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Younghusband expedition

Also known as British expedition to Tibet (1903–1904)

The Younghusband expedition of 1903–1904 was the British military mission to Tibet, led by Francis Younghusband, which fought its way to Lhasa and imposed a treaty on the Tibetan government, out of fear of Russian influence there.

Causes

At the end of the nineteenth century Tibet, under the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, refused contact with British India and ignored trade agreements made on its behalf by China. The viceroy Lord Curzon was convinced that Russia was gaining influence in Lhasa, partly through Agvan Dorzhiev, a Buryat monk from the Russian empire who was close to the Dalai Lama and had visited the tsar. Curzon persuaded a reluctant government in London to authorise a mission to negotiate on the border, which grew into an armed advance.

The advance

The mission, with a military escort of several thousand soldiers, mostly Indian, crossed into Tibet from Sikkim in December 1903 and wintered at Tuna. On 31 March 1904, at Chumik Shenko near Guru, Tibetan troops blocking the road were being disarmed when a scuffle broke out, and British machine guns and rifles opened fire. Several hundred Tibetans, armed with matchlocks and swords, were killed in a few minutes. The episode was criticised in Britain as a massacre.

The expedition then occupied Gyantse, where the Tibetans held the fortress. After weeks of fighting the British stormed it in July. They reached Lhasa on 3 August 1904. The Dalai Lama had fled north to Mongolia.

The treaty

Younghusband negotiated with the regent and the Tibetan officials, and on 7 September 1904 they signed the Anglo-Tibetan Convention. Tibet agreed to open trade marts at Gyantse, Gartok and Yatung, to pay a large indemnity, and to have no dealings with any foreign power without British consent, with the Chumbi valley held as security. The British government, uneasy at the terms, reduced the indemnity and the occupation period.

Because the treaty treated Tibet as a state able to make agreements, it was contested by China. In the Anglo-Chinese convention of 1906 Britain accepted Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, and in 1910 China sent an army to Lhasa, causing the Dalai Lama to flee again, this time to India.

Assessment

The expedition found no Russian presence in Lhasa. It opened Tibet to British influence for four decades, with trade agents at Gyantse and Yatung inherited by India in 1947. Younghusband later became a mystic and founder of the World Congress of Faiths. Historians have treated the expedition as a late and violent episode of imperial rivalry, the Great Game.

Further reading

  • Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
  • Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
  • Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000

See also

  • George Curzon, Lord Curzon — Lord Curzon was a British statesman who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, remembered for administrative reforms, the 1905 partition of Bengal, and his resignation over a dispute with Commander-in-Chief Lord Kitchener.
  • Tibet — Tibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
  • Gyantse Kumbum — The Gyantse Kumbum is a great multi-storeyed stupa at the Palcho monastery in the town of Gyantse in southern Tibet, built in the fifteenth century, whose dozens of chapels hold one of the finest surviving sets of Tibetan Buddhist painting and sculpture.
  • Lhasa — Lhasa is the chief city of Tibet, the capital of the Tibetan empire under Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century and of the Dalai Lamas' government from 1642 to 1959, and the site of the Jokhang temple and the Potala palace.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.