From Russia, with love
Meanwhile, in 1899, a staunch Russophobe and a man who nearly became the Prime Minister of Britain, Lord George Curzon, was appointed Viceroy of India. A few short years later, in 1901, in Nepal—in fact a couple of months after escorting Curzon on a ‘hunting trip’ to the Tarai—Chandra Shumsher staged a coup d’etat and assumed virtual absolute powers, completely sidelining his half-brother Deb Shumsher. This cocktail of events appeared to place Nepal at the centre of an intriguing international chess game of power and politics.
Russian Finance Minister Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte, who had served under not just two emperors but had been at the forefront of the Russian Empire’s industrialisation, was a scholar by nature and had the habit of combing his hair back and exposing his forehead, which was indeed very broad. He looked regal in imperial costume, festooned with various insignia; as he walked through the long corridor leading to Tsar Nicholas’ cavernous office, he left behind a trail of scent from the famous French fragrance Les Fleurs Nicoises Bruyers. He extinguished his half-burnt cigarette and slipped the long, gold-plated cigarette holder into an inner pocket. Two guards flung open the doors for him.
Seated at the other end of the room was Tsar Nicholas II, who would be the last Emperor of Russia; he was also Grand Duke of Finland and Titular King of Poland. As Count Witte entered his office that day, the Tsar motioned for him to be seated. The Count wished to explain to the Tsar how the Russian-built Trans-Caspian Railway, which followed the path of the Silk Road as well as the Trans-Siberian Railway—the construction of which the latter had personally inaugurated in Vladivostok in 1890—was intimately linked to an ambitious plan that was gaining currency in St Petersburg.
This particular plan aimed to bring “parts of the Chinese Empire, including Tibet and Mongolia, under Russian sway [and] could be done without any risk of war and at comparatively little cost by fomenting large-scale insurrections against the currently enfeebled Manchus.” The Count explained that this could be done by establishing an innocuous trading outpost in Lhasa whose real purpose would be to incite rebellion in the local population against Peking.
This idea appealed to the expansionist Tsar Nicholas and to that general effect, on June 23, 1901, the Emperor granted an audience to a man by the name of Dorjieff (or Dorzhiev in Russian) who was a special emissary sent by the Dalai Lama from Lhasa. He was in fact a Mongol Buriat subject of the Tsar but had become a close confidant of the Dalai Lama. With him were two senior Tibetan officials: Lobsang Khenchok and Gyaltsen Phuntsok. The envoys presented a letter and gifts from the Dalai Lama to the Russian Emperor who in return handed over gifts and a gramota written in “solid gold letters” for the Dalai Lama which expressed his “strong hope that, given the friendly and fully well-disposed attitude of Russia, no danger will threaten Tibet in her fortunes hereafter.”
In Calcutta, Lord Curzon had been receiving an alarming stream of intelligence about such meetings and contacts taking place between Lhasa and St Petersburg. Curzon was a Russophobe if ever there was one: he detested the Russians and believed that Russia was the paramount threat to Britian’s most valuable colony, India, and had discussed at great length in his celebrated book, Russia in Central Asia, the perceived threat to British control of India, resulting from among others, the Trans-Caspian railway. He believed that “the resulting greater economic interdependence between Russia and Central Asia would be damaging to British interests.” More important here was his assessment that the “introduction of Russian influence on the northern border would vastly complicate British relations with the Himalayan border states—Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Kashmir.”
Seated on his brown leather Chesterfield Wing armchair in Kathmandu, resplendent in French-inspired military dress and sporting a flowing pepper beard, Nepali Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher knew exactly what was going on and had his fingertips on the designs, not just of the Russians but also the British.
As the eminent Berkeley political scientist, Leo Rose, noted, Chandra Shumsher had “become one of the more assiduous abettors of the British-Russian rivalry” and assumed that within the context of a Russo-British clash of interest in Tibet, Nepal “would have the opportunity to expand its political influence in Lhasa.” To what extent he was successful in that objective is still open to interpretation and beyond the scope of this composition.
In any event, what Chandra managed to do, in coordination with the Nepali Vakil stationed in Lhasa, was to circulate a “veritable flood of rumors concerning Russian activity in Tibet [which were] not easily subject to either verification or disproof.” These rumors seem to have had the desired effect, as Lord Curzon (ever suspicious of the Russians) relented and granted Chandra Shumsher a meeting that lasted nearly two hours, in the midst of preparations he was personally orchestrating for the 1903 Delhi Durbar to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra as Emperor and Empress of India. At this time, Curzon had pointedly declined to meet any of the Indian Princes who had then descended upon Delhi.
The principle outcome of the meeting between Chandra Shumsher and Lord Curzon seems to have been the decision taken in London to dispatch into Tibet an armed detachment (which incidentally included the 8th Gorkha Rifles) led by Col Younghusband to counter the Russian threat. Younghusband was instructed to advance deep into Tibet as far as Gyantse and even Lhasa, which was eventually occupied by this expeditionary force on August 3, 1904.
Chandra Shumsher had offered this detachment several thousand yaks and porters for transportation purposes, which were accepted by the British. A variety of reasons ultimately led to the withdrawal of this British presence in Tibet. The 1906 Peking convention and the 1907 St Petersburg convention “made it obvious to the Dalai Lama the he must seek an accommodation with the Manchu court.”
In the midst of such extraordinary diplomatic activity involving the great powers of the time, as well as the intriguing combination of unusual personalities such as the Tsar of Russia, King of Great Britain, Emperor of China, Prime Minister of Nepal and the 13th Dalai Lama, the Viceroy of India—a thin and bespectacled man who always wore a red vermilion ‘tika’
on his forehead and whom his neighbors described as a “walking thousand watt-bulb”—so bright was his appearance—interjected himself onto the scene of Nepali politics.
Krishna Prasad Koirala had boldly sent a parcel from Biratnagar to Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher containing a soiled and torn ‘Nepali Dhaka topi’ which symbolised the simmering democratic aspirations of his subjects. Whether Koirala’s provocative action was motivated by an honest and well-founded resistance to the un-democratic dispensation of Chandra Shumsher or was, as some historians suggest, a ‘deflecting strategy’ to draw attention away from having defaulted on the collection of customs taxes of the entire Tarai belt for which he was then responsible, one can only surmise the reaction elicited in Chandra Shumsher as he opened that parcel.
This is an important question as the Nepali Prime Minister was described by a very sensitive English observer in the following terms: “Nothing is too small for his notice, yet his grasp of the greater questions that affect Nepal is broader and farther sighted than that of any man who had directed her affairs.”
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