By John Ruwitch
GYANTSE, Tibet, September 9 – Trade agreements snubbed. Letters to the Dalai Lama returned with unbroken seals. Mounting fears the Russians were gaining ground in Tibet.
By mid-1903, Britain’s Viceroy of India had had enough.
So, with London’s blessing, he ordered soldier-adventurer Francis Younghusband — with a detachment of more than 1,000 soldiers, 10,000 porters and thousands of mules and yaks — over the Himalayas and into Tibet to seek “satisfaction”.
The invasion has long been overshadowed by China’s 53-year occupation of the Himalayan region, but it had a lasting impact on Tibet, jarring it out of isolation and reminding the Chinese how vital control of the “Land of Snows” was.
In the most grisly battle en route to Gyantse, where the British hoped to negotiate with the Tibetan government for increased access from India, Younghusband and his well-armed troops slaughtered 700 Tibetans in four minutes.
The Tibetans were armed, in part, with charms they thought would make them bulletproof.
In the garrison town of Gyantse, the British laid siege to a hilltop fort, finally bringing it to its knees with artillery. Another 300 Tibetans were killed or wounded. Just four died on the British side.
“Once Gyantse had collapsed, obviously, then it became much easier for them to advance to Lhasa,” said Patrick French, author of the book “Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer”.
“They waited for a few days to see if negotiators would come, and they didn’t, and they then pushed on to Lhasa itself.”
A hundred years later, in the partly rebuilt remains of the fort that once guarded what is now the bustling town of Gyantse, the “Memorial Hall of Anti-British” tells a version of what happened.
“Tibet is an unalienable part of the motherland,” the museum explanation starts in choppy English.
“In order to safeguard her unification and unite with every nationality, Tibetan people, one stepping into the breech as another fell, once have fought heroically.”
BEFUDDLING LANGUAGE, CLEAR MESSAGE
The language is at times befuddling, but the bows and arrows, cane shields and bullets on display under paintings of battle scenes fill in some of the blanks.
The message: Tibetans died patriotically here, fighting off imperialist aggressors while defending the Chinese motherland.
Indeed, Britain had invaded to defend its interests in the region and ensure the Russian Tsar was not gaining the upper hand in Tibet in the waning days of the Great Game, the 19th century race for influence in Central Asia.
At the time, the Chinese were nowhere to be seen.
In 1903-4, when Younghusband fought through to Gyantse and on to Lhasa, the Qing Dynasty was crumbling and the imperial court’s representative in Lhasa was basically powerless.
Nevertheless, Younghusband’s incursion, with the battle at Gyantse the final straw, strengthened Chinese resolve to assert authority over Tibet.
“The British didn’t really gain any substantive political benefits, apart from the right to put two trade agents inside of Tibet,” French said.
“But what it did do was that it alerted the Chinese government to just how vulnerable they were. In a way it was a sort of wake-up call for successive Chinese governments about how vulnerable they were through Tibet,” he said.
PEACEFUL LIBERATION
The foray also opened up Tibet like never before.
And, incidentally, it was one of the first times journalists were allowed on such a military mission — the original “embedded” reporters. Reuters was there, according to Peter Hopkirk’s book “Trespassers on the Roof of the World”.
French said one journalist, Edmund Candler of the London Daily Mail, lost a hand while trying to get a dispatch out during a battle.
Less then a decade after Younghusband and his troops reached Lhasa, the Qing had collapsed, its reluctance to modernise making it an easy target for powerful Western nations keen to prise open new markets.
In the Chinese civil war that ensued, the memory of the invasion lingered. Nationalists and Communists were both adamant about restaking China’s claim to Tibet.
In 1950, one year after sending the Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan, the Communists “peacefully liberated” Tibet by sending in the People’s Liberation Army.
Nevertheless, the Gyantse fort’s historical significance appears to be largely lost on some of the Chinese who have flooded into Tibet as a result of Beijing’s policy to incorporate the region.
In the shadow of the fort, an ethnic Chinese baker from the northern province of Shanxi, who had lived in Tibet for several months, said he had an idea of what had happened there 100 years ago. But he had never been up the hill for a look.
“I don’t have time,” he said.
