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Duel in the Snows
In the year of his great coronation durbar and perhaps as a continuation of it by other means, London sanctioned the transformation of the Tibet Frontier Commission into an armed mission to Lhasa. The ostensible reason was to lean on the Dalai Lama, who had rebuffed Curzon's trade proposals and sent a Siberian lama as emissary to the Tsar's court; the reality was territorial greed and Curzonian peevishness (he was "indignant that a community of unarmed monks should set us perpetually at defiance"). Tibet was the era's ultima Thule, a Buddhist theocracy beyond the snows, about as far up country as could be reached except that it didn't admit Europeans, so Brits could imagine it how they needed it to be: sublimely divine or brutishly idol-worshipping. While the Tibetans had their own tanka-like internal diagram of the centrality of their "inner land", Allen points out their GDP was measured in prayer and meditation. Everything was set for a confrontation between mutual incomprehensions when Francis Younghusband, the Tibet Commissioner—senior political officer—advanced with 3,000 soldiers, plus the Coolie Corps and abused mules as logistical support (Sikkimese yaks having been abandoned after anthrax) over the Lovely Level pass one morning in December 1903. Younghusband, who had played the glamorous Great Game for 20 years, was exactly the Raj supremacist Curzon wanted: originally it was planned that he should march to Lhasa and "put down any resistance," that classic euphemism of occupation, but London had agreed to no more than diplomacy with an armed escort, which armaments forethoughtfully included the latest Lee Enfield rifles and two of Sir Hiram Maxim's improved machine guns, 2,000 rounds in three minutes. It was a late parade of Empire; and Allen, working from Kodak snaps, vain glorious memoirs and inglorious diaries ("a fearful sight and the smell was awful") follows the show, collecting the yak-dung: essential since it was the main fuel source for the mission camps, ringing with coughs. Allen's histories always have a unique focal length, bringing the past near with extreme clarity; his focus here is sharpened by personal fieldwork among the blue poppies. What a procession he describes: Younghusband locked in reciprocal resentment with the escort commander, General James Macdonald, a wary, weary sapper scarred by the pacification of Uganda; their contention reflected the divergence between the old attitude to empire as a playground for aristo egos (there were 14 Marlburians on the expedition; they held an Old Boys' dinner) and empire as a burden shouldered by career engineers. Colonel Doctor Austin Waddell of the Indian Medical Service, who glared disapprovingly in Allen's previous book, The Buddha and the Sahibs, was drafted in as intelligence expert. He once tried to walk to Lhasa in disguise with surveying instruments hidden in his prayer wheel, but his blue eyes betrayed him; Waddell's condemnation of the monasteries of the Diamond Path for a lack of Presbyterian moral sobriety set the tone for the arrogance of the force. And the rest of the baggage train! But the Maxims commanded the land from the day when the peaceful dispersal of the Tibetan forces turned in a confused second into a massacre - the Tibetans did not run for cover, but walked through the bullets bewildered, until Hadow was so "sickened by the slaughter I ceased fire." The account of the invasion is fine and brisk but Allen, master of aftermath, is most memorable in epilogue. The British government renegotiated more equably the load of reparation Younghusband had dumped on the Tibetans, leaving a power gap through which surged not the Russians but the Chinese. Loot and legit souvenirs rotted alike in the rain at transit camps, although Younghusband went to his grave in Lytchett Minster with, on his coffin, a bronze Buddha generously presented to him by the Regent of Tibet, while the Lhasa Apso pooch came west with the returning column, as did one of the Dalai Lama's wild asses, whose distant progeny may still be alive in Whipsnade Zoo. — The Independent |
THE British invasion of
Tibet in 1903 was an imperial afterthought, a last expansion hatched by
Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon, who is always present at the distant end of
a beeline of just-erected telegraph poles, in this book. When young he
had approached the mystic East via neighbour states of the Raj, and saw
his charge as defending India from Russian adventuring in Central Asia.