Lawrence John Lumley Dundas Zetland
Published: 2012-02
Total Pages: 192
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 58 CHAPTER XXI. Railway Schemes (continued): BRITISH PROJECTS. I Have sometimes heard it said that the line of country to be followed by Great Britain with a view to opening up a direct trade-route with Western China, is across a comparatively narrow strip of country between Sadiya, in Assam, and Bathang, on the confines of China and Tibet; and the Indian Government were on the point of sending a small expedition to examine this unknown strip of country in 1905, when the rising in the neighbourhood of Bathang referred to in chapter viii. took place and rendered the proposed expedition inadvisable. The suggestion is by no means a novel one. Mr T. T. Cooper, who was at Bathang in 1868 in CHINESE AND TIBETAN HOSTILITY. 59 search of through means of communication between India and China, heard from a Chinese tea- trader of the existence of a trade-route from Bathang to Rooemah, a town in the Tibetan province of Zy-yul, situated near the borders of Assam, twenty days' journey distant.1 Tibetan exclusiveness, however, has to this day prevailed against the exploration of the small and peculiar region immediately east of Assam that separates India from China.2 Cooper in 1868, Davies in 1900, Hosie in 1904, all met with a determination on the part of Tibetans and Chinese alike to prevent their crossing the frontier, and the reason given by Cooper for this exclusiveness is probably in the main correct. Nothing, he says, is more contrary to the policy of the Chinese Government and the Lamas than the introduction of Assam tea. The Chinese, on their part, dread the loss of their valuable wholesale monopoly, to retain which they give the Lamas the monopoly ofthe retail supply; who by this means hold in absolute subjection the people, to whom tea is a prime necess...