The Bengal Government also contended then in 1873, as they are still contending now, for the admission of our tea. Indian tea is grown in large quantities on the hills in British territory bordering Tibet. But, said the Lieutenant-Governor, nearly forty years ago: “The Tibetans, or rather their Chinese Governors, will not, on protectionist principles, admit our tea across the passes. An absolute embargo is laid on anything in the shape of tea.” The removal of this, he thought, might well be made a subject of special negotiation. And besides tea, the Bengal Government thought that Manchester and Birmingham goods and Indian indigo would find a market in Tibet, and that we should receive in return much wool, sheep, cattle, walnuts, Tibetan cloths, and other commodities.
Thus, thirty years before the Tibet Mission started the local Government had made a real effort to have the Chinese pressed to abandon their policy of exclusion so far as Tibet was concerned. The lineal official descendant of Warren Hastings in the Governorship of Bengal neither attempted nor advocated any high-handed local measures. He stated his case calmly and reasonably, and advocated the most correct course—the attempt to settle the matter direct with the Chinese.
Local officers are often told that they are too impatient, and that they too frequently want to settle a matter by local action, when it might be so much better disposed of by correspondence from headquarters; by negotiations, for instance, between London and Peking, or London and St. Petersburg. They are urged to take a wider view, and to display a calmer spirit, and greater confidence in the wisdom and sagacity of their London rulers. But when thirty years after this very moderate and perfectly reasonable request was made by the local authority, the matter was still no nearer settlement than it was when the request was made; and when the House of Commons, which controls the destinies of the Empire, was still asking why we did not apply to the Chinese, the local officer’s faith in the superior efficacy of headquarters treatment is somewhat shaken. And he often questions whether matters which, after forming the subject of voluminous correspondence between the provincial Government and the Government of India, between the latter and the India Office, between the India Office and the Foreign Office, between the Foreign Office and the Ambassador abroad, between him and the Foreign Government, which are discussed in the Cabinet, and form a subject for debate in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and for platform speeches and newspaper articles innumerable, do not in this lengthy process assume a magnitude which they never originally possessed; whether, having assumed such magnitude, they ever really do get settled or only compromised; and whether, after all, they might not have been settled expeditiously and decisively on the spot before they had been allowed to grow to these alarming proportions.