The independence of Tibet was not formally declared in a single instrument or on a single date but in a sequence of administrative actions and political proclamations during the period from the autumn of 1911 to the spring of 1913. The decisive single document — the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's five-point proclamation issued from Lhasa on the 14th of February 1913 (the eighth day of the first month of the Water-Ox year in the Tibetan calendar) — was an authoritative statement of a political reality that had been substantially produced by the events of the preceding eighteen months.
The expulsion of the Qing garrison
The withdrawal of Qing authority from Tibet was prosecuted militarily by the Tibetan government against the Qing units stranded in Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse and the eastern frontier garrisons after the October 1911 Xinhai Revolution had cut their lines of supply and command. The Qing administrative apparatus in Lhasa had been substantially reorganised under General Zhong Ying since the 1910 occupation; the dispatch of news of the dynasty's collapse reached Lhasa in late 1911 by the long route through Calcutta and the British political officer at Gyantse, who delivered it to the regent's office in November.
The Tibetan side of the operations was conducted by Tsarong Dazang Dramdul, then a young military officer of the bodyguard, working with the dob-dob militia of the great monasteries (Drepung, Sera, Ganden) and with the local Lhasa population. The principal engagement was the storming of the Qing-occupied positions on the southern side of the Kyichu river in February 1912, which produced approximately 1,500 Qing surrenders and the expulsion of the remaining Qing personnel via the Sikkim route to British India. The negotiated terms — extracted at gunpoint by the besieging Tibetan forces, but observed in their substance — provided for the safe passage of Chinese personnel through Indian territory back to China, the surrender of all Chinese weapons and ammunition to the Tibetan government, and the formal cession of the amban's residence at Lhasa.
The eastern frontier posts in Kham — Chamdo, Litang, Batang, Markham — were progressively retaken by Tibetan forces or by local Khampa militia during the spring and summer of 1912. The new Republic of China, declared at Nanjing on the 1st of January 1912 and reconstituted under Yuan Shikai at Beijing in March, was at this date in no position to mount a relief expedition: the post-Qing transition required all available military resources for the consolidation of the republic against the southern provincial governments and against Mongolia, which had declared its own independence in November 1911 under the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu.
The Dalai Lama's return
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama remained at Darjeeling and Kalimpong, in northern British India, from his February 1910 arrival until his departure for the plateau in June 1912. The exile had been politically formative. The Lama — who arrived in India aged thirty-three speaking no English and no Hindi, and accustomed to Lhasa's intensely closed political culture — had spent two years in regular contact with the British viceregal administration, with Charles Bell (the political officer in Sikkim, who would become his closest foreign confidant), and with the substantial Buddhist intellectual community of Calcutta. He had travelled to Buddhist holy sites in Bihar and the United Provinces. He had received the diplomatic representatives of the Japanese, Russian and Chinese governments at his Darjeeling residence. He returned to Tibet with a substantially more developed view of the international system than he had possessed in 1909.
The journey north took six months. The Lama re-entered Lhasa formally on the 17th of January 1913. The reception was an act of public political theatre: the population of the city, the monastic representatives of the great Gelug establishments, the senior aristocratic officials, the surviving Tibetan military units, and the foreign representatives — Charles Bell from Sikkim, a Nepalese envoy, the British trade agents from Gyantse and Yatung — gathered for a formal investiture that was, in substance, the resumption of the temporal sovereignty that the 1910 Qing occupation had interrupted.
The five-point proclamation
The five-point proclamation of the 14th of February 1913 — known in Tibetan as the tsa-tsig, "the root document" — is the founding text of independent twentieth-century Tibet. The original was issued in Tibetan; the English text most often quoted is Charles Bell's contemporary translation, refined for publication in Bell's 1946 memoir Portrait of the Dalai Lama.
The five points are conventionally summarised as follows: first, that the relationship between Tibet and China had been one of priest and patron, religious and not political, and that the political relationship had ceased with the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912; second, that the Chinese troops who had occupied Lhasa in 1910 had been expelled and the country was now free of Chinese garrison; third, that the Lama personally resumed temporal rule of Tibet, restoring the dual religious-and-secular system of the Ganden Phodrang; fourth, that Tibetans were to obey the new government and renounce the practices and customs that the proclamation associated with the period of Qing protectorate; fifth, that the boundary with the new republican China was, until further agreement, the line on which Tibetan and Chinese troops had stabilised in the autumn of 1912 — that is, the upper Yangtze river through Kham. The substance of the document was a unilateral declaration of Tibetan independence, qualified only by the Lama's evident wish not to provoke the new Chinese republic into an immediate military response.
The Mongolian treaty
On the 11th of January 1913 — three days before the formal investiture in Lhasa and six weeks before the five-point proclamation — a Tibetan and a Mongolian envoy concluded a treaty of mutual recognition at Urga (Ulaanbaatar). The signatories were Agvan Dorzhiev, plenipotentiary of the Dalai Lama, and Da Lama Rabdanov, representative of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu. The treaty has been the subject of substantial historiographical argument: the Republic of China refused to recognise its validity, on the grounds that neither Lhasa nor Urga had the international personality to conclude treaties; the British and Russian governments declined to express a view on its legal effect; some later Tibetan-government sources have downplayed it as Dorzhiev's personal initiative without proper authorisation. The text, however, is unambiguous on its substance: it speaks of two independent Buddhist states recognising one another and undertaking mutual support against external powers. Its significance is that, for whatever weight it bore in international law, it was the first international agreement that an independent Tibetan government concluded with an independent neighbour, two months before the constitutional moment of February 1913.
The Simla negotiations open
The British Indian government — which had a substantial interest in a stable frontier with Tibet and in regularising the trade and political arrangements that had been improvised since 1904 — proposed a tripartite conference of British, Chinese and Tibetan plenipotentiaries to settle the questions of Tibet's status and frontiers. The conference convened at Simla in October 1913. The British delegate was Sir Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary of the Indian government. The Chinese delegate was Ivan Chen, of the new Chinese republic's foreign ministry. The Tibetan delegate was Lonchen Shatra, the senior member of the Lhasa kashag (cabinet of ministers). The Simla Convention, the McMahon Line and the broader question of Tibet's place between the British and Chinese empires — to which the proclamation of February 1913 had given a sharply different political answer than either London or Beijing was prepared to accept — are the subject of chapter IV.
The proclamation, in any case, set the constitutional terms. From the 14th of February 1913 until the People's Liberation Army's entry into Chamdo in October 1950, the Ganden Phodrang government of Tibet conducted its affairs as an independent state — a status that no major foreign power formally recognised, but which the substantive practice of Tibetan administration, taxation, defence and foreign relations made effective for thirty-eight years.
End of Chapter II