The failure to carry out the treaty he attributed entirely to the Tibetans. He was quite satisfied that the Chinese officials in Tibet, whatever might have been their prepossessions in favour of the policy of seclusion, then sincerely desired to see the Convention carried out, being afraid that they would be disgraced by their own Government if it were not. The Tibetans were the real as well as the ostensible opponents. And Mr. Nolan believed their true motives in opposing the treaty were correctly expressed by a monk, who said that if the English entered Tibet, his bowl would be broken, meaning that the influence of his Order would be destroyed, and its wealth, typified by the collection of food made from door to door in bowls, would be lost. And this opposition on the part of the Lamas the Chinese had not the means of overcoming. They certainly had an acknowledged social superiority, and they were feared to a certain extent on account of their power to send an army through the Himalayas, as they had done on several occasions with surprising success. On the other hand, their present forces in Tibet were ridiculously small, and from Yatung to Gyantse they only had 140 soldiers, and at Lhasa only a few hundreds, while the monks at Lhasa numbered 19,100, of whom 16,500 were concentrated in three great monasteries, and they were vigorous and formidable in a riot, having attacked the Chinese in 1810 and 1844 and the Nepalese in 1883.
Mr. Nolan, with his long experience on this frontier, had, as events have shown, most accurately gauged the situation. The Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Charles Elliott, considered that his report showed that the improvement hoped for from conciliation and forbearance had not taken place in the two seasons during which the mart had nominally been opened, and by the systematic obstruction of the Tibetans the object of the treaty with China had been frustrated. He therefore renewed his recommendation that a diplomatic reference should be made to China, pointing out how completely the Tibetans had violated the spirit of the treaty and Trade Regulations, and had refused to be bound by their terms.
But the Government of India again replied that they wished to pursue a policy of conciliation, and did not wish to make any serious representations to the Chinese Government. They repeated that trade had increased, and as regards demarcation of the frontier, they understood from a further report of Mr. Nolan’s that the Tibetans claimed a strip of territory near Giagong, in the north of Sikkim, and these claims the Government of India considered it would not only be impolitic but inequitable to ignore. The Viceroy therefore wrote to the Chinese Resident, suggesting that Chinese and Tibetan delegates should be sent to Gantok, the capital of Sikkim, to meet Mr. White there, and proceed with him to Giagong to make a local inquiry, but that no actual demarcation should take place until the reports of the results of the inquiry had taken place.
And so the game rolled on, and nothing whatever resulted. The Chinese Resident was superseded, and the Chinese asked that action should be deferred till the new one arrived. The new Resident came, and wrote that the Tibetans are "naturally doltish, and prone to doubts and misgivings," and it would be best therefore that they should “personally inspect the line of demarcation mentioned in the treaty,” though a Tibetan representative had been with the Chinese Amban when the Convention was made, and had ample opportunity during the years that agreement took in negotiating to inspect and to give the views of his Government upon it. And so it resulted that when, at the conclusion of five years from the signing of the Trade Regulations, the Secretary of State asked the Government of India for “a full report, both on the progress made since the date of that agreement towards the settlement of the frontier, and on the extent to which the trade stipulations of the treaty and Convention had been operative,” the Bengal Government had to reply[[10]] that the boundary between Sikkim and Tibet, as laid down in Article I. of the Convention, had not yet been demarcated, owing to the refusal of the Tibetans to abide by the terms of the Convention, and to their claiming a tract of land to the north of Donkya-la, Giagong, and the Lonakh Valley; and that the trade stipulations contained in the Regulations, had been inoperative. The Tibetans had prevented Yatung becoming a real trade-mart; absolutely no business was transacted there, and it was merely a registering post for goods passing between Tibet and India, and the proclamation of the place as a mart had in no way influenced the trade between the two countries, for what small increase there was appeared to be mainly due to, and might have been expected from, the restoration of peace between the British Government and Tibet.
This was the net result of the policy of conciliation and forbearance towards the Tibetans and of reliance on the Chinese Central Government, which had been pursued from 1873.
CHAPTER VI
SECURING THE TREATY RIGHTS
Now that five years had elapsed since the Trade Regulations were concluded, and they were, according to their provisions, subject to revision, the Government of India began to consider any practical measures for securing fuller facilities for trade. The Convention of 1890 and the Trade Regulations of 1893 were intended to provide these facilities, but so far none had been obtained; and the Indian Government thought that, as the Tibetans attached great importance to retaining the Giagong piece of territory in Northern Sikkim, and as we had no real desire to hold it, there might be advantage in conceding that point if the Tibetans would, on their side, make some equivalent concession. They might, it was thought, concede to us the point for which we had contended when negotiating the Trade Regulations, and recognize Phari as the trade-mart in place of the quite useless Yatung. Lord Salisbury[[11]] agreed that some action was necessary, but it seemed to him that, as during recent years Chinese advisory authority in Tibet had been little more than nominal, and the correspondence of the Government of India even seemed to show that it was practically nonexistent, it would be preferable to open direct communication between the Government of India and the Tibetan authorities.
Lord Curzon therefore commenced, in the autumn of 1899, a series of attempts to open up direct communication with them. Ugyen Kázi, the Bhutanese Agent in Darjiling, who was accustomed to visit Tibet for trade purposes, was first employed to write a letter on his own behalf to the Dalai Lama, suggesting, in general terms, that a high Tibetan official should be sent to discuss the frontier and trade questions. This letter met with an unfavourable response. Captain Kennion, the Assistant to the Resident in Kashmir, who annually visits Leh and the Western Tibet frontier, was then charged with a letter from the Viceroy to the Dalai Lama, which he was to give to the Tibetan officials in Gartok; but six months after this was returned to Captain Kennion, with the intimation that the officials had not dared, in the face of the regulations against the intrusion of foreigners into Tibet, to send it to Lhasa. These two methods having failed, Ugyen Kázi was entrusted with another letter from the Viceroy to the Dalai Lama, which he was himself to present at Lhasa. In August, 1901, he returned from Lhasa, reporting that the Dalai Lama declined to reply to it, stating as his reason that the matter was not one for him to settle, but must be discussed fully in Council with the Amban, the Ministers, and the Lamas, and the letter was brought back with the seal intact.