CHAPTER II
TURNER'S MISSION, 1782
WARREN HASTINGS was not content with a single effort to reopen the commercial and friendly intercourse which in former times had subsisted between Tibet and India. As he had expected little from the first move, so he had always intended to work continuously with the same end in view, hoping to eventually gain that end by repeated efforts over long periods.
Bogle returned to Calcutta in June, 1775, and in November of the same year Hastings deputed Dr. Hamilton, who had accompanied him to Tibet, on a second mission to Bhutan. Hamilton spent some months in Bhutan, inquiring into and settling certain causes of dispute ; and in July, 1777, he was sent on a third mission to Bhutan to congratulate a new Deb Raja on his succession. Thus, as Markham points out, Warren Hastings, by keeping up a regular intercourse with the Bhutan rulers, by maintaining a correspondence with the Tashi Lama, and by means of an annual fair at Rangpur, prevented the opening made by Bogle from again being closed.
Warren Hastings also intended to send another mission to Tibet itself, and in 1779 Bogle was appointed Envoy for a second time. But in the meanwhile the Tashi Lama had decided to undertake a journey to Peking to visit the Chinese Emperor. Bogle, therefore, was to have been sent to Peking to meet the Lama there, but, most disastrously for all friendly intercourse . between Tibet and India, the Lama died in Peking in November 1780, and Bogle himself died at Calcutta in April, 1781.
The success of Asiatic affairs depends so much on the
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