The single most consequential thing done to Tibet before 1950 was done by Britain, and it was done for reasons that turned out to be imaginary. In December 1903 a British force crossed the Jelep La from Sikkim with a political officer, Francis Younghusband, at its head and about a thousand rifles behind him. It reached Lhasa in August 1904, imposed a treaty, and left. Nothing about Tibet's position was the same afterwards.
The stated purpose was to settle a boundary dispute in Sikkim and to establish trade marts. The actual purpose was Curzon's conviction, as Viceroy, that Russia was building influence in Lhasa through the Buryat monk Agvan Dorzhiev, who had been the thirteenth Dalai Lama's tutor and had travelled to St Petersburg twice. Curzon believed a Russian protectorate over Tibet was in preparation.
The evidence that was not there
There was no Russian protectorate, no Russian agreement, and no Russian arms. Dorzhiev was a genuine intermediary with genuine ambitions, and the Tsar received him; but St Petersburg had no Tibetan policy worth the name, and the Russian archives opened after 1991 confirmed it.
Curzon's despatches admit as much between the lines and press on anyway. The Great Game had reached the point at which the absence of a rival's activity was read as evidence of its concealment. London was reluctant, restricted the mission's remit repeatedly, and was consistently outmanoeuvred by a Viceroy who allowed each restriction to be overtaken by events on the ground.
The Tibetan government's response was to refuse to negotiate at all, on the correct view that Britain had no standing to demand anything. That refusal was then used as the justification for advancing.
Chumik Shenko
On the 31st of March 1904, near a hot spring at Chumik Shenko, the column met a Tibetan force of perhaps three thousand men holding a wall across the road. Negotiations went on for some days. The British then moved to disarm them at close quarters; a scuffle began, a Tibetan general shot a Sikh sepoy in the jaw, and the British opened fire with two Maxim guns and rifles at a range of a few dozen metres.
Between six and seven hundred Tibetans were killed in a matter of minutes. British losses were a dozen wounded. Lieutenant Arthur Hadow of the Maxim detachment wrote home that he got so sick of the slaughter that he ceased fire, though the general's order had been to make as big a bag as possible.
What unsettled the British most was that the Tibetans did not run. They turned and walked away down the valley, slowly, while the guns fired into their backs — the survivors later explained that the Dalai Lama's amulets had been declared proof against bullets and that running would have been an admission of doubt.
Gyantse and Lhasa
The column fought its way through Gyantse, where the dzong on its rock was stormed on the 6th of July after a breach was opened with ten-pounders, and reached Lhasa on the 3rd of August to find that the Dalai Lama had left for Mongolia four days earlier.
There were no Russians. There were no Russian arms. Younghusband found a city that had no idea why he had come.
The Anglo-Tibetan Convention signed in the Potala on the 7th of September opened three trade marts, imposed an indemnity of 7.5 million rupees, and barred any foreign power from acquiring territory or influence in Tibet without British consent. The indemnity was so large that London, embarrassed, reduced it by two-thirds. Younghusband was reprimanded for exceeding his instructions and then knighted.
What it set in motion
The convention had been signed by Tibetan officials, without Chinese participation, which in Tibetan eyes established that Tibet could make treaties on its own account. That reading is one of the foundations of the later independence case.
Britain then undercut it within two years. The Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1906 confirmed the 1904 terms with Peking, over Tibetan heads, in exchange for a Chinese payment of the indemnity — thereby acknowledging a Chinese authority over Tibet that the original expedition had ignored. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 went further, with both powers agreeing to deal with Tibet only through China.
For China the lesson was direct: a nominal suzerainty that could not keep foreign armies out was worthless. Zhao Erfeng was sent into eastern Tibet in 1905 with instructions to convert it into ordinary provincial administration, and a Chinese force entered Lhasa in February 1910, driving the thirteenth Dalai Lama into exile in India — his second flight in six years, in the opposite direction.
He returned in 1912 as the Qing empire collapsed, expelled the garrison, and declared in February 1913 that Tibet was a small, religious and independent nation. Every element of that situation — the exile, the expulsion, the declaration — descends from a British column that marched into Lhasa looking for Russians who were not there.
End of Chapter II