Page:Lhasa and its mysteries.djvu/93

Meanwhile, the British Commission was organised. Major F. E. Younghusband, of the political department, was chosen as Envoy, with the Resident of Sikhim, Mr J. C. White, as assistant, Mr E. C. Wilton of the Consular Service as Chinese interpreter, and Captain W. F. O'Connor, Royal Artillery, as Tibetan interpreter and secretary. In July 1903 this peaceful Mission, with a small escort of 200 Sikh pioneers, crossed the frontier to Khamba Jong as had been arranged, travelling at considerable expense, on account of having to carry its own provisions and transport all the way from the Indian plains. On arrival at Khamba Jong, 20 miles within the Tibetan frontier and across a pass over 16,000 feet above the sea-level, the Mission found no one to meet it, neither Chinese nor Tibetan. An enquiry, addressed to Peking, asking why the representative of the Son of Heaven had not arrived, elicited the reply that the new Amban had started from Peking, but had succumbed to the hardships of the journey, and that another Amban had left Peking in December 1902 and was still on his way, and, meanwhile, a very high Tibetan official had left Lhasa for Khamba Jong. This individual arrived after several weeks' delay, but turned out to be a person of very low rank, so that the British Commissioner properly refused to enter into any relations with him.

In this deadlock Colonel Younghusband's Mission waited wearily for four months for envoys who never came. On the contrary, an army of 3000 Tibetans was drawn up in front of the Mission camp, and threatened to attack it if the Mission did not withdraw.

At the time of this hostile demonstration by the Tibetans there are grounds for thinking that a secret treaty was arrived at between Russia and the Dalai Lama, in which the former assumed the suzerainty of Tibet and protectorate of the Lamaist religion. Russia,