Britain and Tibet 1765-1947

A hundred years ago, in 1904, a British mission under Francis Younghusband, along with a formidable military escort commanded by Brigadier-General James Macdonald, entered Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Thus nearly 150 years of British attempts from their Indian base to establish formal diplomatic relations with the ruling Tibetan theocracy culminated in the deployment of massive armed force. While the Younghusband venture failed to achieve nearly all its stated objectives, it undoubtedly marked the opening of a new era in Central Asian history the full consequences and complexities of which have yet to be revealed in full. To the steadily growing band of students of the history, nature and consequences of Anglo-Tibetan contacts, in which the Younghusband mission features so prominently, Julie Marshall’s revised and enormously expanded version of her bibliography of works relating to British relations with Tibet from 1765 to 1947, of which the first version appeared in 1977, cannot fail to be of outstanding value. Its publication is indeed an appropriate event in the Younghusband centenary.