Tibet: A brief history
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1904-51
A very brief history
The Chinese occupation of Tibet gives Beijing great strategic depth and control over river waters in Asia.
The stand-off between India and Bhutan on one side and China on the other at Doklam, a tri-junction once between India, Tibet and Bhutan, and the larger border dispute between the two Asian giants, have their origins in the British invasion of Tibet in 1904.
At the turn of the 20th century, the geopolitical balance between a crumbling Manchu empire and India was massively in favour of British India. Those were the days of the Great Game, a contest to gain influence from Iran to Tibet, played out between British India and an expanding Tsarist Russia. It was to ward off any perceived Russian influence in Tibet that Lord Curzon dispatched Colonel Younghusband on what the British called their Tibet 'expedition'.
However, the greatest impact of the British invasion of Tibet was on Manchu China. The Qing dynasty and all previous successive dynasties saw the marauding Mongol nomads as the enduring threat to the security of the empire. In the 19th century, a new threat for the empire sailed from across the seas. Western powers subjected China to what the Chinese call 'a century of humiliation'.
While grappling with this new danger posed by the western powers, Manchu China considered Tibet its secure backyard, or as one Manchu official put it, "the hand that protects the face". The Tibetan plateau, shooting up almost three miles in the air, covering a total landmass of 2.5 million square kilometres and ringed by the mightiest mountain range in the world, was considered impregnable. However, the British breach of this buffer in 1904, which had kept the peace between India and China for centuries, alerted a dying Manchu China to the absolute necessity of securing Tibet. Manchu general Zhou Erfeng invaded Tibet in 1908. The 13th Dalai Lama fled Tibet and sought refuge in India.
The People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet in 1949-1950 was a continuation of the strategy to fend off hostile powers from the fringes of the empire. China's occupation of Tibet gives Beijing immense strategic depth and control over most of the river waters of Asia.
The 2017 stand-off at Doklam, or as the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya puts it, Droglam (the nomads' path), China's One Belt One Road project, the militarisation of the plateau and its massive infrastructure building in Tibet are all part of China re-starting the Great Game: expanding Chinese influence across the Himalayas and Central Asia, all the way to Europe.
Mao Zedong, a keener student of The Art of War than of Das Kapital, saw Tibet in strategic terms. He said the Tibetan plateau, which the celebrated Swedish explorer Sven Hedin described as the 'most stupendous upheaval on the face of the earth', was the palm, with Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the 'five fingers'. With China gaining influence in Nepal, now threatening to recognise Sikkim as independent and obliquely hinting at stoking a democratic revolution in the kingdom of Bhutan when it says the "Bhutanese are not a happy lot", Beijing may have plans to join the 'fingers' to the 'palm'.
In the 17-Point agreement signed between Lhasa and Beijing in 1951, China promised to respect the autonomy of Tibet..
Thubten Samphel is the director of the Tibet Policy Institute and the author of Falling through the Roof
The 1904 battle at Gyantse, and after
EDWARD WONG| China Seizes on a Dark Chapter for Tibet| AUG. 9, 2010 | The New York Times
GYANTSE, Tibet — The white fortress loomed above the fields, a crumbling but still imposing redoubt perched on a rock mound above a plain of golden rapeseed shimmering in the morning light.
CreditGoh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse
A battle here in 1904 changed the course of Tibetan history. A British expedition led by Sir Francis E. Younghusband, the imperial adventurer, seized the fort and marched to Lhasa, the capital, becoming the first Western force to pry open Tibet and wrest commercial concessions from its senior lamas.
The bloody invasion made the Manchu rulers of the Qing court in Beijing realize that they had to bring Tibet under their control rather than continue to treat it as a vassal state.
So, in 1910, well after the British had departed, 2,000 Chinese soldiers occupied Lhasa. That ended in 1913, after the disintegration of the Qing dynasty, ushering in a period of de facto independence that many Tibetans cite as the modern basis for a sovereign Tibet.
The Chinese Communists seized Tibet again in 1951, perhaps influenced by the Qing emperor’s earlier decision to invade the mountain kingdom.
The New York Times
These days, Gyantse resembles other towns in central Tibet. Its dusty roads are lined with shops and restaurants run by ethnic Han migrants, whom many Tibetans see as the most recent wave of invaders.
But Chinese officials prefer to direct the world’s attention away from that and to the brutal events at Gyantse in 1904, which conveniently fit into their master narrative for Tibetan and Chinese history.
The Chinese government insists Tibet is an “inalienable” part of China, and it has appropriated the 1904 invasion as another chapter in the long history of imperialist efforts to dismantle China — what the Communist education system calls the “100 years of humiliation.”
In that Communist narrative of Gyantse, the Tibetans are a stand-in for the Chinese who were victimized by foreign powers during the Qing dynasty.
“The local people resisted the British there,” said Dechu, a Tibetan woman from the foreign affairs office in Lhasa who accompanied foreign journalists on a recent official tour of Tibet. “They put up a great resistance, so it’s called the City of Heroes.”
In the late 1990s, when Britain was handing Hong Kong back to China, the Chinese government started a propaganda campaign to highlight that theme.
A melodramatic movie about the 1904 British invasion, “Red River Valley,” was released in 1997. It was a hit, and Chinese still rave about it. It was also required viewing for officials in Tibet and for many schoolchildren.
“I’ve also seen a musical, two plays, another feature film and a novella on the same topic, all from that time,” Robert Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University, said of the late 1990s. He said that he had not seen any reference in Tibetan literature to Gyantse as the City of Heroes before then.
In 2004, the centenary of the British invasion, officials staged activities to commemorate it, including a musical, “The Bloodbath in the Red River Valley.” Then there is the museum in the fort. A sign in English once identified it as “the Memorial Hall of Anti-British.” In 1999, it displayed “shoddy relief sculptures of battle scenes, with unintelligible captions,” according to Patrick French, a historian who described his visit there in his book “Tibet, Tibet.”
So what did happen in Gyantse in 1904?
The Younghusband expedition was sent by Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, to force the 13th Dalai Lama to agree to commercial concessions. Tibet had also begun to figure prominently in what was known as the Great Game, where the British and Russian empires vied for influence in Central Asia.
British officials had heard of a Russian presence in the court of the Dalai Lama and wanted to learn the truth. That meant getting officers to Lhasa, which had never been done before.
Colonel Younghusband was teamed with Brig. Gen. J. R. L. Macdonald to lead a force from Sikkim, in British India, across the Jelap Pass into Tibet. They crossed the border on Dec. 12, 1903, with more than 1,000 soldiers, 2 Maxim guns and 4 artillery pieces, according to “Trespassers on the Roof of the World,” a history of Western efforts to open Tibet, by Peter Hopkirk. Behind them, in the snow, trailed 10,000 laborers, 7,000 mules, 4,000 yaks and 6 camels.
Outside the village of Guru, they encountered an encampment of 1,500 Tibetan troops. Hostilities broke out. The British troops, which included Sikhs and Gurkhas, opened fire. In four minutes, 700 poorly armed Tibetans lay dead or dying.
Later, at Red Idol Gorge, a narrow defile just 20 miles from Gyantse, the British slaughtered another 200 Tibetans.
The Tibetans made their final stand at the fort at Gyantse, called a dzong, or jong, in Tibetan. After they missed a deadline to surrender on July 5, the British attacked from the southeast corner of the fort.
A thin line of officers and soldiers clambered up the sheer rock face. “The steepness was so great that a man who slipped almost necessarily carried away the man below him also,” wrote Perceval Landon of The Times of London.
The Tibetans rained down ammunition and stones. But one lieutenant and an Indian soldier made it through the breach, followed by others. The Tibetans fled, shimmying down two ropes.
“The surrender of the jong was to have a crushing effect on Tibetan morale,” Mr. Hopkirk wrote. “There was an ancient superstition that if ever the great fortress were to fall into the hands of an invader, then further resistance would be pointless.”
The British reached Lhasa soon afterward. Two months later, the evening before leaving Lhasa for good, Colonel Younghusband rode out to a mountain and gazed down at the ancient city, where he experienced a curious epiphany that inspired him to end all acts of bloodshed and found a religious movement, the World Congress of Faiths.
“This exhilaration of the moment grew and grew till it thrilled through me with overpowering intensity,” he wrote in a memoir, “India and Tibet.” “Never again could I think evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed naught but buoyancy and light.”
Helen Gao contributed research from Beijing.
See also
Anglo-Chinese Conventions of 1890 and 1893
Convention between the United Kingdom and China respecting Tibet, 1906
