British India And Tibet

This book, first published in 1960 and revised in 1986, is an important analysis of the under-studied Northern frontier of the British Indian Empire. It considers British relations across the Himalayas, looking at encounters with Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet.

This text explores the diplomatic representatives of the Raj in Tibet. Besides being scholars, spies and empire-builders, they also influenced events in Tibet but as well as shaping our modern understanding of that land.

It is an interesting reflection for those to make who think that we must necessarily have been the aggressive party, that the far-distant primary cause of all our attempts at intercourse with the Tibetans was an act of aggression, not on our part, not on the part of an ambitious Pro-consul, or some headstrong frontier officer, but of the Bhutanese, neighbours, and then vassals, of the Tibetans, who nearly a century and a half ago committed the first actan act of aggressionwhich brought us into relationship with the Tibetans. In the year 1772 they descended into the plains of Bengal and overran Kuch Behar, carried off the Raja as a prisoner, seized his country, and offered such a menace to the British province of Bengal, now only separated from them by a small stream, that when the people of Kuch Behar asked the British Governor for help, he granted their request, and resolved to drive the mountaineers back into their fastnesses. Success attended his efforts, though, as usual, at much sacrifice. We learn that our troops were decimated with disease, and that the malaria proved fatal to Captain Jones, the commander, and many other officers. One can hardly breathe, says Bogle, who passed through the country two years laterfrogs, watery insects, and dank air. And those who have been over that same country since, and seen, if only from a railway train, those deadly swamps, who have felt that suffocating, poisonous atmosphere arising from them, and who have experienced that ghastly, depressing enervation which saps all manhood and all life out of one, can well imagine what those early pioneers must have suffered.

Reproduction of the original.

A short and very informative work on the history of western Tibet including Ladakh. The book has 15 chapters that cover 1) the Greek and Roman authors on the nations of Western Tibet 2) the mission of the Mons to western Tibet 3) the migration of the dards 4) the Chinese records of western Tibet (640-760 AD) 5) the time of the Tibeto-durd Kingdoms (500-1000 AD) 6) the inauguration of the central Tibetan dynasty and its first kings (900-1400 A.D) 7) The days of Tsongkapa and the fall of the first dynasty (1400-1580) 8) the time of the Baltiwars (1560-1640) 9) the great Mongol war 1646, 1647 10) the quarrel for the succession (1680-1780) 11) the last two kings (1780-1843) 12) the fall of the western Tibetan empire (1834-1840) 13) the conquest of Baltistan (1841) 14) war against central Tibet (1841-42). The book ends with 2 appendices that note 1) Rinchana Bhotis career and 2) the Ancient history of Lahore. The book was first published in 1907.