JAMMU AND KASHMIR AND THE DEFENCE OF BRITISH INDIA: THE PROBLEM OF THE NORTHERN FRONTIER. PART 2

LADAKH AND THE GILGIT AGENCY

 In January 1888, in a rare alliance with its neighbour Nagar, Hunza had rebelled against Dogra authority and expelled the Jammu and Kashmir garrisons from two key posts on the road north of Gilgit, Chalt and Chaprot, and held them for several months before withdrawing. For a while Gilgit itself was threatened. Also threatened in 1888, of course, following the Hunza raid on Shahidulla, was trade along the caravan route across the Karakoram Pass. Algernon Durand endeavoured to control Hunza's ambitions by diplomacy; but he soon concluded that the Mir, Safdar Ali, was from the British point of view devious, treacherous and hostile: despite British efforts at persuasion and offers of friendship and protection, it transpired that Safdar Ali had established diplomatic contact with M. Petrovski, the Russian Consul in Kashgar (where he had been stationed since 1882).~' Relations between Algernon ~urand and Hunza, still supported by neighbouring Nagar, soon broke down; and by late 1891 the British found themselves at war with both states. The conflict was brief but hard fought, and, needless to say, the ~ritish won (as every English schoolboy of the day knew, if only because of the three Victoria Crosses which the campaign yielded). Safdar Ali fled, eventually taking refuge with the Chinese authorities in Sinkiang where, some forty years later, he died in Yarkand in somewhat straitened circumstances. His known relationship with the Russians in the 1890s, and his continued position within the Chinese official establishment right up to his death, made his presence on Chinese soil a cause for British concern for many years to come. In Hunza he was deposed by the British and replaced by his half-brother Mohammed Nazim Khan. In the Hunza War of 1891-92 the British force, the Hunza-Nagar Field Force, consisted of some 600 Jammu and Kashmir State troops out of a total strength of under a thousand men (excluding porters and various irregular detachments). In other words, the State of Jammu and Kashmir, with the Maharaja conveniently powerless (but suitably rewarded with a Grand Cross in the Order of the Star of India), was still bearing a large part of the cost of British Indian defence in this crucial sector. The story was soon to be repeated, moreover, when in late 1892 a series of rebellions broke out in a number of the petty states within the Gilgit Agency culminating in a serious crisis in British relations with Chitral in 1895. In all this, Jammu and Kashmir State troops played a most important part in enabling the British to consolidate their position in Dardistan. The Chitral crisis of 1895, the causes of which lie outside the parameters of this book, had one lasting impact upon the Gilgit Agency and the subsequent history of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. It resulted in the removal of Chitral from the supervision of the Political Agent in Gilgit, and the establishment of a new Political Agency, Malakand, to look after Chitral and its neighbouring States of Dir and Swat. Thus in 1896 Chitral, which undoubtedly had in 1878 accepted the suzerainty of the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir (and reaffirmed it in 1914), was effectively removed from a British administrative relationship with that State and established as an Indian Princely State in its own right and one which in the fullness of time would of its own free will join Pakistan. Had the Gilgit Agency acquired the same status as the new Malakand Agency, as Colonel W. (later General Sir William) Lockhart in effect proposed in 1886, instead of remaining under the supervision of the British Resident in Kashmir (a purely British bureaucratic arrangement to preserve unity of command over both parts of the Northern Frontier, Gilgit and Ladakh), then Gilgit and its dependencies too would have passed entirely outside the confines of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and. hence, would have not figured at all in the Indo-Pakistani Kashmir dispute which erupted in 1947. The Hunza War and the subsequent crises in the Gilgit Agencv and Chitral took place at a period when intense Anglo-Russian competition in the neighbourhood of the Northern Frontier was giving way to Anglo-Russian negotiation. The details of this process need not concern us here. The essence lies in two sets of agreements. First: the Anglo-Afghan Agreement of 12 November 1893, signed by the Arnir Abdur Rahrnan and Mortirner Durand, delimited (if sometimes in outline only) a frontier between Afghanistan and the British Indian Empire, the famous Durand Line, which established an agreed boundary alignment right up to the point where China, Afghanistan and the Indian Empire approached each other at the extreme eastern corner of the Pamirs in Wakhan. There were to be problems of demarcation, not least in the Chitral region where the Durand Line was a major factor in the troubles which broke out in 1895; but from now on the British Indian Empire possessed a defined western flank.38 Second: in 1895 the British and Russians came to an understanding concerning "the spheres of influence of the two countries in the region of the Pamirs", achieved following some six years of the most intense contest within the rules of the "Great Game". British protagonists like Francis Younghusband and his young assistant George h4acartney3' (who by 1890 had established himself more or less permanently as British diplomatic agent in Kashgar) competed energetically with such Tsarist representatives as the Polish nobleman Gromchevsky and the Russian commander of Cossacks Colonel Ianov to establish footholds in obscure border tracts. The outcome was the settlement of the northern frontier of Afghanistan with the Tsarist Empire and the establishment of a point in the Pamirs, the PavaloSchveikhovski peak (named after the Russian Governor of Ferghana), which might possibly represent both the easternmost limit of the Russian position in the Pamirs and the southern terminus of the border between Russia and Sinkiang (which here, in fact, has still to this day not been delimited, let alone demarcated, though de facto it follows the line of the watershed along the Sarikol Range between the Tarim basin and the Murghab and Aksu Rivers, flowing into the Oxus). The combination of the 1893 Durand Line and the 1895 AngloRussian Pamirs Agreement created the background for the subsequent history of the Northern Frontier. There were two major problems outstanding. First: would the Sarikol range really mark the limit of the advance the Russian Empire, or would the dominions of the Tsar in due course flow eastward over it into the Kashgar region of Sinkiang? Second: where exactly was the frontier between what was still Chinese territory and those two northern tracts of Jammu and Kashmir State, the Gilgit Agency and its dependencies and Ladakh? The two problems were inextricably bound up with each other in British strategic thought in that both the kind of ~orthern Frontier suitable for British needs, and the urgency of its establish-  ment, depended greatly upon the probability of that frontier being with Russia rather than with China. As Lord Elgin, the Viceroy, put it in September 1895: recent reports . . . emphasise the possibility that Sarikul . . . may at a not far distant date pass into the possession of Russia. . . . The present moment . . . appears favourable for settling the Chinese boundary with Kashmir, Hunza and Afghanistan, and we invite earnest attention to the possibility of effecting an arrangement whereby a definite limit would be placed to possible extensions of Russian territory towards the Mustagh and Karakoram mountains, should that Power succeed China in possession of the tracts referred to.40 The definition of this Northern Frontier was dominated by the nature of the relationships which Hunza had established with the Chinese authorities in Sinkiang. Apart from the payment of annual tribute (and the receipt of gifts of greater value in return), the Mir of Hunza maintained that he had acquired four basic rights on the Chinese side of the main watershed which he was extremely reluctant to abandon. First: Hunza enjoyed certain trading privileges in Sinkiang which were both profitable and prestigious. Second: the Hunza people had at some distant era secured rights (most of them in abeyance in 1895) to cultivate certain plots of land on the Sinkiang side of the Karakoram, notably in Raskam, a tract to the east of the Shimshal (Shingshal) Pass on the upper reaches of streams flowing into the Yarkand River. Third: the Mir was entitled to graze his sheep and yaks on the northern slopes of the mountains, just over the Kilik, Mintaka, Khunjerab and other passes in what was usually referred to as the Taghdumbash Pamir. Finally: in the Taghdumbash Pamir, and probably to its north as well, the Mir of Hunza possessed the right to revenues (apparently collectcd on his behalf by the local Chinese officials) from non-Hunza subjects (the Sarikolis, local Tajik nomads) who grazed their flocks here on a seasonal basis. All these rights were part and parcel of the tributary relationship with China; and the Mir was convinced that their survival depended upon the continuance of his annual tribute missions to Kashgar. While the British were far from enthusiastic about Hunza's relationships with the Chinese Empire, they did not at this period attempt to deny that they existed: they did not, for example, prevent two Chinese representatives of the Sinkiang authorities from attending in an official capacity the installation in 1892 of the Mir Nazim Khan. From the British point of view it was clear by 1895 that the question of Hunza rights to the north of the Karakoram crests was inextricabl, bound up in any attempted boundary definition: and the Hun7a claim to the Raskam plots of arable land was of particl~lar in~port;lnce in this context in that it could be argued to illdic-ate the n~t~;~l possession of terlitol-y rather than the rncl-c enjo\.nlent of 1.evenucs . , derived from its use. If it could be established that Hunza actually did cultivate these plots on a regular basis, then in any boundary settlement they could either be included on the Indian side (thus securing an alignment which ran well to the north of the watershed to provide what many British strategists still sought, a defensive glacis) or bargained away in return for something else. Thus in 1897, when the Mir of Hunza resolved to renew cultivation in the Raskam area, the Government of India did not discourage him. Indeed, in that the Hunza people had not farmed in this area since at least the 1860s (their surplus energies having for many years been devoted to banditry), it is more than probable that the Mir's initiative was taken on British advice. The Political Agent in Gilgit at this time was Captain Henry McMahon, one of the leading frontier specialists in the Indian Political Service and one day to be Indian Foreign Secretary and then proconsul of Empire in ~~~~tMcMahon shared the view advanced by Sir John Ardagh, indeed he had, along with Francis Younghusband and George Macartney, probably helped inspire it, that the British border in the Karakoram should be as far on the northern side of the Karakoram watershed as it was possible to put it. He studied the history of Hunza with great care; and his analysis of Hunza territorial claims was without doubt intended to provide a foundation for an ambitious frontier policy.4' Hunza claims to cultivation rights on the Chinese side of the Karakoram watershed, we have already observed, involved a number of plots of land to the east of the Shimshal Pass. There were two main tracts. First: immediately to the east of the Shimshal Pass, along a stream (the Braldu) running into the Muztagh (or Shaksgam) River which flowed north and then east to meet the Raskam River and become the Yarkand River, there were a number of camping grounds or shelters of which the largest was Darwaza (or Darband), about twelve miles as the crow flies from the summit of the Pass. Second: on the Raskam River, about fifteen miles upstream of the MuztaghRaskam junction, was situated the major group of fields (to which the term Raskam is usually taken to refer), at Azghar on the right bank and Koktash and Bash Andijan on the left bank, about three thousand acres in all. Azghar was some sixty miles as the crow flies to the east (that is to say on the Chinese side) of the Shimshal At one time the Azghar area had supported a population of considerable size; and late 19th century travellers noted abundant signs of abandoned habitation and cultivation. Who these former occupants had been is not known: they may have been of Hunza origin, as some have suggested, but it is more likely that they were not.44 By the 1890s the Raskam valley was virtually deserted. Were Azghar, Koktash and Bash Andijan to be included within the Indian Empire, the border would run a considerable distance beyond the main Karakoram crest and, depending upon the western and eastern termini selected, could enclose many thousands of square miles of territory which on the basis of a watershed border would lie within China. In his 1897 initiative the Mir sent a small party (perhaps no more than six men) to Azghar to plough and sow (wheat or barley) and then return to Hunza until harvest time in the autumn, leaving behind at Bash Andijan two guards to watch over the plots. The senior Chinese official in Yarkand, hearing of the presence of the Hunza pair, immediately ordered their arrest. They were held for six weeks in Chinese custody at Tashkurghan (Taxkorgan Tajik), the nearest Chinese administrative centre, and then released. The Mir was told by the Chinese to keep his people out of Raskam in future: it was, they said, part of the Manchu Empire, and, in any case, other people, the Sarikolis for example, also possessed cultivation rights there. Thus began the first of a series of Raskam crises, which soon acquired new dimensions and greater complexity. The Mir, arguing (with much British support and encouragement) both that his rights to the land in question were sound and that his people needed for their continued well-being access to a greater area of cultivation than they possessed on the Indian side of the watershed, persisted in his essentially token attempts to cultivate the Raskam plots. The Chinese authorities were inclined to work out some sort of compromise with the Mir in which, perhaps, Hunza cultivation could be permitted in exchange for a formal admission that Raskam lay in Chinese territory and was only rented by him.45 However, the Russian Consul in Kashgar, Petrovski, when he discovered was afoot, opposed any such solution on the grounds, so he told the Chinese, that permission for Hunza to cultivate anywhere in Raskam would eventually result in a British annexation of the entire area: the whole Raskam affair, he argued, was merely a cover for British imperial expansion. Should the British take over Raskam, Petrovski indicated, the Russians might seek compensating Chinese territory, perhaps in the region of Tashkurghan on the road leading from their own territory to Kashgar across the Sarikol range. Petrovski's intervention transformed what had been an obscure matter of cultivation rights in one of the remotest parts of Asia into a question which produced considerable diplomatic activity in London, St. Petersburg and Peking. The British were presented with two main choices. Either they could insist that by virtue of the Mir's cultivation rights Raskam lay within the Indian Empire, or they could abandon Raskam, and with it the Mir's interests there, to China. In other words, they had to decide whether they really wanted a Northern Frontier of the Ardagh type running well to ;he north of the watershed (and risking Russian demands for con~pensation elsewhere in Kashgaria) or a Northern Frontier which followed the  convenient line of the Karakoram crests and relied for further protection upon the difficulty of the terrain rather than the possession of any glacis. McMahon was undoubtedly an advocate of the first solution. Not so, however, were his superiors. The opinion of the Government of India under Lord Elgin, reinforced by the intelligence provided by George Macartney in Kashgar, was that it might be best to adhere generally to the watershed line and to abandon territorial claims to the bulk of the Raskam tracts where the Hunza men maintained that they had once raised crops. If Hunza really needed to farm here it could do so by means of some kind of special arrangement with the Chinese. Lord Elgin was not particularly alarmed by the prospect of a Russian dominated Sinkiang. Nor did he believe that moderation over Raskam would in fact lead to a Chinese challenge to the British position in Hunza itself. He appreciated, moreover, that a frontier more or less along the main Karakoram watershed was administratively far more convenient than some inevitably arbitrary line beyond. As he put it, in reply to the arguments advanced by Sir John Ardagh for a more ambitious border: we are unable to concur altogether in Sir John Ardagh's suggestions on military grounds. He advocates an advance beyond the great mountain ranges which we regard as our natural frontier, on the ground that it is impossible to watch the actual watershed. Sir John Ardagh is no doubt right in theory, and the crest of a mountain range does not ordinarily form a good military frontier. In the present instance, however, we see no strategic advantage in going beyond mountains over which no hostile advance is ever attempted . . . Our objection is mainly based upon the opinion of officers who have visited this region. They unanimously represent the present mountain frontier as perhaps the most difficult and inaccessible country in the world. The country beyond is barren, rugged and sparsely populated. An advance . . . [of the British Indian border] . . . would interpose between ourselves and our outposts a belt of the most difficult and impracticable country, it would unduly extend and weaken our military position without, in our opinion, securing any corresponding advantage. No invader has ever approached India from this direction where nature has placed such formidable barrier^.^" Accordingly, in 1898 the Government of India decided upon the following border alignment. It started in the west at the PavaloSchveikhovski peak, that terminus of the 1895 Russo-Afghan border to which the British and Russian Governments had agreed. It then cut south-east across the Taghdumbash Pamir, crossing the upper reaches of the Karachukur (a stream which flowed into the Tashkurghan River and thence into the Tarim basin in Sinkiang) to meet the main Karakoram watershed just to the west of the Mintaka Pass. It continued along the main watershed eastward to the Shimshal Pass whence it diverted north of the watershed to enclose a few square miles to the east of the Shimshal Pass near the permanent shelter at Darwaza (but excluding the strategically most important, but remoter, fields on the Raskam River including Azghar): thence it returned to the watershed line. Continuing in a south-easterly direction along the Karakoram watershed it reached the Karakoram Pass. East of the Karakoram Pass it followed a line across the western corner of the Tibetan plateau between the Aksai Chin and Lingzitang basins along the Loqzung range until it reached the reasonably well established (at least in the view of the Government of India) Ladakh-Tibet border in the neighbourhood of the Lanak Pass. This alignment perforce ran north of the main Karakoram crests in the extreme west when it crossed a portion of the Taghdumbash Pamir: this was the easiest way to link it to the established eastern terminus of the 1895 Russo-Afghan border. Hereafter, with the minor exception of the Darwaza deviation, it followed a watershed line (though it was not based on the sanctity of the watershed principle, merely the practical convenience of crest lines in this kind of country) until the Karakoram Pass. To the east of that Pass, however, those who drafted the 1898 proposals began to run into difficulties. The current state of geographical knowledge provided them with no simple watersheds or crests, yet the Northern Frontier had to end somewhere. The device adopted, of selecting the Loqzung Range between the Lingzitang and Aksai Chin, was but one of a number of possibilities; and it was based upon expediency rather than any historical claims or administrative precedents. This border proposal was communicated to the Chinese Government in Peking on 14 March 1899 in a Note from the British Minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, who declared that: it appears that the boundaries of the State of Kanjut . . . [Hunza] . . . with China have never been clearly defined. . . . It is now proposed by the Indian Government that for the sake of avoiding any dispute or uncertainty in the future, a clear understanding should be come to with the Chinese as to the frontier between the two States. To obtain this clear understanding, it is necessary that China should relinquish her shadowy claims to suzerainty over the State of Kanjut. The Indian Government, on the other hand, will, on behalf of Kanjut, relinquish her claims to most of the Taghdumbash and Raskam districts." The Tsungli Yamen (the Chinese Foreign Office of the day) never replied formally to this Note. It seems, however, that its contents were communicated to the Provincial authorities in Kashgar who studied its proposals; and neither in Kashgar nor in Peking were its terms ever repudiated. Despite the terms of the 1899 Note, the British continued to support diplomatically the Mir's claims to cultivation in Raskam. presumably to keep up the pressure until the C:hinese had replied to their proposals. In February 1901, as Petro\,ski had threatened on  several occasions, the Russians established a military presence in Tashkurghan, consisting of a Russian officer, four Cossacks from the Russian Consular guard at Kashgar and four locally employed soldiers. The Government of India saw this as part of the Raskam problem, the Russian reaction to the support by the British to the Mir's claims. In fact, however, it was more likely to have been a consequence of anti-Russian riots in Kashgar in late 1900 (perhaps not unconnected with the outbreak of the Boxer Rising) which convinced Petrovski of the need to protect his line of communication between the Kashgar Consulate and Russian territory. The Government of India, now under Lord Curzon who had strong views on Central Asian matters, was in no doubt that the setting up of the Tashkurghan post was intended as a Russian warning to the British that they should not exploit the Mir's claims to rights to the north of the Karakoram crest. While by nature disinclined to give way to the Russians (as witness his vigorous reply to what he saw as Tsarist intrigues in Tibet which resulted in the Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa of 1904), Curzon eventually came to accept Lord Elgin's opinion that there was nothing to be gained by pressing forward on the Chinese side of the Karakoram. By 1904 he had concluded, despite his instinctive initial anti-Russian reaction, that there was little point in expending British diplomatic energy in support of Hunza's claimed rights in Raskam. As for the Russian military post at Tashkurghan, the British would just have to learn to live with it. What the British ought to do, Curzon was now convinced, was to terminate all relations between the Mir of Hunza and the Chinese, even if in the process the Raskam cultivation, as well as his other rights and interests in the Taghdumbash Pamir and elsewhere, would have to be abandoned. The Mir could be compensated for his losses: Curzon thought Rs. 3,000 a year subsidy would be enough. Finally: we accordingly recommend that a formal notification be made to China that since the Chinese Government have been unable to fill their promises to the Mir of Hunza . . . [relating to Raskam cultivation] . . . , that State, under the advice of the British Government, withdraw from all relations with China, and henceforth will owe suzerainty to the Kashmir State and the British Government alone. As regards the boundary between Kashmir and the New Dominion, we strongly recommend that the Chinese Government should be informed that, as they have not shown any reasons for disagreeing with the proposals placed before them in Sir Claude MacDonald's despatch of the 14th March 1899, we shall henceforth assume Chinese concurrence and act accordingly.4R Had this been done, it is quite possible that the British would have acquired in the Northern Frontier a boundary alignment explicitly agreed by the Chinese; and, it is probable, independent India some half century later would have been spared its disastrous conflict with the Peoples' Republic of China. After further reflection, however, Lord Curzon decided that from the British point of view there were practical objections to two features of the border in the 1899 Note. First: the ~roposed alignment had started at the Pavalo-Schveikhovski peak; and by so doing it had violated one of the fundamental principles underlying the 1895 Anglo-Russian Pamirs Agreement, namely the need to create a buffer strip consisting of Afghan Wakhan and the Chinese Taghdumbash Pamir between the British and Russian Empires. The intention in 1895 was that the two Empires should not meet. In the 1899 Line proposals they did. Second: the territory allocated to Hunza immediately around Darwaza on the Sinkiang side of the Shimshal Pass in Raskam really was a bit too small to meet the practical needs of the Hunza people. In August 1905 Lord Curzon addressed himself to both these problems.4g He proposed that the Mir of Hunza's territory on the Chinese side of the watershed by the Shimshal Pass should be increased by a few more square miles by pushing the border east from Darwaza to the junction of the Uprang Jilga and Shaksgam (or Muztagh) Rivers. This would still exclude from Hunza territory the main Raskam tracts of Azghar, Koktash and Bash Andijan. He also resolved to draw back the extreme western end of the border from the Pavalo-Schveikhovski peak to the point where the main Karakoram watershed met the Afghan frontier: the result would be to create a short stretch of direct Sino-Afghan boundary between the British Northern Frontier and the Russo-Afghan border along the northern side of the Wakhan tract, thereby returning to the spirit of the 1895 Pamirs ~~reement.~' These new proposals (in contrast to the line of the 1899 Note) gave over to china a substantial tract in the Taghdumbash Pamir in exchange for a few square miles to the east of the Khunjerab and Shimshal Passes. Curzon saw no reason why the British should not be rewarded for this generosity. He advised that the abandonment of British claims beyond the main Karakoram watershed should be accompanied by a formal Chinese recognition of the presence of a British Consulate in Kashgar (where George Macartney was, lacking this status, at a significant disadvantage uis a zlis Petrovski and his successors). In the view, however, of the British Minister in Peking, Sir Ernest Satow, 1905 was not a good year to seek Chinese approval for the planting of further British Consulates on Chinese soil: he was then doing his best to persuade the Chinese Government to come to terms with the consequences of the Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa of 1904 and to accept a version of the Lhasa Convention which Younghusband had negotiated with the Tibetans, a task which tvould certainly be made no easier bv attempts to strengthen the British LADAKH AND THE GILGIT AGENCY presence in yet another part of Chinese Central Asia. ideas for the modification of both the borders and the status of Hunza, accordingly, were not communicated to the Chinese; and the opportunity to formalise the alignment of the Northern Frontier was With the abandonment for the time being of the advanced border on the McMahon or Ardagh model, it seemed pointless to encourage the Mir of Hunza to go on provoking the Chinese Provincial authorities and annoying the Russian Consulate in Kashgar by sending his annual expedition of a half a dozen men to Azghar, Koktash and Bash Andijan. In 1905 the Hunza cultivation of Raskarn was stopped. De facto the Northern Frontier was considered by the British to be the 1899 proposal as modified by Curzon in 1905, an alignment which, interestingly enough, was eventually to be confirmed in its essentials by the Sino-Pakistani Boundary Agreement of 2 March 1963. Indian writers have insisted that in this transaction Pakistan surrendered to China no less than 2,050 square miles of territory to which, in any case, it had no right: in fact, if anything, Pakistan gained a bit, perhaps twenty square miles or so.52 The Russian post at Tashkurghan continued to cause the Government of India a twinge or two of anxiety from time to time. After the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 had enormously reduced tensions in Asia between the two Empires, however, such matters as a few Cossacks here and there were no longer the foundations for major crises. In 1908 the Russians did not oppose, as they had in the past, the conferring by the Chinese of Consular status on George Macartney in Kashgar. By the same token, in 191 1, on the eve of the Chinese Revolution which brought the Manchu Dynasty to an end, the Government of India did not object too strenuously when the Russians greatly strengthened their garrison at Tashkurghan (which was finally withdrawn in 1917 following the collapse of the Tsarist regime).53 In 1916 the British used the precedent of the Russian military presence at Tashkurghan to justify to the Chinese authorities in Kashgar the stationing in the Taghdumbash Pamir of a detachment of Gilgit Scouts. The objective, however, was less to watch the Russians than to monitor traffic between Sinkiang and the Wakhan tract of Afghanistan over the Wakhjir Pass, a route which the Government of India suspected might be taken by German (and, perhaps, Turkish) agents who were known to have established themselves in Persia and ~f~hanistan.~~ In 1912, shortly after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in China, and in the greatly improved diplomatic atmosphere of ~n~lo-~ussian relations which had prevailed since 1907, the British began to explore the possibility of revising the 1907 Convention by alterations in its terms relating to Persia, Afghanistan and ~ibet.~~ The Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, perhaps the last of the rulers of British lndia to be enthusiastic about a forward frontier policy, and the Indian Foreign Secretary, Sir Henry McMahon, whose views on this topic had certainly not changed since he had been Political Agent in Gilgit more than a decade earlier, believed that this might be an opportune moment to secure an advance northwards of the Northern Frontier from the alignment set out in the 1899 Note to China (as modified in 1905). Hardinge and McMahon argued that the increased presence of Russia in Kashgaria, as was implied by the strengthening of the Tashkurghan post in late 191 1, was no threat to British interests provided that the Northern Frontier of British India was clearly defined and accepted by both the Russians and the Chinese. This Frontier, Hardinge and McMahon argued, ought to be of the forward variety instead of the 1899 alignment (even as modified by Curzon in 1905): what was needed was a "boundary line which will place Taghdumbash, Shahidulla and Aksai Chin outside Russian and within our territory".56 There were two major difficulties in the way of implementation of this new policy. First: the Liberal Government in Britain was opposed in principle to any projects for the advance of the Indian frontier, as indeed it'had been since coming to power in 1905. A revision of the 1899 Line would have to be secured by oblique methods which did not attract the attention of the politicians in London. Second: the Russians, when the question of the revision of the 1907 Convention was first raised in 1912, showed no interest whatsoever in widening its scope by adding Sinkiang to Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet. Frontier revision would have to arise, somehow, out of the existing processes of Anglo-Chinese diplomacy. Sir Henry McMahon's solution to the problems posed by these obstacles was so ingenious that it has hitherto escaped the notice of historians. It involved two distinct steps.57 First: the Mir of Hunza was encouraged in 1914 to resume his token cultivation of the Raskam plots of Azghar, Koktash and Bash Andijan. This would retain a British foothold on the northern side of the watershed at the western end of the Northern Frontier which could, should the need or occasion arise, at some future date be converted into a forward boundary, perhaps by Anglo-Chinese agreement or perhaps merely through usage reinforced by time. Second: in the Simla Conference negotiations which started in October 1913 between the British, Tibetans and Chinese in an attempt to resolve a crisis in Sino-Tibetan relations (and, rn pnsstlrlt, obtain for India a more satisfactory border with Tibet along the Assam Himalayas, the McMahon Line), the eastern (Ladakh) end of the Northern Frontier might be introduced surreptitiouslv. McMahon's ploy was to include in the Simla Conference map. intended as a vehicle for exposition of the Sino-Tibetan border under  discussion, an extension of the Tibetan boundary (usually referred to as the Red Line) to the north-west such that it ran along the Kunlun mountains with Aksai Chin to its south. If the Chinese accepted this map they would find that they had agreed to a Tibetan Aksai Chin (an idea which the Foreign Department of the Government of India had been exploring since 1907). No doubt McMahon was confident that he could persuade the Tibetans to transfer this tract (to which, after all, they had never laid claim) to British India at some later date, just as he was in the process of inducing them to hand over Tawang in the Assam Himalayas: meanwhile, a Tibetan Aksai Chin was protected against Russian interference by the provisions of the 1907 Anglo-Russian onv vent ion.^' In the event, the failure of the Simla Conference in 1914 removed any legal force from lines on the map to which it had given rise. The Chinese delegate did indeed put his initials on it; but he was then repudiated by his own Government in All that remained of the Hardinge-McMahon initiative after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was the annual visit of the Mir of Hunza's men to Raskam. The probability that Russia might agree to include Sinkiang within the terms of reference of a revision of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, never high, dwindled in 1915 with the failure of the Dardanelles campaign which deprived the British of the one bargaining counter, the promise of Constantinople, which really interested the ~ussians.~' Nor, by 1916, did the Government of India continue to favour the enlargement of the scope of the 1907 Convention to include Sinkiang. As the administration of Hardinge's successor as Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, put it to the India Office in September 1916, "we strongly deprecate any attempt to bring Chinese Turkistan into the post bellum settlement with ~ussia".~' Any lingering thoughts on this prospect were buried by the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917. All hope that the Chinese might eventually accept a version of the map associated with the Simla Convention died in 1921.~' The Government of India was left with the 1899 Line as the only formal British international statement on the alignment of the Northern Frontier. After the Chinese Revolution of 191 1 and the end of the Manchu Dynasty, the Kashgar region of Sinkiang did not (as Hardinge and McMahon had once anticipated) fall into Russian hands. Instead, it came under the firm control of Yang Tseng-hsin, the first ~e~ublican Governor of the Yang Tseng-hsin was the most powerful Chinese figure in Sinkiang politics since Tso Tsung-t'ang, the conqueror of the Yakub Beg regime; and his representatives in Kashgar did not look on the revival in 1914 of Hunza activity in Raskam with great enthusiasm. For a few years the half dozen or so Hunza men were able to make their way undisturbed to Raskam in the spring to plant the grain and again in  the autumn to harvest it (probably leaving one or two men behind as guards in between); but in 1919 Yang Tseng-hsin's Government started to protest formally to the British Consulate-General in Kashgar against the Hunza activities and to deny that the Mir's subjects had any right to be in Raskam at all. The Government of India, however, encouraged the Mir to go on asserting his rights (including, of course, the grazing and revenue collecting rights in the Taghdumbash Pamir which, since they were so to say mobile, did not lend themselves so easily to the kind of territorial argument aroused by the Raskam cultivation). It seemed possible that the existence of these rights, and the discussions with the Chinese authorities to which they gave rise, could still be exploited by British diplomacy in Sinkiang. There was no longer any wish to press for a forward border of the type advocated by Ardagh, Hardinge and McMahon; but it was certainly useful to have something to bargain with in an effort to counter the revived influence of Russia in Kashgar where in 1925 the Soviets reestablished a Russian Consulate. If the Russians should once more begin to show an unhealthy interest in the affairs of Hunza, then it was open to the Government of India to offer to the Chinese the surrender of the Mir's various rights beyond the Karakoram watershed in exchange for an agreed border (inevitably now of the 1899 Line pattern) proof against Bolshevik-inspired challenge.64 This remained the position during the remainder of Yang Tsenghsin's tenure of the Governorship of Sinkiang. In July 1928 Yang Tseng-hsin was assassinated. His successor, Chin Shu-jen, assumed control of what was now a far less stable regime. Apart from the question of Soviet influence which had revived in 1925, Chin Shu-jen had to resolve what relationship, if any, Sinkiang would have with the Kuomintang Government of Chiang Kai-shek which had just established itself as the nominal ruler of all of China. He had, moreover, to contend with an explosion of separatist movements among the indigenous Muslim peoples of the Province who had been to a great extent held in check by the firm rule of Yang Tseng-hsin. The Northern Frontier of India once more seemed insecure, if only because of the deterioration of Chinese authority to its immediate north; and, with the fall of the Chin Shu-jen regime in 1933, Bolshevik Russia appeared to be closer to the domination of the entire Province of Sinkiang than had ever been the Empire of the Tsars. It was soon evident that the defence of the Northern Frontier called for a further revision in the relationship between the Government of India and the State of Jammu and Kashmir.