bayonets to lhasa: the british invasion of tibet

HISTORY

The British invasion of Tibet in 1904 is one of the strangest events in British imperial history.

Conceived by Lord Curzon as a strategic move in the Great Game – that colossal struggle between imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia for influence in Central Asia – the incursion was in fact ill-conceived and inspired by only the weakest of motivations. Led by the soldier, explorer and mystic, Francis Younghusband, the mission – doomed from the very beginning – became caught in political cross-fire and the distant and destructive machinations of China and Britain and ended in ignominy and disappointment for this idealistic adventurer. Peter Fleming’s gripping portrayal of this curious episode and its charismatic protagonists brilliantly illuminates what is now seen as a key moment in the Great Game, the repercussions of which continue to be felt throughout the region. ‘An observer of great wisdom and learning…’ – Simon Winchester ‘One reads him for literary delight and for the pleasure of meeting an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind… but he is also an observer of penetrating intellect.’ – Vita Sackville-West, Spectator

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T h e P e t e r F l e m i n g C o l l e c t i o nT h e P e t e r F l e m i n g C o l l e c t i o n

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Peter Fleming

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Pete

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Francis Younghusband and the British Invasion of Tibet

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Peter Fleming, OBE, (1907–1971) was a journalist and writer andone of the great travel writers of the twentieth century. He beganhis career as a special correspondent with The Times and later wrotefor The Spectator. He served with the Grenadier Guards during theSecond World War and from 1942 was in charge of military decep-tion operations in Southeast Asia. He is the author of several clas-sic travel books, which include Brazilian Adventure, To Peking (ThePeter Fleming Collection, Tauris Parke Paperbacks), One’s Companyand News from Tartary. Later he wrote accounts of historical eventsin lands through which he had travelled, namely The Siege at Peking,Bayonets to Lhasa and The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. In his memory,The Royal Geographical Society established The Peter Fleming Awardfor projects that seek to advance geographical science.



‘An observer of great wisdom and learning. . . ’ Simon Winchester

‘One reads him for literary delight and for the pleasure of meetingan Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind . . . but he is also anobserver of penetrating intellect.’ Vita Sackville-West, The Spectator

Tauris Parke Paperbacks is an imprint of I.B.Tauris. It is dedicated to publishing booksin accessible paperback editions for the serious general reader within a wide rangeof categories, including biography, history, travel and the ancient world. The listincludes select, critically acclaimed works of top quality writing by distinguishedauthors that continue to challenge, to inform and to inspire. These are booksthat possess those subtle but intrinsic elements that mark them out as somethingexceptional.

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New paperback edition published in 2012 by Tauris Parke PaperbacksAn imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010www.ibtauris.com

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First published in 1961 by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd

Copyright © The Estate of Peter Fleming 1961

The right of Peter Fleming to be identified as the author of this work has beenasserted by The Estate of Peter Fleming in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Potala Palace, Lhasa (oil on canvas) by Kate Otley (b. 1944)© Private Collection/Photo © Bonhams, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any partthereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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BAYONETS

TO LHASA

The British Invasion of Tibet

Peter Fleming

T P PT P PTA U R I S PA R K EP A P E R B A C K S



Contents

List of Illustrations ixForeword xiSources and Acknowledgments xiii

I The Great Game 1II Emissaries and Agents 15

III The Unknown Land 31IV The Pot and the Kettle 39V The Man on the Spot 49

VI The Fate of Two Spies 61VII The Telegram of 6 November 69

VIII The Commander of the Escort 79IX Over the Top 93X ‘A Close Shave’ 107

XI The Action at Guru 117XII Pressing On 133

XIII The Danger on his Doorstep 147XIV The Mission Besieged 157XV The Storming of a Stronghold 173

XVI The Fount of Policy 187XVII A River to Cross 197

XVIII Enter the Amban 207XIX Exit The Times Correspondent 219XX The Treaty Signed 229

XXI A Question of Honour 241XXII The Scapegoat 253



viii Bayonets to Lhasa

XXIII A Secret Pamphlet 263Epilogue 273

Endnotes 289Bibliography 299Index 301

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I

The Great Game

To the world at large, and to England in particular, Russia’sDrang nach Osten seemed at the end of the nineteenth century

to be one of those world-forces which nothing can deflect, nothingsublimate, nothing mollify. It was impossible to imagine an Asia acrosswhich this juggernaut would not be slowly but inexorably grinding.Every precedent, every probability suggested that St Petersburg’simperialist aspirations were a permanent and minatory part of thelandscape. To see beyond them, to suppose them capable of atrophy,or to prescribe for the problems which they posed any but a violentand perilous solution was not within men’s power: any more than,today, we find it feasible to visualise a world in whose destiniesinternational Communism will play a negligible part.

Throughout the nineteenth century Russia’s Asiatic policy hadbeen canny, successful and (within a framework of opportunism)consistent. Four Tsars – Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II andAlexander III – had between them reigned for ninety years; each was aman of character and ability. Moreover, for eighty-three years, from1812 to 1895, the Foreign Ministry had changed hands only twice,and the three incumbents – Count Nesselrode, Prince Gortchakoff,M. de Giers – evolved a tradition.



2 Bayonets to Lhasa

One after another the crumbling Khanates were swallowed –Khiva, Bokhara, Khokand and the rest. The hill-tribes of the Caucasuswere painfully subdued, and their ancestral valleys added to theTsar’s more desirable holdings in Transcaucasia, where the pettykingdoms between the Black Sea and the Caspian had been forcedto acknowledge Russian sovereignty. The territory of the TekkeTurkomans was conquered, and railways – the first to be built inAsia outside India – were reviving the economic life and the strategicsignificance of farflung, forgotten oases which had had little of eitherfor several centuries.

Here and there upon the dun or charcoal-coloured desert the whitebones of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of camels andhorses, scattered in an untidy swathe across some unusually waterlessexpanse, marked a failure in administrative planning; but although theRussians deployed a prodigious military effort, the actual fighting wasseldom severe, and their victories – attended by much ruthlessness –were not costly in their soldiers’ lives. In Genghiz Khan’s time it hadbeen Asia’s armies that were better armed, better trained, better ledthan any they encountered on the periphery of Europe; now the bootwas on the other foot.

∗ ∗ ∗For Russia the tide had begun to turn at the end of the fourteenthcentury, when Tamerlane after reaching the banks of the Oka calledoff the advance on Moscow and wheeled his horde southward forDelhi and Bagdad. He was the last of the great invaders to come upout of Asia, across the mountains and the deserts, on to the glacis ofthe steppes, behind which in their swamps and forests the Russiansacted, involuntarily and with varying success, as a flank-guard toChristendom. After Tamerlane the balance shifted and the patternchanged. The Russians, growing in strength and unity, threw off theTartar yoke and passed gradually to the offensive. Europe counter-attacked Asia.

By the nineteenth century this historical process was at its apogee.The impetus given to it by Peter the Great showed no signs



The Great Game 3

of flagging; it had even carried the outposts of an ebullient Em-pire across the Pacific to Alaska. What started as a quest for se-curity, dictated by the need to drive back and contain the forcesof Asiatic barbarism which had threatened Russia’s very existencefor so long, had become a gigantic foray into empty or ill-defendedlands.

Hallowed – in her own eyes – by a sense of national destiny,Russia’s expansion had behind it a diversity of impulses, rangingfrom the serfs’ need for land (the serfs, to the number of twenty-three million, were liberated in 1861) and the piratical instincts ofthe free-ranging Cossacks, to a natural desire to keep up with theJoneses; for in Africa and Asia Russia’s European rivals were carvingout for themselves new and enviable domains.

Russian policy, then, was an inevitable product of the times, partof the rhythm of history. Her actions were based, perhaps, as muchon instinct as on reason; the interests which they were designed tofurther were, by the standards of the nineteenth century, legitimate;her belief that she was fulfilling her destiny may be called speciousbut it can hardly be called mistaken, for it is inconceivable that shecould have behaved otherwise than she did behave.

To those, however, who were injured or threatened by Russia’saggrandisement, its inevitability, if they apprehended it, broughtno comfort; an understanding of the laws of gravity does little tolessen the misgivings of people who find themselves in the pathof an avalanche. Of the European Powers, Great Britain was themost directly affected by this tempestuous overspill. By the endof the nineteenth century Russia’s position in Central Asia con-ferred on her, vis-a-vis England, advantages of a peculiarly disturbingkind.

Not only had the extension of her frontiers until they were all butcontiguous with India’s created a dangerously inflammable situationfor which a solution would become increasingly difficult to find, butthe consolidation of her conquests in the East gave her an importantlever in the West. ‘The stronger Russia is in Central Asia, the weakerEngland is in India and the more conciliatory she will be in Europe.’



The Great Game 5

Skobeleff, the victor of Geok Tepe, had said that, and it was roughlytrue.1

There was a marked air of insatiability about Russia’s Asiaticpolicy; for four hundred years (according to calculations made byNansen in 1914) the Russian Empire had been growing at the rate offifty-five square miles a day, or roughly 20,000 square miles a year.Few Englishmen seriously entertained the hope that her eastwardprogress would be halted by prudence, by exhaustion or by anyother cause. Even if it were, her dominant position, so swiftly andferociously achieved, challenged British prestige and British interestsall over Asia, and notably in India, still haunted by memories ofa Mutiny which might not be the last of its kind. At the close ofQueen Victoria’s reign a clash, sooner or later, between the twoEmpires seemed highly probable to all, unavoidable to some. Twicein the 80’s – over Merv and over Penjdeh – such a clash had beennarrowly averted; during the Penjdeh crisis in 1885 the StationeryOffice printed, as a precaution, documents announcing that a state ofwar existed between Great Britain and Russia.2 There was a generalfeeling that things could not go on like this for much longer.

∗ ∗ ∗No one, or at least no one with a first-class mind, held this view morestrongly than the man who was appointed Viceroy of India in 1898.‘As a student of Russian aspirations and methods for fifteen years,’Lord Curzon wrote in 1901, ‘I assert with confidence – what I donot think any of her own statesmen would deny – that her ultimateambition is the dominion of Asia;’ and he went on to argue that ‘ifRussia is entitled to these ambitions, still more is Britain entitled, naycompelled, to defend that which she has won.’

It was on no merely academic studies that these convictions werebased. A tireless traveller (despite the injured spine which causedhim constant pain) and a keen observer, Curzon had watched Russianpolicy at work all round her Asiatic frontiers from Persia to Peking.He had been among the first foreigners to jolt along the new strategic



6 Bayonets to Lhasa

railway from the Caspian to Samarkand, noting as he did so (in1888) that the whole of Russian Central Asia was ‘one vast armedcamp,’ and that in the Russian newspapers photographs of this linewere invariably captioned ‘On the Road to India.’ He had driventhe last two hundred miles to Tashkent by tarantass, a ‘sorrowful andspringless vehicle.’ From the breached ramparts of Geok Tepe he hadlooked down on the long, livid trail of bones which, winding awayinto the desert for eleven miles, marked the path of the victoriousCossacks after the stronghold fell. He had pondered the words ofSkobeleff, the man who unleashed them on a pursuit which cost thelives of twenty thousand men, women and children: ‘It will be inthe end our duty to organize masses of Asiatic cavalry and to hurlthem into India as a vanguard, under the banner of blood and rapine,thereby reviving the times of Tamerlane.’

Curzon’s experience of Asia was large, his knowledge of herhistory encyclopaedic; but his theories about the role which Russiameant to play upon that continent had been formed, at least in outline,before he acquired either. These theories thus had an element in themwhich was instinctive or emotional rather than purely intellectual. Allstudents of his complex character agree that, as Sir Harold Nicolsonputs it, ‘most of Curzon’s basic convictions, the articles of his faith,were absorbed before he left Eton in 1878;’ and it would not beunduly fanciful to suppose that the story of Britain’s violation ofTibet began on, or anyhow not later than, 7 May 1877, when theReverend Wolley Dod’s House Debating Society met to discuss thequestion: ‘Are we justified in regarding with equanimity the advanceof Russia towards our Indian frontier?’

‘The President [Curzon wrote in the Society’s Minute Book afterthe debate] expressed the opinion that the policy of Russia was amost ambitious and aggressive one. It dated its origin from the timeof Peter the Great, by whom the scheme of conquest had been firstmade. He did not imagine for a moment that the Russians wouldactually invade India, and were they to do so we need have no fear ofthe result; but . . . a great question of diplomacy might arise in Europe



The Great Game 7

in which the interests of England were opposed to those of Russia.It might then suit Russia to send out an army to watch our Indianfrontier. In such a case as this England’s right hand would obviouslybe tied back.’3

Two decades later the premises from which, as a schoolboy, he hadthus argued had become much stronger. The ‘scheme of conquest’continued to be implemented; and during his Viceroyalty Britain’smilitary commitments in South Africa, North China and elsewheremade India a still more tempting target for diversionary activities, oreven (as many feared) for a full-scale invasion.

Curzon’s views on the Russian menace were well-known. Hedeplored the attitude of ‘those who decry British interference any-where and extol the odious theory of sedentary and culpable inaction.’‘Whatever be Russia’s designs on India,’ he wrote in 1889, ‘whetherthey be serious and inimical or imaginary and fantastic, I hold thatthe first duty of English statesmen is to render any hostile intentionsfutile.’ His advocacy of a forward policy was persistent, sonorous anddidactic.

In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that, as his officialbiographer puts it, ‘beneath the general chorus of approval’ whichgreeted his appointment as Viceroy at the age of thirty-eight ‘thereexisted a thin but perceptible current of uneasiness, which tendedto crystallize into a fear of a policy of adventure beyond the Indianfrontier.’ Sir William Harcourt ended his letter of congratulationwith a postscript: ‘Let me beg as a personal favour that you will notmake war on Russia in my life-time.’ ‘Campbell-Bannerman,’ wroteLabouchere, ‘spent this morning conclusively proving to me that youwill drag us into a war with Russia.’ The fire-eating Sir Bindon Blood,who in the previous year had commanded the Malakand Field Force,struck the same note: ‘It will amuse you to hear that I am being toldby the Anti-Forward-Policy people . . . that now I shall have as manywars as I want.’

‘It cannot,’ his biographer comments, ‘be said that these appre-hensions were altogether without justification.’ The passage of five



8 Bayonets to Lhasa

years did nothing to diminish them; they powerfully influenced theevents with which my narrative deals.

∗ ∗ ∗‘The boundaries of the British Empire in Asia,’ Curzon wrotetwo years after his resignation, in painful circumstances, of theViceroyalty, ‘had always exercised upon me a peculiar fascination;’4

and soon after he arrived in India he set in motion administrativereforms (the most notable being the sequestration from the Punjabof the territory thenceforward known as the North West FrontierProvince) which brought matters of frontier-policy directly under theViceroy’s control. Upon this ‘Land Frontier 5700 miles in length, themost diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poisedin the world,’5 Afghanistan was the most explosive sector, Persiathe weakest. Britain had already fought two unsatisfactory wars inAfghanistan, in 1841 and 1880; each was to a large extent provokedby Russophobia. As for Persia, the Russian railway network in CentralAsia was steadily enhancing the military threat from that quarter.

Tibet, by comparison, was a backwater. But its borders, in thosedays as in these, were disputed and ambiguous, and for some yearsthe Government of India had been endeavouring, with a completelack of success, to regularise affairs on the distant watersheds sepa-rating Tibetan territory from the British feudatory states of Sikkim,Nepal and Bhutan. This unsatisfactory situation had arisen from thefollowing causes.

In 1886 the Tibetans debouched from the Chumbi Valley, a corri-dor of fertile land flanked by the territory of Nepal on the one side andBhutan on the other, and occupied a strip of Sikkimese territory sometwenty miles deep. In 1888 a small British expedition expelled theintruders without difficulty. British casualties were one officer killedand three other ranks wounded; Tibetan losses were estimated at twohundred killed, four hundred wounded and two hundred captured. In1890 a Sikkim–Tibet Convention was concluded with China, whosesuzerainty over Tibet Britain recognised, and this was supplementedin 1893 by a set of Trade Regulations. The main purpose of these



The Great Game 9

instruments, as far as Britain was concerned, was to secure formalChinese recognition of her paramount rights in Sikkim; but theydealt, in detail, with matters of commerce, frontier-delimitation andso forth.

China’s hold over Tibet, precarious already, was further weakenedby her disastrous war with Japan in 1894–95; this followed on theheels of a bloody Moslem rebellion in her northwestern provinceswhich cut one of Peking’s main lines of communication. The Tibetans,who detested their Chinese overlords, found it easy to take the linethat, since they had not been party to the Convention or to the TradeRegulations, the provisions of neither were binding on them; and fromthis obdurate attitude, which the Chinese were powerless to modify,stemmed an endless series of vexatious incidents. Grazing rights wereinfringed, trade obstructed, boundary-pillars overthrown; Britishattempts to negotiate a settlement of these matters were greetedwith the cheerful contumacity of which the Tibetans are masters.

These then, in brief outline, were what may be called the tacticalconsiderations which obliged the Government of India (and wouldhave obliged it under any Viceroy) to do something about Tibet.Although the British grievances, when, promoted almost to the statusof a casus belli, they were in due course published in a Blue Book,have a petty, parochial air, they cannot be regarded as frivolous, letalone trumped-up.

The pasturing of a few score or a few hundred yaks on the ‘wrong’side of an inadequately surveyed watershed, the destruction by ig-norant and superstitious hillmen of boundary-pillars whose moderncounterparts on a Surrey common would be unlikely to survive twofine week-ends – these were not the things that mattered. Whatmattered – what always matters on a frontier – was prestige. TheGovernment of India was a tiny oligarchy controlling a huge sub-continent. Once it had asserted its rights on the Tibetan frontier,there was a point beyond which its neighbour’s intransigence and itsown forbearance could not be allowed to go. In the Indian Empire,as in all others, this was one of the rules of the game, one of the factsof life; and to ignore it on the North East Frontier involved jeopardy



10 Bayonets to Lhasa

to the tenuous bonds which bound Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan to theBritish connexion.

∗ ∗ ∗As a tactician on the Indian Frontier Curzon showed an unlooked-forstreak of caution. His admiration for and his understanding of soldierswere limited, and he was quick to suspect them of wasting moneyon huge, elaborate fortifications and small, superfluous expeditions.‘On the North West Frontier and the North East Frontier alike hewas constantly vetoing proposals for advances across the bordersand reducing commitments urged on him by his military advisers.’6

As a strategist, on the other hand, he was visionary and audacious.Circumspect in his use of pawns, he liked a board which offeredpossibilities for a sudden, paralysing coup by his queen. He had notbeen long in India before he began to discern in Tibet an opportunity –the only opportunity within the realm of practical politics – for justsuch a deployment.

Britain’s tactical interests in Tibet have been summarised above.Of her wider, long-term interests this is the picture – nebulous butchallenging – which had begun to emerge during the last decade ofthe nineteenth century.

Construction of the 3500-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway, putin hand in 1891, unmistakably portended an intensification of Russianactivities in Manchuria, Mongolia, China and Korea; in the last twocountries Russia’s interests were already in direct and on the wholesuccessful competition with Britain’s. Four years later the ManchuEmpire, pole-axed by Japan, appeared to be on the point of dis-integration. It seemed that a great power-vacuum was about to becreated, into important parts of which Russia, if only by virtue of hergeographical position, was destined to expand.

Sinkiang, the huge Chinese dependency immediately to the northof Tibet, was one of the territories most likely – again for geographi-cal reasons – to be annexed. Russia had occupied the Ili Valley in the70’s and still held a useful bridgehead there. In Kashgar her Consul-General, impressively attended by a Cossack escort, enjoyed greater



The Great Game 11

prestige than Macartney, the British representative, whose consularstatus Peking declined to recognise. Rumours of a projected mili-tary railway which would link the Trans-Siberian line with EasternSinkiang and North West China were crystallised in a despatch to theForeign Office in which, on 1 January 1898, the British Ambassadorat St Petersburg recorded an interview with Count Witte, then themost powerful politician in Russia:

Producing from a carefully locked desk a map of China, the Minister pro-ceeded to draw his hand over the Provinces of Chihli, Shansi, Shensi andKansu, and said that sooner or later Russia would probably absorb all thisterritory. Then putting his finger on Lanchow, he said that the SiberianRailway would in time run a branch line to this town.7

‘Essentially,’ Prince Ukhtomski, who was active in Far Eastern affairs,declared two years later, ‘there are not and there cannot be anyfrontiers for us in Asia.’

When Curzon assumed the Viceroyalty nothing that could becalled a British policy towards Tibet had been formulated. As long asSinkiang remained under Chinese control, India’s North East Frontierwas insulated from Russia by two buffer-states, one on top of theother; but among the few experts who had studied the matter theconsensus of opinion was that, if Sinkiang was annexed by Russia,some assertion of British influence in Tibet would be desirable, ifnot essential. An invasion of India across the inhospitable plateauxof the Changtang was not seriously feared; but nobody liked theidea of Russia establishing a hold over the religious centre of theBuddhist world (which included the whole of Mongolia), and, asBower, a British soldier-explorer, pointed out, ‘two hundred menand a couple of mountain guns could take Lhasa and that number ofRussians there would be sufficient to cause restlessness among thenatives of Calcutta.’ ‘Unless we secure the reversion of Lhasa,’ wroteSir John Ardagh, the Director of Military Intelligence, in 1898, ‘wemay find the Russians there before us.’

Despite the cold clarity of his mind, Curzon took a romantic viewof the Great Game,8 the semi-clandestine duel in which the agents oftwo Empires contended in the desolate Asiatic uplands; ‘its incidents,’



12 Bayonets to Lhasa

he once wrote in words which might almost have come from the penof John Buchan, ‘and what I may describe as its incomparable dramaare the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in the clubsof London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are not engaged in tracinglines upon the unknown corners of the earth.’ Line-tracing, as part ofa rather cloudy Kriegspiel, appealed to the strategist in him. ‘South of acertain line in Asia,’ he wrote in 1899, ‘her [Russia’s] future is muchmore what we choose to make it than what she can make it herself.’

In this pronouncement the hard core of practical meaning is nolonger readily to be detected; but perhaps it helps to illustrate thestrong attraction which a Tibetan problem, once he got his teeth intoit, was bound to have for Curzon. Here, on the Roof of the World,there was space for manoeuvre, scope for brilliance and boldness.Further west the Great Game was becoming inhibited by the terribleconsequences of a false step. The grey and khaki pawns, if they werenot yet jostling each other, could no longer make a move of anysignificance without endangering world peace. Only in Tibet, whereneither side’s pieces were as yet committed, might an adroit strokethwart the adversary’s plans before he could put them into effect.

∗ ∗ ∗Throughout the first two years of Curzon’s Viceroyalty the Govern-ment of India – seconded, when it was deemed necessary to bringpressure to bear on the Chinese, by the Foreign Office in London –continued its patient attempts to settle affairs on the Tibetan frontier.These attempts had now been going on since 1890; they proved nomore efficacious in the last two years of the century than they hadin the previous eight. The far from exigent terms of the Conventionof 1890 and the Trade Regulations of 1893 were ignored. An illegaltariff continued to be levied on the trickle of trade entering Tibetfrom India. The boundary remained undemarcated. From meetingsarranged between Tibetan and Chinese representatives and the onlyBritish official in an area roughly the size of Yorkshire it was normalfor the Tibetans to absent themselves without explanation, whilethe Chinese emissary would excuse himself on the grounds that the



The Great Game 13

Tibetans, a people ‘naturally doltish and prone to doubts and mis-givings,’ had failed to provide him with transport. Any hope that theChinese might be induced to take a more serious view of their treatyobligations was dispelled by the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion.A situation had arisen – had, indeed, existed without showing anyimprovement for ten years – which the Government of India couldnot, without dereliction of its duty, tolerate any longer.

On 11 August 1900 the Viceroy dispatched a letter to the DalaiLama.

bayonets to lhasa: the british invasion of tibet

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