India and Tibet / A history of the relations which have subsisted between the two countries from the time of Warren Hastings to 1910; with a particular account of the mission to Lhasa of 1904

by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

We of the actual Mission were now to leave the military escort and ride rapidly back to India to arrange final details with the Government of India. So on the following morning we started early, and as we rode away the whole of the 32nd Pioneers turned out to say good-bye. Some native officers had come to me the previous evening to say the men wanted us to leave camp through their lines. As we rode by, the men all came swarming out of their tents. The native officers clustered round our ponies shaking our hands, and the whole regiment waved and cheered as we passed out of camp. They had been with the Mission from the very start; indeed, they had been working at the road in that steamy Sikkim Valley before the Mission was formed. They had been through all the fighting and through the dreary investment at Gyantse; and it did one good to feel that something substantial had been obtained in return for their labours, and that they would be able to go back to their villages rewarded and happy. Indian troops of the best type have a wonderful capacity for invoking attachment, and for both the 32nd and 23rd Pioneers I shall always have a warm affection.

The behaviour of these Indian troops had also contributed greatly to the change of feeling in the Tibetans. Their discipline was excellent. They had fought hard when fighting was necessary. When the fighting was over they readily made friends with the Tibetans. And the latter more than once told me that the people suffered more from their own troops than they did from ours. This discipline and good behaviour of Indian troops we take for granted. It is none the less very remarkable. We had with us Gurkhas, trans-frontier Pathans, Sikhs, and Punjabi Mohammedans. All of these in their natural state, under their own leaders, and uncontrolled by British officers, would have played havoc in Lhasa. Their good behaviour on the present occasion was one of the main causes of the Tibetans suddenly swinging round as they did in our favour.

With the relays of riding animals and transport which General Macdonald had arranged for us at every stage down the long line of communications we now pressed rapidly on. We did not strive to emulate Mr. Perceval Landon, who had a week or two before made the record ride from Lhasa to India, but we doubled or trebled the ordinary marches, and in a few days reached Gyantse again.

Here a redistribution had to be made. Captain O’Connor, to whom so much of the success of the negotiations was due, was to remain here permanently as Trade Agent under the new Treaty. Also a party had to be sent to Gartok to arrange for the opening of the new trade-mart there. And preparations for some exploration work had to be made.

As soon as the Treaty was signed and I could say for certain that we would be returning to India, I obtained from the Tibetans and Chinese, through Captain O’Connor’s and Mr. Wilton’s powers of persuasion, leave for three parties to return to India by three different routes besides the one we came up by. One party was to go down the Brahmaputra to Assam; another party was to go up the Brahmaputra to Gartok, and come out by Simla; and Mr. Wilton was to return to China through Eastern Tibet. For all these passports were given, but only the second actually set out.

The journey down the Brahmaputra was the one in which many adventurous officers at Lhasa and Sir Louis Dane, the Foreign Secretary, were keenly interested. No one to this day knows for certain that the San-po of Tibet is the Brahmaputra of Assam. And it was to solve this problem, to discover how and where this mighty river cuts its way clean through the main axis of the Himalayas, and to see the falls and rapids which are involved in a drop from 11,500 to 500 feet, that so many ardent spirits were set. Mr. White was to have had charge of this party, and Captain Ryder was to have accompanied it as Survey Officer. All that was wanting was the sanction of the Government of India, and that, unfortunately, at the last moment was not forthcoming. The party would have had to find a way through some truculent, independent tribes between the border of Tibet and the Assam frontier, and Government were not at that moment prepared to run any further risks. It was a pity, and a sad disappointment to many, for it will be many a year before we again have such an opportunity of solving what is one of the greatest remaining geographical problems.

Mr. Wilton’s journey I had myself to stop, though there is nothing I hate more than to block enterprise in travel. The negotiations with the Chinese were not concluded—in fact, had hardly commenced—and I could not afford to part with anyone so valuable to us in India as he had proved himself to be. We Indian officials are like children in dealing with the Chinese, and the help of that special experience with which Mr. Wilton so effectively had aided us was particularly necessary at this time, though it is deplorable to find from the latest Blue-book how little advantage was taken of the advice he gave.

The Gartok party I put in charge of Captain Rawling, as its main purpose was to open the new mart, and he had in the previous year made a remarkable and most useful journey in Western Tibet. Captain Ryder had been detailed for charge of the survey operations of the expedition down the Brahmaputra, and Lieutenant Wood, R.E., who had been engaged for some time in resurveying the peaks round Mount Everest in Nepal, was to have done the survey work with the Gartok party. But now that the project for the former expedition had fallen through, Captain Ryder also accompanied the Gartok party and took charge of the survey. He was an officer of great capacity, and during the Mission had done most valuable work in extending the triangulation of India right up to Lhasa. He had now an even more interesting piece of geographical work before him—the survey of the upper course of the Brahmaputra (San-po) to its source, and the settling definitely of the question whether there was any higher peak than Everest at the back of the Himalayas.

But the party would have to race against time, for they had many hundreds of miles to traverse, and had to cross the Himalayas back to Simla before the winter finally closed the passes. They had also to face the possibility of obstruction in the matter of supplies and transport, and even the possibility of active hostility, for they would be travelling with no other escort than a Gurkha orderly apiece through a country which had only recently been in open arms against us.

Captain O’Connor and Mr. Magniac accompanied them as far as Shigatse, and Lieutenant Bailey, 32nd Pioneers, a keen and adventurous officer, who had distinguished himself with the mounted infantry, and in his leisure moments learnt Tibetan, was also attached to the party to proceed to India.