Tibet's part in the 'great game.' (Agvan Dorjiev)
by Hundley, Helen
History Today
Vol.43( Oct 1993)
Pp.45-50
COPYRIGHT History Today Ltd. (UK) 1993
Why did the visit of a Buddhist holy man to Lhasa at the turn of the
century throw the British Foreign Office into a state of paranoia?
Helen Hundley explores the life and times of Agvan Dorjiev and the
part he played in the Asian rivalry of Britain and Russia.
This announcement of the activities of a ~certain official', clipped
in St Petersburg by the British Charge d'Affaires, Charles Hardinge,
and sent to the Foreign Office in London, introduced the British to
a citizen of the Russian empire, the Buriat lama, doctor of Buddhist
theology, Agvan Dorjiev (1853 - 1938). In the summers of 1900 and
1901 Dorjiev led embassies from the Dalai Lama to Russia expressing
official greetings. His presence at the embassies was to spark a
particularly interesting example of ~The Great Game' between Great
Britain and Russia. British perceptions of Dorjiev's role and
connections to the Russian government eventually led to the British
invasion of Tibet, the Younghusband Mission of 1904.
How could such an ~innocent' visit by a Buriat lama have initiated
such havoc? What role did this enigmatic man play in the affairs of
the great powers at the height of the imperialist era? In fact, the
mere presence of a citizen of the Russian empire in Tibet served to
alarm the British in India. At the time of the ~Great Game' none of
the players could imagine that non-Europeans could have their own
agendas or that a citizen of an empire would not share the same
goals as those of their mother country. It is not surprising then,
that the British naturally assumed that the Russian government
controlled all of Dorjiev's acts. British action at the time was
based on this perception of Dorjiev and his role in Tibet. For the
Tibetans, this perception of Russian support and interest was
precisely what they desired.
Agvan Dorjiev, a Transbaikal Buriat, certainly came from the Russian
empire, a fact his friends advertised during his visits to Russia
for the Dalai Lama. His home territory in eastern Siberia, located
on both sides of Lake Baikal, known as Buriatia, became the Buriat
Autonomous Republic under the Soviets and still retains their
identity under the Russian Republic. When the Russians annexed the
Baikal territory in the mid-seventeenth century the local
population, Mongolian people known as Buriats, all practiced
Shamanism. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the vast
majority of those Buriats who inhabited the region on the eastern
side of Lake Baikal, known as the Transbaikal, practiced Mahayana
Yellow Hat Buddhism, or Lamaism.
The Transbaikal Buriats were well aware of their minority status
both ethnically and religiously within the Russian empire. No matter
how isolated they may have been within the empire, however, they
were part of a greater religious, cultural, and ethnic ~family'
beyond - the Lamaist Buddhist religious family - which stretched
from the Transbaikal through Khalka, or Outer Mongolia, to Inner
Mongolia, to Tibet.
Lhasa, Tibet, is the home for this branch of Buddhism. Thus, for any
young Transbaikal Buriat wishing to perfect his religious
understanding, it was necessary to study in Tibet, a Chinese
tributary. After preparation at home in the 1860s Agvan Dorjiev
attended the Drepung Monastery, one of the most important
theological centres for Yellow Hat Lamaism in Tibet. It was an
atmosphere in which he thrived, winning the highest award for a
Buddhist scholar. In the mid-1880s, soon after completing fifteen
years of study and achieving honour as a scholar, he was named as
one of the new 13th Dalai Lama's (b. 1876) teachers and as his
spiritual adviser. He retained this role as spiritual adviser until
the late 1910s at least, when his physical absence attenuated that
side of their alliance.
Their relationship, however, went beyond that of student-teacher.
Dorjiev most certainly played a role in saving the life of the young
Dalai Lama in the mid- and late-1890s. The young man's continued
survival was in itself quite unique, as his four predecessors had
not lived long enough to actually rule (9th, 1805-1815.110th,
1816-1837; 11th, 1838-1855; 12th, 1856-1875). It is believed that
they were not allowed to live, and that the regents, the
Demo-Khutukhtus, were the agents of these deaths, possibly at the
behest of the Chinese. What is known through the Buriat scholar,
Tsybikov, who was in Lhasa from 1899 to 1902, is that there was an
internal struggle for the future of Tibet and Buddhism and that when
it was over, Dorjiev's charge, the 13th Dalai Lama, still lived,
indicating that the party that wished for more independence from
China for Tibet had prevailed. Needless to say, this period must
have deepened a close relationship and certainly placed Dorjiev in
the camp of those who wished to oppose destructive outside
interference.
The question remains, what purpose did the deaths of the earlier
Dalai Lamas serve, and what greater problems did their deaths imply?
In fact, the early deaths of the Dalai Lamas were just the most
visible signs of Tibet's precarious situation in the nineteenth
century. Throughout the century, Tibet had faced a growing challenge
to her limited local autonomy under the Dalai Lamas from her Chinese
overlords, who had occupied the country in the early eighteenth
century and became Tibet's official suzerains in 1792. By ensuring
that the young Dalai Lamas would not live long enough to take civil
control of the government, China removed a potential source of a
legitimate and organised challenge to its rule.
Unfortunately, Chinese interference was not the only danger that
confronted Tibet during this period. She also faced challenges to
her sovereignty from her neighbour, Gurkha-dominated Nepal, as well
as from the great imperial power to the south, Great Britain. Nepal
had shown interest since 1791, when she invaded Tibet and annexed
Shigate. As recently as 1855, Nepal had forced a 10,000-rupee tax on
Tibet and continued to exert pressure into the late nineteenth
century.
The British had also indicated early and persistent interest in
Tibet, sending in a string of explorers while pressing for a special
trading place on the border of, or inside, Tibet. The British
interest had begun in the late 1700s during the tenure of India's
first Governor-General, Warren Hastings. By 1817 the British had
annexed Sikkim, a region that had hitherto paid special taxes to
Tibet, leaving that territory to Nepalese local control. In fact, an
1886 British Commercial Mission instigated border skirmishes that
involved Tibet, India, and Sikkim and eventually led to 1890 and
1893 trade agreements between China and Britain requiring Tibet to
trade with Britain, at a location chosen to serve British trade
needs. At the time, the Tibetans correctly understood the British
desire for increased trade, but they also feared that the British
would then annex them and totally destroy their culture. In the
1920s, the 13th Dalai Lama told Britain's representative, Sir
Charles Bell, that he had genuinely feared that the British had
wished to annex Tibet, and that if they had succeeded the survival
of Buddhism itself would have been in doubt.
Agvan Dorjiev provided a possible counterweight to dangers from both
directions. Here was a citizen of a state powerful enough to provide
a challenge to British aggression, and his actions from 1898 to 1904
illustrate the fact that he realised the impact he might have. For
their part, the Tibetans knew little to nothing about Russia.
Dorjiev was in the position to tell them. By all accounts, by the
1890s, Dorjiev began to expound the story that the mythical kingdom
of Shamba-la, a kingdom to the north of Tibet whose king would save
Buddhism, was actually the kingdom of Russia. Whether Dorjiev, the
Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama's government and advisers, or all of
these men in concert, originated the plan of seeking contact with
the Russian empire, the activity was underway at least by 1898 if
not sooner. Although we cannot be certain how far everyone wished
this relationship to go, at the very least it is safe to assume that
they sought protection from British pressure and perhaps even hoped
to see a loosening of Chinese overlordship by playing Dorjiev's
Russian card.
The Tibetans may have had purely local interests, Dorjiev certainly
had broader goals. At this time of tremendous political and social
questioning in Europe, the peoples of the Russian empire were
exploring their own nationalist identities. In the Siberian regional
press, Dorjiev engaged in a battle with other Buriat intelligentsia
over the correct direction for Buriats. He argued for a
pan-Buddhist, pan-Mongolist movement directed at merging all
Buddhists, from the Baikal to perhaps even Tibet, into one state,
rather than to attempt to create an independent secular Buriat
state. In order to face the political realities of the times, he
recommended that this expanded Buddhist world unite under the aegis
of the Russian empire. With their increased physical size and
numbers, Buddhists could expect greater security in the Russian
empire.
Whatever the agendas, hidden or otherwise, in 1898 Dorjiev was sent
to Europe by the Dalai Lama to learn more about European affairs. On
this trip Dorjiev met Tsar Nicholas II for the first time,
unofficially. in the spring of 1900 Dorjiev returned with six other
representatives of the Dalai Lama who travelled through India on
their way to meet with the Tsar in Odessa in July at the Livadia
Palace. At this point, the British government and the newspapers
were blissfully unaware of the existence of Dorjiev or his mission.
The following year the pilgrimage was repeated with Dorjiev and the
other representatives meeting this time with the Tsar, the Minister
of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Finance in St Petersburg.
Probably none of these exchanges of pleasantries would have been of
much interest, nor would they have had the desired effect of
implying Russian support for the Dalai Lama, had they remained
secret. The Russian press and especially the Tsarist official Dr
Badmaev, a Buriat himself, made certain that the visits were
publicised and that Dorjiev's role and background were discussed
extensively in the Russian papers. On the surface, it appeared that
the information was having a subtle effect. in July and August 1901,
The Times in London repeated the Russian information, from the St
Petersburgskiia Vedomosti and other Russian journalistic sources,
with and without editorial comment. The activities of the ~Buddhist
from the Trans-Baikal Province' and his mission received several
mentions at a time replete with seemingly more important news,
indicating British fascination with Dorjiev's mission.
Although British initial information on Dorjiev came from the
Russian's themselves, a Japanese Buddhist monk, Ekai Kawaguchi, who
had visited Lhasa incognito, because of his status as a foreigner,
for eighteen months, expended an enormous amount of effort telling
the British about Dorjiev's activities. His account of his 1901-2
stay in Lhasa was published in Japanese in 1903-4 in 156 daily
issues of an Osaka newspaper, and in English in 1909. More
importantly, the indian government had access to all that Kawaguchi
saw, and all that he thought that he saw. Whilst in Tibet, and
later, Kawaguchi sent reports on Dorjiev's activities to his Tibetan
tutor, the Bengali, Sarat Chandra Das (1849-1917), a British agent.
In these letters, Kawaguchi did not make vague statements, based on
a general assumption that a citizen of the Russian empire might be a
source of future trouble in the region, but instead made very
specific allegations. He not only reported that Dorjiev had
encouraged the Dalai Lama to think of the Russian empire as
Shamba-la, that Dorjiev was Minister of War, but also that he was
personally responsible for creating an arsenal in Lhasa through the
importation of American guns from Mongolia. The Japanese monk also
reported that Dorjiev's agitations were at odds with a general
pro-British feeling among the Tibetans. His work did not remain
hidden: in the account giving his own justification for going into
Tibet, Sir Francis Younghusband, leader of the British expedition
into Lhasa and Commissioner to Tibet (1902-4), cited these same
accusations.
Kawaguchi also managed to visit Tibet's arch enemy, Nepal, on his
way out of Tibet in 1902. While there he spoke to Chandra Shamsher,
Nepal's prime minister, to report that the Russian citizen had
gained influence over the Dalai Lama, and that ~... Tibet had taken
a hard line since Tsan-ni Kembo's [Dorjiev's] return from Russia'.
Nepal in turn used Kawaguchi's information to justify asking Britain
for action when talking to British Resident, Colonel C.W. Ravenshaw,
in October 1902, providing the Viceroy of India, George Nathaniel
Curzon, with justification for subsequent action on his part. Why
had Kawaguchi taken such a negative attitude toward Dorjiev? While
there is no proof that he was a Japanese spy, a spy, Navita
Yasuteru, had been sent to Lhasa at about the same time. Kawaguchi
may very well have been a self-appointed defender of his country's
interests in Asia. Additionally, documents in Tibet and Japan imply
a pro-British attitude on his part.
While we know a great deal about Kawaguchi's attempts at painting a
dark picture of Dorjiev's activities before 1904, we know very
little about yet another reporter of Russian intrigues - the German,
Wilhelm Filchner. In 1924, he wrote a lurid account of Russian
intrigue in Tibet through Dorjiev and his supposed agents. We do not
know, however, if he was able to communicate his theories to the
British at the turn of the century.
Was Lama Dorjiev actually an agent of the Tsar? Perhaps it is not
important whether he was or not. Because of a combination of the
Russian-supplied information and Kawaguchi's reports, he was
certainly seen as the embodiment of evil and trouble by a number of
representatives of the British government. In spite of subsequent
denials of interest in Dorjiev, members of the Younghusband
Expedition all relate stories of his activities in Russia, based on
these accounts, as prefaces to their actions in Tibet. Thus, his
activities reached the group for which they were meant, but
unfortunately resulted in an undesirable reaction.
The clipped, translated articles sent back to the British Foreign
Office stating the circumstances of the visit, and especially
Dorjiev's presence in the entourage and his leading role in
negotiations, created an explosion in the Viceroy of India's
offices, and led Curzon to initiate a pre-emptive mission to Tibet.
From the beginning of their awareness of his existence, Dorjiev's
presence and activities caused concern if not hysteria on the part
of Britain's representatives in India.
Younghusband himself specifically stated that Dorjiev's visits to
Russia in 1900 and 1901 were the cause of his own mission. His
vocabulary on this subject was firm but not flowery - his underlings
were more poetic in their statements. While the civil servant,
Charles Bell's, more seasoned and mature writings quietly held
Dorjiev responsible for the Dalai Lama's actions, Edmund Candler
with the 23rd Sikh Pioneers called Dorjiev an ~arch-intriguer' and
~adventurer'. Lieutenant Colonel Waddell, the doctor on the
Younghusband Mission, went even further, stating that Dojiev ~was
the agent through which the Peter's pence of the Tartars of Baikal
were made over to the Lhasa exchequer'. In his memoirs published the
year after the mission, Waddell specifically and repeatedly blamed
Dorjiev for the need for the mission. Waddell reiterated Kawaguchi's
accusations saying that Dorjiev had created the Shamba-la-Russian
myth, that ~he poisoned his [the young Dalai Lama's] mind against
the English', and was even ~supervising the war preparations in the
Lhasa Arsenal'. However bluntly they stated the case, all of these
British officials firmly established Agvan Dorjiev as a source of
danger, and even as a spy, in the minds of the British public.
What then did the man who sent the British into Lhasa think? All
evidence implies that Curzon reacted extremely to Dorjiev's visits
to Russia, based on an assumption that he was a Russian agent.
Curzon was not just reacting to meetings between Dorjiev and Russian
officials, however. The hyperactive rumour mill fuelled by the
~Great Game' served to provide the viceroy with ~concrete' actions
on the part of the Russians. Rumours of treaties written as a result
of these visits were the real source of Curzon's discomfort.
Moreover, Curzon's concern about Russian designs was not based on
fantasy or rumour. Russia genuinely presented a security threat to
Britain's empire in Asia at the turn of the century. Russia's
successful invasion and annexation of Central Asia from the 1860s to
the 1880s, her annexation of the Amur and Ussuri territories in
1860, her movement into the Liaotung Peninsula in the 1890s, her
activities in Manchuria where her troops lingered as a result of the
Boxer Rebellion, all gave credence to an assumption of an insatiable
Russian appetite for territory, and credence to British fears of
encirclement of her ~jewel in the crown', India. Before he was
viceroy, Curzon had travelled throughout the territories that Russia
had recently annexed in Central Asia, in order to evaluate
realistically the danger Russia presented to Britain in Asia. He
stated that neither the alarmists nor the apologists understood the
Russian empire. Based on his personal observations, Curzon came to
the conclusion that Russia was very successful at adding territory
but not a good administrator after annexation. While this analysis
certainly calmed some of his fears, Curzon believed that Russia
would continue to expand outward unless checked.
Curzon did not wish to stress or even admit his concern over
Dorjiev's activities or anxiety over Russian intrigue in his
arguments with the London Foreign Office, as they were less
susceptible to the rumours of the dangers Dorjiev presented. At the
beginning of the mission in January 1904 he wrote to Younghusband
advising him to ~Remember that in the eyes of HMG we are advancing
not because of Dorjieff or the Mission to Livadia or the Russian
spies in Lhasa, but because of our convention shamelessly violated
...' as London would only accept a legal concern as reason for
action.
In the end, whatever Curzon's justification for his actions, a
heavily armed and supported Younghusband Expedition travelled
through Tibet in 1903 and entered Lhasa in August of 1904. Once in
Lhasa, Younghusband was ~itching' to write an agreement with the
Dalai Lama when he found to his great chagrin that the Dalai Lama
and Dorjiev had fled Lhasa the week before. Even at that juncture,
as well as later, the colonel exhibited as great an interest in
Dorjiev's whereabouts as in the Dalai Lama's.
Younghusband's account reflects an obvious expectation of greater
opposition and better armed opponents, revealing an intimate
knowledge of Kawaguchi's as yet unpublished claims of Dorjiev's
activities. The ease with which the British moved through Tibet, and
the absence of any Russian agents or hoards of weapons all pointed
to the emptiness of the claims of Dorjiev's activities. The obvious
inaccuracies of Kawaguchi's claims were ignored, however.
Younghusband did finally discover someone to sign his British and
Tibetan Convention of 1904. The expedition left Lhasa in September
and returned to India in the autumn of 1904.
After all the effort, it really is not certain how much the
expedition succeeded in its goal as a pre-emptive strike to warn the
Russians away from further expansion in south-central Asia. The
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and the Russian Revolution of 1905
turned Russia's attention inwards. Russian interest, if it had ever
existed, had cooled so much that by 1907, Britain and Russia were
able to write a Convention in which Russia essentially forswore any
interest in Tibet.
Interestingly enough, Dorjiev's role as a lightning rod for British
panic about alleged Russian plots did not end after his flight from
Lhasa, or even after the Convention of 1907. He continued to be a
source of fascination because of his trips to St Petersburg to seek
help for the Dalai Lama during his flights from Lhasa to China and
India. Still attempting to build his Pan-Buddhist union, Dorjiev's
trip to Urga in 1912 resulted in the writing of two treaties, one
between Russia and Mongolia and one between Mongolia and Tibet,
neither of which had been initiated by Russia. Dorjiev's presence in
Mongolia in 1911 and 1912 was enough even to fuel a rumour that the
Dalai Lama was about to take Russian citizenship and live in St
Petersburg in a Buddhist temple being constructed at Dorjiev's
instigation.
Beginning in 1901, Dorjiev served as the perfect scapegoat for
Viceroy Curzon to justify his actions. While Curzon took a broad
view of Russian abilities in Asia, because of his citizenship and
ethnicity, Dorjiev served as a proximate cause for Curzon's actions.
However sophisticated Curzon's thinking may have been, certainly
those on the expedition had no doubt about who was the villain, and
that the Russian government had to be pulling his strings, as no
non-European could possibly have a goal that did not serve a
European power.
At the time, and even now, almost everyone has been wrong about
Agvan Dorjiev of the Transbaikal. He was no one's puppet. He
certainly was not the ~Russian master spy' that he was depicted to
be. Dorjiev may have worked for closer relations between the Russian
empire and Tibet, but he was not interested in serving the Russian
empire per se. Dorjiev was a pan-Mongolist and a pan-Buddhist. His
entire and lengthy career points to his dedication to these
interests and his willingness to be ~flexible' in the manner in
which he achieved his goals. Moreover, he was innocent of many of
the activities he was accused of by both Kawaguchi and Filchner,
activities that were used as justifications for British actions both
prior to, and after, 1904.
Finally, who then in St Petersburg bore the blame for drawing Russia
into yet another dangerous game? Recent evidence of the archives
supports the theory that the Russian Foreign Ministry initiated
nothing, and even important British observers of the time agreed.
The British Charge d' Affaires in St Petersburg, Spring Rice, told
the Foreign Office that the activity on Russia's part arose from
Nicholas II's romantic fascination with the East and the possibility
of his having a role in an exotic religion. This last explanation is
probably closest to the truth. There certainly is ample evidence of
the Tsar's interest in ~exotic' healing and the religions that
spawned it. Dorjiev used the Tsar's interests to strike up
Russo-Tibetan contacts.
For a brief moment Agvan Dorjiev and his Dalai Lama attempted to
balance the dangers facing Tibet and Buddhism from the European,
Nepalese, and Chinese threats. The Russian card ultimately failed
due to the essential peripheral interest Russia and England had in
Tibet. Everything and everywhere else was more important.
While the 13th Dalai Lama succeeded later in establishing a tenuous
Tibetan autonomy, since 1949 Tibet has lost its battle with China,
seeing the destruction of its religion and even its people. Under
the Soviets, Dorjiev continued his efforts to pull Mongols together
until Stalin stopped him. After the October Revolution he worked to
keep Buddhism alive, succeeding to a certain extent until Stalin
took control of the government. The aged Dorjiev was put under house
arrest in the 1930s and died under uncertain circumstances, in 1938.
Dorjiev's vision of a Mongol union, however, has not died. Today,
after the breakup of the Soviet Union, religious-centred and
secular-centred Buriats are discussing possible relationships of
which Dorjiev would heartily approve.
Helen Hundley is Assistant Professor of History at Wichita State
University, Kansas.