Although the British had not yet grasped the fact, far grander visions now occupied the mind of the new Tsar Nicholas than the annexation of Chitral, or even the conquest of India. Under the persuasive influence of his Finance Minister, Count Witte, he dreamed of opening up to Russia the whole of the Far East, with its vast resources and markets, before these fell to other predators. It would thus become his India. Russia would be a great economic power, as well as a great military one. Witte knew just how to feed his sovereign’s dreams with visions of a golden future for Russia. ‘From the shores of the Pacific, and the heights of the Himalayas,’ he declared, ‘Russia will not only dominate the affairs of Asia, but those of Europe also.’ And while his grand design would extend Russia’s resources to the full, it involved no risk of war – or so he believed. To wrest India from the British was one thing, but to capture its trade was another.
Witte’s plan involved the construction of the greatest railway the world had ever seen. It would run for 4,500 miles across Russia, from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok and Port Arthur in the east. Indeed, work had already begun on it, starting simultaneously at either end, although it was not expected to be completed for at least twelve years. When finished, Witte calculated, it would be capable of carrying merchandise and raw materials from Europe to the Pacific and vice versa in less than half the time it took by sea. It would thus attract not merely Russian commercial traffic, he reasoned, but also that of other nations, thereby seriously threatening the sea routes which served as Britain’s economic arteries. But there was much more to it than that. The railway would enable Russia to exploit its own enormous but still untapped resources in the inhospitable Siberian wastes through which it would run. Entire communities from overcrowded parts of European Russia could be moved eastwards by railway, to work both on its construction and also in the new towns along its length. And in time of war its role could be crucial, for it could be used to rush – at 15 miles an hour – troops and munitions eastwards to a Far Eastern war zone, without risk of interference by the navies of Britain or any other power.
Even that, however, was not all that Witte dangled before the impressionable Nicholas in his vision of the future. In 1893, the year before Nicholas’s accession, an astute Buryat Mongol named Peter Badmayev, a lecturer in Mongolian at St Petersburg, had submitted to Alexander III an ambitious plan for bringing parts of the Chinese Empire, including Tibet and Mongolia, under Russian sway. This could be done, he assured Alexander, without any risk of war and at comparatively little cost by fomenting large-scale insurrections against the already enfeebled and universally disliked Manchus. To accomplish it he proposed the setting up of a trading company, to be run by himself, whose real purpose would be to incite the population against their alien rulers. Alexander, however, turned the scheme down, calling it: ‘so fantastic . . . that it is hard to believe in the possibility of success’. But that did not deter Count Witte from reviving it after Alexander’s death, and using it to excite Nicholas’s expansionist dreams. And in this he appears to have had some success. Badmayev’s company, with an initial capital of two million roubles, was set up, and Nicholas expressed to his Minister of War, General Kuropatkin, a wish to add Tibet to his domains. It is perhaps more than a coincidence, therefore, that around this time a growing number of reports began to reach Calcutta of shadowy Russian agents, usually Buryat Mongol subjects of Tsar Nicholas’s, travelling between St Petersburg and Lhasa. All appeared to be somehow connected with the mysterious Badmayev.
Whatever the truth about Badmayev’s machinations in Tibet and Mongolia, elsewhere in the Far East the major European powers were at that moment engaged in a frantic scramble for their share of the dying Manchu empire, and anything else that was going. The Germans, late starters in the colonial game, began the immediate rush, fearing lest the other powers gain a monopoly of the world’s markets and resources. Their first requirement was a naval base and coaling station for their new Far Eastern fleet somewhere on China’s northern coastline. The murder of two German missionaries by Chinese bandits in November 1897 gave them their chance. By way of reprisal, Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops seized nearby Kiaochow, known subsequently as Tsingtao, on which the Russians already had their eye. Peking was given little choice but to grant Germany a ninety-nine-year lease on it, together with mining and railway concessions. In the ensuing scrimmage, Britain and France gained further concessions, while Russia, ever posing as China’s protector, obtained the warm-water naval base of Port Arthur and its immediate hinterland. The Russians further gained a crucial strategic concession – agreement to link the base by rail to the now half-completed Trans-Siberian line. The United States, too, joined the Far Eastern scramble, acquiring in 1898 Hawaii, Wake, Guam and the Philippines, which Russia, Germany and Japan were known to covet.
While this was taking place on the periphery of Great Game territory, something occurred in India which was to have a profound effect on the game itself. George Curzon, that arch-Russophobe, had been appointed Viceroy of India. At the age of only 39, and newly raised to the peerage, he had thus achieved his boyhood dream. Needless to say, the hawks were delighted, for Curzon’s views on the Russian threat to India were well known. St Petersburg’s ultimate ambition, he was convinced, was the domination of the whole of Asia, a goal it sought to achieve step by step. It was a remorseless process which must be resisted at every stage. ‘If Russia is entitled to these ambitions,’ Curzon wrote, still more is Britain entitled, nay compelled, to defend that which she has won, and to resist the minor encroachments which are only part of a larger plan.’ He was confident, moreover, that with firm action the Russian steamroller could be halted. ‘I will no more admit’, he declared, ‘that an irresistible destiny is going to plant Russia in the Persian Gulf than at Kabul or Constantinople. South of a certain line in Asia her future is much more what we choose to make it than what she can make it herself.’ It need hardly be said that his appointment as Viceroy was to cause alarm in St Petersburg.
Persia, particularly the Gulf, was seen by Curzon as an area especially vulnerable to further Russian penetration. Already St Petersburg was beginning to show an interest in acquiring a port there, and even in building a railway for the Shah from Isfahan to the coast. It was worrying enough, he wrote to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, in April 1899, having to defend India from a Russian overland attack, without the added menace of a seaborne one. He urged the Cabinet to make it quite clear to both St Petersburg and Teheran that Britain would never allow southern Persia to fall under any foreign influence other than her own. Nor were the Russians alone in showing an interest in the Gulf, for both Germany and France were beginning to challenge British supremacy there. The Cabinet, however, did not appear unduly perturbed, causing Curzon to write to Hamilton: ‘I do not suppose that Lord Salisbury will be persuaded to lift a little finger to save Persia . . . We are slowly – no, I think I may say swiftly – paving the way for the total extinction of our influence in that country.’ Afghanistan, too, was a worry to Curzon, despite Britain’s long-standing treaty with Abdur Rahman and the settlement of the northern frontier with Russia. For intelligence began to reach Calcutta that Russian officials in Transcaspia, including the governors of Ashkhabad and Merv, were endeavouring to communicate with the Emir directly, and not, as St Petersburg had agreed, through the Foreign Office in London. In the event, the Russians were rebuffed by Abdur Rahman, and a crisis was averted. It was to Tibet, however, that the focus of the Great Game now shifted, as word was received in India that twice within twelve months an emissary from the Dalai Lama had visited St Petersburg, where he had been warmly welcomed by the Tsar.
The Russians have always insisted that the comings and goings of this emissary – a Buryat Mongol named Aguan Dorjief – were purely religious, and without any political significance. Indeed, it could not be denied that the Tsar had many Buddhists of the Tibetan school among his Buryat subjects in southern Siberia. What was more natural, therefore, than for spiritual contacts to be made between a Christian head of state and a Buddhist one? But Curzon, for one, was unconvinced. He felt fairly certain that Dorjief, far from being a simple Buddhist monk, was working on behalf of Tsar Nicholas against Britain’s interests in Asia. The discovery that Dorjief was a close friend of Peter Badmayev’s, who was now the Tsar’s adviser on Tibetan affairs, served only to confirm Curzon’s suspicions. The final truth will almost certainly never be known, although most scholars today believe that British fears were largely groundless, Nicholas being beset by too many problems of his own to be thinking about Tibet. However, writing in 1924, a respected German traveller and Central Asian scholar, Wilhelm Filchner, claimed that between 1900 and 1902 there was an all-out drive by St Petersburg to secure Tibet for Russia. In Storm Over Asia: Experiences of a Secret Diplomatic Agent, Filchner described in detail the activities of a Buryat Mongol named Zerempil, a man even more shadowy than Badmayev or Dorjief, with whom he was closely associated. Among other things, Filchner claims, Zerempil was used by the ‘Indian Section’ of the Russian General Staff to smuggle arms into Tibet. If Zerempil, who was said to go under a variety of names and guises, did in fact exist, then he managed to go undetected by the British intelligence services, for there are no references to him in the archives at that time.
But it was the behaviour of the Tibetans themselves rather than of the Russians that finally convinced the new Viceroy that something underhand was going on between Lhasa and St Petersburg. Twice he had written to the Dalai Lama raising the question of trade and other matters, but each time the letter had been returned unopened. And yet the Tibetan God-king appeared to be on excellent terms with the Russians, as even the St Petersburg newspapers were beginning to claim. Curzon was both genuinely alarmed, lest some secret treaty was being forged behind his back, and also personally affronted by this rebuff to his authority by a political nonentity like the Dalai Lama. By the beginning of 1903 he was convinced that the only effective course of action was for the Indian government to dispatch a mission to Lhasa – using force if necessary – to discover the truth about Russian activities there, and to put Britain’s relations with Tibet on a firm and proper basis.
Curzon found the home government – which had only just extricated itself from a humiliating and unpopular war with the Boers – reluctant to embark on any further adventures, especially in Central Asia where there was the added danger of a Russian countermove. Nonetheless, that April he managed to get the Cabinet’s approval for a small escorted mission to visit Khamba Jong, just inside Tibet, where it would endeavour to hold talks with the Tibetans. The political officer chosen by Curzon to lead the mission was one whose earlier Great Game exploits he much admired – Major Francis Younghusband, now aged 40, and promoted to colonel for the occasion. However, the Tibetans refused to negotiate – except on the British side of the frontier – and withdrew into their fortress, or jong. After a stalemate lasting several months, the mission was recalled to India, having achieved nothing and lost considerable face.
Stung by this second rebuff by his puny neighbours, the Viceroy persuaded London to agree to a second mission. This time it would be accompanied by a 1,000-strong military escort, and would venture considerably further into Tibet. Such a show of force, Curzon believed, would surely bring the Tibetans to heel. Strict orders were given, however, that the mission was to proceed no further than the great fortress at Gyantse, half-way to Lhasa. At the same time St Petersburg and Peking – the latter being the nominal ruler of Tibet – were officially notified of Britain’s intended move. The Russians immediately lodged a strong protest. But this was brushed aside by London, it being pointed out firmly that this move was purely temporary, and in no way comparable with their own permanent annexation of vast areas of Central Asia. Again Colonel Younghusband was chosen to head the mission, with a brigadier-general in command of the Gurkha and Sikh escort. Led by a sepoy bearing a Union Jack, the party crossed the passes into Tibet on December 12, 1903. Behind, in the snow, trailed a straggling column of 10,000 coolies, 7,000 mules and 4,000 yaks, together carrying the expedition’s baggage, including champagne for the officers. So began the last forward move in the Great Game, and what would prove to be one of the most contentious episodes in British history. At the same time the Russians, seemingly at the height of their power in Asia, were about to suffer a succession of spectacular disasters there. Between them, these two events were to mark the beginning of the end of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia.
As the Younghusband mission made its way northwards towards Gyantse, much was happening elsewhere in Asia, particularly in China. In the summer of 1900, taking the European powers by surprise, had come the Boxer Uprising. It sprang from a bitter resentment among the Chinese towards the ‘foreign devils’ who, taking advantage of their weakness, were acquiring treaty ports and other commercial and diplomatic privileges. The rebellion began in Tientsin with the massacre of Christian missionaries and the lynching of the French consul, and was finally put down by a six-nation relief force which occupied (and looted) Peking. But although the uprising was over, it was to have far-reaching consequences in Manchuria, where the Russians had feared for the safety of their newly-built railway at the hands of the Boxers. For, among many other grievances, the rebels were convinced that the construction of railways had upset the natural harmony of man, and had thus been responsible for recent droughts and flooding. In order to protect their expensive investment there – or so St Petersburg insisted – the Russians had at once moved 170,000 troops into Manchuria. It was one of the largest such concentrations of military might ever seen in Asia, and it caused considerable alarm among other powers with interests there, especially Japan.
During the protracted negotiations which followed the crushing of the Boxers, considerable pressure was put on St Petersburg to withdraw its troops now that the danger was over. The Russians were clearly extremely reluctant, though finally they agreed to do so, but in three stages. As it turned out, they only honoured the first of these promised withdrawals, for in the meantime Count Witte and the more moderate of his ministerial colleagues had been eased out of power by those close to Tsar Nicholas who favoured a more aggressive foreign policy. ‘Russia has been made, not by diplomacy, but by bayonets,’ declared the new Minister of the Interior, ‘and we must decide the questions at issue with China and Japan with bayonets and not with pens.’ It now became increasingly obvious that the Russians, as so often before in Asia, intended to stay put. To the British it was merely another broken promise by St Petersburg, but to the Japanese it was the last straw.
For many months the Japanese had watched with growing apprehension the Russian military and naval build-up in the Far East, which directly threatened their own interests there. They had noted with particular alarm the Russians’ relentless infiltration of Korea, for this brought them dangerously close to Japan’s own shores. The Japanese knew, moreover, that time was against them. Once the Trans-Siberian Railway was finished, the Russians would be able to bring up vast numbers of troops, heavy artillery and other war materials from Europe in the event of war. For these reasons, and after much agonising, the Japanese High Command decided to do what the British, wisely or otherwise, had never risked doing in Central Asia. This was to meet the Russian threat head on. On February 8, 1904, the Japanese struck without warning. Their target was the great Russian naval base at Port Arthur. The Russo-Japanese War had begun.
News of its outbreak reached the Younghusband mission as it approached the small village of Guru, half-way to Gyantse, now only fifty miles off. Without spilling a drop of Tibetan blood, Younghusband and his escort had successfully overcome three major obstacles – the 14,000-foot Jelap Pass, a defensive wall which the Tibetans had built across their path, and the fortress at Phari, which at 15,000 feet was said to be the highest in the world. Each had fallen without a fight. It was at this moment that the Tibetan mood began to change, with the arrival at Guru of a group of warrior monks from Lhasa, the capital, who had orders to halt the British advance. They were accompanied by 1,500 Tibetan troops armed with matchlocks and sacred charms – each one bearing the Dalai Lama’s personal seal. These, their priests promised them, would make them bullet-proof.
Younghusband’s escort commander, Brigadier-General James Macdonald, quickly moved his Gurkhas and Sikhs into position around the Tibetans, wholly surrounding them. Then the mission’s Tibetan-speaking intelligence officer, Captain Frederick O’Connor, was sent to call for them to lay down their arms. But the Tibetan commander ignored him, muttering incomprehensibly to himself. Orders were now given by Macdonald for the Tibetans to be disarmed, forcibly if necessary, and sepoys detailed for this task began to wrestle the matchlocks from their reluctant hands. This was too much for the Tibetan commander. Drawing a revolver from beneath his robes, he blew the jaw off a nearby sepoy, at the same time calling on his troops to fight. The Tibetans immediately hurled themselves on the escort, only to be shot down by the highly trained Gurkhas and Sikhs. In less than four minutes, as their medieval army disintegrated before the murderous fire of modern weaponry, nearly 700 ill-armed and ragged Tibetans lay dead or dying on the plain.
‘It was a terrible and ghastly business,’ wrote Younghusband, echoing the feelings of all the officers and men. As head of the mission, however, he had taken no part in the killing, and had hoped for another bloodless victory. Why Macdonald did not order an immediate ceasefire the instant he saw what was happening is not clear. As it was, the firing continued while the Tibetans, not realising perhaps what was happening, streamed slowly away across the plain. Possibly Macdonald did try to halt the killing, but was not heard above the sound of the machine-guns and other clamour. As the subaltern commanding the machine-guns wrote in a letter to his parents: ‘I hope I shall never have to shoot down men walking away again.’ When word of the massacre reached London, it was to outrage liberal opinion, even though the mission doctors worked around the clock trying to save the lives of as many of the Tibetan wounded as possible. Remarkable stoicism was shown by the latter, some of whom were badly mutilated. One man, who had lost both his legs, joked pitifully with the surgeons: ‘Next time I shall have to be a hero, as I can no longer run away.’ The wounded found it hard to understand, Younghusband noted, ‘why we should try to take their lives one day and try to save them the next.’ They had expected to be shot out of hand.
Far from slackening, Tibetan resistance grew stiffer as the British advance on Gyantse was resumed. Tibetan casualties, too, continued to mount. At the spectacular Red Idol Gorge, twenty miles from Gyantse, 200 more perished before the mission could safely pass through the defile. In what was possibly the highest engagement ever fought, a further 400 Tibetans died in the fierce struggle for the 16,000-foot Karo Pass. British casualties amounted to only 5 killed and 13 wounded. In view of their unexpected resistance (organised by the mysterious Zerempil, according to the German traveller Filchner), London foresaw that the Tibetans were unlikely to agree to talks with Younghusband at Gyantse. Younghusband was instructed therefore to warn the Tibetans that unless they did so within a given period, the British would march on Lhasa itself. In view of the sanctity with which they regarded their capital, it was reasoned that this would bring the Tibetans to the negotiating table. But the expiry date passed without any sign of them. Ten days later, on July 5, 1904, the order was given to advance on Lhasa. Considerable excitement was felt by all ranks at the prospect of entering the most secretive city on earth, while the outbreak of the war between Russia and Japan had dispelled any fears of countermoves by St Petersburg.
Before the British could advance, though, the great fortress of Gyantse, perched on a precipitous outcrop of rock high above the town, had to be taken. Macdonald’s attack was launched at four in the morning, after the wall had been breached by concentrated artillery fire. A storming party, led by Lieutenant John Grant, crept forward in the darkness and began the hazardous climb towards the breach. Soon, however, the Tibetans spotted them and began showering large boulders down on them. Grant, revolver in hand, had almost reached the breach when he was knocked violently backwards by a rock. Despite his injuries, the young Gurkha subaltern tried again. This time, watched from below by the entire British force, he made it through the hail of missiles. With several Gurkhas at his heels, he entered the fortress, shooting down a number of the defenders. Moments later the rest of the storming party were through the breach. A fierce struggle for the Tibetan stronghold, which was said to be invincible, ensued. This continued until late afternoon, when Tibetan resistance finally broke. The defenders, who had fought with great courage, now fled, slipping away through secret underground tunnels known only to themselves, or over the walls using ropes. They left behind more than 300 dead and wounded, while British casualties totalled just 4 killed and 30 wounded. Grant was later awarded the Victoria Cross, the only one ever to be won on Tibetan soil.
When news of Gyantse’s fall reached Lhasa, it caused utter dismay. For there was an ancient belief that were the fortress to fall into an invader’s hands the country was doomed. At last this had happened. After overcoming one last stand by the Tibetans, the British reached the banks of the wide and swift-flowing Tsangpo river, the only remaining obstacle between them and Lhasa. The crossing, using canvas boats, took five full days to complete, an officer and two Gurkhas being swept to their deaths in the course of it. The road to the Tibetan capital, barred for so long to the outside world, was now open. Two days later, on August 2, 1904, the British got their first glimpse of the holy city from a nearby hill. Turning in his saddle to his intelligence officer, Younghusband said simply: ‘Well, O’Connor, there it is at last.’ Fifteen years earlier, as a young subaltern, he had dreamed of entering Lhasa disguised as a Yarkandi trader, but his superiors had turned down the idea as too perilous. Since then, a succession of European travellers had tried to get there, though all had been turned back. The next day, with only a small escort, and in full diplomatic regalia, Younghusband rode into the holy city.