It is apparent from his journal that Manning was not greatly interested in Bhutan. A stay of six weeks during his outbound journey is covered in five pages of his journal, his return visit in just a few lines. It was a country to be traversed rather than explored. Thimphu was by-passed completely. Chinese culture was Manning’s objective and, in Bhutan, the delays, the weather, and troubles with his travelling companion filled him with frustration. He had none of Samuel Davis’s eye for the country’s customs or beauty.
Unfortunately, by the time of the next reports in English, British attitudes had been set by increased confidence over India and advances made on its frontier. Their track culminated in Ashley Eden’s extraordinary humiliation at Punakha, in 1864 – a tale which has entered Bhutanese folklore, but which, for reasons which will quickly become apparent, is barely known in Britain. This, the second chapter in an account of Britain’s early relations with Bhutan and Tibet, rebalances the record. It deals first with Manning’s Lhasa adventure. It concludes with a descent into the kind of war with which the first chapter began.
The Journey of Thomas Manning (1811 – 1812)
Thomas Manning was born in 1772, the second son of a liberally minded Norfolk rector and his wife. Influenced by his unconventional father, he refused to subscribe to the Church articles required for the conferment of his Cambridge degree, but he was well-respected in his milieu, forming close friendships with the master of his college, Dr. Martin Davy, as well as with the eminent physician, George Tuthill, and the classicist, Richard Porson.
Porson became known for his epigrams about William Pitt and Henry Dundas drinking in the House of Commons as war was declared with France:
Your foe in war to overrate,
A maxim is of ancient date:
Then sure ’twas right, in time of trouble,
That our good rulers should see double.
As his biographer put it, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura. The same might be said of Manning’s ‘Epigrammata Necessaria’, on the Caius College ‘bogs’:
Our Founders follow’d Nature’s plan
With wisdom most bewitching
She join’d the belly & ar-e in man
They join’d the bogs & kitchen
And,
On our bogs how unfair this deriding
They’re surely most happily plac’d,
For we see our next dinner providing
All the while we’re discharging our last.[3]
This doggerel notwithstanding, Manning was retained, for some years, as a tutor in mathematics. He published a moderately successful book on arithmetic. He then developed his fascination for China, abandoned his post and, in 1802, travelled to Paris to study Mandarin. It is a measure of his idiosyncrasy that the only solid fruits of his labour were an essay on ‘Chinese Jests’ published in the New Monthly Magazine, and a Chinese ‘dictionary’ which was not published at all. Yet, Manning understood that Britons had to learn Chinese if they were to understand China. Very few had done so: in 1793, not one Englishman was found to interpret during Lord Macartney’s embassy. (He depended on Li Zibiao, an Italian-speaking Chinese priest, trained in Naples.) Yet Manning was not making a point about diplomacy, or commerce. He criticised his countrymen generally for travelling with ‘the chambers of their brain ready furnished,’ for rushing to condemn things which they found were ‘at variance with their preconceived notions.’[4]
One of his ideas was that Chinese mores would be best understood through interaction with ordinary people (not a simple matter, given Canton’s restrictions). In particular, he thought that their concerns would be revealed through their ‘lighter productions’, especially those of their jests that seemed least funny.
One joke which qualifies concerns a doctor, prone to making mistakes, who disposes of the bodies of the babies he has killed by hiding them in his sleeve before dropping them into the river. A servant, sent to keep watch by the head of his household, observes the doctor flinging a body over a bridge:
[He] calls out, ‘You imposter, you base man! How dare you make away with our young master in that manner!’
‘No such thing; no such thing,’ says the doctor coolly, lifting up the sleeve of his left arm. ‘Yours, my friend, is in this sleeve!’
The underlying message concerns popular scepticism over Chinese medical practice. Having made the point, however, Manning explains that some Chinese wore very large sleeves, and none more so than Manchu ladies, who …
… wore them so wide as actually to expose their bodies through them, when they lifted up their arms. And, as through a telescope the curious spectator may more advantageously distinguish the milky way, and the appearances, configurations and movements of the celestial orbs, than by naked inspection, so, by peering through the vista of these sleeves the bystander was so favoured by their amplitude and directing power as to be able to discern with most admirable clearness – not indeed the inward movements of the Ladies’ hearts – but the external movements of their bosom!
Arguably, even in our morbid age, the explanation is funnier than the jest which spawned it.[5]
Manning’s reputation for mathematics preceded him to France: he came to know Lazare Carnot and other members of its intellectual establishment. By July 1802, however, he was meditating a first visit to China. ‘’Tis difficult but not dangerous,’ he wrote to his father before, in June 1803, he was detained upon the resumption of the war with England. He remained a prisoner until early 1805, when Talleyrand obtained for him a passport to travel East. This was exceptional. The reason given was that he was ‘a most celebrated savant.’ Fancifully, Manning decided that he would rather return to England. He asked Talleyrand whether Napoleon might be persuaded to change the terms of his parole. When he was told not to try, he broke them.[6]
Back in England, Manning studied medicine. His determination to visit China had not abated. Journeying in Europe had taught him that much was to be learned ‘not out of books, but out of crawling things called men.’ Though no great supporter of the Company, he knew it needed doctors as well as linguists. In 1806, he asked Sir Joseph Banks for support. On quitting France, he wrote, he had abandoned a plan of travelling to Peking via Russia, as to do so ‘as a fugitive, without competent practical knowledge of the language would be idle.’ Now he wished to stay in Canton, under the Company’s protection, until he had acquired ‘the requisite information.’ Banks was convinced, and Manning left England, in May 1806, reaching China eight months later.
Learning Mandarin was a slow process but, within the year, Manning applied to become an astronomer and physician to the emperor. Unsurprisingly, the suggestion was ignored. Manning lacked the requisite standing, and there were sufficient astronomers already.[7]
Despite the disappointment, Manning wrote to his father in good heart,
I have given petitions to the mandarins here begging leave to go up to Pekin and feel the emperor’s pulse & teach him to calculate eclipses, but I believe they had rather not have his pulse felt by anybody belonging to the English nation whose fame spreads in India rather faster than is agreeable to any of the Asiatic potentates … Well, I have done my duty in trying & the sin now rests upon the hand of the mandarins of Canton if the Great Dragon should lay hold of the moon before the kettledrums are ready to frighten him off …
Already, Manning had developed a second plan:
But what do you think I am going to do now? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. I am going on a visit to the King of Cochinchina! The Company have vessels here employed in the surveying business. They are going to potter about the Paracels this season off the Cochinchina coast; so they first set me down at Turon, which is about a 3 days trip from Macao …
I am not going to Cochinchina from any high idea I have of that country – for I think them a set of ½ civilized vagabonds, but I have two or three objects of some importance. 1st the comparison of the language with that of China. 2ndly the possibility of being employed as a physician in a Cochinchina embassy to Pekin. The rest I’ll not commit to paper at present, because least said is soonest mended.
Manning signed off with a notice of his ambivalent attitude towards the Company. He posed as a Quaker, which ‘some folks call quarrelling with my bread & butter,’ to avoid ‘entangling’ himself with it. ‘I am not particularly fond of attaching myself to institutions,’ he declared. He feared they would involve him in business ‘that would not suit my conscience.’ Still, he would be ‘zealous for the interests of my country as if I was engaged’ and, on that basis, he wrote, ‘I shall permit the Honourable Company to pay the expenses of my trip.’[8]
Alas, the result was ‘a grievous bore, to say no worse of it.’ The vessels left late. There was no time to manage matters onshore, and Manning was confined on board:
We found the Paracels in all their hideous deformity – breakers – sandbanks – coral rocks &c. Turtles, shellfish, wailing seabirds so unused to man that they would not rise from their nests …
The only highlight was the rescue of the survivors of a wrecked Chinese vessel. Manning wrote that ‘our ships were noisomely crowded with them,’ and that ‘their gratitude was unspeakable.’ ‘I lost my time,’ he complained, adding ‘I can hardly bear even now to think of it with patience.’[9]
Back in Canton, Manning next hatched a scheme with a Chinaman for crossing the border in disguise, before he decided that his collaborator ‘was laying a plot for playing the rogue.’ The factory’s select committee had warned of the risks of being taken for a spy. They would not be able to protect Manning, if he got into trouble, as he had ‘only the tacit leave of the head to run away.’ So, he resolved on a passage through Tibet. Possibly, a copy of Samuel Turner’s journal, published in 1800, had come into his possession. With the select committee’s blessing, he sailed to Calcutta. There was further disappointment. Lord Minto was too preoccupied with the French threat in Java to pay attention. So, Manning travelled to Rangpur, to engineer a pass for Bhutan at the annual fair. He arrived in December 1810. The fair took place in May. In August, a pass was secured.
Before he departed, Manning wrote to Banks, venting his frustration and urging him to support an embassy to China, for 1812. ‘Quaker principles’ meant he could not be part of it, he explained, but he offered to accompany it, provided the ambassador were ‘a personable portly gentle-motioned man.’ It would serve the Company’s interest: not for the next five hundred years would they ‘have so clever a man again in the situation I am actually in!’ In another letter for Sir Joseph to give to King George, he claimed that he would be able to bring to bear ‘such a critical knowledge of the Chinese Idioms, both oral & written, as … no European before ever reached to.’ He had mastered Chinese tones and was able to speak and read the language. He lacked nothing in confidence.[10]
From Macao, in December 1808, Manning had written to his father,
Did I tell you that I have adopted the Chinese Dress? Or rather a mixture Chinese & Cochinchinese. I wear a long robe, loose drawers, nankin boots & a black fine crape turban. Vastly comfortable in the hot weather & so becoming with my long beard you may be sure! I shall certainly smuggle a suit into England, to shew you at Diss.
If he believed his outfit would put the Chinese at ease, others were less convinced. In Canton, he had reportedly been caught outside the Company’s compound and returned ‘in a hamper slung on a pole.’ He was warned that ‘beard and chopsticks do not make a Chinese – and that next time he would be packed up “heel to point”, but without a head.’ Henry Prinsep, the historian, later remembered Manning in Calcutta,
… as wearing a fancy dress, which he said was that of a Tartar gentleman; but with his broad English face and full flowing beard, as looking as little like a Tartar as any one of Adam one might meet in London.[11]
In September 1811, he departed India. He took with him a Chinese Catholic convert, Zhao Jinxiu, once the employee of a Hong merchant in Canton, whom he variously referred to as his ‘servant’, his ‘munshi’, or ‘C’, but never by name. They were an ill-suited couple: C sullen, Manning a taskmaster. When, early in the journey, a Bhutanese headman stopped at noon at ‘a wretched pigsty’ for the night, Manning insisted he would go on:
No horse, no bearers; they said it was 2 miles then 4 miles. I said I could walk it. I would not enter the miserable place; stood in the mud; showed myself not tired. Got porters for my things and set off, I and my C. and my guide on foot. Then it was six miles. All over the bed of a torrent, cruel stones, sometimes up to my middle in water. At last, it turned out by acknowledgement to be 8 good miles, 7 on the plain and one up the hill. I was tired when I arrived at the foot of the hill, and it was steep and stony. Feet sore but could not stop more than half an hour. Toiled up slowly, and with considerable difficulty. Very well when I got to the top, but C. had palpitations, unwell, lay down, sweated profusely, eruption broke out and next day he says his skin peeled away. I told him it would do him good, save a fever …[12]
They took a more westerly route than Bogle and Turner to Paro, Manning cursing the incessant rain, the bad wine, officialdom, and C’s ‘impertinence’. ‘I find going uphill does not agree with me,’ he decided, ‘perhaps because naturally I am going downhill.’ At Paro, he was confined for three weeks in a smoke-filled guardhouse before its bemused governor decided his peculiar charge might proceed. Manning’s frustration is manifest from his diary, which is peppered with the briefest of entries: ‘Leeches’, ‘Audience’, ‘Visit’, ‘Rest’, ‘Distress’, ‘Prisoner still’.[13]
On the first day out, his discontentment boiled over when he discovered that two pewter spoons had taken the place of silver in his baggage. For this, his servants were derided as ‘partners in iniquity.’ They begged Manning to continue and allow the silver spoons to catch up, but he would not have it. A ‘slave’ was sent back to collect one, then the other. ‘It was not the value, but the example,’ Manning wrote. ‘I am in bad, bad hands.’
On 18 October, the party experienced their first snow. ‘Where am I?’ Manning wrote in wonderment. ‘How can I be come here? … Wept almost, through excess of sensation, not from grief.’ C, however, was ‘as cross as the devil.’ ‘A spaniel would be better company,’ Manning decided, before he discovered the cause. C had fallen off his horse and he thought Manning had deliberately ignored him. ‘I did not see it,’ Manning protested.[14]
Then, whilst negotiating a pass at Pagri (‘Pari-jong’), in Tibet, Manning encountered a Chinese ‘general’. The town provided a miserable backdrop, but his mood immediately improved:
31st [Oct]: Mandarin arrives. C. visits his curator. One of his soldiers, who is also his cook visits us. He asks me if I am a Mussulman. I answer no I eat pork, which I believe was not interpreted to him; all the better as he afterwards declared himself a [H…] (a sic Chinese man). C. says the curator seems a very good man. Chinese politeness even in the common soldiers forms a great contrast with the barbarians of this place.
An ability to communicate no doubt helped, but it was cherry brandy, the medicinal properties of opium, and Manning’s claims to be a physician that won the Chinese over:
Nov. 1st: C. visits the mandarin. Afterwards I. Some of his people said I could not sit down before him. In that case I should not have gone. Very civil. Promises to write immediately to the Lhasa mandarin for permission for me to proceed. I give him two bottles of cherry brandy, and a wine glass. He asks me to dinner with my C. C (I know not why) excuses me. Afterwards, visit the curator &c.; offer them a douceur which he absolutely refuses. Afterwards send him a bottle of cherry brandy. The secretary and my C write the letter together. Chinese lords here like the English in India. Tibetans stand before them. Applied to as a physician to cure soldiers &c. Come to me in the evening.
2d. Soldiers describe their complaints, but conceal their origin, supposing perhaps that I as physician can find that out. True, by dint of questions. 1st to be ill, cured disease of three years standing. 2d similar. 3d eruptions in leg and old cough. Give cal & opium to 1st as he complains of pains in bowels and pains all over. To the 2d, whose nose is attacked, and who has violent pulse, and complains of chest; says blood breaks out there, and bones split. I give cal. stuffed into nose, and digitalis. To 3d, intended to apply Ac. Vit. by mistake apply A. Nitric to leg. Give oil camphor for cough. 4th comes whose stomach is strange. Give calomel pills to begin with.
By 3 November, positive noises were being made about commerce through Bhutan. Manning wrote of his frustration with the Company:
Can’t help exclaiming in my mind (as I often do) what fools the Company are to give me no commission, no authority, no instructions. What use are their embassies when the ambassador can’t speak to a soul, and can only make ordinary phrases pass through a stupid interpreter. No finesse, no tournure, no compliments &c. Fools fools, fools to neglect an opportunity they may never have again![15]
In fact, Tibet’s Chinese ambans were unlikely to have relaxed their attitude to British trade. Yet, the medicine worked wonders. The soldiers persuaded their commander that Manning should accompany them ‘towards China’, without waiting for an answer from Lhasa. It was a valuable service which, later, he was reminded to keep secret.
Manning’s journal now becomes a little more expansive, if light on geographical detail. He passed the Calo Chu, where he had an eye for the profusion of duck. ‘The people of Tibet never disturb them,’ he wrote. ‘They eat no birds, but on the contrary, let the birds eat them.’ He considered deploying his ice skates, but the freezing wind had affected his constitution, and he decided to forego the opportunity of showing off his skill. The following night, after a near disaster involving a ‘vicious’ horse, the ‘detestable furniture’ of its saddle, and a frozen bog full of holes, he took ‘an impertinent peep’ at some women undressing for bed in his shared quarters. Sadly, he wrote, ‘the smoke was so thick, and the light so bad, that I could discern nothing.’[16]
By now, one of the general’s servants had been deputed to keep Manning comfortable. The Chinaman, to whom Clements Markham gave the improbable name of ‘Sid’ (Manning’s script is unclear), professed to be a cook’s assistant. Manning was undeceived: for days, the mandarin had wanted rid of him, to ‘pay him out of my pocket.’ Quickly, it became clear that Sid did not understand ‘even the elements of his profession.’ When C refused to accept the evidence, Manning resisted the provocation. Instead, he employed Sid as a valet. ‘The Chinese are all expert at little domestic offices,’ he wrote. For his own part, he confessed, he could fold up a handkerchief, ‘but not a shirt or other vestment.’[17]
Except at its beginning and end, when its content is briefest, Manning’s diary is almost as bereft of dates as it is of references to altitude and points of the compass. We therefore do not know when he reached Gyantse. What we do know is that he arrived in the general’s train, and that the Tibetans avoided him. It is not clear that this concerned Manning greatly. Indeed, he was struck by how his surroundings – the neatness, the buildings, his bed, his cushions – were all in ‘exact conformity to the Chinese models.’ The general was a genial host, much struck by Manning’s manner (as Manning puts it). He entertained him with a concert of music. His tailor made for him a warm woollen robe, with fur cuffs. He declared that he had never seen so handsome a beard. (Mention was made of a mandarin with a better moustache, but Manning was unpersuaded. His own had been cut short, ‘for convenience of eating soup and drink.’)
Manning continued to dispense his medicine, on one occasion curing a Chinaman and his wife of fever with opium, Fowler’s solution of arsenic and some pieces of ‘bark’ (quinine). More reasonably, he advised his patients to avoid drinking the local water. For his part, the general secured for Manning an onward pass to Lhasa, which Manning repaid with an order to Calcutta for some broadcloth (violet, as suited to a ‘high mandarin’) and a pound or two of opium. He knew that, after parting, he would feel the want of the general’s assistance. Lhasa’s senior mandarin was ‘a man of a particular suspicious nature,’ who had been sent into bureaucratic exile for mismanaging Britain’s occupation of Macao, in 1808. Manning had interpreted during the negotiations, so their encounter might prove troublesome.[18]
The journey took eight days, much of it – in late November – hard going, in barren valleys laced with frozen rivers, in which faces became blistered by the sun. At the western end of Yamdrok Lake, noted especially for the ravens of the Samding monastery – itself characterised as a ‘massive castle’ inhabited by a ‘capricious and tyrannical’ female magistrate – Manning was hosted by some kind Tibetans. Still feeling the glow of the general’s hospitality, he wrote that they were the first that he ‘at all wished to be acquainted with.’ Thereafter, however, the land had been afflicted by poor harvests and cruel frosts. Manning was clearly struck by the poverty of the people, and it was a relief to reach the softer and more prosperous Lhasa valley. Here an air of gaiety suffused everything and everyone. The broad, level road combined with ‘a majestic mountain of building’ to produce a magnificent effect. Yet, close to, some of the magic was lost:
If the palace had exceeded my expectations, the town as far fell short of them. There is nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt. The avenues are full of dogs, some growling and knawing bits of hide which lies about in profusion, and emits a charnel house smell … In short, everything seems mean and gloomy and excites the idea of something unreal. Even the mirth and laughter of the inhabitants I thought dreamy and ghostly. The dreamyness no doubt was in my mind, but I never could get rid of the idea; it strengthened upon me afterwards.[19]
Before visiting the Dalai Lama, Manning presented himself to the Chinese amban. Concerned that he might be recognised, he put on his spectacles. He disguised his understanding of Mandarin and, knowing ‘how averse the Europeans are to bending,’ made a point of kowtowing. He need not have worried. ‘The old dog was purblind and could not see many inches beyond his nose.’[20]
The climax of Manning’s journey came on 17 December 1811. Unfortunately, most of the broadcloth he had brought for a gift had been pilfered in Bhutan, and a pair of ewers, intended for some artificial flowers, had been left behind in Gyantse. Manning collected what he could: some candlesticks (which belonged to the Canton factory), twenty silver dollars (popular as belt ornaments), a bottle of Smith’s lavender water, some Nanking tea:
I presented my gifts delivering the coin with a handsome silk scarf with my own hands into the hands of the G(rand) Lama and the Teemoofoo (Gesub Rimboché). While I was kowtowing the awkward servants contrived to let fall and break the bottle of lavender water intended for the Teemoofoo; of course I seemed not to observe it though the odoriferous stream flowed close to me and I could not help seeing it with the corner of my eye as I bowed down my head.
Having delivered the scarf to the G. Lama I took off my hat, and humbly gave him my clean shaved head to lay his hands upon. The ceremony of presentation being over M and I sat down on two cushions not far from the Lama’s throne and had suchi brought us … The Lama’s beautiful & interesting face and manner engrossed almost all my attention. He was at that time about seven years old. Had the simple and unaffected manners of a well-educated princely child. His face was, I thought, poetically and affectingly beautiful. He was of a gay and cheerful disposition; his beautiful mouth perpetually unbending into a peaceful smile, which illuminated his whole countenance. Sometimes, particularly when he had looked at me, his smile almost approached to a gentle laugh. No doubt my grim beard and spectacles somewhat excited his risibility …
In their exchange, interpreted through the medium of Latin (since Manning abjured Chinese and Zhao was Catholic), the Dalai Lama asked about Manning’s journey. His response, that his troubles had been ‘amply compensated’, persuaded those present that the stranger possessed a ‘tincture of civility.’ A gift of dried fruits was presented and Manning requested some Buddhist tracts before he and his munshi withdrew.
Manning declares that he was ‘extremely affected’ by the interview, that he ‘could have wept through strangeness of sensation.’ Later, he made two pencil sketches of the lama’s face, and wrote into his diary,
This day I saluted the Grand Lama!! Beautiful youth. Face poetically affecting. Could have wept. Very happy to have seen him, and his blessed smile. Hope often to see him again.[21]
Manning remained in Lhasa for four months, much of his time dispensing medicine. One of his charges was a senior official whom he called the ‘Mad Mandarin’. His condition, he says, arose from guilt at having hidden from Peking the murder of a lama by a Chinese soldier, the spark behind some inter-communal riots. He had then joined a conspiracy to be rid of a member of the Council who had refused to compromise his principles. Manning hoped that, if he effected a cure, the mandarin would ease his way to Peking. Unfortunately, his ministrations were not welcomed by the most senior of the plotters who, by now, distrusted the patient. Manning abandoned his efforts, observing that, as Lhasa was not a popular posting, it tended to be governed by officials who had been banished for crimes committed elsewhere. The policy, he suggests, was not conducive to wise administration.
In his lucid moments, the ‘mad mandarin’ spent his time arranging the few short hairs which Manning dismissed as a ‘trifling appendage to his chin.’ Otherwise, he was ‘uncombed, unwashed, beslimed with his own spittle … and almost intractable.’ Other patients were more agreeable. On one occasion, ‘two handsome, well-dressed, well-washed lasses’ visited with their mother. Manning says, ‘I could not find out that there was anything the matter with them, except superabundance of health and spirits.’ He confesses that ‘feeling their pulses rather disordered my own.’[22]
For most, Manning’s medicine was a matter of curiosity: after a first experiment, his prescriptions were frequently forgotten. This concerned him rather less than the surveillance directed at him and his munshi. The Chinese amban made his opinion crystal clear:
Now one man has come to spy the country, he will inform others. Numbers will come, and at last they will be for taking the country from us.
He sent a report to the emperor, expressing his concern. Manning hoped that he might still make it to China – indeed, that Peking might prefer him to travel that way, rather than return via Bhutan or Nepal. It was not to be. His unusual appearance made him an object of suspicion. More serious were his failures in religious observance. Towards the end of his journal, Manning remarked that he had not visited the temples, on the grounds that he had no one who could show him what to do. When, eventually, Zhao persuaded him of the need, Manning’s effort only raised suspicions further. He took a Tibetan guide,
… who from his childhood had been a neglected orphan (and) was ignorant as a beast. He was nominally a Mahomedan, but utterly ignorant even of his own religion. He so spleened me with his brutish ignorance, and hoggish answers, that I could not help speaking crossly and this before the images of the saints. There were hundreds of people in the temple; some gathered about me, and seemed astounded at my irreverent manner …
On visits to two other temples, Manning deliberately made no ‘salutes or reverences.’ He imagined this would make him appear impartial. Instead, he looked less like a Buddhist pilgrim, and more like a spy, or a Catholic missionary. When the emperor responded to the amban’s message, he ordered that Manning should be gone by spring.[23]
By then C had been denounced as a runaway. He was warned that he might be executed for conspiring with foreigners. For his part, Manning confessed,
I never could even in idea make up my mind to submit to an execution with firmness and manliness. The sight of the despotic pomp of mandarins at Canton where I was perfectly secure has almost turned me sick. What I read of their absolute power not only in China but in various Asiatic countries has always appalled me. I put myself in imagination into the situation of the prisoner accused. I suppose myself innocent. I look round. I have no resource, no refuge. Instruments of torture, instruments of execution are brought by florid, high-cheeked, busy, grinning, dull-hearted men. No plea avails. No kind judge to take my part as in England, but on the contrary, because I am accused (and perhaps by my judge) I am presumed guilty.[24]
His sympathies for the ‘civilised’ Chinese had toughened noticeably. When he left Lhasa, his munshi was not permitted to do so. Manning wrote that he had an opportunity of leaving for Szechuan, but that he ‘loitered’ in Lhasa, for the sake of a farewell present. This was hard-hearted. C had reasons to be fearful. At one stage, he returned from a visit to the mandarins ‘in chains.’ He bribed a treasurer but suffered banishment to Xinjiang. He was still living in 1814, when Manning sent him a thousand silver dollars. Thereafter, he disappears from the record.
Manning came to fear for his safety also. He was ‘sickened’ to discover his letters had been opened. He ‘dreaded’ that missionaries in Peking might reveal something about him, or that his earlier presence in Canton might come to light. When he fell ill, he thought he had been poisoned. The atmosphere at Lhasa became tense. On 5 April 1812, its Bhutanese population demanded the recall of the Pagri magistrate. When they showed violence, they were surrounded by soldiers and forced to ‘lay down their knives.’[25]
On 19 April, Manning departed. He left with a sorrowful heart, but the sparseness of his diary – the seven-week journey is covered in just two and a half pages – suggests disenchantment. (Markham reports that he was ‘disgusted’ by his treatment, ‘and when he returned to Calcutta, he would give no one any particulars of his journey.’) [26]
For a period of four years, he almost drops from view. (We know he visited Penang, in 1813.) However, Lord Amherst’s embassy offered a final opportunity for Manning to put his Chinese to good use. (The ambassador suffered his beard, on condition that he replace his Chinese gowns with attire more suited to an Englishman.) Consulted on whether Amherst should perform the kowtow, Manning decided on balance that it was ‘inexpedient’, although he personally had complied with it at Lhasa. The embassy failed over such matters of etiquette.[27]
On the return journey to England, in 1817, he met Napoleon, on St. Helena. They discussed Manning’s encounter with the lama, Napoleon asking the Englishman whether he had feared being seized as a spy. Laughing, Manning pointed to his beard and his dress and said that, while his nose was ‘too good for a Tartar,’ he had passed himself off as a Hindu. Whatever he may have thought of this, Napoleon ended the interview by declaring it had given him more pleasure than he had experienced in months. Conceivably, he wasn’t setting the bar very high.[28]
In England, Manning eschewed the limelight. He knew that his cosmopolitan philosophy sat at odds with received opinion and, seemingly, he was reluctant to pick a fight in public. After publishing his essay on jests, he spent two years in Italy, before retreating to rural seclusion in Kent. There, he barely furnished his cottage, subsisting on a few chairs, no carpets, and his library of Chinese books. Even so, his obituarist wrote that he was visited by ‘the greatest characters of the age,’ none of whom objected ‘to taking their chop’ beneath his roof. He wore his milky white beard down to his waist until, annoyed by the impertinent remarks of strangers, he plucked it out by the roots. He died in 1840, at the age of sixty-eight.[29]
Sir John Davis, the son of the artist who had visited Bhutan in 1783, became familiar with Manning during Amherst’s embassy. He wrote,
I knew Manning well and liked him much. His eccentricities were quite harmless, and concerned only himself personally … He was seldom serious, and did not often argue any matter gravely, but in a tone of banter in which he humorously maintained the most monstrous paradoxes …
He did everything in his own odd and eccentric way. Being one day roused by a strange shouting, I went out and discovered it was Manning, who, wishing to cross the water and finding nobody who would attend to him, commenced a series of howls like a dog, supplemented by execrations derived from the Chinese vernacular. This led our attendant mandarins very naturally to infer that he was mad, and they lost no time in conveying him over the river to the other side, which was all he wanted.
Manning was much more serious than this, his external persona or most of his written legacy suggest. Basil Hall who, in 1816, sailed in HMS Alceste to Korea, shared something of his interest in other peoples and cultures, but with nothing approaching Manning’s depth of vision. Henceforth, men even with his sympathies appear rarely in the literature. The character of Britain’s enterprise in Asia had changed. Participation in trade, which had animated the Company’s dealings since the early 1600s, was giving way to dominion. It is not hard to see why those who followed Bogle, Turner and Manning to Bhutan were less attractive than they.[30]
Francis Jenkins and Bhutan’s Duars
In the twenty-five years between Jigme Sengay’s abrupt departure from Thimphu, in 1788, and the outbreak of the Anglo-Nepalese War, in 1814, eleven desis (‘deb rajas’) ruled in Bhutan. Two were unchallenged. Three were killed, four were forced out, and two others had a co-ruler imposed upon them. The civil strife, to which Samuel Turner had been witness, had become entrenched. An unfortunate consequence was that Punakha’s dzong was three times consumed by flames, in 1798, 1803 and 1810.[31]
Towards Bhutan, Britain’s policy was disengaged, but not inimical. Hostility fitted ill with nervousness over Gurkha expansionism and a desire to keep open communications with China after the Nepal trade route had been closed. Yet, after their victory in Kathmandu, in 1792, the Chinese wished Tibet to have little to do with the British. Bhutanese contact dropped away.
In later years, Robert Pemberton attributed Bhutan’s silence to a desire to keep the country hidden, so that she might ‘more securely … pursue [a] systematic course of aggression against the border states.’ This was unjust. Introversion was a function of internal discord, the need to keep friends with Nepal, and a belief that Calcutta had little to offer. For its part, Calcutta was guilty of inattention. When, in 1814, Krishna Kanta Bose investigated a dispute between Cooch Behar and Punakha over the district of Maraghat, he was officially ‘deputed to Lassa (in Tibet) … to negotiate some boundary agreements with the Deb Raja (of Bhutan).’[32]
Bose’s report is light on diplomacy, stronger on Bhutanese customs and organisation. Unlike Bogle, Turner and Manning, he travelled through the centre of Bhutan, reaching Punakha from Goalpara via Bijni and the Puna Tsangchu to Wangdiphodrang. Even so, Pemberton complained that his inquiries ‘were directed to objects of comparatively inferior importance.’ Bose explained that he had been sickened by the unhealthy climate, the strange diet and ‘the impure habits of the people and their hostility to the Hindoo religion.’ Certainly, some of his findings are surprising. In Bhutan, he suggested, lighting rose from holes in the earth. He had been shown them by the inhabitants. Otherwise, certain rituals of the battlefield deserved special mention:
When they fight with a Deb Raja, or the Pillos (penlops) amongst themselves, they stand at a distance and fire arrows at each other, and if one of them is killed, both parties rush forward and struggle for the dead body; whichever of them succeed in getting it, they take out the liver and eat it with butter and sugar; they also mix the fat and blood with turpentine, and, making candles thereof, burn them before the shrine of the deity. The bones of persons killed in war are also used for making musical pipes, and of the skulls they make beads, and also keep them set in silver for sipping water at the time of the performance of religious ceremonies.[33]
Calcutta ruled in Bhutan’s favour over Maraghat, in 1817, yet there followed ‘a total cessation of intercourse’ until the annexation of Assam, in 1826. Thereafter, Britain’s stance became less friendly. By then, the frontier between India and Bhutan stretched for 240 miles along the plains at the foot of the duar escarpment, from Siliguri in the west, to Udalguri in the east. Bose wrote that they were poorly administered, generating no more than 300,000 rupees, and might produce nearly three times as much, ‘if well cultivated.’ Others shared his opinion. The strip’s fertile soil was suited to producing, rice, cotton, tobacco … and tea.[34]
From the first, the attraction of the Tibetan trade had been that its balance of payments promised a flow of bullion into India. So thought Warren Hastings when he sent away George Bogle, in 1774. By 1779, Hastings was characterising Bengal’s money outflow as ‘alarming’, yet within five years of the 1784 Commutation Act, which slashed the duties on tea, the Company’s imports had risen from 4,000,000lbs to over 20,000,000lbs annually. There was no prospect of those being financed by Calcutta’s exports of goods to Canton, or Lhasa.[35]
An alternative solution suggested itself: export tea from India rather than import it from China. In 1780, Bogle had written to Hastings from Rangpur explaining that, when he had shown some tea seeds to the subah at Buxa Duar,
… he got up and danced around them like David. He says they are worth to his country a lack (lakh) of rupees, considering how much money goes annually out of it for tea brought overland from China.
In December 1788, Sir Joseph Banks advised the Company on the ‘very desirable object’ of cultivating tea in its Indian possessions:
Black teas [he suggested] … may certainly be cultivated with success in the northern parts of the province of Bahar and Coosbeyhar, for instance, where the latitude and the cooling influence of the neighbouring mountains of Boutan give every reason to expect a climate eminently similar to the parts of China in which black teas are at present manufactured.
If the Bhutanese were properly incentivised, he wrote, in time ‘the whole of the tea trade will be transferred into that quarter.’ Chinese cultivators should be encouraged to move to Calcutta, with ‘their shrubs and all their tools of culture and manufacture.’ Space should be set aside for them in the botanic gardens. In 1789, Robert Kyd, Calcutta’s botanic chief, proposed sending someone to Tibet with instructions for ‘obtaining either the seed or plant of the tea … and delivering it in a state of vegetation to the chief at Rungpoor.’[36]
The plan came to nothing, and Banks’ conception dropped from view. Then, in 1834, Lord Bentinck formed a committee for the cultivation of tea in India. Captain Francis Jenkins, Assam’s chief agent, sent Lieutenant Andrew Charlton, of the Light Infantry, from Guwahati to investigate the territory of the Singphos near Sadiya. He returned with some plants which were found to be the same as the Chinese. In 1836, William Griffith, of the botanical garden, was sent to Sadiya to conduct experiments in their cultivation. The first shipment of Assamese tea left for England, in 1838. In January of the same year, Griffith crossed into Bhutan with Robert Pemberton. They were the first Britons to visit Punakha for nearly twenty-five years.[37]
Jenkins, who had to deal with frequent raids from Bhutan onto the fertile lands beneath the Assam duars, was the leading advocate of the Pemberton mission. The raids were not a new phenomenon. Prior to 1826, the Ahom princes, who ruled the district, had been powerless to prevent them. They tried to purchase security by exchanging five duars for an annual payment. Two others were shared, the Ahoms controlling them between July and November, the Bhutanese for the rest of the year. The arrangements were maintained by the British, but complications emerged. Disputes arose when payments in the form of goods realised less at auction than the British expected. (Often, the intermediaries whom they employed substituted inferior products.) The British also took exception to payments in Deba Rupees, which were minted in Bhutan and contained less silver than the Narainee Rupees they replaced.[38]
The core of the problem, however, was that the duars were unproductive, their climate pestilential. As civil discord weakened Bhutan’s government, officials on the border became more autonomous. Since they derived limited pecuniary advantage from their mountain lands, they shared in the raiders’ profits. Thus Robert Pemberton. He deemed the rule of the Ahoms ‘imbecile’: it caused the hill men to look upon the people below ‘with the same sort of feeling which the taskmasters of Egypt entertained for the enslaved Hebrews.’[39]
No doubt, actions from the British side of the frontier contributed to the difficulties. The evidence, however, is one-sided: the Bhutanese kept no records, whereas detailed schedules of ‘outrages’ were prepared for Calcutta. At least once, however, Jenkins admitted that ‘officers who held charge in our part’ were ‘in some measure’ responsible. Their oppressions, he wrote, accounted for counter-oppressions by the Bhutanese. David Rennie, who toured Jaipalguri in 1865, believed that its population had suffered most from the British side of the frontier. Likewise, he declared of Chamorchi,
The peasantry hereabouts made no complaints of oppression, and said that they seldom saw the Bhotanese except in the months of December and January, when they came down from the hills to collect the Dooar revenue.[40]
With time, British policy became more muscular. In March 1836, twenty-five Bhutanese were killed when a force of six hundred, under the Dewangiri raja, clashed with eighty sepoys, at Subankhata. After Banksa Duar had been occupied, the Tongsa penlop wrote to Jenkins, claiming:
I was not aware before now of the circumstance of dacoities, or of the arrears of revenue which have now come to light … You allude to the several perwannahs (warrants) you sent to me, but the Dewangiri Raja never gave them to me …
At any rate, considering the great friendship subsisting between the Company and Bootan, I beg you will not withhold your kindness from me … Remember that you are for me, and I am for you. If you have a mind to listen to what enemies say … of course there is nothing that would prevent your doing so. You are however acquainted with all that is just and fair … Whatever you may require you will kindly write to me about, and whatever I may want I will mention to you; what will I say further?
Unfortunately, his envoys had no negotiating powers. Faced with the certainty that the duar would not be returned without concessions, they sent for instructions. In return, they received blank forms affixed with the dharma raja father’s seal. They were ‘filled up’, and an outline peace was agreed (but not ratified).[41]
By now, Francis Jenkins had been captivated by the duar strip’s potential. After touring the country, in 1837, he wrote,
How greatly it is to be desired that we should endeavour to prevail on the Bhootan government to cede the doars to us. To get them to sell their rights at once would, I suppose, not be practicable; but I should suppose it practicable to get that government to rent the doars, either permanently, or for a long lease … To this extent unsettled and retrograding countries would be removed from our frontier districts, and their gain would be great in the alteration. Nor is this the only advantage; our government would obtain all the doars and rich lands, and by command of the forests, the increase of cultivation, and the creation of trade, the doars themselves would always pay for the expense of management.[42]
The numbers mustered at Subankhata by the Dewangiri raja had far exceeded British expectations. Yet, their resistance had ‘evinced an extreme degree of pusillanimity.’ If there were further raids, the British might conclude, hostilities could bring their reward …
Judging the Attitude of China
There was one important caveat: Calcutta lacked a clear idea of the relationship between the frontier states and China.
This problem had much exercised Lord Moira during the war with Nepal. In August 1814, he received a report from Francis Buchanan that Beem Sing, ‘the present manager of the affairs of Goorka,’ was sufficiently nervous of a British attack that he had sacrificed a Pewar boy ‘to propitiate the gods.’ More menacingly, he had sent for Chinese assistance, offering concessions of land in exchange. Buchanan warned that the establishment of a new frontier ‘between two powerful nations holding each other in mutual contempt, seems to point to anything but peace.’
In September, William Moorcroft, a veterinarian who had visited Western Tibet, in 1812, reported news from a trader with contacts in Lhasa that, to a request for assistance from the Gurkha Raja,
… an answer has been received, declaring the readiness of the emperor to afford the necessary aid, and requiring to know its amount.
In May 1815, the British intercepted the troubling draft of a letter in which the raja encouraged China’s emperor to ‘consider the Goorkas as your tributaries.’ ‘Reflect,’ he continued,
… that the English come to conquer Nepaul and Bhote, and for these reasons be graciously pleased to assist with a sum of money … Or, if you are unwilling to assist us with subsidies … you may easily send an army of two or three hundred thousand men by the route of Dhurma into Bengal, spreading alarm and consternation among the Europeans as far as Calcutta.
If he followed this advice, the raja explained, the emperor’s name would become ‘renowned throughout Jumboodweep.’ If not, the British would become masters of Lhasa, and ‘the world will henceforth say that the emperor of China abandoned to their fate his tributaries and dependents.’[43]
In September 1816, after the war’s end, reports were received via Sikkim that the Chinese at Lhasa had considered the Gurkhas most culpable for events, even that one of their envoys had been put into confinement. And, in truth, so insignificant was the war’s impact that it was not even raised during Lord Amherst’s embassy. Yet, that same September, Bose reported talk in Bhutan that an army of ten to twelve thousand had left Lhasa for Assam, and that another, of twenty thousand, was headed for Nepal. A sharp drop in the supply of tea from Lhasa, he argued, suggested the presence there of a force ‘of considerable strength.’
At this, Lord Moira became concerned that the peace terms had upset the Chinese. Indeed, for a time, he was nearly persuaded by the Gurkhas to close the Kathmandu Residency, to appease the ‘offence’ it had caused. Then it became clear that China disavowed any sovereignty over Nepal. Provided she received her tribute, she was comfortable with the peace treaty’s arrangements. British nervousness abated until the channel of communication via Sikkim fell into abeyance and Chinese attitudes became mysterious once more.[44]
In 1833, TC Robertson, Francis Jenkins’ predecessor, suggested sending a mediator to Bhutan to deal with the raids. Their inconvenience, he suggested, would be,
… insignificant in comparison with the expense and embarrassment to be apprehended from warlike operations, which, if defensive, must be confined to an unhealthy region at the foot of the hills, or if active and offensive, be pursued at the imminent hazard of a war with China. [45]
Later, Pemberton reported that, in 1830, when the Tongsa penlop, Dorji Namgyal, rose against the desi, Chokyi Gyaltshen, he had received support from Lhasa:
… two Chinese officers were sent with a body of troops to his aid, and on their arrival an investigation was ordered into the merits of the question at the castle of Tongso; a compromise was effected by the temporary abdication of Sujee Gasseé, and his rival Durzee Namdé was installed, when the troops returned to Lassa.[46]
In 1837, therefore, Jenkins sought to involve Lhasa as much as possible in British negotiations with Punakha. As he explained to Lord Auckland,
It appears to me that it would be a good opportunity if I were to address the Dalai Lama or the Governor of Lhassa to whom I believe they (ie. the Bhutanese) are all subject, inviting him to send a person to settle these disputes and to arrange for the collection of the black mail on a less objectionable footing than hitherto prevailed.
(By ‘black mail’, he meant the revenue paid to the Bhutanese by the people of the plain.)
However, alongside Tibetan pressure on Bhutan, Jenkins also hoped to encourage the trade which the missions of Bogle and Turner had once promised. Free commerce with Lhasa had been denied to Calcutta’s subjects ‘through the jealousy and influence of the Chinese Government,’ but he hoped to establish ‘periodical fairs’ along the frontier at which ‘the Tibetan caravans might be prevailed upon to meet our merchants.’ Accordingly, a letter from the governor-general was prepared for the Dalai Lama. It referred to Turner’s mission fifty-three years earlier:
When so long an interval has been suffered to elapse without the renewal of friendly demonstrations on either side, it is not surprising if suspicion of neglect or cause of misunderstanding should have arisen. My sole motive in making this overture is to perpetuate and consolidate a friendship, the foundation of which was laid so happily and so long ago … I shall be very glad to hear that you have honoured [my envoy] with an invitation to attend you.
In the event, Pemberton got no closer to Lhasa than either George Bogle or Krishna Kanta Bose. It was said of Bose that he had lacked ‘the discretion requisite’ to persuade Punakha to grant him passage, but Pemberton was convinced that the Bhutanese were ‘most determinedly opposed’ to facilitating communications. This is plausible. Communications might have compromised Punakha’s independence. Indeed, after Subankhata, when the mission was first proposed, the Bhutanese refused to admit it at all. Then, in April 1837, Hurgovind Katham, who controlled Maynaguri Duar (‘Minagoori’) opposite Bengal, rose in revolt. He was supported by Indian and Gurkha irregulars from within British territory, and offered to pay for British protection. When the desi turned to Calcutta for support, Lord Auckland seized his opportunity.[47]
The Mission of Pemberton and Griffith
Pemberton and Griffith entered Bhutan in the east, at Banksa Duar, in January 1838. They hoped to travel to Punakha through Zhongar (‘Jongar’), but its dzongpen was supporting the rebellion of his brother, the Dagana (‘Daka’) penlop, Dorji Norbu, against Chokyi Gyaltshen, who was again desi, following Dorji Namgyal’s assassination. They made an extensive detour, they claimed because the Bhutanese wished to make their journey more taxing. In fact, the rebellion was serious, and their route, a regular one, was hardly more arduous. From Deothang (‘Dewangiri’), they travelled northwards towards Tibet and then, from Tashi Yangtse (‘Tassangsee’), westwards across the mountains. The distance to Punakha was rather more than 250 miles. It took twenty-six travelling days, although delays and halts for recuperation increased this to sixty-eight.[48]
Pemberton’s lengthy report belies his claim that intense surveillance made the obtaining of information almost impossible. Inter alia, he observed that officials received no fixed salaries which, given they usually served briefly, was a powerful incentive for peculation. Pemberton added that, in Bhutan,
… on the death of any head of a family, however numerous his children … the whole of his property becomes escheated to the Deb or Dhurma, and all that escapes the cupidity of the Soubahs, and Pillos, is forwarded to Poonakh or Tassissudon … without the slightest reference to the wide-spreading distress which so sudden a deprivation … may entail on the afflicted survivors.
No system, he concluded, could have been ‘better calculated to strike at the root of national prosperity than this.’
Otherwise, Pemberton criticised polyandry just as Samuel Davis had in Tibet, but with even greater fervour:
It is a singular fact that during the whole of our journey through the country, we scarcely ever saw an aged person: this, it is evident, could not have arisen from climate, for there are probably few spots on the globe presenting more favourable conditions to longevity than the lofty mountains and bracing air of Bootan; and the causes are to be sought in that premature decay, which inevitably follows the unbridled indulgence of the passions, and the existence of a social compact which legalizes prostitution and attaches no disgrace to a plurality of husbands.
Like Davis, he judged it most peculiar that, at the injunction of the priestly class, ‘a total separation from wife and children has been regarded as an essential condition of accession to office.’[49]
Before Pemberton reached Punakha, Chokyi Gyaltshen was driven from office for a second time. He retired to Wangditse but his supporters appointed Tashi Dorji, the Thimphu penlop, as a rival desi to Dorji Norbu. Pemberton met both, and the infant dharma raja, Jigme Norbu. (Griffith considered him ‘good looking, particularly when the looks of his father, the Tongso Pillo (penlop), are taken into consideration.’) The negotiations at Punakha were protracted, and fruitless. A draft treaty was agreed by Dorji Norbu and his ministers, but not by Tongsa, nephew of the ‘most aristocratic personage’ who had written to Jenkins, in 1836. Contrasting him with his uncle, Griffith branded him ‘a mean looking, bull-necked individual.’ (He was assassinated in 1840, after he had kidnapped Jigme Norbu in a sack, and taken him from Punakha to Thimphu.)[50]
Pemberton’s conclusion was that negotiation was ‘utterly hopeless.’ ‘[Bhutan’s] nominal head,’ he wrote, ‘is powerless, and the real authority of the country is vested in the two barons of Tongso and Paro, who divide it between them.’ He recommended ‘attaching’, or annexing, the Assam Duars until a treaty was ratified. This would ensure ‘the weight of punishment’ fell on the Tongsa penlop. In the face of Bhutanese opposition, he advocated reopening relations with Lhasa, in part because reports of persons of European appearance spending time there ‘writing and reading in books’ suggested Russian penetration. Since China had accepted Britain’s representative at Kathmandu, he also favoured installing an agent at Punakha.[51]
For a while, the governor-general held fire. Then, in 1840, the Kalling and Buri Gomar duars were ‘attached’ against the payment of arrears. Jenkins was in favour of annexing them permanently, but Lord Auckland was wary of precipitate action during the Opium and Afghan Wars. When the action produced no protest, reflecting the confusion within Bhutan, Jenkins convinced himself that she would permit all the duars to be farmed, for a fee. This would result in the ‘tranquillization of the whole country’ for, without the revenues from the plains, the desis could not finance their operations:
Had we possession of the Dooars [he wrote] the Bootan Government would necessarily in a short time become entirely dependent on us, as holding in our hands the source of all their subsistence.
Furthermore,
Under our management, the vast tract of fertile land which these Dooars comprise would soon be occupied by the outpourings of the immense population of Rungpore and Cooch Behar, and beside the great increase of their value by the extension of cultivation, the Dooars would become of inestimable importance to all Eastern Bengal.
A mission should be sent to negotiate a treaty. Again, Lord Auckland demurred. He disliked the idea of engaging with any party in Bhutan who controlled only half the country. ‘Fruitless missions of this kind,’ he declared, ‘will only tend to aggravate our embarrassments, and are not creditable to British power.’ Instead, an ‘admonition and warning’ was sent and, when they produced no result, the other Assam Duars were attached. In exchange for 990 square miles of fertile ground, the British paid ten thousand rupees annually.[52]
Jenkins’ sentiments were gaining traction but, in the 1830s and 1840s, British India had multiple issues to grapple with: Sikkim (Darjeeling was made over in 1835), the activities of Gulab Singh in Ladakh and Western Tibet, wars in Afghanistan and China. These contributed to inconsistency in policy. Periods of passivity in the face of border incidents served to ensure they persisted.[53]
The decisive moment came, in 1854, with a dispute between Jenkins and Jigme Namgyal, since 1853 the Tongsa penlop. When some officers, sent to Guwahati to obtain an increase in rent for the Assam Duars, were charged with a series of ‘dacoities’, Jenkins complained directly to the desi. The desi punished the penlop with a fine, whereupon, in outrage, Jigme Namgyal demanded that Jenkins contribute half. Jenkins was no less appalled. In time, an apology was obtained for the penlop’s ‘insolent and overbearing tone’ but, henceforth, Jenkins was convinced of the need to annex the Bengal Duars, as well as those in Assam.[54]
The governor-general still hoped that the payment of subsidies would bend Bhutan ‘to the will of the British,’ but Jenkins was sure she was taking advantage of British leniency, even as the absence of central authority made her impossible to deal with. In addition, the ‘wretched state’ of the duars pained him: he claimed that their people welcomed the British and had promised to take up arms, if they were sent reinforcements.[55]
Again, Calcutta forbore, until February 1857, when a military cantonment was established at Jalpaiguri, opposite Maynaguri Duar. In January 1860, possession was taken of Ambari-Falakata, a little to the north-west. The border infringements continued. Then, in November 1860, the British superintendent of Darjeeling precipitated a crisis in Sikkim by impetuously marching in, to obtain restitution for kidnappings of refugees. (Archibald Campbell was partly motivated by revenge for his own arrest and imprisonment, after he had indiscreetly crossed into Tibet, in 1849.) Calcutta disapproved of his action, but they were obliged to respond when he was pushed out. A force was sent, with Ashley Eden as political officer, and Sikkim’s ruler, Tokhang Donyer Namgyal, was toppled. Yet, Calcutta did not proceed to annexation. A treaty established Sikkim as a buffer state between India and Tibet. Eden wrote that the alternative would have ‘embroiled … the whole of the frontier and the Indo-Chinese States … [in] a long, tedious, and most expensive war.’[56]
Whether or not this judgement was correct, under the treaty British India obtained everything it required: free trade, free access for Europeans, help in building a road to the Tibetan frontier. Success gave it the confidence to be bolder with Bhutan. For, by now, Calcutta was convinced that Bhutan’s frontier officials were a law unto themselves, that the central government, insofar as it operated, was clueless. Punakha was told to expect a mission.
For a year, the British were put off with promises until, in August 1863, Ashley Eden was appointed envoy. Briefly, consideration was given to accrediting him to the Dalai Lama and to securing for him a Tibetan pass from Peking. The idea, however, was abandoned as impractical. Instead, Eden was instructed, ‘clearly and distinctly, but in a friendly and conciliatory spirit,’ to explain Calcutta’s actions, to investigate Bhutanese complaints against British subjects, and to formalise a treaty.[57]
Ashley Eden’s Progress to Punakha
As he was preparing, he learned that the latest desi, Nagzi Pasang, had been deposed, and that ‘the whole country was in a state of anarchy and confusion.’ A new desi, Tshewang Sithup, had been installed by Jigme Namgyal and his allies, the dzongpens of Punakha and Jakar. Nagzi Pasang was supported by the Paro penlop who, at the same time, was engaged in a private war with his subordinate, the jungpen of Dalingcote (Dalimkotta). Unfortunately, Dalingcote was Eden’s point of entry into Bhutan. Despite the news, Calcutta decided, optimistically, that a substantive government had been formed and that the mission should proceed. It comprised a force of around a hundred, which was rapidly reduced through desertions and a want of resources for carriage. Henry Godwin-Austen, of the Indian trigonometrical survey, served as Eden’s assistant, Benjamin Simpson, an accomplished photographer, as medical officer. Chibu Lama, who had represented the principal opposition to Dewan Namgyal in Sikkim and was now its representative in Darjeeling, acted as interpreter. The mission departed on 4 January 1864.[58]
Of his encounter with the Dalingkote jungpen, Eden writes,
He was accompanied by a large and disorderly following, – standard-bearers carrying a flat piece of wood like a broad oar, printed with inscriptions; musicians; a number of led ponies and mules; sepoys with matchlocks and knives, probably about 200 men in all. As they approached our camp the whole party halted every twenty yards and gave loud shouts, apparently in imitation of a pack of jackals. Whilst the screaming was going on, the Jungpen put down his head and shook himself in his saddle; the same practice was observed on other occasions, but I could obtain no explanation of it except that it was an ‘old custom.’
… The Jungpen, on arriving at my tent, was seized by the legs by some of his followers, and after being twirled around in the air twice was carried to the tent, as it was thought below his dignity to walk. The ceremony was however, very far from dignified, for the Jungpen attempted to get down, and was brought to my tent, kicking violently, and abusing his men. He was a fat, uncouth, boorish, ignorant man.[59]
Once Eden explained his purpose, the jungpen became more co-operative. Ambari-Falakata came under his purview: he stood to gain if the British proposals were accepted. Yet, he was averse to Eden’s advancing until permission had been received. This was an attitude Eden encountered regularly, which, given the haphazard nature of communications with Punakha, was awkward. Usually, however, the jungpens were persuaded that, in the absence of written instructions barring him entry, Eden should be allowed to proceed. In language that is rather typical, Eden writes of an encounter near Saybee,
(We) found that Zinkaffs had arrived from the Durbar, and had given out that they had orders to stop and turn me back … I pointed out to them that I could not act upon the information of petty messengers like themselves, and unless they could show written authority from the Deb to forbid my coming on, I would have nothing to say to them.
Hereupon, Eden was shown a communication intended for the Dalingkote jungpen, as it contained instructions concerning the mission:
I opened the cover and found two letters, according to the Booteah custom, one full of professions of friendship for the British Government, and instructing him to do everything he could to satisfy me and settle any dispute I might have with him regarding the frontier, but not a word about my going on or back. This letter was evidently intended to be shown to me. The second was a most violent and intemperate production, threatening the Jungpen with forfeiture of life for having allowed me to cross the frontier … at the same time telling him on no account to allow me to go away angry, but to try and entice me across the frontier again, adding, however, that if he could not get rid of me without offending me, he should send me to the durbar by the Sumchee and Dhone road …
Eden pointed out that to go back and re-enter Bhutan by the Sumchee road would take fifteen days, and that if he continued in his current direction, he would join it in two. At this, the zinkaffs agreed that the instructions made little sense, that they ‘should not trouble themselves in the matter,’ and that Eden might go which way he liked.[60]
Otherwise, Saybee was notable for the appearance of ‘three miserable blear-eyed albinos’ who were brought out by the villagers. They were considered to be Europeans, an omen that the country would pass into European hands. The villagers could hardly be persuaded that there was not something mysterious about them, or that they were unconnected with Eden’s appearance.
At the Haa Pass (12,150 ft.), ‘a bleak, dreary, open plain swept by the most bitter, piercing wind,’ Godwin-Austen waited behind for the mist to clear so that he could take his observations. He was caught in heavy snow and two of his team perished. Their corpses were stripped by the men of a former jungpen of the district, who also attempted to steal some of the expedition’s baggage.
At the Chelela pass (13,100 ft.), Eden learned that a deputation was on its way. Despite the earlier lesson in the changeable weather, Eden pressed on, thinking that, once he reached the road to Paro, there could be no excuse for stopping him:
The pass itself was nearly clear of snow, and the men started for the [next] village in high spirits … But we speedily found out our mistake, for as we advanced the snow became deeper and deeper; men and horse were continually sinking up to the neck, and since we were obliged to march in single file, – as on one side of us was a steep bank and on the other a precipice, – it was almost impossible for one man to pass another …
Evening began to draw on whilst we were still on the pass, and the coolies became frightened and desponding, and many wanted to be allowed to lie down and die … The horses and mules struggled through the snow in the most wonderful manner, sinking over their hocks at every step, constantly rolling over on their backs and yet keeping up with us …The road was continually lost in the dark, and we were delayed sometimes for three-quarters of an hour whilst it was being traced. Midnight passed and still there was no trace of the village which we were told was just below the pass. At one in the morning, we heard the welcome sound of a Thibet watch-dog baying, and reached the village perfectly exhausted, not having tasted food since nine the previous morning, and having marched through deep snow continuously for fifteen hours [61]
When it arrived, the deputation tried to halt Eden’s progress. Disputes over the frontier and the return of the Assam Duars had to be settled first, they said. Eden threatened to return to Darjeeling and declaim Bhutanese unwillingness to co-operate unless he was permitted to deliver his letter: if he turned back, he feared the Bhutanese would say he had been welcome and expose him to criticism. In fact, the government was in no state to receive him.
At Paro, there were two penlops, a stepfather (Nyima Dorji) and a stepson (Thinley Zangpo). Their initial welcome was far from encouraging. There were arguments over where the British might pitch their tents. Sepoys crowded round, jeering at Eden’s followers, calling them slaves, and threatening them with knives. Eden was told that there was no point in referring to the desi, who had no authority. Even so, he was told a messenger would be sent. Four days later, he had not departed. When Eden complained, Thinley Zangpo blamed his stepfather ‘who … had no right to exercise any authority, having voluntarily abdicated.’ This was a subterfuge designed to protect Paro against attack, the stepson being related to some of Jigme Namgyal’s allies. In fact, Nyima Dorji was very much in charge.
Eden was impressed by much of what he saw at Paro. It was well-maintained, situated on a productive plain, rich in iron ore, and was just two marches distant from Pagri, ‘one of the chief marts in Thibet.’ Extravagantly conceiving that it might become ‘one of the largest cities in the East,’ he believed Paro ‘ought to be the entrepôt of the trade of Thibet, Tartary, China, and India.’ Nyima Dorji, however, was ‘physically completely worn out with debauchery of every description.’ With time, he became more civil, but he was unprincipled:
He described the unscrupulous character of the Amlah (state council), especially of the Tongso Penlop, with the greatest fidelity and unreserve. We saw quite enough of him, however, to see he would not allow any sense of right or wrong to stand in the way of his own interests, and he had the reputation of having done as much violence and wrong in his day as his neighbours. Though intelligent as compared with the rest of the Amlah and chieftains, he was a singularly childish old man, and would amuse himself for hours with a mechanical toy or musical box.
For his first meetings, Nyima Dorji set up before himself a vase producing clouds of scented smoke, which Eden attributed to the wish of Buddhist chieftains ‘to keep up a sort of dreamy mysticism about them.’ But he was too cordial and inquisitive a character to keep this up for long. Soon, the vase and his staff were sent away, and the penlop was joined by his favourite daughter. Eden’s attitude began to change. Sustained by copious draughts of wheat beer (chang), the penlop’s conversation was marked ‘by an absence of modesty and an amount of indecency which would have disgraced the most uncivilized barbarian in the world.’ Yet the British were treated with friendship and kindness. At the end of their stay, they were permitted to watch the singular horse display at the tshechu festival, even to photograph it.
About the stepson, Eden is less flattering:
(He) used to go out occasionally for a walk; he was always preceded by clarionets, and went about half a mile from the fort, and sat down while a rough hut of fir boughs was built over him by his attendants; he always sent for us on these occasions to see what he could get out of us, and the interviews generally ended by his making demands for presents, and on our refusing them, walking off in a huff. He was hated by the Amlah, and it is generally known that the moment the old man dies this youth will be removed by the chief officer, or zimpen, an intelligent good sort of man, who according to routine should have been appointed to the office when the ex-penlow abdicated.
Of the fort’s defensive worth, Eden was equally disparaging. At first sight, it appeared imposing, with thick, stone walls overlapping a large central rock, but surveys showed it ‘would quickly crumble to pieces’ if the windows were knocked away. It was completely overlooked by six outposts in the hills. It had a garrison of four hundred, of whom 250 were ‘sepoys’, though more like ‘chuprassies’ (labourers). They were indentured for seven years, received no pay, but obtained their food and clothing for nothing, and were free to plunder the local population.
According to Eden,
The insolence of the sepoys is, as a rule, beyond all conception; but there are some exceptions, and we attached to our camp on several occasions two or three quite intelligent men who abused their employers in hearty terms, and gave us much information about the country, expressing a strong hope that we should take it.[62]
Humiliation at Punakha
As Nyima Dorji indicated, Jigme Namgyal, the Tongsa penlop, was the de facto ruler at Punakha. He dominated the Amlah, having appointed himself ‘chief officer’ (‘zimpen’) to Yeshe Ngodup, a boy of about thirteen who, as the sungtrul (‘speech’) incarnate of the Zhabdrung, was the acting dharma raja. Since Eden’s appointment, Tshultrim Gyalstshen had been made joint desi with Tshewang Sithub, but he had since died and Tshewang Sithub had been replaced by Kagyu Wangchuk. Eden describes him as an unremarkable, elderly lama, with ‘a startled, frightened look.’ (He died shortly after Eden’s departure.)
There was no real deb during our visit to Bootan. There had been a series of struggles between the penlows and the Amlah to establish various nominees of their own on the throne, but as fast as a man was appointed he was either dethroned by the opposite faction, or died suddenly; the consequence was that no one would take the office, and, to keep up a show of government whilst we were at Poonakh, they fixed upon a common lama from a neighbouring monastery and made him represent the deb.[63]
According to Eden, Tongsa was hated by the rest of the leadership, who daily expected either to be murdered by him, or to be removed from office to make way for his nominees. His only supporters were Darlung Tobgay, the jungpen of Wangdiphodrang (‘Angdu-Forung’), and Khasar Tobgay, Tongsa’s son-in-law, the dzongpen of Thimphu (‘Tassisudon’). Even their support was ‘lukewarm.’ Tassisudon at one point warned Eden of Tongsa’s treachery. He secured for him supplies when they were otherwise unobtainable and facilitated his escape. After Eden’s departure, Darlung Tobgay seized and murdered Tassisudon for ‘stealing’ his wife (whatever that meant). He then joined forces with the Tongsa penlop whom Jigme Namgyal had earlier deposed.
Eden says that Jigme Namgyal had the most repulsive countenance of anyone he met, and that he was considered ‘utterly reckless of human life and … an avaricious, treacherous, unscrupulous robber.’ [64]
The Paro penlop had warned Eden that Tongsa’s ‘confidential adviser’ was
… a Hindustani, who represented himself to be a king, and had come after the mutiny with a number of papers purporting to bear the seals of the ‘Kings of Delhi, Lahore, and Nepal’ and others, and had proposed to the Bootanese to join a general war for the purpose of driving the English from India …
He represented himself to the Booteahs as being General Nundanun Singh, son of Attaram Singh and grandson of Runjeet Singh. He had, I found out, been in the habit of procuring arms and ammunition, in small quantities, from a certain Lutchmun Baboo, said to reside within seven days of Dalingcote.
Thus Eden’s letter to Colonel Durand in the secret and political files. In his published report, Eden says that Tongsa’s adviser was ‘represented by some to be Ummer (Amar) Singh, the brother of Kooer (Kunwar) Singh’, who led the rebellion against the British in Bihar, in 1857. (Amar Singh, he added, was generally believed to have died in a government charitable hospital.) Considering his attempts to entice away the sepoys in Eden’s escort, this adviser was judged ‘a most mischievous, intriguing character.’[65]
From the start, the negotiations were difficult. Jigme Namgyal demanded that two British subjects, who had sought refuge with the mission, be delivered to him, so that he could make enquiries and punish those who had taken them captive. Eden acceded, with reluctance, and later found that they became ‘slaves at a monastery.’
On 17 March, the mission was received by the Amlah at a house near Punakha’s dzong. On their passage there, the British were pelted by a crowd with stones and pieces of wood. For two hours, they were kept outside in a burning sun, ‘exposed to the jeers and impertinences of several hundred persons.’ Then they were admitted. Jigme Namgyal imposed himself completely on proceedings. ‘None of the customary friendly ceremonies were observed.’ None of the Amlah were permitted to participate. Because of the language barrier, it was agreed that Chibu Lama would pass between the two sides, relaying proposals. The meeting dispersed and Eden submitted his draft treaty.
Over the next two days, he says, it was discussed, principally with Jigme Namgyal. The only objections raised related to the appointment of a British resident, and free commerce. ‘Some slight hints were thrown out regarding the return of the Assam Dooars,’ but ‘the subject was dropped’ after Chibu Lama explained it lay outside Eden’s brief.
After two further days, Eden’s party were taken to the desi and dharma raja. Embarrassingly, he had no presents to offer – they were following somewhere on the trail. Still, Eden complained that ‘every opportunity was taken of treating us with indignity.’ Previously, envoys had been received inside the palace. They had been permitted to sit. Eden’s contingent were taken onto the plain behind and ‘hustled’ into an unbearably hot tent just a few feet square. It was so pressed upon by ‘the mob’ that they feared it would collapse on top of them. After half an hour, they were summoned by the Amlah. They were told to sit on mats in the sun. When Eden objected, he was told he ‘must adapt himself to the habits of the country.’ However, he still expected the treaty to be approved. And so, rather than raise difficulties, he persuaded his colleagues to accept that the ‘extraordinary conduct’ of the Bhutanese was the result of ‘ignorance rather than any intention to insult.’ What followed came as a shock.[66]
Eden expected to present the governor-general’s letters to the desi and dharma raja personally. In this, he was disappointed. Jigme Namgyal interposed himself. The envoys were taken to a canopy beneath which the desi was sitting, and their letter was brought in by a ‘common coolie’ and placed before him:
The Deb seemed much frightened and did not speak; the Tongso Penlow acted as spokesman, and told us, as if from the Deb, that the Penlow would conduct with us any business for which we had come to Poonakh. We were then pushed rudely on one side to make way for the Deb, and after a short delay followed him to another little canopy in which a boy of about eighteen (sic.) was seated. The same course was followed here, and the Tongso Penlow told us that the Dhurma Rajah also referred us to him for the conduct of business, though in point of fact the Rajah never opened his lips …
The Rajahs went back to the Palace, and we were kept in the tent for an hour before the Amlah would see us. During this period, the Sepoys of the Deb and the Amlah mustered in great force around us, jeering at us, and behaving with great insolence, pushing one another against the tent, and on one occasion they took up a man, lifted the side of the tent up, and threw him into the midst of us.
When, eventually, the discussions began, Jigme Namgyal announced almost immediately that,
… the resumed Assam Dooars should at once be made over to Bootanese officers, and that after this had been done all other matters in dispute could be arranged; that till this was done it was no use discussing the surrender of captive British subjects or of plundered property; these were matters of no importance and could be settled at any time.
Eden was startled as much by his pronouncement, as by his manner. Gathering his wits, he answered that the issue of the Assam Duars had been closed for several years and that Britain had paid the agreed revenue in full. (This would have been disputed.) He added that, since his government was unaware that Bhutan wished to discuss the matter, he had been empowered to discuss Ambari-Falakata only. The Amlah should therefore,
… dismiss all consideration of that subject from their minds and take measures to prevent the loss of further lands, which would inevitably follow from a refusal to comply with the moderate and just demands of our government.
Here was plain-speaking, as Eden knew. Even so, he was surprised by the reaction:
The penlow took up the draft treaty, crumpled it up, and said, ‘then we will have war; you are nobody; you have no authority from the Governor General; we don’t want Ambaree Fallacottah, and as to the demands of the Government of India, a chupprassee might have been sent to settle them. I will have nothing more to do with you; go!’
Tongsa’s harangue convinced Eden that his mission was ‘hopeless’. He announced that he would return to Calcutta. His words were greeted in stony silence, although the Amlah later sent several messages deploring what had occurred. The penlop, they said, had no authority to speak as he had. They had all approved the draft treaty. They did not want the Assam duars restored. Tongsa had been appropriating all their revenue for himself, and now he was ‘endeavouring to usurp the whole government.’ They begged Eden to stay, adding that, if he did, Tongsa would be resisted, but that his going away ‘would end in a disturbance.’ Eden acceded to their request, provided that Jigme Namgyal was absent from future consultations and the Assam Duars were not mentioned.[67]
On 22 March, there was another session. Although some more stones were thrown and Tongsa took his seat at the head of the table, the matter of Assam Duars did not arise. The Amlah asked simply that the treaty’s clauses relating to free trade and the resident agent should be removed. Since there was little point pressing, Eden agreed. Tassisudon asked for a present, on the grounds that he had been responsible for Tongsa’s forbearance. Eden was sent away to prepare a translation of the text.
On 24 March, the parties reconvened over rice and tea. Almost immediately, Jigme Namgyal proposed that the Assam Duars and all their revenues since their attachment (calculated as Rs.300,000 per annum) should be surrendered to him upon finalisation of the treaty. Eden was astounded:
I looked at the Amlah expecting them to interfere, but, with the exception of the Augda Forung Jungpen, they all pretended not to know what was passing, and occupied themselves in eating pawn, and talking in a trivial childish way to the other officers of the mission … I pointed out that their conduct in agreeing to a treaty … and then at the last moment rejecting it, was quite incomprehensible … The Amlah were laughing and talking all the time I was speaking, and did not pay the slightest attention to what was passing.
Tongsa brooked no refusal. He denied the Amlah had agreed to the draft treaty. They had simply asked for a fair copy. He himself would consent to nothing until the duars were returned. Eden, he added, had not been invited to Punakha. Now, he would not be allowed to depart until he had conceded.
The manner and tone of the Tongso Penlow and the Augda Forung Jungpen became every moment more offensive. The penlow took up a large piece of wet dough and began rubbing my face with it; he pulled my hair, slapped me on the back, and generally conducted himself with very great insolence. On my showing signs of impatience or remonstrating, he smiled and deprecated my anger, pretending that it was all the familiarity of friendship, much to the amusement of the large assemblage of bystanders …
The Augda Forung Jungpen surpassed the Penlow in insolence; he took some pawn which he had chewed in his mouth and told Dr. Simpson to eat it, and on his refusing, threw it angrily in his face.
This was serious. The British considered withdrawing at once, but decided against it, the crowd having closed in around them:
Dr Simpson sat perfectly still without wiping the pawn from his face, showing clearly that the insult was felt and understood by us all. The Augda Forung Jungpen next seized Cheeboo Lama’s watch-ribbon from his neck, and with great violence wrenched away the watch that had been given to him by the Governor General; he passed it to one of the other Amlahs, who secreted it in his dress. They saw us consulting and looking for our escort, and apparently thought they had gone too far. The watch was returned, and Dr. Simpson was asked to wipe the stain from his face, which, however, he declined to do.
Eden challenged the rest of the Amlah to declare out loud what they had put in their earlier messages. Most ‘pretended not to hear.’ Others said that they agreed with Tongsa. There was little point continuing. When Eden demanded a safe conduct back to Darjeeling, Jigme Namgyal insisted again on the return of the Assam Duars. Without them, he declared, it was ‘better to have war than a treaty.’ He said he would write to the governor-general. Uneasily, Eden backed away and returned to his camp.[68]
The next day, Chibu Lama was given a paper summarising Tongsa’s demands. The whole frontier between India and Bhutan was to be ‘readjusted’ and the Assam Duars restored; compensation for their attachment should be paid at the rate of Rs.300,000 rupees per annum; runaway slaves and political offenders taking refuge in India should be delivered up. Assuming that this was Tongsa’s letter for Sir John Lawrence, Eden promised to deliver it. He misunderstood what was expected of him. He was told immediately to sign and seal it.
When Eden explained this would serve no purpose,
… the Tongso Penlow threw off all pretence of friendship, told Cheeboo that he had brought us to the country for his own ends, and should suffer for it; that he was now convinced that I was a person of no authority or position, and not even of rank equal to a servant of the Governor-General’s servants; that unless I at once agreed to sign the paper and give an order for the surrender of the Dooars he would seize and imprison Cheeboo Lama and myself, and confine us in stocks in the dungeon of the fort. He said that we had come without any invitation, and having done so, must take the consequences; that we should now see that we could not ‘sit on the heads’ of the Bootanese.
To this, Darlung Tobgay added his tuppence. War was inevitable, he declared. It would be best to start it by killing everyone at hand.
Still, the British were given time to discuss their options. They decided that the dharma raja, the desi and most of the Amlah were ‘puppets in the hands of two treacherous and notoriously unscrupulous robber chiefs.’ There was nothing to be gained by remaining. Yet, with an escort of just fifteen, limited supplies, and no communications with the frontier, there was little chance of resisting arrest. Consideration was given to leaving Eden and Chibu Lama behind, on condition that the remainder were permitted to withdraw. This was rejected on the grounds that the advanced season made rescue impossible. An overnight dash for the border was thought impractical: several sickly coolies were scarcely able to stand and, whilst the Paro penlop had indicated he might provide refuge, it was now felt that little confidence could be placed in the word of anyone. Eden resolved to sign.[69]
One obstacle remained. The presents from the governor-general remained to be delivered. When, after a few days, these reached Punakha, Eden bartered them for supplies, holding back some jewellery and guns, which he did not think it ‘expedient’ to hand over.
On 29 March, Eden signed two copies of the document, adding the words ‘under compulsion’ to each copy, ‘to prevent its being sent down to Assam and made use of before I could communicate with the government.’ He derived some comfort from the observation that the fair copy he was given omitted reference to the 300,000 rupees, and that it contained no clause binding him to obtain ratification. An extra paragraph specifying that, if she encroached on Bhutan, Britain was ‘to submit to be punished by the Bootanese, Sikkimese and Cooch Behar Governments acting together,’ he dismissed as ‘absurd’. (Chibu Lama was required to sign also, in the misguided hope that his signature would commit Sikkim and Cooch Behar.)
Otherwise, the text refers to ‘foolish men on the frontier having caused a disturbance’ on both sides, and to the governor-general having sent his envoy ‘with a good intention’. Once the duars had been returned to Bhutan and refugee offenders exchanged, it envisaged a pact, in which three of Bhutan, Sikkim, Cooch Behar and the Company would support the others against any aggression committed by any fourth. All would combine against an external enemy. Finally, it threatened that,
… (if) this settlement is made with one word in the mouth and two in the heart, … the Dhurma Raja’s demons will, after deciding who is true or false, take his life, and take out his liver and scatter it to the winds like ashes.
On 29 March, Eden and his party attended the desi and dharma raja for the last time.
They placed the usual white scarfs on our necks … We were told that the Demon Mohakul would be put on the heads of all present, and that if anything was then done to injure the Bootanese that demon would at once take notice of it. A large wooden four-headed demon was then carried round, and everyone near the tent received a knock from it. A letter was then given for the Governor General, three ponies were presented, and a few pieces of silk …[70]
The mission departed by forced marches, in the face of some intimidation. After a short stay at Paro, they continued to the Taigon Pass, where they were informed that an insurrection had begun. The former desi had had a hostile meeting with Tassisudon, and the Paro penlop went to his aid. He planned to arbitrate, obtain a footing in the Tassisudon dzong, and take it into his possession. The full details emerged when Eden reached Dalingkote:
… the plan fixed upon was for the Byogur Jungpen to seize on Tongso, and shut the penlow out of his own fort; the whole of the Amlah were then to combine with the Paro Penlow to prevent his return to the durbar, and to eject his son-in-law from the fort of Tassishujung. The Tongso Penlow, on the other hand, was said to have determined to place his own brother in his place at Tongso, to return, eject the Deb whom he had himself appointed, and assume that office himself. If it is borne in mind that the men who are now combined with the Paro Penlow to eject the Tongso Penlow and support the ex-Deb, are the very men who last year invited the Tongso Penlow to Poonakh to eject that Deb and besiege Paro, and that these internal commotions are the normal condition of the country, it will at once be seen how futile it is to expect that under any circumstances a strong and stable Government can ever be established in Bootan.
Otherwise, Eden’s message was clear. Calcutta could no longer doubt that Bhutan’s leaders were complicit in the outrages of their people:
We now know that they are the instigators and promoters of every act of lawlessness and aggression on our frontier, and that all British subjects captured on these occasions are kept as slaves in their forts and residencies … The friendship of this government has been deliberately rejected, and we have no option as to the course which we must pursue.[71]
From Trade to Dominion
Hostilities followed at the end of 1864. A promising start against the frontier guard made the British over-confident. Early in 1865, Jigme Namgyal drove them out of Dewangiri and captured two guns, his men fighting bravely, despite their inferior equipment. Legend says that five British officers were shot by the penlop himself. Guided by the telescope of his Hindustani adviser, the ‘Padshah Raja’, and by the raven-headed deity, Mahakala, whose crown he wore in battle, he fired his gun ‘with a single pointed concentration and aspiration for the welfare of Buddhism and sentient beings,’ and, with a single bullet, killed all five as they conferred in their tent. The hand of Lieutenant Urquart, was chopped off and hung in the chamber of the protecting deities at Tongsa.[72]
After eleven months and a bloodier battle at Dewangiri, the war came to an end. In the duars, the British were debilitated by disease, but they threatened a full-scale invasion and convinced the Bhutanese that they meant it. At the peace of Sinchula, Bhutan surrendered the document Eden had signed, and the guns. The Bengal Duars and a tract of land between the Teesta and Jaldhaka Rivers (twenty per cent of Bhutanese territory) were exchanged for an annual subsidy of fifty thousand rupees. The treaty stood until 1910. Its successor, the Treaty of Punakha, remained in force until 1947.
In 1864, Tongsa had been the ruler of Bhutan de facto, if not de jure. By 1870, he was both. After his death, in 1881, Bhutan entered a final period of civil war, before Ugyen Wangchuk, Tongsa’s son, emerged as pre-eminent leader. In 1903-1904, during Francis Younghusband’s expedition to Lhasa, he endeared himself to the British by mediating in negotiations with the Tibetans. When, in 1907, he became the first king (Druk Gyalpo) of Bhutan, the British political officer, Sir Claude White, attended the ceremony, and took the photographs.[73]
Might the Duar War have been avoided? Tension had been building for years. The fertile lowlands were bound to be the object of attention. For a while, the British behaved with moderation, but they were innocent neither of retaliation, nor of presumption. Their policy was frequently misunderstood. Restraint and inconsistency were confused with weakness. Certainly, Bhutan underestimated the scale of the problem, just as they underestimated the strength of British India.
In a report of 19 May 1864, Charles Aitchison, under-secretary to the government of India, held Eden wholly responsible for his mission’s disgrace. He, in turn, was criticised for failing to consider the letters Eden had sent before entering Bhutan, in the face of which he had been asked to continue his advance. Yet, Eden’s experiences on the road to Punakha should have given him pause for thought. It was in his power to moderate his behaviour. Certainly, he was censured for failing to offer gifts before entering into negotiations, for his inflexibility, and for failing to explain to the Bhutanese what he meant by signing the agreement ‘under compulsion’ whilst accepting gifts for the governor-general.[74]
David Rennie believed that Bhutan had just grievances against the British. Writing in 1866, he was persuaded that, before the war, the inhabitants of Jaipalguri had ‘no complaints to make of the Bhotanese’ and suffered ‘much more’ from the British side of the frontier. ‘Raiding within the Dooars by natives living under British protection,’ he wrote, ‘has apparently been as common as it has been within our own frontier by the Bhotanese.’ Eden, he thought, was unlikely to judge impartially those who had insulted him, and his claim that the desolation of the duars was severest where the Bhutanese had control was ‘hardly supported by facts.’ [75]
Certainly, Jigme Namgyal’s conduct at Punakha precipitated the final crisis. Arguably, his intransigence reflected his interest in the Assam Duars more than the interest of Bhutan. Yet, as Jenkins recognised, all along, Bhutan’s tumult made failure the likely outcome of Eden’s mission. The Sikkim campaign of 1861 significantly influenced Calcutta’s approach. The policy of ‘attaching’ the duars for rent had produced confusion rather than direction, and it taught them they had little to fear from China. Looking back, in 1909, Sir Claude White, who considered himself a friend of Bhutan, felt able to argue that the opposition Eden had encountered before Paro would have justified him returning to Darjeeling. Calcutta, he opined, ‘would have had sufficient cause to annex the Duars … and the indignation of the mission would have been spared.’[76]
What else had happened? In September 1864, the Calcutta Englishman bemoaned the withdrawal, by Lord Bentinck, in 1832, of the kind of support given to the Bhutanese traders at Rangpur by Hastings and Bogle. Bentinck sought economy. But his decision reflected a change in attitude. The commercial spirit of Bogle and Turner, their sympathy and their patience, had been replaced by conceit born of dominion.[77]
Younghusband’s statement, in his book, India and Tibet, that he regretted the way in which Hastings’ policies had not survived him, sits oddly with the arch-imperialist. Yet, considering the interruption in the intercourse between Calcutta and Lhasa after 1792, he wrote,
The results of Warren Hasting’s forethought and careful, steady endeavour were all lost. Yet it must be conceded by the sturdiest advocate of non-interference that those endeavours were not only statesman-like, but humane. There was never any attempt to aggress. No threats were ever used; no impatience was shown … He had some right to expect that when he himself had shown so much restraint and moderation, those who followed after would continue the same deliberate policy. Unfortunately … the policy of drift and inaction in regard to Tibet set in on Warren Hasting’s departure. The promotion of intercourse had proved a difficult business, and with so much on hand elsewhere in the building up of the Indian Empire, it was perhaps natural that an ordinary Governor-General should let the matter drop.[78]
It is to be doubted that Younghusband ever regretted ‘the building up of the Indian Empire,’ but his remark that it was accompanied by a change of priorities was well made. They reflected a change of temperament. Perhaps that too was natural. Thomas Manning, for one, would have considered it unfortunate.
