The Snow Lion and the British Lion continues....

The Tibetan understanding of their boundary with China is worth recording. Their belief is that the Sino-Tibetan frontier lies well east of the Drichu (Yangtse River), starting from Lake Koko Nor in the north, to east of Xining in the north-east and not too far to the west of the Gansu-Shensi border, running south thereafter to include the country of the Goloks in the bend of the Machu River (the Yellow River), then bulging east and than again south along Longitude 103 degrees East in Kham Province, the traditional ethnic dividing line between Tibet and China, to Kangding enclosing Horhok, Gyalrong, Nyagrong and Dartsedo (Tatsienlu to the Chinese). Continuing southwards the frontier includes the Mili area and the northern part of what is presently China’s Yunnan Province, south to approximately Latitude 26 degrees North.

It is ostensibly on the issue of the blue line dividing ‘Inner Tibet’ and ‘Outer Tibet’ that China did not agree with the terms of the agreement arrived at between British India and Tibet, but the much bigger unstated reason was the huge loss of face involved for China. Tibet, which they had all along been considering their vassal state, signing an agreement with a foreign power, was a blow to their prestige.

The new Republic of China, did of course, make
the point that the Chinese representative at the Shimla talks, Chen I-fan, did not have the
authority to sign the agreement even as a witness. They also made clear that his signing did not mean that the Government of China had accepted the division of Tibet along the blue line suggested by Sir Henry McMahon, the Foreign Secretary of the Government of India.

But the loss of face would not have allowed them to agree officially, even if they had found nothing objectionable from the Chinese point of view, or nothing that might have hurt Han China’s national interests.

To be continued....