The pilgrim’s enchanted eye gazed out at the sheets of blue ice of the Lake of the Peacock Spots, Tso dom-dongma, illuminated by the light shining off the five great peaks of Kanchenjunga. Then, a grey shroud began to form. “Look at the sky,” the pilgrim’s guide warned. “Those will shortly fall in heavy snow, from which no human means can enable us to escape.” “Why proceed up further,” he remonstrated? “Death awaits us in this desolate place. One more hour, and we shall be gone.”

Less than a month later, in December 1878, the great scholar, adventurer and imperial spy Saratchandra Das had clawed his way past the The Western Flying Medicine Monastery, Nub Mang-din, through the forbidden frontier of Tibet.

The saffron-robed Bengali scholar’s incredible journey—among the greatest feats in the history of spycraft—would lay the foundations for the war China and India fought sixty years ago this week. The expedition would set off a bloody struggle to draw borders through the inner Himalaya between two great empires, the Qing and the British.

Facing out across the Line of Actual Control, the armies of the People’s Republic of China and independent India are inheritors of a struggle manufactured by greed, geopolitics, and imperial mapmaking.

The mountains before maps

“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth,” notes the 16th century fantasy novel Journey to the West, telling of the monk Xuanzang’s travels to India, to collect the great Buddhist sutras The emperor Qianlong, fifth of the Qing dynasty, later had a special edition commissioned to illustrate the strange worlds of which the novel told. The map showed Hindustan lay somewhere south of the Kuen Lun range. Like words, maps acquire a life of their own.

There was a line somewhere in the Himalaya—but no one knew just where it ran.

East India Company officials, pushed by Governor-General Warren Hastings, had begun to explore trading with Tibet in the 18th century. England was seeing a surge in demand for commodities from China, historian Vibha Arora has shown….

Full article: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/how-qing-and-british-empires-mapmakers-laid-the-foundations-for-1962-india-china-war/1173532/