The international position of independent Tibet from 1913 to 1933 was, in the language of the time, anomalous. The country administered itself, conducted its own foreign relations and was governed by its own institutions; but no foreign government formally extended de jure recognition. Tibet's external relations were, in effect, a four-way set of bilateral arrangements: with the British Indian government, which provided the country's principal diplomatic interlocutor and its only significant supplier of arms and modern goods; with the Republic of China, which continued to assert Chinese sovereignty over the plateau but whose actual capacity to enforce that claim was negligible; with the Soviet Union (after 1922), to which Tibet related principally through the Mongolian intermediary; and with the Himalayan and Inner Asian states — Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, and the Mongolian People's Republic — with which substantively bilateral relationships existed.
The Simla Conference
The conference at Simla — the British Indian government's summer capital, in the western Himalayan foothills — convened from October 1913 to July 1914 with the formal purpose of settling the question of Tibetan status, the frontier between Tibet and British India, and the frontier between Tibet and China. The British delegate, Sir Henry McMahon, foreign secretary of the Indian government, intended a tripartite settlement in which the British, the Chinese and the Tibetans would all be signatories on equal terms. The Tibetan delegate, Lonchen Shatra, came with substantial documentary preparation — including territorial claims that extended to the entirety of the cultural Tibetan area including all of Kham and Amdo — and with the substantial diplomatic skill of a senior member of the Lhasa Kashag. The Chinese delegate, Ivan Chen, of the Yuan Shikai foreign ministry, came with the formal Chinese position that Tibet was an integral part of the Republic of China and that the conference's only legitimate subject was the delimitation of internal administrative arrangements.
The McMahon compromise of April 1914 distinguished between Outer Tibet (the central plateau west of the upper Yangtze, including Ü, Tsang and western Kham) and Inner Tibet (the eastern Tibetan-speaking regions of Kham and Amdo that had been progressively administered by Chinese provincial governments). Outer Tibet would be substantively autonomous under the suzerainty (not sovereignty) of China; Inner Tibet would remain under Chinese administration; the boundary between them would be the upper Yangtze line. The British and Tibetan delegates initialled the convention on the 27th of April 1914; the Chinese delegate initialled the document but the Chinese government in Peking subsequently refused to ratify. The convention was formally signed by McMahon and Lonchen Shatra on the 3rd of July 1914, with a published declaration that it constituted a bilateral British-Tibetan agreement and that the Chinese government was excluded from its benefits — particularly the new commercial concessions — for so long as it refused ratification.
The McMahon Line
The McMahon Line — the part of the Simla settlement that has had the most consequential subsequent history — delineated the frontier between British India and Tibet from Bhutan to Burma, along a line that approximately followed the crest of the Himalayas through what is now Arunachal Pradesh. The line had been negotiated as a confidential bilateral agreement between McMahon and Lonchen Shatra in March 1914, separately from the broader tripartite work, and was annexed to the Simla Convention. The line transferred to British India the Tawang tract (the headwater region of the Brahmaputra above Bhutan, religiously significant to the Tibetan Gelug establishment) and substantial other tracts that had previously been considered Tibetan or contested.
The Chinese government's refusal to ratify the Simla Convention had the consequence that the McMahon Line had no formally tripartite status. The Republic of China declined to accept the Indian frontier as so delineated, and the People's Republic of China continued the same refusal after 1949. The Sino-Indian War of October-November 1962 was, at one level of analysis, the Chinese repudiation of the McMahon Line by force; the subsequent ceasefire returned the de facto frontier substantially to the McMahon Line as previously administered by the Indian government.
Charles Bell
The principal architect of the Anglo-Tibetan diplomatic relationship of the 1913–33 period was Sir Charles Bell, the political officer in Sikkim from 1908 to 1918, who had become the personal confidant of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama during the Indian exile of 1910–12 and who served as the Indian government's principal Tibet expert through the war and after. Bell's year-long mission to Lhasa in November 1920 – October 1921 — the first visit by an accredited British representative to Lhasa since the 1904 Younghusband Expedition — established the working pattern of British-Tibetan relations for the following thirty years: regular but informal correspondence and occasional missions, conducted through Sikkim and the Indian government rather than through London, with substantial discretion accorded to the political officers at Gyantse and at Lhasa (the resident British mission was established in 1936 and continued under Indian government auspices after 1947).
Bell's three books on Tibet — Tibet Past and Present (1924), The People of Tibet (1928) and The Religion of Tibet (1931) — and the posthumous Portrait of the Dalai Lama (1946) constitute the principal early-twentieth-century English-language scholarly account of the country. The political documents and diaries he kept were donated to the British Library after his death in 1945 and constitute, with the parallel correspondence kept by Hugh Richardson (the last British representative in Lhasa, 1936–40 and 1946–50), the primary documentary archive for the period.
The Republic of China
The relationship between Lhasa and the successive Chinese republican governments — the Yuan Shikai administration to 1916, the warlord period to 1928, the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek from 1928, the wartime Nationalist Government from 1937 — was substantively defined by the Chinese government's continuous formal assertion of sovereignty over Tibet and its continuous practical incapacity to exercise that sovereignty. The Chinese government refused to recognise Tibetan passports, refused to receive Tibetan diplomatic representatives in the capacity of foreign envoys, and continued to maintain a Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (later the Tibet Office at Nanjing) that received Tibetan delegations as if they were domestic Chinese provincial representatives.
The Tibetan position was the reciprocal: that the patron-priest relationship had ended with the Qing dynasty, that the new Chinese republic was a separate state with which Tibet had no constitutional relationship, and that any future bilateral arrangement would have to be negotiated as between sovereign states. The practical accommodation through the period was that the Chinese Nationalist government maintained an unofficial mission at Lhasa from 1934 (under the cover of a condolence delegation for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's funeral, which never returned to China); the Tibetan government similarly maintained an unofficial mission at Nanjing and Chongqing through the 1930s and 1940s. Neither party formally recognised the other's representatives but both substantively accepted their presence.
The Soviet question
The Soviet Union's relations with Tibet, after the closure of the Dorzhiev avenue in 1917 and the 1921 establishment of the Mongolian People's Republic, were conducted indirectly through the Mongolian government and through the Buryat-Mongolian communities of the Soviet Far East. The 1924 Soviet-Mongolian treaty effectively foreclosed any further Russian diplomatic initiative toward Lhasa: Outer Mongolia had become a Soviet satellite, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu had died in 1924 and his line had been suppressed by the Mongolian Communist authorities, and the Tibet-Mongolia treaty of 1913 became politically irrelevant. The 1933 prediction of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (chapter III above) referred specifically to the Mongolian model as the warning case.
Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim
The Himalayan states with which Tibet conducted substantively bilateral relations were Nepal, Bhutan and (under British protection) Sikkim. The Tibet-Nepal Treaty of 1856 — concluded after the Gorkha-Tibetan war of 1855–56 — continued to govern the bilateral relationship through the entire 1913–51 period; the treaty provided for substantial Nepalese trading privileges in Tibet, the resident Nepalese mission in Lhasa, and the maintenance of approximately 2,000 Newar-Nepali merchants in the Lhasa commercial sector. The Bhutanese relationship was managed through the Tibet-Bhutan trade routes and through religious institutions; the Sikkim relationship was substantially conducted through the British political officer.
The international position that resulted from these arrangements was sufficient for Tibet's purposes through the 1920s and 1930s, when no major power had a sustained interest in altering the status quo. It was not sufficient for Tibet's purposes in 1949–50, when the Chinese Communist Party's military reunification of China extended to the plateau and no major power was willing to convert its informal acceptance of Tibetan autonomy into the formal recognition that would have entailed a willingness to defend it.
End of Chapter IV