especially the import of tea from China, and didn’t want their revenue streams interrupted by interfering foreigners. Nor did they wish to offer a route in for European missionaries gathering on Tibet’s borders. French Lazarist priests in Tibet’s eastern fringes would prove expert in winding up international opinion for a more open Tibet. More urgently, the British were perceived as allies of the Gorkha regime in Kathmandu, which since its inception had been at odds with Lhasa. Tibet feared Gorkha’s military aggression and resented the Treaty of Thapathali they had signed with Nepal following Jang Bahadur’s invasion of 1854, involving not just the restoration of a Nepali resident to Lhasa but also the payment of tribute. True, in the early nineteenth century Nepal had been an enemy of British India but the relationship had over the decades altered dramatically. In the minds of Tibet’s rulers, Gorkhali support for the East India Company during the 1857 rebellion completed the picture.

  In that context, when in the 1860s the British began building roads in India close to the Tibetan border, particularly in Sikkim, Tibet considered such activity a security threat. Tibet also feared any strengthening of the relationship between Kathmandu and Beijing. Jang Bahadur had resumed Gorkha’s tribute missions to Beijing in 1866, although more for trade than an expression of obedience. In return Beijing sent ambassadors to Kathmandu, but this apparently cosier arrangement provoked anti-Nepali riots in Lhasa. China’s ambans were swift to reassure the Dalai Lama’s government, and as a gesture of support instructed their troops to use the Nepali resident’s house for musket practice. Relations between Beijing and Kathmandu soured further when China helped Tibet fortify its border with Nepal; by 1873 war between the two small neighbours seemed almost inevitable. That it didn’t happen says a great deal about the relative weakness of all concerned. Nepal feared a repeat of 1792, when Chinese troops came close to Kathmandu. China knew that while it still had a couple of thousand troops in Tibet, it could no longer attempt that kind of boldness. Tibet was almost paralysed, its leaders invested in a theocratic system that seemed unwilling and incapable of facing the immense political and cultural changes that industrialisation and global trade had brought.

  Britain was at the forefront of both and looked with interest at how it might exploit this conflict. The Indian army officer and administrator Owen Tudor Burne wrote in 1874 that tension among India’s Himalayan neighbours

  cannot but be productive of advantage to ourselves, as whatever the issue, it must tend to improve our relations with Nepal and Tibet which are now closed doors, and will ever remain so as long as we rely on Mr Wade and Sir Jang Bahadur.

  Mr Wade was Thomas Francis Wade, ‘Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary and Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China’, and as such was not inclined to push the almost negligible issue of trans-Himalayan trade at the cost of good relations with the Qing. To Wade, Tibet was picturesque but unprofitable and consequently not worth the bother. British officials in Darjeeling were left to make educated guesses about the political situation across the border from the frequent interruptions to trade between Tibet and India.

  Pressure to improve this trade nevertheless remained strong, a weight of opinion galvanised by the self-styled ‘pioneer of commerce’ Thomas Thornville Cooper. The eighth son of a ship-owner from County Durham, Cooper was a sickly teenager who on medical advice escaped Britain for the sunshine of Australia. At nineteen he was working for the Arbuthnot bank in Madras, then travelled throughout India before embarking for Shanghai, where he became mixed up in the hugely destructive Taiping rebellion. With that ended, he set out to travel to India via Tibet with support from European traders in the city. Cooper considered joining the Nepali tribute mission as it returned home to Kathmandu, but was denied permission to enter Tibet even before he’d left Shanghai. So in early 1868 he set out on his own. Reaching Batang in China’s Sichuan province on the main trade route between Chengdu and Lhasa, he met the town’s Lazarist missionaries, who, sensing an opportunity, offered their help. They persuaded the governor of Sichuan to give Cooper a passport for Tibet, hoping that Cooper would be arrested by the Tibetans, forcing the British to act and so open up Tibet to missionaries, including them. Cooper played along but when he reached the border his passport was simply refused: the pioneer of commerce was forced to turn south and approach India across the Hengduan mountains, again unsuccessfully and he returned to Shanghai. Cooper later attempted the same journey but in reverse: reaching China from the Indian state of Assam. Once again he was turned back.

  Despite these reversals, Cooper became a champion of trade between India and western China. He read a lengthy memorandum on the subject to the Calcutta chamber of commerce after returning from his second attempt, describing the state of trade running between Chengdu and Lhasa via the border town of Kangding, historically known as Tachienlu. At the heart of this trade was tea. Cooper estimated that Tibet consumed annually more than two thousand tons of the stuff, largely imported from Sichuan. Why should that tea not come from the gardens of Darjeeling instead? Cooper knew Tibet’s monasteries held a near monopoly on this trade and took a cut of the taxes paid on it. They weren’t about to give up that interest without some kind of intervention. As far as Cooper was concerned, nothing would change until a ‘British Minister resides in Lhasa and the Lamas have been taught their utter helplessness when actually brought into contact with a British force’. In 1873, as Tibet and Nepal came close to war, Cooper helped put together a powerful lobbying group of old Himalayan stagers that included Brian Houghton Hodgson and Joseph Hooker. Their proposals for improved roads, trade fairs and British representation inside Tibet would become the policy of the Indian government. Pressure came too from chambers of commerce in northern English industrial towns, which even before Cooper’s entry on the scene had petitioned the India Of
fice to do something about access to western China’s markets. The prolific author Demetrius Charles Boulger, an imperial cheerleader writing in the 1880s, looked forward to the day when ‘the people of Szechuen [Sichuan] wear Manchester goods and use Sheffield cutlery’.

  The conduit for such trade was to be via Sikkim’s Chumbi valley into Tibet, which Younghusband would call ‘the only strategical point of value in the whole north-eastern frontier from Kashmir to Burma’. In March 1860, Archie Campbell, still smarting a decade on from his humiliating imprisonment, took a company of native troops into Sikkim to protest against infringements of British jurisdiction but was himself attacked and forced to retreat so hastily that the baggage of his small force was abandoned. Once again clearing up Campbell’s mess to maintain British prestige, Calcutta retaliated with a much larger force led by John Cox Gawler. With him went the political officer Ashley Eden who on conclusion of a swift campaign signed the Treaty of Tumlong with the chogyal. Restrictions on trade were lifted and the British were given the right to build roads inside Sikkim.

  Some of Calcutta’s enemies in Sikkim fled to Bhutan, the catalyst for an escalation of tension that had been brewing for decades. Eden was despatched to reach some kind of settlement but was treated rather like Campbell had been in Sikkim. This time Calcutta didn’t hesitate in sending troops. Bhutan was destabilised by civil war and its military was armed with antiquated matchlocks and bows and arrows. Some of its soldiers still wore chain mail. Yet they offered stiff resistance and British Indian forces suffered embarrassing reversals. When they eventually prevailed in 1865, Bhutan ceded the duars, the plains at the foot of the mountains, to the British in return for rent. Calcutta concluded that buying Bhutan’s cooperation would be easier than enforcing it. The violent civil unrest that plagued Bhutan for the next two decades offered the British little hope of using the country as a route to Tibet. With western Tibet closed, Nepal off limits and a proposed railway to China through Assam little more than a distant dream, the focus for liberalising trade across the Himalaya really did fall squarely on Sikkim.

  The assumption remained throughout this period that the riddle of Tibet would be solved in Beijing. And at times it seemed as though progress was being made. In 1875, the British translator Augustus Raymond Margary was murdered returning through Yunnan to Shanghai from a mission to explore trade routes between China and Burma. (Violent death was an occupational hazard for colonial servants in such remote locations: three years later, the trade lobbyist Thomas Cooper, by then serving as political agent in Burma, was also murdered.) Thomas Wade, Elgin’s successor in Beijing, used Margary’s death to win more concessions on freedom of movement from the Chinese, in the Chefoo Convention of 1876, making sure Tibet was covered too. It didn’t make any difference. Trade across the border at Sikkim was no easier and Tibet remained forbidden ground, whatever passports were issued in Beijing.

  In 1883, the Bhutanese, buoyed with British subsidies and resentful of Lhasa’s suzerainty, looted the Tibetan frontier town of Phari, close to the Sikkimese border. That interrupted trade across the Jelep La, the pass separating Tibet from Sikkim, which in turn was noticed in the bazaar at Darjeeling. An official called Colman Macaulay, financial secretary of the government in Calcutta, was despatched to Tibet to investigate. An Ulsterman with a Protestant father and Catholic mother, Macaulay sensed an opportunity. At Khamba Dzong, an administrative centre on the road to Shigatse, a local official told him of pent-up demand in Tibet for European goods and how ‘whenever a man gets an article of English manufacture, a hundred people come to look at it’. It was the conservatism of the great Lhasa monasteries that stood in the way: a sizable chunk of the laity would welcome warmer relations. The Panchen Lama at Shigatse, he hinted, might offer a route in. Macaulay had read George Bogle and adopted his strategy: the Indian government should offer the Panchen Lama a piece of land in Calcutta, as Bogle had done. The monasteries at Lhasa, which he described as ‘the national party in permanent opposition to the Chinese’, could be paid off. The Panchen Lama for one seemed delighted at this prospect, sending Calcutta a long shopping list that included English–Tibetan dictionaries and photographic equipment. The prospect of exporting Indian tea and English manufactured goods to Tibet and western China seemed within reach.

  Not everyone was so optimistic. The chargé d’affaires in Beijing was another Irishman, Nicholas O’Conor from County Roscommon. O’Conor warned London that the Qing still regarded Tibet as an integral part of its empire but could not impose its wishes on the Dalai Lama, or at least his government, since the Dalai Lama was then a boy of nine. There was the real risk of a violent reception for any British mission, especially if it went armed. Macaulay pressed ahead, winning the approval of Randolph Churchill, then secretary of state for India, while on leave in London. Churchill sent Macaulay to Beijing to get the necessary Tibetan passports. With him went Sarat Chandra Das, counted among the pundits for his secret journeys within Tibet. In Beijing he stayed at the Yellow Temple, where the Tseten Nomonhan, Tibet’s ambassador, had his residence, and from where the Tibetans kept a close eye on Macaulay’s negotiations. Das realised the Tibetan establishment was determined to block Macaulay, that the Panchen Lama had simply been looking for leverage against Lhasa and that the Chinese were anxious to avoid a repeat of the Margary affair. Should something happen to Macaulay, they reasoned, the British would have an excuse to annex Tibet much as they were doing in Burma. Nor was there much enthusiasm for Macaulay’s plan in Calcutta. The viceroy Lord Dufferin was acutely aware of public hostility at home to the Burmese campaign and only too happy to cancel Macaulay’s mission in exchange for China recognising the British position in Burma. A more astute diplomat than Macaulay or Churchill, the last thing he needed was another unpopular and expensive war on the fringes of the empire.

  Dufferin’s decision came a shade too late. Some within the Tibetan government were reluctant to antagonise the British but the monastic power behind the Dalai Lama thought otherwise. The Nechung, Tibet’s state oracle, advocated military action and in the summer of 1886 Tibetan troops crossed the Jelep La into Sikkim where they fortified themselves against attack. This wasn’t an isolated show of strength. For years and all along its Himalayan frontier, Tibet had been asserting itself, as much to show its independence from China as in defiance of British India. Two years later, with Calcutta’s patience at an end, a British force finally cleared the Tibetans out of Sikkim and a protracted series of negotiations began. In 1890 a new treaty was signed with the Qing dynasty that tightened Britain’s grip on Sikkim. John Claude White became the first British political agent at the Sikkimese capital Gangtok and a trade agent was stationed at Yatung close to Sikkim’s border with Tibet. Trade talks continued and further regulations were agreed in 1893. A year later the scholar Herbert Hope Risley, author of the Sikkim Gazetteer, wrote that Tibet ‘lies on the other side of a great wall, which we, as rulers of India, have not the slightest ambition to climb’. Any attempt to make that climb would be, Risley concluded, ‘a piece of surpassing folly’.

  Despite Risley’s warning, within a decade the Indian government would send Francis Younghusband and a military expedition across that great wall to occupy Lhasa.

  *

  For half a century the British had tried to regulate its Himalayan border with Tibet through China but Tibet’s invasion and brief occupation of Sikkim had now made it clear that China could no longer guarantee the terms of any treaty it signed with relation to Tibet. In 1895, the Qing were defeated at the hands of imperial Japan. It was now starkly obvious that the balance of power in East Asia was shifting towards Japan and away from the Western European powers, a process accelerated by the Boxer Rebellion, the anti-imperialist and anti-Christian uprising that began in 1899. In the tiny world of Sikkim, less than a rounding error in the business of empire, John Claude White discovered the Tibetans reluctant to adhere to the agreement signed in 1890; trade remained paltry and border disputes continued. Two men, bot
h charismatic and ambitious, now emerged to galvanise this uncertain scene: Lord Curzon and the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Antagonists who never met, both men can be judged to have failed, but only one of those failures, that of the Dalai Lama in his attempts to modernise his country, would prove a tragedy.

  Lord Curzon of Kedleston became Queen Victoria’s last viceroy of India in January 1899, at the apogee of the British Raj, fulfilling an ambition he had held throughout his adult life. Talented, industrious and widely disliked, Curzon’s name is almost shorthand for the dismissive arrogance of the British upper classes. At Balliol College, Oxford, the doggerel written for him stuck:

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

  I am a most superior person.

  My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

  I dine at Blenheim twice a week.