IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| India and Tibet : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
202 GYANTSE
action of the Indian Government. They still wanted a1
representative at Lhasa ; and in view of the determined
hostility of the Tibetans, they wanted discretion to occupy
the Chumbi Valley as a guarantee for the fulfilment of
the treaty ; and when the Russians had permanently
stationed thousands of troops in Manchuria, had con-
structed railways, built forts, and established posts, where
seventeen years before I had not seen a single Russian, N
and when they had Consular representatives all along
their border in Chinese Turkestan and Mongolia, it was
hard to see on what grounds they could have objected to
the very mild measures which the Government of India
desired to adopt. In any case, when the Tibetans had
shown, not merely passive obstinacy, but downright hos-
tility, and when, even though it might be the case that, in
the words of Count Lamsdorff to Sir Charles Hardinge,*
the relations between Russia and Tibet were of a purely
religious nature, due solely to the large number of Russian
Buriats who regarded the Dalai Lama as their Pope," it
-was clear that the Tibetans relied on those merely religious
relations as a support against us, the Government of India
might have hoped that their hands would be freed to
enable them to definitely settle up this intrinsically not
very important Tibetan affair. But wider international
considerations " were, as so often happens in Indian affairs,
to tell hardly against the Government of India. Since the
Mission had started into Tibet war between Russia and
Japan had broken out. Our relations with Russia were,
consequently, at a very delicate stage. War was in the
air, and statesmen had to be careful. For the sake of
this insignificant business with Tibet, it would be hardly
worth while endangering our relations with Russia,
especially when her adhesion to our arrangement with
France in regard to Egypt was required. Yet when we
look at the map at the end of this book, and see how far
the Russian frontier is from Tibet and to what a length
our own actually touches it, and when we remember, too,
that there was actually in Lhasa at this time a Russian
subject who had been accustomed to go backwards and
* Blue-book, III., p. 20.
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