Contesting Zomia: British India and the Northeast Corridor, 1850-1910

A thesis submitted by

REN Chao

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

February 2017

Advisors: Ayesha Jalal Kris Manjapra

Abstract

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, the

British had a long-held aspirational policy of advancement into the Northeast corridor, eastward of Bengal through Assam and Burma into Yunnan. The purpose of this advancement was to open up and access the populous market of Southwest China, in order to sell their increasing amount of industrial products, aiming at a much larger commercial empire than British India. The formation of such a policy was heavily facilitated by the escalating imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth century, especially that with France. This aspirational policy led to large-scale expedition projects, information gathering activities, and finally territorial contestation in the area, including the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Through careful study of a wide range of colonial political correspondences, expedition reports, and linguistic and cartographic surveys, this thesis would like the establish the narrative of the British imperial aspiration in the

“Northeast Corridor” in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Such a narrative can serve as a crucial lens in understanding the imperial aspiration and geographical imagination of British colonialism in South Asia in a transnational and global context. In addition, such a narrative can help us reflect upon the very concept of “British India” as well as the geopolitics of the northeastern states in India in the postcolonial era.

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Zomia and British India: The “Northeast Corridor”………………………………………3

Chapter 1

Trekking Zomia: Burma-Yunnan Expeditions and Imperial Geographical Imagination, 1850s-1870s……………………………………………...…………………………19

Chapter 2

Knowing Zomia: Information Gathering and Classification of Colonial Knowledge, 1870s-1890s …………………….………………………………………………….42

Chapter 3

Territorializing Zomia: Imperial Rivalry and Territorial Contestation in the Northeast Corridor, 1885-1905………………………………………………………………..64

Conclusion……………………………..………………………………………………..92

Bibliography…………………………..……………………………………………….100

Acknowledgements………………….………………………………………………...108

2 Introduction – Zomia and British India: The “Northeast Corridor”

Zomia has always been a forgotten corner of history. Boxed in the mountain ranges of Assam and Yunnan, hidden in the mists of the Naga and Kachin hills, along the river valleys of the Brahmaputra and the Irrawaddy, it is a land of marginality and diversity, populated by the “hill people,” whose very existence has invited the exotic, fantastical fascination of the “civilized world.” Located at the crossroads of many states and regions, it was also considered, until the mid-twentieth century, to be the last major remaining area that had not been fully incorporated into the state structure.1 For much of the rest of the world, Zomia is unknown, mysterious, fascinating, confusing, and prohibitive. Zomia is the ultimate “other” of civilization.

Yet this land of negligence was once at the center of an ambitious British imperial design, a grand scheme of imperial expansion that could potentially alter much of human history. While the Industrial Revolution in Britain was on its rise in the nineteenth century, the demand for overseas market increased significantly. The markets of the East therefore became crucial to an expanding manufacturing economy. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, India had but little demand for what Britain produced. So while

1 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), x.

3 Britain was gradually transforming India from a consumer of imported goods into an exporter of crude resources, it needed to find another repository for its manufactured goods. What the British eyed was China.

The vast inland market of China caught the attention of merchants and politicians from Britain and other imperial powers alike. The scramble for China had been going on for decades along the coast, yet the large, populous inland areas remained unplowed by foreign capital. According to historian Ho Ping-ti, the estimated population of the province of Sichuan (or Szechwan) in 1850 was more than 44 million, a number too appealing to be missed in any consideration of potential commercial interest.2 Therefore, starting in the mid-nineteenth century along with a number of massive geographical engineering projects around the globe, the part of Zomia between British India and

Southwest China became a crucial site of imperial design and contestation due to its critical location as a strategic corridor into the China market.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the

British in India had a long-held and somewhat consistent aspiration toward the Northeast, hoping to reach the vast market of Southwest China by land across the mountain valleys

2 Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 283.

4 of Burma and Yunnan. The opening up of such a corridor would allow the British to integrate their commercial empires in India and in China, thus completely reconfiguring their imperial endeavors in the East. Such a grand scheme of connected empires, with the unparalleled resources it would be able to provide, would definitely make Britain the ultimate, unrivaled supreme power of the globe. The sun of the empire would never, ever set again.

Yet Britain was not the only imperial power preying upon this area. The British encroachment in this area was shaped as much by British aspiration as by French competition. From the 1860s to the early 1900s, France featured prominently in the background of all British discussions on this topic, and the pressure of imperial rivalry ultimately became the driving force of territorial conquests in this area. Other polities, large or small, also played their part in the story of imperial contestation over this area.

The Russians, the Qing, the Burmese, the Tibetans, the Panthays of Yunnan, and the hill peoples across the area all had their own considerations and leverages, and made their own footprints in this story.

British aspiration for this area and for the market in Southwest China eventually remained unfulfilled. In addition to the contestation from various polities, other external factors also contributed to curb the British plan of advancement through Assam and

5 Burma into Yunnan. Topographical difficulty was the first, and the most insurmountable challenge, which the British only learned gradually after decades of expedition work. The concern for security was another reason that the British eventually abandoned their previous plans: The hill peoples of the area provided constant threat to British groups who trekked through their hills and forests. Another factor that gave the British aspiration in this area a final blow was the political unrest in India after the announcement of the

Partition of Bengal in 1905, which split up Bengal and created the new province of East

Bengal and Assam. This political unrest eventually shook the British Raj and propelled the British to move their capital in India to Delhi, leaving the Northeast an area of lesser significance.

The British ambition for a trans-Asian commercial empire eventually remained unachieved, but the history of this unfulfilled imperial design left an indelible mark on the geopolitical situations of this area. To put the story of the Northeast corridor in historical perspective can help us better understand the history of British imperialism in

Asia and around the globe, building important bridges amidst the segmentation of national histories and regional studies. Moreover, such a historical practice can also provide us with a necessary historical depth to better understand the complicated geopolitical situation of the area today.

6 Zomia and the “Northeast corridor”

Throughout history, Zomia has not only escaped state structures, but has also been largely out of the reach of scholarly attention and access. Ever since the coinage of the term in 2002 by Dutch scholar Willem van Schendel, Zomia has received limited (though exciting) scholarly attention from various disciplines. As the inventor of the term based on its Chin-Mizo-Kuki linguistic roots, van Schendel himself uses the term “Zomia” largely in a geographical sense to refer to the vast mountainous areas at the intersection of South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Inner (or Central) Asia.3 He famously calls this area “a victim of cartographic surgery” and uses this geographical concept to challenge the existing structures and conventions of area or regional studies in the post-war Western academic world.4

Since then, the concept of Zomia has caught the attention of several scholars, who find the idea to be a useful conceptual device. The most famous of them all is certainly the Yale political scientist James C. Scott, who builds his whole idea of the “art of not being governed” on the concept of Zomia, and extends Zomia into a political category of

3 Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20:6 (2002), 653. 4 Ibid., 652.

7 intentional statelessness that transcends its specific original geographical designation.5

Among the first historians to take this term seriously as a conceptual device for historical analysis is Rila Mukherjee, whose work on the “pelagic passageways” of the northern

Bay of Bengal considers the “Zomian borderland” (together with the Bengal deltas and the Arakan coast) as a regional unit in pre-colonial history.6 In 2010, a special issue of the Journal of Global History titled “Zomia and beyond” was dedicated to the discussion of Zomia, convening a team of scholars from various disciplines and regional specialties.7

This thesis uses “Zomia” in a geographical rather than political understanding of the term. But I have also chosen to use the expression of “Northeast corridor” to discuss

British imperial aspirations from Assam and Upper Burma into Yunnan in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It is very difficult to name this area in question properly, and any term has its own perspectives, assumptions, and connotations. I have chosen the term “Northeast corridor” over possible alternatives such as “British Zomia” for a variety of reasons. First, the area in question is only a part of the larger geographical area as understood by van Schendel, which includes much of the Tibetan Plateau and extends southward to the intersection of present-day Vietnam, Thailand, and the Laos.

5 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 6 Rila Mukherjee, “Introduction,” in Rila Mukherjee, ed., Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Before Colonialism (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), 1-260. 7 William G. Clarence-Smith and Jean Michaud, eds., “Zomia and beyond,” Journal of Global History, Special Issue. 5:2 (July 2010).

8 The second reason is that the British aspirational process itself had a complicated history regarding imperial territorialization, and the area was under heated contestation by a number of imperial powers (Western and local), so it would be problematic to categorize the area simply as “British.” The word “Northeast” certainly indicates that it is from the geographical perspective of British India, but since British India and its related personnel occupy much of the stage in the story, I have decided to make peace with this partiality of terminology. I have also chosen the word “corridor” over possible alternatives such as

“frontier” or “borderland” to avoid any potential perspective from a certain political center.

Historiographical intervention

The main purpose of this thesis is twofold. First, to establish the narrative of British aspiration of the “Northeast corridor” in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries; second, to establish the “Northeast corridor” as one unit of historical analysis in the studies of colonial history of South Asia, and to put this geographical area in perspective within global and imperial histories.

The Northeast corridor is a region that has been invariably marginal in historical writings: It is always subject to the woes of Indo-centrism or Sino-centrism, and is

9 peripheral to civilizational discourses which assume the (more superior) existence of civilizational cores. Yet the history of the Northeast corridor provides us with a crucial lens of understanding colonial history in a trans-regional perspective. It is a key to understanding British endeavors across Asia in the heyday of global imperialism. It also brings our attention to the question of whether there was a fixed idea of “British India.”

Such an investigation of the history of “British India” highlights two different understandings of territoriality between British imperialism of the nineteenth century and the postcolonial territorial nationalism of the twentieth century: The first considers territoriality to be secondary concerns compared to commercial interest, while the latter treats territoriality of the nation as sacred and valuable in itself.

Compared to the attention given to other more heated topics, previous historiography on modern South Asia and on frontiers has rarely looked at the Northeast corridor as a trans-regional unit of historical analysis. The recent turn of regional histories, which often focus on the processes of regional identity formation and the role of the region in the making of the nation, has made tremendous historiographical contributions by successfully challenging the hitherto hegemony of monolithic national narratives.8 In the

8 Some of these regional histories include, but are not limited to, Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press,

10 meantime, however, because of the very nature of the questions they address, regional histories have mostly been premised within the framework of an existing “whole.” The

“regions” are often discussed in relation to the center and therefore as a part of the subcontinental whole, but rarely in a trans-regional perspective that interrogates the boundaries of the subcontinent. These regional histories hint at the potentials and alternatives of historical trajectories from a regional perspective, but it is not their mission to extend the consideration into a trans-regional framework. The Northeast, therefore, is largely missing from this picture of regional histories.

Certain works of frontier history have addressed the geographical area of the

Northeast corridor. Although more scholarly and media attention is still given to the postcolonial predicaments of the area, throughout the past decade, a good number of studies on the colonial history of this area have emerged.9 David Ludden’s and Iftekhar

Iqbal’s spatial discussion of the 1905 Partition of Bengal, David Vumlallian Zou and M.

Satish Kumar’s article on colonial cartography of the Northeast, Indrani Chatterjee’s work on the religious lives of the Brahmaputra valley, and Jayeeta Sharma’s study of

2010); Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 Some examples of such studies on the postcolonial era include Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (New York: Anthem Press, 2005) and Bertil Lintner, Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

11 colonial Assam have all made solid contributions to the historiography of the Northeast and of modern South Asia in general.10 Meanwhile, the historiography of Yunnan has also been enriched by the recent works of David G. Atwill, Yang Bin, and C. Patterson

Giersch, who have collectively brought Yunnan into the attention of late imperial

Chinese history.11 Anthropologists have also made their solid footprints and valuable contributions to the study of this area, from the exemplary early pioneer of Edmund R.

Leach to the more recent James C. Scott and Erik Mueggler, providing a crucial ethnographical perspective in addition to archival sources.12 Also, in recent years,

Willem van Schendel and others have started to probe the nontraditional, non-textual sources such as colonial photography as a means to study the history of this area, providing a new angle and a new challenge to the studies of an area that has historically

10 David Ludden, “Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam,” Modern Asian Studies, 46:3 (2012), 483-525; Iftekhar Iqbal, “The Space between Nation and Empire: The Making and Unmaking of Eastern Bengal and Assam Province, 1905–1911,” Journal of Asian Studies, 74:1 (2015), 69-84; David Vumlallian Zou and M. Satish Kumar, “Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the Geo-body of India's Northeast,” Journal of Asian Studies, 70:1 (2011), 141-170; Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 11 David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Yang Bin, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 12 Edmund R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structures (London: The Athlone Press, 1959); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

12 been under-documented.13

These works of pioneering scholars have all made tremendous contributions to the study of this area, without which I would not be able to conduct on my own.

Unfortunately, however, as much as it may be against the will of the authors, sometimes these frontier histories have also been plagued, reluctantly, by the powerful lingering paradigms of Indo-centric or Sino-centric (or similarly, Burmo-centric) categorization of historical writing. Therefore, for instance, David Ludden’s and Indrani Chatterjee’s work are considered to be South Asian history, and thus largely only read within the field of

South Asian history. In a similar manner, Atwill’s and Giersch’s work are labeled

Chinese history and rarely come to the attention of historians of South Asia; Leach and

Scott are categorized as must-reads of Burma Studies, and Erik Mueggler’s book on

Yunnan is hardly ever seen outside of syllabi of Chinese ethnography. Knowledge of this area becomes compartmentalized by the institutional arrangements of academia, and the frontier becomes further frontier-ized both within the current political structures of nations and regions and within the academic establishments of knowledge production.

It is my wish to establish the Northeast corridor as a regional unit of historical

13 Willem van Schendel, Wolfgang May, and Aditya Kumar Dewan, The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland (Dhaka: University Press Ltd., 2001); Joy L. K. Pachuau and Willem van Schendel, The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

13 analysis in the study of colonial history and global history, which could serve as a corrective to the current compartmentalization of academic knowledge. Such a geographical vision can provide us with a unique perspective to look at historical linkages and connectivity. Here I am heavily influenced by the Indian Ocean historiography of the distinguished Indian Ocean historians, such as K. N. Chaudhuri and

Sugata Bose, who treat the Indian Ocean as a powerful unit of historical analysis and reveal important patterns of historical connections.14 I am also particularly indebted to

Sunil S. Amrith, whose brilliant recent work on the Bay of Bengal distinguishes itself as a marvelous example of connected and trans-regional history that considers the Bay as a singular unit in the economic and environmental histories of the colonial era, bringing insightful geographical visions into historical understanding.15 Their wonderful scholarly works have been my most significant sources of historiographical inspiration to move beyond national histories and area studies.

A note on the study of colonial policy

In this day and age of a rising and more assertive Asia in the global arena, such a

14 K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 15 Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

14 study of British colonial policy looks ghastly out of date. A note is therefore needed to explain why a study of British colonial policy is necessary for our understandings, both academic and political.

While recent scholarship tend to celebrate inter-Asian connections among different parts of Asia, especially in the pre-modern and early modern worlds, it should be reminded that it was European colonialism that brought about the most fundamental changes in the patterns of connection and migration between different parts of Asia in the modern era. The scholarship on Asian connectivity without colonialism certainly has its political significance, showing that the different parts of Asia were not historically static and immutable, which serves as a powerful rebuttal to the Orientalist scholarship of the

West in the previous generations. Yet this political message should not be executed at the expense of identifying the most crucial factor of change in the modern history of Asia.

This politics of creating a connected and united Asia despite the force of colonialism has produced two kinds of histories: either a history running the risk of de-politicizing the whole story and focus almost exclusively on trade and maritime networks, mostly focusing on the early modern era, when the colonial story was only vaguely in the background at best, or on the other extreme end, a history overstating a pan-Asianism of the twentieth century as a story of universal fraternity and anti-colonialism, often by focusing exclusively on a handful of wishfully-minded intellectual elites, an approach

15 which both ignores much of the East Asian experience and colludes dangerously with the blatant, never-dying Japanese rightwing-ism of the present day.

In light of such a scholarly background, a new venture (not a return) into the history of European colonialism is very much necessary in providing a new perspective on Asian connectivity. Although the connected histories of modern Asia should certainly not be reduced to a colonial story, it is also worth pointing out that the paramount power of

European colonialism in shaping Asian realities and imaginaries has not been fully explored in historical writings. As the late C. A. Bayly reminds us in his work Imperial

Meridian, while the focus of historiographical attention might shift to “Third World peasantries and the strategies of their business classes and intelligentsia” in the age of decolonization, this should not be done “at the expense of [the study of] the policies of colonial governors.”16 Similarly, the study of the connected histories of modern Asia should not completely ignore the tremendous driving force of European colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Outline of argument and chapter plans

16 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 13.

16 My argument is rather straightforward: Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, the British had a long-held aspirational policy of advancement into the Northeast corridor, eastward of Bengal through Assam and Burma into Yunnan. The purpose of this advancement was to open up and access the populous market of Southwest China, in order to sell their increasing amount of industrial products, aiming at a much larger commercial empire than British India. The formation of such a policy was heavily facilitated by the escalating imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth century, especially that with France. This aspirational policy led to large-scale expedition projects, information gathering activities, and finally territorial contestation in the area, including the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Due to various external factors locally and globally, this imperial aspiration finally faded into hibernation around the time of the outbreak of the Great War.

There are three substantial chapters in this thesis, roughly following a chronological order from the 1850s to the 1900s. Chapter One focuses on the early discussions of a railway plan from British India and Burma into Yunnan, and the various expedition projects carried out by British officials in Calcutta and Rangoon from the 1850s to the

1870s. Chapter Two covers the period of the 1870s to the 1890s and discusses the processes of information gathering and knowledge production on the Northeast corridor, especially cartographical triangulation and linguistic scholarship. Chapter Three stretches

17 from the 1880s to the 1900s and is centered on the topic of territorial contestation, highlighting the new phase of imperial rivalry and leverages among various polities which led to a fierce territorialization of this area.

I hope that such a study of British aspirations of this area can shed light on our understanding of British India and British imperial endeavors throughout Asia. The

Northeast corridor was not an area of no significance in colonial history, but rather was a crucial site of imperial gaze and aspiration loaded with lucrative potentials and imperial dreams. For a good understanding of the history of the Northeast corridor, the only possible way is to see this geographical area beyond the political and academic frameworks of nations and regions, and to consider it as one singular unit of historical analysis that is connected to, not insulated from, the wider forces of historical contexts.

18 Chapter One - Trekking Zomia:

Burma-Yunnan Expeditions and Imperial Geographical Imagination, 1850s-1870s

For some twenty years in the 1860s and the 1870s, British authorities in Calcutta and

Rangoon carried out multiple expedition projects to the northeast direction, trying to find new land routes for commercial purposes from Bengal or Burma into Yunnan. Such a plan originally started in the 1850s as a whimsical fantasy of a certain colonial official, but was soon picked up by the colonial state and the merchant groups in the British homeland, as Britain started facing new economic situations and challenges in the 1860s.

Industrial productions in Yorkshire and Lancashire faced a downturn of the European and

American markets, as the more populated Continental Europe became increasingly industrialized itself, and the American Civil War in the 1860s significantly boosted the growth of domestic manufacturing in the United States.17 The urgency of such an attempt was especially heightened by the mounting pressure of imperial rivalries in the

East, most notably that of French advancement in Indochina in the 1860s, and the completion of the American transcontinental railroad in 1869.

17 Commerce with the Shan States and West of China, by railway direct from Rangoon to Kiang Hung, on the Upper Kamboja River, on the south-west frontier of China. Memorial 50 thereon. From the Huddersfield Chamber of Commerce to the Lords of Her Majesty's Treasury, April, 1869 (Huddersfield Chamber of Commerce, 1869), 7-8.

19 It was under such conditions and circumstances that the opening up of new markets became an imperative for the British. With the construction of the Suez Canal completely shaking the human geographical consciousness, the British extended their spatial imaginations and eyed the heavily populated southwestern chunk of the Chinese empire as their next target from India. There were altogether six major expeditions in this region, spread out between 1863 and 1876: The expedition teams of Dr. Clement Williams

(1863), of Captains J. M. Williams and C. H. Luard (1867), of Major E. B. Sladen (1868), of Thomas T. Cooper (1870), of Colonel Horace A. Browne (1875), and of Thomas

Grosvenor and E. C. Baber (1876).18 The expedition attempts came to a sudden halt in

1876, with the signing of the Chefoo Agreement in the midst of British and Qing security concerns, but the contestation of the area lived on for much longer.

Early whimsies: Richard Sprye and Clement Williams, 1850s-1860s

The earliest consideration of a broader picture of British commerce in Asia through

18 Clement Williams, Through Burmah to Western China, Being Notes of a Journey in 1863 to Establish the Practicability of a Trade-Route between the Irawaddi and the Yang-Tse-Kiang (Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and sons, 1868); E. B. Sladen, Official Narrative of the Expedition to Explore the Trade Routes to China, via Bhamo (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1870); Alexander Bowers, Report on the Practicability of Re-opening the Trade Route, between Burma and Western China (Rangoon: American Mission Press, 1869); Thomas T. Cooper, New Routes for Commerce: The Mishmee Hills. An Account of a Journey Made in an Attempt to Penetrate Thibet from Assam to Open New Routes for Commerce (London: H.S. King & co., 1873); John Anderson, Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875, under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne (London: Macmillan, 1876); Edward Colborne Baber, Report of Mr. E. C. Baber’s Journey through the Province of Yunnan with Mr. Grosvenor (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1877).

20 the Upper Burma corridor was proposed by Captain Richard Sprye and his colleagues in

Burma in 1852, submitted to the Governor-General of India. Captain Richard Sprye was a retired official of the Indian Army, who used to serve in the Madras Presidency in the

1830s.19 In this petition in 1852, he specifically highlighted “Burma or Ava, Siam, the

West of China, and Japan” for their vast potential value to the “profitable extension of the foreign trade of the United Kingdoms.”20 A few years later, Captain Richard Sprye published a collection of letters to Queen Victoria’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, elaborating on his proposal of a railway from Rangoon to Yunnan and then eastward to the upper Yangtze valley. Despite his enthusiasm and continuous effort, the plan did not seem to be too appealing for London. Lord John Russell, the Foreign Minister in 1859, dismissed the plan in a straightforward manner based on its impracticality: “Captain

Sprye is a visionary who indulges in the wildest notions…there is a certain degree of interest attaching to his schemes but they are impracticable.”21 However, the idea of initiating trade with the Shan States and Western China had certainly enthused the commercial sectors in Britain. According to Sprye, the commercial chambers and

19 John Burke, and John Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England (London: Scott, Webster, and Geary, 1838), 208. 20 Richard Sprye, Correspondence between Captain Richard Sprye and the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone, M.P. for South Lancashire, Chancellor of H.M.’s Exchequer, &c., on the Commercial Opening of the Shan States and Western Inland China, by Railway, Direct from Rangoon (London: Private Printing, 1865), 1. 21 Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, “Late Ch’ing Foreign Relations, 1866-1905,” in John K. Fairbank and Liu Kwang-ching, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 11: Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 82.

21 associations of the “manufacturers, merchants, shipbuilders, shipowners, and bankers, of

South Lancashire” had petitioned since 1859 “numerous memorials to Her Majesty’s ministers in favour of the commercial opening of the Shan States and Inland West of

China Proper, by railway direct from the port of Rangoon.”22

In spite of his strong interest, Captain Richard Sprye was known as an “armchair general” with little practical experience of Burma, so he had little respect from the policymakers and became a constant topic of ridicule among the colonial officers, despite his tireless effort much into the 1860s.23 The first person who brought such a conceptual interest into action was a surgeon of the 68th infantry in Burma, Dr. Clement Williams.

During his official tenure in Mandalay between 1860 and 1861, Dr. Clement Williams became gradually interested in personally testing the practicability of a transportation route upstream the Irrawaddy River as far as it was navigable and then crossing eastward into Yunnan. In late 1862 he finally obtained permission from the Burmese King, and started his journey at the beginning of 1863. While he traveled and observed extensively

22 Richard Sprye, The British and China Railway: From Her Majesty’s Port of Rangoon, in the Bay of Bengal, through Pegue & Burmah, to the Yunnan Province of China: With Loop-lines to Siam & Cambogia, Tonquin & Cochin-China. Prjected by Captain Richard Sprye, K.C.J.J., Reynell-Hele-Fowell Sprye, & Courtenay-Hele-Fowell Sprye, Esqrs. in a Series of Letters to the Right Hon. the Earl of Malmesbury, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (London: 1858), dedication page. 23 Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), Chapter 8; Richard Sprye, East India (Shan States, &c.) Copy of a Letter from Captain Richard Sprye to the Secretary of State for India, Dated 15 January 1866, and of the Maps Attached Thereto, Referring to Commerce with the Shan States and West of China from Rangoon, and Extension of the Indo-European Telegraph by Land from Pegu to Hong Kong and the Chinese Open Ports (London: House of Commons, 1866).

22 in Bhamo and other parts of northern Burma, he was unable to execute his final plan to cross over into Yunnan due to a delay in further permissions. Before the new permission arrived in Bhamo, a sudden insurrection broke out in Mandalay, for which Dr. Williams was recalled back to the capital immediately since he had by then been appointed the

Political Agent to the Chief Commissioner of British Burma.24

Although Dr. Clement Williams did not achieve what he aspired, i.e. to cross over the mountains and reach the Chinese frontier, he nevertheless was convinced of the plausibility of such a trade route. Upon his return to Mandalay he forwarded a memorandum to the Indian Government promoting his opinions, but the suggestion failed to attract wider attention in the midst of further complications of political unrest in

Mandalay as well as the various changes to Dr. Williams’s own personal political career.

Despite being recognized as knowledgeable on issues related to Burma, Dr. Williams, along with his idea of a trade route between Mandalay and Yunnan, soon fell into oblivion among the wider public.25

Imperial rivalry and the official sanctioning of expeditions, 1860s-1870s

24 Clement Williams, Through Burmah to Western China, Being Notes of a Journey in 1863 to Establish the Practicability of a Trade-Route between the Irawaddi and the Yang-Tse-Kiang (Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1868), v-vii. 25 Ibid., vii-ix.

23

Although the Sprye and Williams plans did not attract the attention of British authorities in India initially, Calcutta nonetheless had their own grand scheme of geographical reconfigurations. From 1860 to 1862, a series of correspondences went back and forth between the Secretary of State for India and the British Consul at Bangkok, discussing the potential feasibility of constructing a canal-railway complex across the

Isthmus of Kraw. The idea of a Kraw canal can be dated back to as early as 1858, proposed by Deputy Commissioner in Pegu Mr. E. O’Riley. In addition to saving tremendous cost of shipping to the East Asian market, according to the correspondences of 1862, the construction of such a canal would have benefits in “cheapening Chinese goods, importation of Chinese labourers, opening up a country rich in minerals…[and]

[p]olitical considerations.”26 However, despite much interest from the colonial officials, such a plan was finally aborted due to financial concerns, since the cost of construction was huge and the mileage being saved was rather small compared to Suez.

The interest to explore the land route to Yunnan, as previously demonstrated in private endeavors of Sprye and Williams, was finally taken seriously a few years later when the British woke up to the realization of new economic conditions and regional

26 Tenasserim and Martaban Provinces: Report of a Journey by Captains Fraser and Furlong across the Isthmus of Kraw. Despatch to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for India, No. 65, dated 22nd May 1862.

24 imperial competitions. In the early 1860s, the French managed to consolidate their control over Saigon as the center of their colonial enterprise in Indochina. Several years later, starting in 1866, the French in Indochina commissioned their own expedition teams upstream the Mekong River in search of the possibility to develop extensive river-bound transportation in order to integrate Asian trade along the river route. Such an ambitious plan would potentially render Saigon the center of a much broader Asian commercial enterprise connecting the gigantic markets of East Asia and the Indian Ocean world.27 In response to such competition, the Chief Commissioner of British Burma, Colonel A. P.

Phayre went to Mandalay in 1862, managing to negotiate with the Burmese court a trading route to Yunnan with a transit in Upper Burma, yet this trade was soon offset by the monopolizing attempts of the Burmese court as well as the rising political instability in Yunnan due to the Panthay rebellion.28 In the mid-1860s, the French antedated the

British in establishing contact with the Panthay regime in Yunnan. Although the French met with cold unwelcome, the potentiality of a French-Yunnan alliance terrified British merchants, who saw their trading potential under mounting threat. In the late 1860s, merchant groups and various chambers of commerce urged London and Calcutta to explore the northeastern corridor to open up the huge market of southwest China.29 The

27 Ibid., viii; Francis Garnier 冕西士加尼, Jianpuzhai yibei tanlu ji 柬埔寨以北探路記 [Voyage d'exploration en Indo-Chine] (Taipei: Huawen shuju, 1969). 28 S. T. Wang, The Margary Affair and the Chefoo Agreement (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 26-27. 29 Rangoon and Western China. Copy of Further Papers Or Correspondence Between the Government of

25 French expeditions in the Mekong continued for a few years between 1866 and 1873, a period which also saw the more official and serious efforts of British expeditions into

Upper Burma and Yunnan (1868 to 1875).30

In 1867, in response to increasing demands from the commercial circles,

Commissioner Colonel A. P. Phayre dispatched an expedition team under the leadership of Captains J. M. Williams and C. H. Luard of the Calcutta Railway Department to examine the plausibility of the railway proposal. This was the earliest of several officially sanctioned expeditions in this region for the purpose of trade.31 As it is shown in the map, the Williams and Luard mission of 1867 did not go very far in terms of distance, but they specifically named the route “China route survey,” with an eye on furthering the exploration of the route in the near future.

India and the Secretary of State, on the Proposed Communication Between Rangoon and Western China, &c. (in Continuation of Parliamentary Paper, No. 373, of Session 1865) (London: House of Commons, 1867); Commerce with the Shan States and West of China (Huddersfield Chamber of Commerce, 1869). 30 Milton Osborne, River Road to China: The Mekong River Expedition 1866-1873 (New York: Liveright, 1975). 31 Rangoon and West of China. Copy of Memorial of the Association of the Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom to the Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone, dated 17th day of February 1873; and of the appendix and maps attached to the same (London: House of Commons, 1873); Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948), 117.

26

Map 1. Map created by the Williams and Luard mission of 1867.32

32 Map of the country between Rangoon & the British Frontier, shewing the routes examined in 1867. National Library of Australia. Link: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-234416128. Accessed 8 June 2016.

27 In 1868, under the pressure of escalating French exploration activities in the region,

British authorities in Calcutta commissioned Major E. B. Sladen to lead an official expedition team to explore Upper Burma and Yunnan, with the clearly stated aim of testing the possibility of exploring the trade route between Burma and southwest China.

The pre-existing trade between Yunnan and Bhamo was reportedly at half a million pound sterling per annum, according to Henry Yule’s previous mission to the court of

Ava. However, the trade was disrupted by the rise of the Panthay regime in Yunnan, so one of the purposes assigned to the Sladen mission was to investigate the attitudes of the different peoples of the region (the Kachins, the Shans, etc.) towards the Panthay regime, and in the mean time try to “endeavour to influence these several communities towards the re-establishment of trade.”33 This land route mission was conducted in addition to the previously proposed railway plan, and not supposed to “interfere with…the prosecution of the present survey for a line of railway from Rangoon to China by the best practicable route.”34 The Foreign Secretary of India also obtained the permission of the Burmese king Mindon for the Sladen mission to pass through Burmese territories, and the cost of

33 “From Colonel Albert Fytche, Chief Commissioner of British Burmah and Agent to the Viceroy and Governor General, to Captain Sladen, Political Agent to the Chief Commissioner of British Burmah, Mandalay, --No.12M, dated Rangoon, the 11th November 1867.” Further papers regarding the proposed exploring expedition to Western China via Bhamo. India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London. IOR/L/PS/6/554, Coll 12: Nov 1867-Dec 1867. 34 “Colonel Albert Fytche, Chief Commissioner, British Burmah, and Agent to His Excellency the Viceroy and Governor General of India, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, with the Governor General—No.127P.-54P.S., dated Rangoon, the 21st June 1867.” Routes between Burmah and Western China, proposed to explore the caravan route from Ava via Bhamo. India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London, IOR/L/PS/6/552, Coll 189: Jun 1867-Aug 1867.

28 the mission (altogether Rs. 23,500) was all covered by the Financial Department.35

Sir Edward Bosc Sladen was born in 1827 in Madras to a family of Company officials. After serving in the army during the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852, he also participated in the military recapture of Lucknow after the 1857 Mutiny.36 In

January 1868, under the order of Major General A. Fytche, the Chief Commissioner of

British Burma and Agent to the Viceroy, Captain E. B. Sladen led a team of 58 people and embarked onto the journey from British Burma to Bhamo and Yunnan. Apart from

Sladen himself, his team included an engineer, a medical doctor and naturalist (Dr. John

Anderson, who later published his detailed reports on the Sladen and Browne expeditions), three mercantile representatives, one native doctor, one police inspector, and fifty armed police.37

The most remarkable achievement of the Sladen mission was that it managed to establish early diplomatic contacts with the Panthay Muslim regime in Yunnan. Unclear

35 “From the Foreign Secretary, India, to the Chief Commissioner of British Burmah, --No.1150, dated Fort William, the 28th November 1867.” Further papers regarding the proposed exploring expedition to Western China via Bhamo. India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London. IOR/L/PS/6/554, Coll 12: Nov 1867-Dec 1867. Figure of cost mentioned in letter from Fytche to the Secretary to the Government of India, in Footnote 18. 36 “Sladen, Sir Edward Bosc (1827-1890),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Link: http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/view/article/25711. Accessed Oct. 24th, 2015. 37 E. B. Sladen, Official Narrative of the Expedition to Explore the Trade Routes to China, via Bhamo (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1870), 19.

29 about the political future of Yunnan, the Sladen mission was open to befriending the enemies of the Chinese court, who desperately sought the friendship of the British in order to combat the Qing. The Sladen mission reached Tengyue (otherwise referred to as

“Momien” in various sources, which comes from the name of the place in the Shan language) in western Yunnan and was greeted with warm and generous welcome from the local leader Li Guolun, one of the high officials and military commanders of the

Panthay regime. Sladen communicated with Li Guolun on the issue of a renewed trade route (new for the British but renewed for the local merchants), while Li responded positively and reported to the authority in the capital city of Dali. Meanwhile, Sladen expressed their hope to reach Dali to meet directly with the Panthay supreme leader, Du

Wenxiu, but was discouraged from doing so due to ongoing warfare on the route from

Tengyue to Dali between the Qing authorities and Panthay armed forces. Sladen was eventually convinced to give up on the Dali plan when news runners from Dali faced bloody attacks on their way back to Tengyue. Authorities in Dali also responded positively to Sladen’s suggestion of the trade route, and agreed to make Bhamo a regional center of trade between the British and Panthay-controlled Yunnan, given Bhamo’s location on the Irrawaddy River and relative proximity to Tengyue, although Dali did not provide detailed terms of tax. Li Guolun generously feasted and accommodated the

Sladen team, giving the latter huge monetary gifts that went far beyond their expectation.

The Sladen team stayed in Tengyue for a month and a half during the summer of 1868

30 before they departed for their return journey to Mandalay.38 This diplomatic contact rejuvenated a few years later, when the Panthay regime was under threat from the Qing and was desperately trying to woo the British for military support. In late 1870, Liu

Daoheng (otherwise known as Prince Hassan), a high official of the Panthay regime, set off on a diplomatic mission to London to befriend the British, but ended up with little success since the British were clearly not interested in getting themselves involved in this political dispute.39

In the late 1860s, the completion of the Suez Canal and the Transcontinental

Railroad in the United States tremendously enlarged the scope of imperial geographical imagination of the time. The British suddenly realized two things. First, with the Suez

Canal now open, they could save months of time by not having to go around the Cape of

Good Hope to reach the East, a huge convenience point for trade with the Asian market.

Yet the second realization was not as blissful: the Americans, whose manufacture industry had been boosted by the increasing demand of the American Civil War, were now able to reach the Asian coast in merely eighteen days with the help of the newly

38 Huang Chia-mu 黃嘉謨, Dianxi Huimin zhengquan de lian Ying waijiao 滇西回民政權的聯英外交, 1868-1874 [British Relations with the Panthay Regime of Western Yunnan, 1868-1874] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Minguo 65 [1976]), 103-115; Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽, Qing shigao 清史 稿 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), Vol.48, 14684.

39 Liu Daoheng 劉道衡, “Shang Du gong shu” 上杜公書. In Bai Shouyi 白壽彝, ed., Zhongguo jindaishi ziliao congkan: Hui min qiyi 中國近代史資料叢刊：回民起義, vol. 2 (Shanghai: Shenzhou guoguang she, 1953), 168.

31 opened Transcontinental Railroad. An expansion of geographical imaginations, combined with new pressure of yet another imperial rival, urged the British merchants, London politicians, and colonial officials to take further action to address the issue of Asian market.

Discussions and debates on the Burma/India-Yunnan trade route had by then become a heated topic in the Britain homeland. In 1870, Major Sladen delivered a lecture at the

Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, in which he elaborated on his position and consideration in the two major debates that had emerged on this topic. The first debate was centered around the very nature of the transportation of the route: Captain Sprye famously proposed his plan of a railway connecting Burma and inland China, whereas others advocated for a combination of land transportation and river navigation. The other debate was regarding the geographical location of the route: some proposed a route from

Rangoon to Yunnan via Bhamo, while others suggested a route from Calcutta into

Yunnan along the Brahmaputra valley at the foot of the eastern Himalayas, bypassing much of Upper Burma.40

The first person to put the Brahmaputra-Himalaya plan into action was Thomas T.

40 E. B. Sladen, Trade through Burma to China: An Address to the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce 14th Nov., 1870 (Glasgow: 1870), 10-17.

32 Cooper. As a young man born in 1839, Cooper had worked previously in the British commercial and military sectors in Madras, Burma, and Shanghai, where his brother was stationed and where he fought against the Taiping insurgents in protection of the city.

After the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1860s, the commercial encroachment of China again became an issue of concern for British merchants.41

It was under such circumstances that Thomas T. Cooper embarked upon two great expedition attempts, the first from Shanghai westward in an attempt to penetrate through

Tibet to India, and the second from Calcutta to Yunnan along the Brahmaputra valley through the Mishmee Hills. In his audacious trip from Shanghai westward, he was determined to become the first person to make this grand tour in-between these British territories by land, across mountains and rivers. But his ambition was thwarted in western

Sichuan by the Chinese authorities, and then again in Yunnan where he turned to after his initial setback but accidentally involved himself into the political disputes between different local tribesmen and the Panthay regime. His plan to penetrate western China into the Brahmaputra valleys had eventually to be aborted.42 But Cooper was adamant in his determination to open up a new market for Assam tea and Manchester-manufactured

41 “Cooper, Thomas Thornville (1839-1878),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Link: http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/view/article/6234?docPos=14. Accessed Oct. 25th, 2015. 42 T. T. Cooper, Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce in Pigtail and Petticoats; or, An Overland Journey from China towards India (London: J. Murray, 1871).

33 goods, so soon afterwards he again approached this route from the other direction, mirroring his first attempt. He started from Calcutta and went upstream the Brahmaputra valley for a long distance in the hills, until he met with determined opposition from local authorities near the geographical meeting point of present-day Arunachal Pradesh,

Nagaland, Tibetan Autonomous Region, Yunnan, and Kachin. Although his ambition was not completely achieved, Cooper was evidently pleasant and confident about his adventures and discoveries, that he titled his published account of the Brahmaputra trip simply as “New Routes for Commerce.”43

Cooper’s endeavors caught the eye of the colonial authorities and later received official recognition from the imperial state. Cooper’s initial effort to travel from the

China side was a private enterprise and met with ridicule and sarcasm of many people in

Shanghai, who were satisfied enough with their trading situation in the East.44 Yet by

1872, when Liu Daoheng’s mission from the Panthay regime was returning from London with disappointment, Cooper was appointed by the Foreign Office to accompany the Liu

Daoheng group on their way back.45 The expedition efforts of Cooper certainly earned

43 Thomas T. Cooper, New Routes for Commerce: The Mishmee Hills. An Account of a Journey Made in an Attempt to Penetrate Thibet from Assam to Open New Routes for Commerce (London: H.S. King & co., 1873). 44 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 256. 45 Ibid., 257.

34 him official recognition as a representative of British commercial interest in the region.

The Browne mission and the end of the expedition era, 1875-76

The last British expeditions in this region for similar purposes were the 1875 expedition led by Colonel Horace A. Browne, and its follow-up trip in 1876 led by

Thomas Grosvenor. In the early 1870s the political scenario in Yunnan became somewhat clearer, as the Panthay rebellion was finally crushed by the Qing authorities.

Trade between Bhamo and Yunnan saw a perceptible increase, especially in cotton. Both the Chief Commissioner of British Burma and the Secretary of State for India proposed that another delegation be sent from Calcutta through Mandalay to Yunnan, and even potentially visiting Shanghai, in order to eliminate any possible political suspicions from the Qing (since the British in India had previously been in contact with the Panthays) and to pave the way for better trade conditions between Bhamo and Yunnan for the future.46

The Horace Browne mission later turned out to be the starting point of a series of significant events in the history of Anglo-Qing relations. British diplomat in China Sir

Thomas Wade delegated a young Augustus Raymond Margary, fluent in the Chinese

46 John Anderson, Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875, under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne (London: Macmillan, 1876), 345-347.

35 language, to set off from Shanghai to meet the Browne mission in Yunnan and to serve as their translator. After meeting up with the Browne mission in Bhamo, Margary led a few men into Yunnan to explore the potential dangers in the region. They were attacked by some local armed forces, and everyone died except for their chef. Upon receiving the news, the Browne mission soon cancelled their further plans and returned to Rangoon.47

Next year, a team was commissioned to investigate the case of Margary. This mission, led by Thomas Grosvenor and joined by E. C. Baber, was the last major attempt of the

British to explore the possibility of a route from India and Burma to Yunnan.48 Sir

Thomas Wade took this opportunity to advance his diplomatic demands to the Qing government, using this incident “as a stock on which to graft matters of a different nature,” which included issues such as diplomatic protocol in Peking, trade, and tariff.49 In the

1876 Chefoo Convention, held between Sir Thomas Wade and the supreme Qing minister

Li Hongzhang, confirmed issues related to British obtaining Chinese approval for frontier trade between Burma and China, and the arrangement for a mission of apology to London, which was to become the first resident Chinese legation abroad.50 Although the Browne

47 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Transmitted to Congress, with the Annual Message of the President, December 6, 1875. Vol.1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1875), 322-323. 48 Edward Colborne Baber, Report of Mr. E. C. Baber’s Journey through the Province of Yunnan with Mr. Grosvenor (Calcutta: Printed at the Foreign Department Press, 1877). 49 Horace A. Browne, “The Yunan Expedition of 1875, and the Cheefoo Convention,” in Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, Jan 1, 1906, Vol.21 (41), 346. 50 “Wade, Sir Thomas Francis (1818-1895),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Link: http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/view/article/28382?docPos=2. Accessed Oct. 25th, 2015.

36 mission returned due to safety concerns, the ambition of the British was evident: the

British steamer that carried this last mission back from Mandalay to Rangoon was named

“Yunnan.”51

In the Chefoo Agreement of 1876, the British made tremendous advancements on their aspiration of the North-east corridor. The British gained permission to establish an outpost in Dali (in western Yunnan) for five years, in order to gather information and to prepare for future trade routes. An additional clause of the Chefoo Agreement even renders it mandatory for the Qing to escort future British expedition teams towards India from the China side.52 After the trading privileges were granted, including lucrative tariff terms on opium, the British hesitated in pursuing the exploration of the route due to security concerns, especially after the bloodshed of the Margary group. Chinese minister

Li Hongzhang was also strongly against any further British expeditions into Yunnan, because the province was weakly controlled by the central government, so any potential security issue of banditry could be used as an excuse or leverage for furthering British diplomatic benefits against the Qing. Having obtained access to Qing escort within China, the British decided to opt for the other route from the Chinese coast inland, in effect ending the period of British expeditions from India and Burma into Yunnan.

51 John Anderson, Mandalay to Momien, 453-454.

52 “Yantai tiaoyue 煙臺條約,” in Wang Tieya 王鐵崖 ed., Zhongwai jiu yuezhang huibian 中外舊約章 彙編, Vol.1 (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi Sanlian shudian, 1957), 347-350.

37

The Qing Empire and the southwestern frontier in the late nineteenth century

The Qing Empire had a troubled relationship with its southwestern frontier. The southern and southwestern provinces of the Chinese empire were never well integrated into the centralized state until much into the Ming Dynasty, through the expansion of lineage structures, which brought together local society and imperial administration and ideology.53 The southwestern frontier areas remained out of reach for the imperial state until the Qing effort of gaitu guiliu, “replacing native officials with state-appointed, circulating officials/magistrates,” carried out gradually in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to incorporate the frontier regions with centralized state bureaucracy.54

However, due to constraints in the technologies of governance and in administrative resources available to the frontier provinces, this process of imperial integration achieved very uneven effects throughout the geographical span of the hill areas of the Southwest.

While some areas in the plains and valleys had already become integral parts of the

53 David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 54 John E. Herman, “The Cant of Conquest: Tusi Offices and China’s Political Incorporation of the Southwest Frontier,” in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 135; David Faure, “The Tusi That Never Was: Find an Ancestor, Connect to the State,” in David Faure and Ho Ts'ui-p'ing eds., Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 171.

38 empire, the various hill areas across the southwestern provinces still remained unruly.

The relationship between the Qing authority and these remote areas resembled the political order in early modern mainland Southeast Asia, with diminishing and overlapping spheres of political authority the further away from the political centers, which the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah terms “galactic polity.”55 The Panthay uprising in Yunnan between 1856 and 1873 was an evident demonstration of the local chieftains’ tremendous ability in social organization across different ethnic groups and their ambition to wager for competing political patronage of the British, and by contrast the poor control or legitimacy the Qing Empire held in these frontier areas.56 Even in the late 1870s, throughout the region there were constant occurrences of indigenous people, numbered in hundreds and armed with sharp swords, occupying the Han county-level government building and looting local Han officials and merchants. 57 The newly migrated Han people therefore built tall brick structures amidst the hatch huts of the local people, trying to protect themselves from such bloody attacks.

Given the weak imperial control of the Qing over the Southwestern territories, the

55 S. J. Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 293 (1977): 69–97. 56 David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

57 Guizhou sheng Danzhai xian difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui 贵州省丹寨县地方志编纂委员会, Danzhai xianzhi 丹寨县志 (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 1999), 14.

39 British interest in the Yunnan route can be understood not only as an imperial attempt of encroachment onto Chinese territories, but rather as a British-French-Qing trilateral contestation for these hill areas. The nominal authority that the Qing court held over the

Yunnan territories did more harm than good to Peking, as it brought the Qing court much diplomatic responsibility for unpredictable events happening within Yunnan, which the court did not have a real solid control over.

Conclusion

Since as early as 1852, British officials of British India and Burma in various functions and capacities had imagined and conceived of a trading corridor between the eastern parts of British India and the southwestern provinces of the Qing Empire, wishing to venture into the vast market of southwest China from the Indian side. Motivated by new economic challenges of the 1860s and agitated by the imperial rivalry with France and the United States, British merchant groups and political personnel picked up the idea of such a trading corridor and subsequently put such aspirations into action with the numerous expedition projects into the wild mountains and rivers. Following the bloody incidents of the Browne mission of 1875, the British eventually managed to make significant gains in the China market through treaty arrangements. Although the efforts of expedition toward the Northeast paused due to security concerns, the British managed to

40 consolidate their control over the Northeast in the upcoming decades through massive statistical projects of surveys, in the midst of a new wave of imperial competition in the region between Britain and France. It is to these decades of surveys and consolidation that I now turn.

41 Chapter Two - Knowing Zomia:

Information Gathering and Classification of Colonial Knowledge, 1870s-1890s

From the 1870s to the 1890s, while the expedition efforts were waning down, the

British authorities in Calcutta carried out a series of information gathering projects on the

Northeast, turning the hitherto unknown territories of British India into classified categories of governable knowledge. These projects took various forms, such as those of geographical mappings, statistical surveys, and linguistic studies. Through various institutional arrangements, the crude data of collected information were translated and curated into colonial knowledge, ready to be used for administrative purposes. The colonial state’s unprecedented attention on the region, especially exemplified by the large body of officially sponsored scholarly publications on the numerous local languages of the Northeast, indicated the colonial state’s awareness of the strategic importance of the region, and pointed to potential future colonial activities toward that direction.

Information gathering and the Northeast

Information gathering projects was of course nothing new to the colonial state.

During the early period of the Company Raj, the British had already carried out massive

42 geographical survey projects in order to map their imperial holdings in the subcontinent and to coin a spatial understanding of them. 58 Early forerunners such as Francis

Buchanan and Colin Mackenzie were distinguished pioneers in information gathering, carrying out gigantic information collection projects largely based on individual initiatives.59 After the 1857 Mutiny, the colonial state significantly reconfigured its strategies of information gathering, institutionalizing large projects of surveys of British territories and subjects of the subcontinent. The rise of the informational colonial state was also an era of new technologies of information, with large-scale expansions of informational infrastructures such as newspaper media, printing press, and telegraph communication throughout the subcontinent.60

British geographical mapping of the subcontinent has often been associated with the creation of the idea of an Indian nation with geographical unity, later picked up and used as a rhetorical device of anticolonial nationalism against British rule. In her work on the creation of the Indian national space during the colonial period, Manu Goswami invokes

58 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), Chapter 6. 59 Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, performed under the orders of the most noble the Marquis Wellesley, governor general of India, for the express purpose of investigating the state of agriculture, arts, and commerce; the religion, manners, and customs; the history natural and civil, and antiquities, in the dominions of the rajah of Mysore, and the countries acquired by the Honourable East India company (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 82. 60 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 338-345.

43 the example of Bipin Chandra Pal and argues that although he denounced the colonial claim of “India” as a mere geographical expression, Pal was nonetheless inheriting and assuming an idea of India (or Bharat) as a “territorially bounded and historically singular national entity,” an idea which had “permeated popular geographical discourse” and

“acquired a self-evident givenness” by the turn of the century.61 The rise of such a spatial imaginary was largely a result of the British geographical activities throughout the nineteenth century.

The British endeavor of geographical mapping has also been understood to be responsible for the creation of a cultural entity of “India” as a cultural “other” for orientalists and Victorian anthropologists, whose understandings of the “oriental civilization” had tremendous impact on the ideologies of colonial rule in India. Matthew

H. Edney, in his study of the early British mappings of the subcontinent during the

Company Raj, remarks that “[b]y mapping the subcontinent, the British defined a conception of a natural and eternal geographical entity called ‘India.’ This India was the site of the orientalists’ enthusiasms, an India that stood in marked opposition to active and dynamic Britain.”62 According to this line of thought, such a construction of “India” as a cultural entity served as a justification of colonialism, both for those who upheld the

61 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 165-166. 62 Edney, 335.

44 discourse of rule and violence and for those who were proponents of the discourse of improvement and benevolence. In the meantime it also served as a consolidating factor for nineteenth century orientalist scholarship, which viewed “India” through a civilizational lens with overwhelming attention to the (textual) civilizational essence.

In neither of these historical pictures does the Northeast have a place. In the discussions both of the creation of an Indian national space and of a British cultural construction of an oriental “other,” the Northeast always seems to be an outlier. The creation of this Indian national space, or what Bipin Chandra Pal would refer to as

“Bharatvarsha,” never really includes the Northeast as an integral part of this political imagination. Such a political imagination exclusive of the Northeast lingered on into the postcolonial period, and has demonstrated itself in the various political tensions between the all-India center and the regional concerns of the Northeast. On the other hand, the

Northeast also did not feature in the British cultural construction of an oriental “other.”

The British cultural construction of an Indian “civilization” was mostly focused on either the Sanskrit language, or a textually-based “classical” Hinduism. The “tribes” (not civilization) of the Northeast was certainly not part of the world of Sanskrit literary cultures and traditions, nor was the area entangled in the myriad branches of the “ancient banyan tree” of Hinduism.63 If we were to approach the linguistic studies on the

63 Julius J. Lipner, “Ancient Banyan: An Inquiry into the Meaning of ‘Hinduness.’” Religious Studies,

45 Northeast through the prism of British orientalist scholarship, then the case of the

Northeast would certainly prove to be an anomaly.

In addition, the historicist distinction between the Indian “civilization” and the uncivilized, inferior “tribes” of the Northeast has lived on in the postcolonial Indian state, both in the political discourses as well as in intellectual discussions.64 Such a division portrays the societies of the Northeast as fixed and incapable of change. Combined with the nationalist discourses, it creates an image of savagery and barbarism of the Northeast to mirror the more superior Indian “civilization,” legitimating the “civilization” ’s claim over the Northeast. This “invention” of the primitive societies of the Northeast functioned in exactly the same way as that of the Victorian anthropologists of Britain in their discursive construction of the non-Western “Other.”65 Not only does such a distinction set up a ladder of historical progression and hierarchy, it discursively eliminates any possibility for the Northeast to move up such a ladder through the various political arrangements of the postcolonial state. Similar to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued for the historicist idea of the “waiting room” of history, projected by the Europeans onto

32:1(1996), 109-126. 64 For example, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, The Place of Assam in the History and Civilisation of India: Banikanta Kakati Memorial Lectures, 1954 (Gauhati: University of Gauhati, 1955); Birendra Chandra Chakravorty, British Relations with the Hill Tribes of Assam since 1858 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1964). 65 Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (London: Routledge, 2005).

46 India, the Indian nationalists, following the European example, has rendered the

Northeast as irrelevant and obstructive to historical progress.66 Either an idea of the

“cultural construction” of India or a nationalist imagination of the national space can do justice to the Northeast itself.

The Northeast has been largely neglected or marginalized in the discussion of information gathering in the days of high colonialism. The role of information gathering in the making of an “Indian” Northeast has also not been fully addressed. The case of the

Northeast poses a few challenges to certain historiographies of the information gathering projects. I would like to argue that, following the administrative logic of the post-1857 colonial state, the large-scale British information gathering activities in the Northeast from the 1870s to the 1890s can be best understood as part of a larger scheme of administrative plan to advance British control and influence eastward, fueled by British commercial interests and urged by imperial rivalries among various Western powers. The survey of the Northeast was not an endgame in itself, but rather a stepping-stone towards further endeavors in the same geographical direction.

Geographical survey in the Northeast, 1871-1885

66 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8-10.

47

In the 1870s and 1880s, the Northeast emerged as an area of attention for the surveyors of British India. Before then, the Northeast was never really considered an integral part on an all-India map, and the eastern boundary of the map often ends on the

Sylhet-Chittagong line.67 Throughout the decades of 1870s and 1880s, however, the

Great Trigonometrical Survey triangulated the Northeast for mapping purposes, and highlighted the strategic importance of the area for the purposes of commerce, cultivation, and coal mining. It was in this period that the Northeast really started to appear on the all-India map as an integral part of British India, expanding the eastern rim of the all-India shape from the Sylhet-Chittagong eastern boundary of Bengal to the eastern end of the Brahmaputra Valley near Shivsagar and Sadiya (variably spelled as Sibsagar and

Sudiya).

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Trigonometrical Survey had already assumed the status of the central mapping institution for all of British India, coordinating triangulation and geographical mapping at the all-India level.68 While the geographical survey of various regions of British India had been going on for decades, it was not until the 1860s and 1870s that the triangulation started to cover the Northeast. In the 1860s, the

67 Edney, 226-227, 315. 68 Ibid., 287.

48 easternmost coverage of the geographical survey was the “Eastern Frontier Series,” reaching the eastern line from Sylhet to “Independent Tipperah” southward to Chittagong.

It was then further extended to the areas in Lower Burma, including Akyab, Arakan, and even as far as Moulmein.69

69 Clements R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, Second Edition (London: W. H. Allen, 1878), 129.

49 Map 2. Index chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, showing the

Sylhet-Chittagong-Akyab eastern line, 1870.70

Starting in the 1870s, however, the Sylhet-Chittagong eastern borderline was breached and the survey teams entered the hitherto untouched region of Assam and the areas. In 1871, under the directorship of Mr. W. G. Beverley, the triangulation team started to survey the northeastern part of Assam, but progress was slow due to tremendous topographical challenges of the area. The triangulation reached Sibsagar in

1874 and also carried out some preliminary explorations in the Daphla hills and the Naga hills.71 This work on the northern frontier of Assam was considered of great importance because it provided crucial information concerning the course of the Brahmaputra.72 In the meantime, south of the Brahmaputra Valley and the Garo hills, and east of the previous border of the Eastern Frontier Series, a survey team was dispatched in 1871 to the Lushai hills and the Northern Chittagong hills.73

70 Index Chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, showing Colonel Lambton’s net-work of triangulation in southern India, the meridional and longitudal chains of principal triangles, the base lines measured with the colby apparatus, the lines of the spirit-levelling operations, the astronomical, pendulum & tidal stations, and the secondary triangulation to fix the peaks of the Himalayan & the Soolimani ranges, Completed to 1st May 1870 (Dehra Doon: Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, 1870). 71 Markham, 130. 72 Ibid., 430. 73 Ibid., 171-172; R. G. Woodthorpe, The Lushai Expedition, 1871-1872 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1873).

50 After the early water-testing surveys of the early 1870s laying out the sketch of the region, the survey teams in the mid-1870s took a more adamant and aggressive manner in their work. In 1874, Major Godwin Austen, together with the Duffla (Daphla) military expedition, entered hitherto unknown territories in Narampur in the north of Assam, prepared to battle the local people. Such attempts received strong encouragements from the Surveyor General, hoping that “with tact and precaution all difficulties in the way of visiting and exploring the narrow strip of hills between the Assam valley and Tibet may be overcome.”74 The role of Tibet in the inter-imperial contestation of this region will be further detailed in the next chapter, but it is worth pointing out that in the 1870s both

British political agents such as Thomas T. Cooper and the surveyors in Calcutta had already expressed a keen interest in exploring the Brahmaputra as a potential site of connectivity, leading to British spying missions such as that of Sarat Chandra Das.

Meanwhile, also in 1874, Captain Badgley and Lieut Woodthorpe were employed to survey the eastern Naga hills south of Sibsagar. Yet in February 1875, their team of more than a hundred people entered the forbidden territories of the locals, which saw fatal conflicts between the two sides, killing more than eighty.75 Captain Badgley narrowly escaped from the bloody site, and recovered soon enough to become a prominent figure in the survey of the Northeast territories in the upcoming years.

74 Ibid., 173. 75 Ibid., 173-174.

51

The early- to mid-1870s was also a period during which the British political authorities started to come to a better realization of the strategic and economic importance of the Northeast. In August 1873, the Government of India in Calcutta passed the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, drawing an “inner line” between Bengal and the

Northeast, prohibiting unauthorized personnel from entering the area due to commercial or political concerns, thus reserving the Northeast for official purposes.76 In addition to serving as the gateway to the Assam-Burma-Yunnan corridor, the land of the Northeast itself had also begun to demonstrate its own value in its provision of resources. With the demand rising in the heyday of colonialism, coal mining and tea cultivation became the two crucial attractions of the Northeast, and the geographical survey of the Northeast came to its full gear in the coming decade, followed by firmer political control of the land and its resources.

The rich depository of coal in the Northeast was discovered in the early 1860s. As the railway system in India expanded significantly in the 1870s, the demand for coal increased by a large amount, and the British started to actively explore the coalmines of the Northeast in the mid-1870s following the geological surveys of the area.77 In 1876,

76 Government of India, Regulation 5 of 1873: Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 (Calcutta: Government of India, 1873). 77 Markham, 220, 222.

52 after reviewing the coalfields of the Naga hills, the leader of the survey Mr. Mallet remarked that the coalfields of the Naga hills “… for quality and quantity of the coal, rank as the most important of the Indian carboniferous deposits.”78 The coal of the

Northeast became a much-desired resource that the British were actively seeking.

In the decade after 1875, the Survey Department carried out a series of more detailed and systematic triangulations of Assam. As the cultivation of tea and other crops expanded in the Northeast, accurate land measurement was needed for the collection of land revenue. It was believed that a lack of accurate surveys of the newly reclaimed areas of the Northeast had been “costing Government heavily in fraudulent zemindari claims.”79 In the meantime, the British revenue departments were also looking for local collaborators for the purpose of expanding cultivation through land reclamation, and for the collection of land revenue through these local intermediary classes. Instead of battling the indigenous people as they previously did, now the British were seeking cooperation from the more friendly candidates among the locals. Remarks on the characters and natures of the local peoples started to emerge in the survey reports in a very detailed and vivid manner. In one instance, for example:

78 Charles E. D. Black, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 1875-1890 (London: E. A. Arnold, 1891), 238. 79 Ibid., 76.

53 Major Badgley says of the Tipperahs that they are active fellows, and excellent hands at jungle cutting, but their fondness for burning the forests makes them undesirable cultivators. … The Manipuris he describes as pleasant-spoken, independent, and good hands at a bargain, but in matters concerning land as often victimised by the Sylhetias, who are strong, cowardly, morose, and quite uncompromising in their hatred of Europeans.80

During years of work in this region, the British were always confronted with the hardship of climate, challenges of topography, and hostility of the local people.81 Due to these difficulties, in the late 1870s, they finally decided to resort to a collaborative scheme with the local intermediaries for land reclamation and revenue collection, similar to what the

British had previously done during their expansion in North India.82 Such a collaborative scheme soon saw its rewards. The same Major Badgley, who escaped from the Naga hill incident in 1875, commented in 1881 on the Tipperah hills saying that “[t]hese tracts of country up to that time described on the maps as ‘hills covered with impenetrable jungle’ were rapidly becoming valuable, as they were being taken up and opened out for tea cultivation,” largely as a result of this collaborative arrangement.83

The second triangulation of Assam went on further until 1885, after the Survey

80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 51, 75, 78, 127. 82 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 83 Black, 77.

54 Department in Calcutta had gathered a somewhat thorough and systematic collection of geographical information on the Northeast. In July 1885, the “No. 6 party” of the Survey

Department, responsible for the geographical survey of the Northeast, finished its task and was dissolved after its initial formation some two decades ago.84

It is also worth pointing out that the surveyors were aware of the discussion on the potential land route for trade from Assam into Southwest China, and saw their work as related to and contributing to such a project. The Secretary of State and the India Office also considered the survey projects to be part of a bigger plan to connect “Calcutta,

Assam, and China.” Recounting the relationship between the two, surveyor Charles Black recalls in his memoir,

Burma and Assam Frontier. — The opening up of the Assam frontier was pressed on the attention of the Secretary of State even before the annexation of Upper Burmah. On the 31st July 1878, a deputation, headed by the late Mr. W. E. Porster and Sir R. Alcock, and comprising Col. Godwin-Austen and various gentlemen interested in Assam and its tea-trade, waited on Lord Cranbrook at the India Office with a memorial praying for the improvement of the communication between Calcutta, Assam, and China, and for preliminary exploration along the connecting route across the mountains. The matter was commended to the notice of the Government of India on the 29th August 1878 (Despatch No. 46 (Geographical)). The papers which form Appendix B. to Gr. T. S. Report for 1876-77 (see Survey Proceedings for April 1878) contain some interesting details as to the geography of N.E. Assam, and a Note

84 Ibid., 80.

55 (Appendix B.) on the old Burmese route over the Patkoi and by way of Nongyong, viewed as the most feasible and direct route from India to China. The deputation undoubtedly helped to concentrate attention on this important region, and some useful explorations were subsequently made…85

After the British annexation of Upper Burma in 1885, the survey of Upper Burma became an integral part of the geographical survey endeavors. Given its better accessibility than before, knowledge of the terrains of Upper Burma also became crucial to the potential Assam-Yunnan corridor. While discussing the topographical work in the extreme northeastern frontier of Assam in 1885, Charles Black says “a knowledge of the mountainous region between the head of the Assam valley and the upper waters of the

Irawadi is even now (1891) very important, as the establishment of a direct means of communication between the two countries will be a great administrative and commercial gain, and help towards opening up this part of Upper Burma.”86 Immediately after the annexation of Upper Burma, the corresponding section of the Survey Department was significantly strengthened, and special attention in the survey was given to the area between Mandalay and Bhamo, a critical passageway for the Northeast corridor.87

Throughout the survey decades, the Northeast, together with Upper Burma, was conceived of as a connecting intermediary between Calcutta and China, a crucial bridging

85 Ibid., 165-166. 86 Ibid., 78-79. 87 Ibid., 166, 168.

56 point in a much larger imperial design, and not only a marginal “frontier” at the far end of the civilizational sphere.

Linguistic scholarship on the languages of the Northeast

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Calcutta witnessed a proliferation of publications in the grammars and dictionaries of the various languages of the North-East.

These works covered languages such as Naga (1872), Garo (1873), Lushai (1881),

Paharia (1881), Lepcha (1867-1893), Khond (1899), Uraon (1898-1900), Mundari (1900),

“Thibetain” (1902), Sikkimese (1906), etc.88 The research and publication of these works were largely sponsored by British authorities in Calcutta, with military personnel being the major contributors to such works. The British authorities paid for their research leaves and the publication of these works, often printed in official printing presses in Calcutta.

Eventually, these works of linguistics significantly informed the enterprising project of

Sir George A. Grierson, which culminated in the comprehensive, multi-volume Linguistic

Survey of India, published between 1903 and 1922.

Such a large-scale linguistic survey and research project poses a significant conceptual and historiographical challenge to our established understanding of British

88 Books and Publications Catalogue, The State Archives of West Bengal. Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

57 orientalist scholarship on India from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The standard narrative of British orientalist scholarship on India starts with Sir William

Jones’s announcement of his discovery of the Indo-European linguistic family in 1786, and proceeds to include important milestone figures such as Henry Thomas Colebrooke,

Horace Hayman Wilson, Monier Monier-Williams, and Friedrich Max Müller. From the theory of Indo-European languages, to the history of the Boden Professors of Sanskrit at

Oxford, to the compilation of the vast Sacred Books of the East, British orientalist scholarship on India had two distinctively recognizable nexuses at its center: the Sanskrit language, and a textually-based “classical” Hinduism.

The late-nineteenth-century linguistic survey project of the Northeast conforms to neither of these two nexuses. Most, if not all, of these languages of the Northeast being studied are non-Indo-European: they fall broadly into various different linguistic families and groups, such as Tibeto-Burman, Munda, Khasi, or even Dravidian. The “Sanskrit cosmopolis” that Sheldon Pollock has articulated had never reached this area, and there had never been a process of Sanskritization of these languages similar to the historical processes that had happened to South Indian languages such as Tamil.89 Therefore these languages do not contribute to the understanding of a mutual “Aryan”-ness between the

89 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11-12.

58 British and the people of the subcontinent, as Thomas R. Trautmann has argued in the case of the study of the Indo-European languages by the British.90 Nor did the people of this region identify themselves with any form of Hindu worship or practices. Indigenous forms of worship and religiosity were still the predominant form of religious life in this region until large-scale, successful Christian evangelical movements took place in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the study of the languages of the

Northeast also would not contribute to a better understanding of a textually-based

“classical” Hinduism, which the British orientalists considered as a crucial gateway to understanding the civilization of India as a whole.91

The linguistic survey and research project on the Northeast did not conform to the established understanding and narrative of British orientalist scholarship on India. The only way to comprehend this “anomaly” of orientalist scholarship was to put it into its historical and political context. As I have stated above, during the previous decades, the

British authorities in India had conceived of an ambitious plan to explore and expand commercial interest eastward into Yunnan. In order to access this huge market, the

British would first need to take a tighter control on the frontier territories of the Northeast.

90 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 172-178. 91 Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770-1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 144-183; Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 170.

59 As C. A. Bayly masterfully argues, the British based their control in India on a meticulous system of information gathering, which expanded significantly in the final decades of the nineteenth century.92 The significance of such a large-scale linguistic survey and research project would become rather evident when it is located in the decades-long British pursuit of a Northeast corridor for commercial gains, and this

“anomaly” of British orientalist scholarship on India can be understood as one firm administrative step in the British aspiration to expand interest further east.

Systematic publication and the curating of colonial knowledge

Information only becomes readily accessible and comprehensible when it is properly classified and curated into knowledge. The information projects of the British on the

Indian Northeast also went through such a curating process. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the informational endeavors evolved from the collecting phase to the curating phase, and manifested themselves in the various large-scale all-India official publication projects, integrating the knowledge of the Northeast into the knowledge body of the whole of India.

One of the landmarks of the post-1857 information and surveillance regime was the

92 Bayly, Empire and Information.

60 large-scale publication of censuses and gazetteers. These publication projects in the late nineteenth century generally cover the whole of the Indian subcontinent, and one of the noticeable new dimensions they have was the inclusion of the Northeast in their consideration of India as a whole, a phenomenon almost completely new to the later nineteenth century. In the decennial Census of India as well as the Imperial Gazetteer of

India series, the Northeast was presented as an integrated part of the British territory in

India, except being placed, in some cases, at the end of the list of provinces. The same holds true for the Linguistic Survey of India series of Grierson.

In the compiling process of these publications, the surveyed information on the

Northeast throughout the past few decades becomes integrated into the larger picture of the whole of India. Similar to what Thongchai Winichakul has argued for the relationship between colonial cartography and the making of the geo-body of Siam, British information projects in the late nineteenth century also helped to merge and mold the

Northeast into the main consideration and narrative of the whole of India.93 The peoples, provinces, and territories of the Northeast hence started to be officially catalogued as part of British India.

93 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

61 In the meantime, a wide range of introductory volumes and pamphlets emerged in the publication sector, both in London and in Calcutta, sketching the basic information of the Northeast and of Burma to a general audience. Many of these were official publications, although they might not take the form of official reports. John Murray and

Trübner & Co., both of London, emerged as prominent publishers for this kind of works.

Among the most important and influential writers were Sir Alexander Mackenzie, whose

History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East

Frontier of Bengal was published in 1884; Herbert Hope Risley, who published his four-volume The Tribes and Castes of Bengal in 1891 with a serious dose of racial theory based on comparative anatomy; James G. Scott, publishing on the Burman people under the Burmese pseudonym Shway Yoe in 1882, who was later in charge of the enormous project of the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States.94 These publications displayed an escalating interest in the subject among the reading circles, and were likely meant to prepare and familiarize the general reading public for the expansion of commercial enterprise toward the east.

Conclusion

94 Sir Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal (Calcutta, Printed at the Home Dept. Press, Government of India, 1884); Herbert Hope Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891); James G. Scott (pseud. Shway Yoe), The Burman: His Life and Notions (London: Macmillan & co., 1882).

62 Information gathering had always been crucial to British colonial endeavors. British information gathering in India underwent a total reconfiguration in the wake of 1857. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the British in India carried out systematic information projects in the Northeast, including geographical mapping and linguistic studies. These projects in knowing the territories of the Northeast were a testimony of the vested interests of the British in this area, as a preparation for the potential further administrative and commercial activities toward the east. It was also through this process of information gathering and knowledge classification that the Northeast, for the first time in history, became integrated into the geo-body and political imagination of the whole of India. The commercial potential of the Northeast corridor was therefore crucial to the making and consolidation of an “Indian” Northeast.

63 Chapter Three - Territorializing Zomia:

Imperial Rivalry and Territorial Contestation in the Northeast Corridor, 1885-1905

Fin de siècle was exciting times. Not only was it a period of intellectual and artistic splendor in Europe, narrated masterfully by the likes of Stefan Zweig and cherished by generations of admirers of German-speaking Europe, but it was also a period that saw

Western imperialism in its most heightened and developed form across the globe.95

Throughout the two decades around the turn of the century, the Northeast corridor remained a site of tremendous contestation among the imperial powers, all of which were striving for their paramount commercial and political interest in the East.

The fierce competition among the imperial powers during this period led to an unprecedented level of political tension in this region, which later turned into a process of territorial contestation, carving up this area with borderlines and markers of sovereignty.

The various local polities (the Burmese kingdom, Tibet, and Qing) also had their own coping mechanisms, trying to play their cards of leverage amongst the predatory Western powers. The contestation around the Northeast corridor also had significant political ramifications for the surrounding areas under the control of the imperial powers, not the

95 Some of the most well-known examples include Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York: Viking Press, 1943); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1980); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989).

64 least of which was the 1905 Partition of Bengal.

The annexation of Upper Burma and the heightening of territorial contestation, 1880s

After the waning of the initial expedition projects of the 1860s and 1870s, British interest in the Northeast corridor received a renewed boost in the mid-1880s, when

France turned its initial interest in Tonkin into a heated military confrontation with the

Qing Empire in 1883 and 1884. The British became acutely aware of the situation and the potential threat in the region posed by the French, and eventually took the opportunity and executed the annexation of Upper Burma in 1885. The competition over the

Northeast corridor entered a new phase of territorial contestation.

While the pressure of French influence escalated in the early-to-mid-1880s, the discussion of the Burmese railway route went through a revival among the British circles.

The construction of the railway across Upper Burma had long been considered impractical after the expeditions of E. B. Sladen and Horace Browne in the late 1860s and early 1870s, yet the rising pressure from French Indochina urged the British to make extra effort to further consolidate its control over the access to Yunnan. The most prominent proponent of the railway construction plan was Archibald R. Colquhoun,

Deputy Commissioner of British Burma, who later became the first administrator of

65 Southern Rhodesia in the 1890s. Like many political officers of his time, Colquhoun was well aware of the French presence and competition in the region over potential commercial and political interests. In his proposal for the construction of the Burma railway first laid out in the early 1880s, he enumerated the multiple possible plans of the

French, and called the imperial railway competition in this area a “railway race for south-western China trade.”96 A mounting sense of urgency to take strong hold of the region was the key theme of this railway scheme, which proposed a much-revised and more aggressive plan of the railway route. Compared to the 1860s railway route along the

Irrawaddy-Bhamo line, the Colquhoun plan proposes to move the route eastward cutting through the Shan States, bordering French Indochina on the east and reaching southward into the Gulf of Siam.97 Such a plan was directly responding to French territorial pressure in a straightforward and aggressive manner. In the publicity of his railway scheme, Colquhoun fancied himself as the “Cecil Rhodes of China,” and called for a

“new India” for Britain to meet the growing threat of international competition.98

Colquhoun’s railway scheme received enthusiastic support from the commercial circles through the British Empire. In the following years, he received financial support

96 Archibald Colquhoun and Holt S. Hallett, Report on the Railway Connexion of Burmah and China, with Account of Exploration-Survey by Holt S. Hallett (London: Allen, Scott & co., 1888), 24-26. 97 “Map of Indo-China showing proposed Burma-Siam-China railway,” ibid., 3. 98 London Chamber of Commerce Journal, November 1882, quoted in Pelcovits, 150.

66 from the Chambers of Commerce in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Rangoon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It is worth pointing out that even Singapore and Hong Kong, whose commercial status would have shrunk if a Yunnan trading corridor were successfully established, also started to support the plan due to the rising French encroachment in

Indochina.99 Throughout the British Empire, a strong urgency was felt to compete with the French over the Burma-Yunnan corridor—and ultimately for the vast market in

Southwest China, which eventually led to escalated levels of territorial grasping in this area.

The annexation of Upper Burma could be viewed as a direct consequence of this new phase of imperial rivalry between Britain and France over the Northeast corridor. While the British constantly pestered the Court of Ava for commercial advancement, Burmese kings from Mindon to Thibaw, along with their ministers, had always entertained the idea of befriending the French in order to counterbalance British pressure.100 In 1885, the foreign minister of France sent a secret letter to the Burmese court, promising to offer arms and ammunition supplies to the Burmese for them to prepare for potential British advancements. However, this conspiracy was unearthed by the British intelligence

99 Pelcovits, 150-151. 100 Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125.

67 agency, who spent huge sums to get the confidential letter stolen from the inner court.101

After a failed attempt to negotiate with the French, the British took a legal excuse regarding the right to transport wood logs in the area and launched a military march towards Mandalay in the coming months.102 In November 1885, British army finally reached Mandalay and conquered the Burmese court. King Thibaw was ousted from his throne and exiled in Ratnagiri in Bombay Presidency until his death in 1916. The official annexation of Upper Burma into British India was recognized on the first day of 1886.

Soon after the fall of Upper Burma, Siam also became a site of territorial contestation between the British and the French.

The fact that the British took extra effort and cost to launch a military annexation over Upper Burma demonstrates the heightened strategic importance of this area in the heyday of global imperialism. The British had always been acutely aware of the tremendous maintenance cost involved in the direct administration of territories, and had therefore devised various mechanisms of collaboration throughout the previous century of colonial rule in the subcontinent in order to exert control over profitable territories without having to splash the cash on direct administration. Territorial conquest, therefore, was a clear sign of British awareness of the necessity of territorial control for greater

101 Zhongguo haiguan yu Mian Zang wenti 中国海关与缅藏问题 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 5.

102 Thant Myint-U, 189.

68 benefits, in spite of the cost being generated.

The “High Noon” of territorial contestation: Anglo-French rivalry in the early 1890s

The 1890s was a decade of full-blown imperial rivalry between the British and the

French, demonstrated through territorial contestation and railway construction in Asia and in other parts of the world. It was in the 1890s that the British, under the pressure of further French advancement along the Mekong River, started to make plans for territorial conquests into Yunnan. It was also in the 1890s that the territorial ambitions of the two imperial powers materialized into railway tracks into the mountains and valleys of this contested area.

In the early 1890s, Prince Henri d’Orléans of France, widely known as a violent

Anglophobe, launched his ambitious trip upstream from French Indochina, hoping to find out the sources of the great rivers such as the Mekong and the Irrawaddy. A great grandson of the last king of France, Prince Henri d’Orléans was a renounced lesser claimant to the throne behind his uncle and cousin, and had always had a keen interest in imperial geography. He had extensive experience traveling in Siberia, Tibet, East Africa, and Madagascar before he embarked onto this grand trip. Throughout the trip, Prince

Henri d’Orléans regarded the discovery of river sources as a crucial leverage point

69 against the British in the expansion of China trade. In a later account on the trip, Prince

Henri recalled and detailed the reasons for “the slowness in the development of our commerce with China,” and made a further remark in which he warned the French authorities by comparing the race between France and Britain to the fable of the hare and the tortoise:

We know our errors; it is for us to remedy them, if we would profit by the privileged commercial position which Tonkin gives us on the flank of China. I cannot too strongly insist on the danger there is of our playing the role of the hare to the English tortoise. Whilst writing these lines I have before me the last Report of the Royal Geographical Society, in which is marked by a dotted line the railway in course of construction from Mandalay to the frontier of China. The English have 275 miles in a straight line to traverse. We, who from Hanoi to Laokay have only 135 miles, or half as far, —what are we doing?103

By invoking the tale of the hare and the tortoise, Prince Henri d’Orléans was apparently referring to the long history of Anglo-French rivalry and the decades-long French investment in this area, dating back to the days of Francis Garnier in the early 1860s.

Prince Henri used this tale as a rhetorical device to call for more aggressive policies competing against the British. It was not necessarily true that the French were lagging behind the British by any means. Actually the French had never stayed rested in their exploratory endeavors toward Yunnan: French explorers and colonial officers such as

103 Prince Henri d’Orléans, From Tonkin to India by the Sources of the Irawadi,: January '95-January '96. Trans. Hamley Bent (London, Methuen & Co., 1898), 32.

70 Auguste Pavie had already done a substantial amount of work exploring the terrains between Tonkin and Yunnan from 1879 to the 1890s.104 Both the French and the British were simply exploiting a perceived urgency of imperial rivalry to push for further advancement, especially among the merchant circles who made every effort to lobby for a policy of advancement using this rhetoric of urgency.

In the meantime, the British military department filed an important military report on western Yunnan (west of the Salween River), elaborating territorial ambitions into

Yunnan for the first time. Captain H. R. Davies, Staff Captain of the Intelligence Branch of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, reported from Rangoon in 1894 on the general conditions of this area for potential British military campaigns in Yunnan. Starting at the very beginning of the report, Davies makes it very clear that the report was “intended only to convey information of military value, and does not enter into commercial or historical questions.”105 The report includes detailed information on local inhabitants, climate, supplies and transport (including information on livestock such as mules, and on the necessity for British soldiers to bring biscuits, tinned meat, preserved potatoes, and

104 Auguste Pavie, The Pavie Mission Indochina Papers, 1879-1895 – Volume 1: Pavie Mission Exploration Work: Laos, Cambodia, Siam, Yunnan, and Vietnam. Trans. Walter E. J. Tips (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1999). 105 H. R. Davies, Report on the Part of Yunnan between the Bhamo Frontier and the Salween (Rangoon: Superintendent of Government Printing of Burma, 1894), 1.

71 coffee), and the estimated “troops required for the invasion of western Yünnan.”106

Davies simulated the potential of a British invasion into Yunnan in two possible scenarios. The first was under the circumstances of a British total war with China, which would most crucially focus on the coastal front, and the British in Burma would comfortably take a large slice of Southwest China without much foreseeable opposition from the Qing.107 The second scenario, and a more urging concern for Captain Davies, was the possibility (albeit unlikely) of the Chinese irritating the Burma-Yunnan border by smuggling arms to the hill people in the Kachin and Shan highlands. The local hill people were critical to the security considerations of the borderland, as Davies says,

In every part of Burma…if the Chinese could manage to smuggle in arms, they would find thousands of men ready to rise if they thought they saw half a chance of freeing themselves from British rule. In fact, if the Chinese played their cards well, they would succeed in reducing a considerable part of the frontier and possibly of Burma itself to the state it was in in 1886, only rather worse.

To prevent this sort of thing happening it would be absolutely

necessary to take the initiative and advance into Yünnan, not with the real

intention of invading China but to show at once to the border Chinese and

to the Kachins and other tribes that we intended to be on the winning side,

106 Ibid., 3-9, 20. 107 Ibid., 10.

72 and to fight the Chinese wherever we could find them.108

What lies behind Davies’s belief in the necessity of preemptive military activity

was a deep conviction of the strategic importance of the Burma-Yunnan frontier to

the British Empire. The rather unruly local people of this area, whom James C.

Scott argues had always been practitioners of an “art of not being governed,” was

deemed crucial to the strategic security of this frontier.109

Elsewhere in Davies’s report, the local people played an even more significant

role in regard to their potential to fight the Chinese on behalf of the British. Davies

dedicates an entire chapter of the report to the topic of “Panthays as soldiers,” and

goes to tremendous length to argue that serious consideration should be given to

the Panthays as soldiers fighting for the British against the Qing. In a similar

manner to what the British had previously considered for the Sikhs and the

Gurkhas in India, the British applied the “martial race theory” to their

consideration of the Panthays:

… [W]ould they make good fighting men? The ordinary Yünnanese is not

108 Ibid., 11. 109 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

73 considered a great warrior. The Panthay, however, has a great deal of Tartar blood in him, and though mixed a good deal with Chinese, he is certainly not exactly the same race as the ordinary Chinaman. … Their fighting in the rebellion was certainly good enough to make them worth trying. They are men who have been used all their lives to a hilly and jungly country, and ought certainly to be of great use in the particular sort of warfare that would have to be carried on in or on the borders of Burma.110

The “Tartar blood,” or rather the physical attributes associated with the Muslim-ness of the Panthays, made them distinctive from the other groups of the region in British understanding. In addition to the discussion on the martial nature of the Panthays, Davies also cites the mutual animosity between the Panthays and the Chinese as supporting evidence for recruiting the Panthays as soldiers for the British. As a response to potential doubt over the loyalty of the Panthays, Davies argues that the Panthays were different from the other local groups, whose loyalty should always be guarded against, and the

Panthays were comparatively more reliable because of the recently extinguished rebellion in the 1870s:

There is not perhaps much open enmity shown now between Panthays and Chinamen, but neither side has forgotten the rebellion, and hatred of the Chinese Government, which they probably never liked, will take a long time to die out. So far from their being likely to join the Chinese, they would probably be delighted to have a chance of turning on their old enemies.111

110 Davies, 22-23. 111 Ibid., 23.

74

The Davies report was the first systematic expression of a British conception of a territorial invasion into Yunnan. Despite previous territorial conquests in Assam and

Burma, British imperial aspiration in this corridor had hitherto always taken a more commercial and non-territorial approach regarding Yunnan, because of both cost and the prospect of upsetting the Qing court. Yet in the context of unprecedented imperial rivalry between Britain and France in the 1890s, the British had little choice but to take a more aggressive step to protect their commercial interest in Southwest China by preparing to advance territorially into the Chinese province.

The “High Noon” of railway race: Anglo-French rivalry in the late 1890s

Although a potential railway plan in the corridor area had long become a cliché by this time, the Anglo-French railway race for Yunnan manifested itself in the most systematic and aggressive manner in the late 1890s. Throughout the previous half century, from Richard Sprye in the 1850s to Archibald Colquhoun in the late 1880s, the British railway plan connecting British India with Yunnan had received extensive, if sporadic, attention. The British had carried out massive topographical survey projects for this railway scheme, yet discussions on this topic were often punctuated or interrupted by external distractions or other considerations. In the mid-1890s, while

75 the French were starting to prepare for a railway route between Tonkin and Yunnan, the British finally began to feel the real pressure burning, and the railway scheme was again, and this time more seriously than ever, on the agenda of the administrators of

British India.

In the mid-1890s, railroad in British India was extended to the eastern frontier for the first time, as the Assam-Bengal Railway was completed and opened in 1895, connecting various cities of Bengal with Gauhati and the Assam valley. Unlike the other major railroads, the Assam-Bengal Railway operated on a metre gauge, most likely due to the topographical challenges of the area. During the years around the turn of the century, the Assam-Bengal Railway was always operating on an economic loss.112 Yet the colonial state decided to maintain the railway operation, exactly because of the strategic potential of this railway line, and what could possibly connect to it on the east, stretching into Burma and maybe even further.

A confidential report of the India Office in 1895, authored by W. Lee-Warner and

E. Neel, elaborated on the mounting French pressure of Mekong valley trade and the two major schemes of “railway extension into China.” The report provides details of

French trade with the inland through Tonkin or the Mekong valley, and juxtaposes

112 John Hurd and Ian J. Kerr, India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 171.

76 two proposed railway schemes from Burma to Yunnan. The first was what the report calls the “Mandalay-Kunlong line,” connecting Mandalay and other parts of British

Burma with Kunlong, a small town on the Salween near the Yunnan border. The other scheme was what Archibald Colquhoun and Holt Hallett had previously proposed in the 1880s, namely a railway going through the Shan hills in the east of British Burma, and connecting Simao in the north and stretching into Siam in the South.

Despite the more aggressive nature of the latter proposal, the 1895 report heavily criticizes this plan on the basis of strategic security. The report argues that it was very much to the commercial interest of the British to keep Siam independent as a buffer zone between British India and French Indochina, so the latter proposal would mean to expose much of the railway line close to potential French threat in Siam, which might be subject to French conquest at any time. The alternative Mandalay-Kunlong line, however, was preferred on grounds of not only security but also convenience: It had the potential of being connected with already-existing railways or other means of transportation in both British India and Yunnan.113 There are also frequent references to Sichuan (“Szechuan”) and names of other provinces in Southwest China, as well as

113 “Schemes of Railway Extension into China; Prospects of Trade with Yunnan, and Railway Extension, W. Lee-Warner and E. Neel, 11 & 19 Nov 1895,” Trade Reports: Mekong and Manam Basins; Siam; Yunnan. Political and Secret Department Records, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London, IOR/L/PS/18/B72/2: Nov 1895, 5-6.

77 to the H. R. Davies report of 1894.114 The attention given to the potential market in the populous Chinese hinterland by way of Yunnan was evident.

The report was acutely aware of the recent progress of railway construction in

French Indochina, although it tried to demonstrate statistically that the French were lagging far behind the British in this endeavor. In spite of the confidence, the report nonetheless compared the railway race for the China trade to a running competition, in a similar manner that Prince Henri d’Orléans compared the Anglo-French railway race to the tale of the hare and the tortoise:

… as we have heard so much of the “race to China,” and as a runner may well glance at the progress of his competitor, the prospects of a French railway deserve attention. … in my opinion the phrase “race for the China trade” as applied to enterprise in railways is misleading, for there is no competitor except Great Britain in the field. Under these conditions a line through Burma which will pay as it goes, which ends in Yunnan, and which is not exposed to attack, seems the best practical step, and the Mandalay-Kunlong line answers that description.115

Such British optimism stood true until about 1898, when the French launched their own railway construction project into Yunnan after a yet-again heightened situation of competition between the two powers. In what was called the “Fashoda Incident” in 1898,

114 Ibid., 2. 115 Ibid., 6.

78 the French and the British had a brief military confrontation in Fashoda village in Sudan at the crossing point of British planned railway vertically across Africa, from Egypt in the north to Rhodesia in the south, and French planned railway horizontally across Africa, from the West African coast to the Indian Ocean littoral. After this direct confrontation, the French adopted a more aggressive strategy in the global competition with the British for imperial dominance.

This new strategy was soon translated into the construction of concrete railway tracks in French Indochina in a few years. A railway between Hanoi and Kunming was already being conceived by the French colonial government in Indochina, with potential extension to Haiphong on the coast, covering a total of around 850 kilometers. Despite the voices and concerns of certain railway skeptics, on Christmas Day of 1898, Governor

General of Indochina Paul Doumer successfully convinced President Félix Faure to approve of the railway plan. 116 In the upcoming years, Paris started an official fundraising campaign in order to collect private capital to fund the railway project. A

“Compagnie française des chemins de fer de l'Indo-Chine et du Yunnan” was established to attract private investors, and the fundraising campaign lasted for a few years until the government-owned company received enough private investment to kick off the

116 Jean-François Rousseau, “An Imperial Railway Failure: The Indochina-Yunnan Railway, 1898–1941,” The Journal of Transport History, 35:1 (2014), 4-5.

79 project.117 After several years of preparation and further planning, the construction started in 1904, and the full line was finished in 1910, when the first train made its trip from Haiphong to Kunming on April 1st, 1910.118

The Indochina-Yunnan railway was the first concrete step of French advancement in the so-called “railway race for China trade,” discussed by so many both in Britain and in

France. It was a solid French response to the mounting territorial contestation in the area between Britain and France throughout the past two decades. The reality of a French railway into Yunnan further agitated the English, who were clearly keeping a close eye on the French side and shocked by the recent developments. One of the possible results of such British administrative responses to the French advancement was the 1905 Partition of Bengal. In the meantime, however, British activities on the other side of the territory deserve some discussion, i.e. British interaction and involvement in Tibet and its strategic effort to thwart Russian threat.

The concern of the North: Tibet and the Russian threat: 1895-1904

While the British and the French were unleashing their railway race and territorial

117 Ibid., 5-6. 118 Ibid., 10.

80 competition in the east of the region, the British were also facing another mounting threat on the north: the Russian attempt to establish Tibet as a protectorate. Although the “Great

Game” had most often been associated with the geopolitics in Iran and Central Asia, the

Russians had been plotting for some time to extend the “Great Game” eastward to the

Himalayas.119 Meanwhile in Europe, Russia had made an alliance with France in the early 1890s to combat the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. In addition to warding off the rising German Empire, the Franco-Russian alliance was also used to combat British power, especially in the East. This alliance was maintained throughout World War I until the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917.

The Franco-Russian alliance saw a mutual strategic interest in stopping British advancement into Southwest China. If the Russians were able to establish their control

(or at least spheres of influence) in Tibet, and the French in Yunnan, then it would mean that the French-controlled and the Russian-controlled territories in Asia would be able to connect in the river valley mountain areas bordering Tibet in northwestern Yunnan. Such a territorial connection would effectively end the half-century old British plan to advance into Southwest China, which would also mean a Russo-French monopoly over the entire inland Chinese market, barring only a few American ships upstream on the Yangtze

119 For a recent, more critical assessment of the historiography of the “Great Game,” see Benjamin D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 34-60.

81 River.

In December 1895, soon after the alliance was made, Russia and France joined hands and established the Russo-Chinese Bank in St. Petersburg and Paris in order to fund their imperial activities in the Far East. In addition to Russian and French capital, the establishment of the Bank also attracted funds from the Qing court.120 The Qing had just recently lost a humiliating war to Japan in 1894-95 and signed the devastating Treaty of

Shimonoseki, conceding both territorial sovereignty and huge sums of financial compensation to the Japanese. Having already suffered from decades of war and financial drain and under the pressure of a huge asking price from the Japanese, the Qing court was desperately in need of new sources of moneylenders, in order to avoid its over-reliance on British banks. Therefore the Qing court agreed to contribute to the establishment of the Russo-Chinese Bank, and in a few years opened up branches of the bank in Shanghai,

Hankou (Hankow), Tianjin (Tientsin), Harbin, and Changchun.

1895 was also a crucial year in the history of the Tibetans. It was the year that the thirteenth Dalai Lama, Tupten Gyatso, reached maturity and obtained real political power.

One account of the time claimed that the thirteenth Dalai Lama was the first Dalai Lama to reach maturity in a century and a half amidst various political interferences from the

120 Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽, Qing shigao 清史稿 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), Vol.16, 4508-4509.

82 Qing, so the Tibetan political elites all supported the establishment of the thirteenth Dalai

Lama as a political figure representing Tibetan interests.121 1895 was also the year, as mentioned above, of the Qing defeat to the Japanese. It was a huge devastation to Qing political self-esteem, and a huge boost for Tibetan political confidence. Because of these two factors, the year 1895 has been associated with the “first signs of Tibetan nationalism,” and the Bka’shag government of Tibet considered itself a player in the international game of geopolitics, rather than only a subject of the Qing Empire.122

Both the Russians and the Tibetans used the Pan-Mongol connection of Tibetan

Buddhism as a convenient discursive device to forge new political relationships. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia occupied vast areas of Central Asia and parts of southern Siberia populated by the Mongols, who were practitioners of Tibetan

Buddhism and acknowledged the spiritual authority of Lhasa. In the 1890s, a number of

Buriat and Kalmyck Buddhist monks entered Tibet from Russian territories as pilgrims and students, and the young Dalai Lama cautiously saw this connection as a potential opportunity to establish an alternative political patron apart from the Qing.

121 Louis Richard, L. Richard’s Comprehensive Geography of the Chinese Empire and Dependencies 中國 坤輿詳誌. Translated and enlarged by M. Kennelly (Shanghai: T’usewei Press, 1908), 548.

122 Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 39.

83 The most prominent figure in the Russo-Tibet relation of this period was Dorjiev, a

Buriat monk from Russian Central Asia and a proponent of Pan-Mongolism. By about

1898, Dorjiev had already established himself as the most knowledgeable adviser of the

Dalai Lama on European affairs.123 In 1900, Dorjiev met with Tsar Nicholas II and negotiated with him over the situation in Tibet. After Dorjiev returned to Tibet from

Russia, the thirteenth Dalai Lama was very optimistic about this new political patronage and claimed that Tibet had found a new patron that was stronger and more reliable than the Qing.124 While the new Russo-Tibetan relationship developed, a new literature began to grow in both Tibetan and Russian laungauges that portrays the Russian imperial family in the messianic Tibetan imagery of Shambhala.125

The British had long been keeping an eye on Tibet, regarding it as a crucial buffer zone for British India. British authorities in Calcutta had been training and sending intelligence agents into Tibet for decades. The most prominent of them was Sarat

Chandra Das, a Bengali Hindu from Chittagong who studied in Calcutta and then established himself as an expert of the Tibetan language in Darjeeling. Starting in the

1870s, he worked for the British as an intelligence agent and made several trips to Lhasa

123 Ibid., 39-40. 124 John Snelling, Buddhism in Russia: The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev, Lhasa’s Emissary to the Tsar (Rockport, MA: Element, 1993), 74. 125 Tuttle, 40; Alexander Andreyev, “Russian Buddhists in Tibet, from the End of the Nineteenth Century– 1930,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 11:3 (2001), 349–362.

84 and Central Tibet throughout the 1880s.126 Later in his life he retired to Darjeeling and spent the rest of his life working on an enormous Tibetan-English dictionary and a comprehensive grammar of the Tibetan language.

With their extensive information gathering networks at work, the British were acutely aware of the rising Russian influence in Tibet. In October 1902, after receiving reports from the Mobilisation and Intelligence Department, Lord Roberts, the

Commander-in-Chief in British India, made a remark on the situation and noted,

Russia’s predominance in Tibet would not be a direct military danger to India, but it would be a very serious advantage. … I consider it out of the question Russia being permitted to obtain a footing in Tibet; we have had, and shall still have, quite enough trouble owing to Russia being so near us on the N.W. frontier of India – that we cannot avoid; but we can, and ought to, prevent her getting a position which would inevitably cause unrest all along the N.E. frontier.127

Much of the historiography on British relations with Tibet has focused on the issue of tea trade, yet at the time it was clear to the Council of India and to the Viceroy Lord Curzon himself that the trade in Tibet “was not worth the very big candle.”128 The reason of

126 Sarat Chandra Das, Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (London: John Murray, 1902), v-ix. 127 Mobilisation and Intelligence Department, WO to FO, 1 Oct 1902. Affairs of Tibet, Volume 1, 1902-1903. FO 17 1745. Public Records Office, The National Archives, London. 128 “Minute by Sir D. Fitzpatrick, 20 April 1903 on Tel.,” Political and Secret Letters and Enclosures Received from India, Vol.152, No. 517. Political and Secret Department Records, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London, IOR/L/PS/7/152: 1903.

85 British interest in Tibet was strategic: It did not want Tibet to fall into the protection of

Russian hands. In order to fulfill this goal, in 1903-04 the authorities of British India launched the Younghusband Mission, a military expedition into Lhasa which ended in a treaty named the “Convention Between Great Britain and Thibet,” signed between the

British and the Bka’shag government without Qing involvement. The treaty guaranteed exclusive rights in Tibet for the British among all “Foreign Powers,” prohibiting further

Russian encroachment at least on a legal premise.129

In the meantime, the faltering Qing court was also perceptive of the problem and threat in the Southwest, and responded with new institutional arrangements in the imperial bureaucracy. In addition to the long-established position of zhuzang banshi dachen (“Grand Minister Resident in Tibet to Handle Affairs”) in Tibet, in 1906, the court institutionalized the new position of chuan-dian bianwu dachen (“Frontier

Commissioner for Sichuan and Yunnan”) as a response to the rising uncertainty in the southwestern frontier.130 As its name indicates, this position was created to handle various affairs of Sichuan and Yunnan, and it was likely that the court considered

Sichuan to be a crucial part of the whole frontier situation.131 However, this institution

129 Alastair Lamb, British India and Tibet, 1766-1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 249.

130 Tuttle, 46; Qian Shifu 錢實甫, ed., Qing dai zhiguan nianbiao 清代職官年表 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), Vol.4, 3104. 131 It was not clear, however, whether the expression of “chuan-dian” (abbreviations of Sichuan and Yunnan) was a customary usage, or was it a special phrase coined in this period for this specific purpose.

86 did not last very long before the Qing fell in 1911, so it was not able to exert any substantial influence over the situation of the frontier regions. Yet it nonetheless represented a Qing effort, however late it might have been, to try to rescue the situation and to join the muddled mess of territorial contestation in this area.

Territorial contestation and the 1905 Partition of Bengal

The Partition of Bengal in 1905 has long been considered a significant watershed moment in the history of Indian nationalism. It was the direct cause of the Swadeshi

Movement, the first major mass-mobilized political unrest in the history of Indian nationalism. Given its monumental status in historical memory, the 1905 Partition has occupied a prominent place in modern South Asian historiography. Throughout the twentieth century, the 1905 Partition has largely been portrayed, mostly by nationalist historians of India, as evidence of the British political mechanism of “divide and rule.”132

This narrative claims that the Partition was a British conspiracy to divide up the people of

Bengal along lines of religious differences at a time of rising nationalist sentiment. Until recent years, this ideological interpretation remained the standard, predominant narrative

The one thing that is certain is that the name indicates an explicit attention of the court to consider Sichuan and Yunnan together in the frontier matters of the Southwest. 132 For example, Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, Sucheta Mahajan, and K.N. Panikkar, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), 124-125; Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India (New Delhi: Oriental BlackSwan, 2009), 248-249.

87 of the 1905 Partition of Bengal in modern South Asian historiography.

More recently, however, this ideological narrative has been seriously challenged by historians who have been looking at the 1905 Partition from a perspective of spatial history and political economy. Scholars such as David Ludden and Iftekhar Iqbal have argued lately that the British decision to partition Bengal in 1905 was largely based on administrative rather than ideological concerns, for the purpose of a more spatially balanced distribution of resources in the east, in order to develop the eastern region with

Dacca as its envisioned center.133 This new emerging narrative specifically invokes the

“imperial gaze east of Kolkata” as a reason for Lord Curzon’s decision to reconfigure spatial arrangements in Bengal and Assam, and highlights trade as a key factor in the consideration of the eastward advancement.134

Building upon this new narrative, a history of the British pursuit of the Northeast corridor in the second half of the nineteenth century locates the 1905 Partition of Bengal in a longer temporal framework. If this emerging narrative is considered in the broader global context of the late nineteenth century, the Partition of Bengal in 1905 can be seen

133 David Ludden, “Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam,” Modern Asian Studies, 46:3 (2012), 483-525; Iftekhar Iqbal, “The Space between Nation and Empire: The Making and Unmaking of Eastern Bengal and Assam Province, 1905–1911,” Journal of Asian Studies, 74:1 (2015), 69-84. 134 Iqbal, 71-73.

88 as a logical consequence of the longer history of British eastward advancement for

Chinese market, and more specifically, of the heightening territorial agitation in this highland frontier area since the 1880s. Imperial competition with the French had been increasingly taking the form of territorial contestation in the closing decades of the century, and a mounting pressure from the Indochina-Yunnan railway, the construction of which started in 1904, further consolidated British determination to make territorial reconfigurations to boost the efficacy of frontier administration.

When this new narrative is put in such a context of imperial rivalry and territorial contestation, it also becomes clear that the 1905 Partition of Bengal was but only one in a series of actions that the British took, throughout several decades, to consolidate their control over the borderland areas of the Northeast and Upper Burma. The desire and consideration for the China market had always been a crucial factor, first as a discussion point among the commercial circles, and then as a point of contestation in global imperial rivalries. The pressure from the French and the Russians urged the British to take the initiative to protect their potential interest toward Southwest China. The 1905 Partition was therefore a product of imperial economic concerns as well as a result of imperial re-imagination and re-mapping of Asia. To run the risk of overstating the argument or oversimplifying the situation, it might be possible to say, without too much exaggeration, that the heavily populated demography of Sichuan was an important cause of the 1905

89 Partition of Bengal.

Conclusion

The decades around the turn of the century witnessed a new phase of heightened imperial contestation over the areas of the Northeast corridor. Both the British and the

French fully acknowledged the crucial strategic importance of the area for access to the large market in Southwest China. Starting in the 1880s, imperial rivalry in this area took the form of territorial contestation, most notably the French consolidation of Indochina and the British annexation of Upper Burma. In the 1890s, the “railway race” received a rejuvenation among both the British and the French, and both launched serious railway projects, in Assam and Tonkin respectively. It was also the first time that the British made a conscious plan for a possible military conquest into Yunnan. In the meantime, also featured in the picture was Tibet, who welcomed the Russians to exert influence over the area. With the Franco-Russian alliance in place, the British took preemptive measures to establish their control in Tibet in order to prevent a potential Russia-French territorial connection in the area. After the French started the construction of the Indochina-Yunnan

Railway in 1904, Lord Curzon announced the plan for the creation of the new province of

East Bengal and Assam, culminating decades of territorial consideration in a bold administrative move, which brought about unexpected political consequences.

90

The territorial contestation between the 1880s and the 1900s was the high point in the decades-long history of the British pursuit of and imperial rivalry over the area. Such a pursuit was soon disturbed by the turmoil of Swadeshi agitations and the upcoming

Great War, after which British interest in the region became less urgent given the changing situations in British India and in China. It was not until the early 1940s that the corridor again came under the spotlight and turned out to be a crucial focal point of global geopolitics in the war against Japanese aggression, but that is a story beyond the scope of the current thesis.

91 Conclusion

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British in India displayed a long-held eastward aspiration toward the Northeast corridor, trying to connect

British India and Burma with Southwest China, especially Yunnan. Such an attempt was motivated by economic concerns back home in the British Isles, where the rise of the

Industrial Revolution had created a fast-growing supply of manufactured products. The vast, populous areas of Southwest China provided a perfect outgoing market for these

British machine-produced goods. In an age of geographical audacity, the British hoped that by connecting India and Southwest China through Assam, Upper Burma, and

Yunnan, they could incorporate the two colossal areas into one gigantic commercial empire of the East. Based on such optimistic and visionary premises, the British embarked on a series of projects of expedition and information gathering throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, unveiling the hitherto “unknown” (unknown to the

British and other major polities) area of the Northeast corridor.

Yet such a grand scheme of imperial design was not monopolized by the British alone. The French, who were consolidating their control over Indochina in the late nineteenth century, also eyed this area as a potential game changer of global imperial domination. Throughout several decades, the British were acutely aware of French

92 ambitions and activities, and vice versa. The heightened contestation between the two imperial powers finally took the form of heated territorialization of this area from the

1880s to the early 1900s, right before the outbreak of the Great War.

Throughout the twentieth century into the twenty-first, the area of the Northeast corridor remained a fuzzy one that has been heavily contested in the processes of war, nation-making, decolonization, and economic development. The world finally awoke to the geographical importance of this corridor during World War II, when Japan occupied the entire Pacific coast from Sakhalin to Singapore, and the Kuomintang government of

Republican China was pushed to the corners of Southwest China. This crucial corridor between Burma and Yunnan, hence known to the world as the “Burma Road,” became the indispensible lifeline of the Allied forces on the Eastern front. In 1962, this area again became the focal point of a military encounter, this time between the postcolonial giants of India and China. One important reason of this war was the colonial legacies of territorial configuration in this area. Since then, this geographical area has receded further and further away from public attention. In recent decades, whenever this area featured in the news, it is mostly either about the independent movements in Nagaland or the Kachin state, or about the influx of Chinese capital in Myanmar.135 An area once crucial to

135 A recent example of this latter discussion is Thant Myint-U, Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

93 global imperial design has gradually faded into oblivion in an era of nation-states and regionalization.

As I have previously mentioned, the main purpose of this thesis is twofold: First, to establish the narrative of British aspiration of the Northeast corridor during the colonial era; second, to establish the Northeast corridor as one unit of historical analysis in South

Asian and global histories. A study of the history of the Northeast corridor can direct our attention further away from the “center,” and urge us to reconsider, historically, the many potentials and possibilities of “British India” and the whole of British colonial enterprise, which were conditioned by various historical circumstances and contingencies. Situating the Northeast corridor in South Asian and global histories would bring a revealing geographical angle into this reconsideration, in order to shed light on things and issues hitherto unseen or unnoticed.

The can’s and cannot’s of this thesis: Some misgivings and a note for future work

Establishing the Northeast corridor as a singular unit of historical analysis can have many important historiographical ramifications. It would bring together the study of

South Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Inner Asian histories, and serve as a potential corrective to the compartmentalization of knowledge in the current academic

94 institutional arrangements. Such a unit of historical analysis would be particularly useful in the study of not only imperial political economy, but also the study of the various hill peoples and the study of Christian missionary activities during the colonial era.

Through careful archival research, mostly of British colonial documents, this thesis is able to establish a narrative of British aspiration of eastward advancement from India into

Southwest China in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This thesis reveals that the area of the Northeast corridor, far from an area of no significance, was central to a grand scheme of imperial planning and geographical imagination. In addition, the narrative of British eastward advancement also suggests that the very concept of “British

India” needs to be considered in a broader, global framework of imperial expansion, closely related to British commercial interests back home and geographical ambitions elsewhere.

Nevertheless, this thesis is far from a perfect piece of historical work. Due to various constraints of time and resources as a master’s level student, I have been unable to address a few key historical issues and problems in this thesis. Therefore it is important for me to highlight these issues and problems for the readers and for future research, since these issues are left under-examined not because they are unimportant but only because time and resource did not permit me to do full justice to them.

95

The first problem is that the very concept of “the British,” when it refers to the politically powerful, needs to be further unpacked and substantiated. There were obviously many players of different interests in the political arena who could broadly fall under the umbrella term of “the British”: the Parliament, India Office, Foreign Office,

Government of India, merchant groups, etc. I was able to at least identify the distinction between the politically powerful and the commercially influential, especially the chambers of commerce in Britain which had tremendous lobbying power. A more fully developed research would certainly need to pay more attention to the different political players operating under the name of “the British.” It is a very important task to distinguish the different players and to examine the relationship among themselves in the decision-making processes. For this, a much more in-depth knowledge of the political institutions of the British Empire is needed, as well as a much more careful and extensive mining of various relevant sources. As the thesis currently stands, however, the lack of such information does not seem to hinder the establishment of the main narrative, although a more detailed picture of “the British” would certainly bring a necessary depth to the research.

The second problem is the total negligence of Christian missionary activities in this thesis. In the late nineteenth century, Christian missionaries carried out extensive

96 evangelizing activities in British Assam, Upper Burma, and western Yunnan, bringing

Christianity as well as the Roman script to the hill peoples of this area. No colonial history of the Indian Northeast would be complete without a serious discussion of the

Christian missionary activities in the late 1800s. Christianity was also crucial to the histories of the Kachin areas and of certain parts of western Yunnan. The missionaries certainly understood this area across many mountains and polities as related and connected, and Christian institutions across borders such as the Lisu Church have survived until this day.136 But I have decided to leave this topic out of my current thesis, primarily because of time constraint. The relationship between Christian missionary activities and colonialism is a very complicated one that has many players, with various degrees of connection with the colonial authority. Recent works on colonialism and

Christianity, such as the work of Elizabeth Foster on French Senegal, and the ongoing work of Mou Banerjee on Christian missionaries in India, have highlighted the very importance and complexity of this relationship.137 Any future improvement or expansion of the current research would absolutely need to take into serious consideration the history of Christian missionary activities in this region.

136 For an example of a Christian missionary discussion of the Kachin (or Jingpo/Jingpho/Jingpaw/Singpho) people across borders, see Rev. Ola Hanson, The Kachins: Their Customs and Traditions (Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press, 1913). 137 Elizabeth A. Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880– 1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

97 The third problem is the under-use of non-Western language sources in my thesis research, and a consequent lack of enough attention given to indigenous voices. Given the very nature of this project as a political history of imperial policy, it is almost inevitable that I have mostly relied on the colonial archive and the English and Chinese language sources. The various hill peoples of this area, such as the Kachins, the Lisus, the

Mizos, and the Nagas, had no written language of their own until around the 1890s.

However, in order to explore the history of this area more fully, one would have to pay more attention to the indigenous voices and perspectives. As Edmund Leach and James C.

Scott have masterfully revealed, the hill peoples of the Indian Northeast, Upper Burma, and western Yunnan are themselves related and connected by language, culture, and religious lives and should not be considered separated, so a connected vision from the indigenous perspective is necessary for any serious study of these peoples.138 In order to achieve this goal, one needs to probe new frontiers of sources by acquiring new linguistic skills and delving into unconventionally collected archives. Personally I am looking forward to working with these languages and sources in the future.

A final problem is about the argument of the relationship between the British plan of eastward advancement and the 1905 Partition of Bengal. Most crucial to this argument,

138 Edmund R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structures (London: The Athlone Press, 1959); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

98 the Curzon papers housed at the British Library were humongous in volume, and the funding I possessed at the time could not allow me to explore the documents fully. Given the constraints in resources, I decided to go for the other sources that would help me lay out the main structure and framework of the thesis, yet it is indeed inexcusable that I have not provided sufficient corroborative primary sources to substantiate and support the anticipatory argument. Any future revisions or expansions would have to explore this connection more fully with investigation of primary sources.

Much work remains to be done in the study of this geographical area. As a Chinese idiom says, “throwing out the clay brick in order to usher in the jade” (paozhuan yinyu). I hope that the clay brick of my thesis can serve as a modest usher to introduce future works of jade on the history of this under-studied yet important geographical area.

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107 Acknowledgements

This MA thesis has taken me across three years and six countries. Throughout these journeys, I have received generous help and support from many teachers, colleagues, friends, and family members, to whom I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

My greatest intellectual debt is to my primary thesis advisor, Professor Ayesha Jalal, who has shaped me deeply both as a historian and as a person with her noble commitment to high scholarly standards and her unstinting care and support for her students. I would also like to thank my other advisor, Professor Kris Manjapra, who was especially crucial to my intellectual growth in the first year of my MA program. A special word of thanks is for Professor Brian Hatcher, the person who ushered me into the study of South Asia, with whom I proudly share a pre-history at Illinois Wesleyan before we reunited at Tufts.

Professor Sugata Bose introduced me to the graduate level studies of modern South Asian history, and generously helped me outside of classroom settings. Professor Sunil Amrith has been a major inspiration in my intellectual developments in recent years, and has been extremely generous and encouraging with my academic pursuit. In the past few years, I have also been tremendously influenced by Professor Charlie Hallisey, whose brilliance and wisdom have not only inspired me intellectually but also helped me in the helpless dark nights of real life. In the Boston area, I am blessed to have the support of

108 Professor Steve Marrone, Professor Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Professor Sunil Sharma.

Professor James Russell’s camaraderie has made life in the Kaliyuga less miserable than it is. Back in Bloomington, IL, I am always fortunate to have the love and care from my former teachers and advisors, Professor Mike Young, Professor Tom Lutze, Professor

Paul Bushnell, and Reenie Bradley.

I am also grateful for the company of my dear colleagues and friends, who have sustained me with intellectual enrichment as well as moral support in everyday life. I remember the many memorable dinners and conversations in Boston, New York, London,

Beijing, Shanghai, Kolkata, and Singapore throughout the past few years. I would like to thank, in alphabetical order, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla, Mou Banerjee, Charlie Carstens,

Hardeep Dhillon, Dong Yuting, Andre Elias, Hua Yang, Isa Lacuna, Joseph Ledford, Lim

Hongjie, Liu Hong, Muyessar Wapadar, Shayan Rajani, Ren Qiran, Nick Scott, Neelum

Sohail, Sun Shangliao, Tian Muye, Lik Hang Tsui, Wang Hongsu, Wang Xingyi, Yang

Tianxiao, Yao Ying, Yin Hang, Yin Xiaotian, Ying Lei, Zhang Yichi, Zhao Tianshu,

Zhou Xiaochi, Zhu Taole, Zhuang Shuting, and Zou Songxun. Of course, this is only a partial list. I am grateful to all whose company has illuminated my life and I do look forward to more dinners, drinks, and conversations in the many more years to come.

During the research and writing process of this thesis, I have benefited hugely from

109 the help of various institutions and their staff members. I would like to thank Tufts

University, especially the Department of History and the Tisch Library. A special thanks to Annette Lazzara, who has been a lifesaver for so many of us in so many occasions. My research has also been enriched by the archival experience in the Widener Library,

Harvard-Yenching Library, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the British Library, the National Archives at Kew Gardens, the Centre of South Asian Studies library at the

University of Cambridge, the State Archives of West Bengal, the National University of

Singapore libraries, and the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. The Kolkata Centre of

American Institute of Indian Studies hosted me for a full academic year, and I would like to thank all the teachers and staff for their instruction, guidance, and fun-loving nature.

The Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore provided me with a generous summer fellowship, which enabled me to conduct the final write-up of the thesis. Also my gratitude to Rev. R. D. Mawia Ralte at the Bishop’s College, Kolkata, whose passion about the Mizo people inspired my early interest in this specific geographical area.

A number of my teachers and friends passed away during the past few years. I would like to remember them, who taught and cared for me in various stages of my life: Ms.

Zhang Wenying (1967-2012), Professor Sir Christopher A. Bayly (1946-2015), Professor

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966-2015), Professor M. Shahab Ahmed (1966-2015),

110 Rev. Dr. Chester E. Sheldon (1918-2015), and Helen McNicol Sheldon (1919-2015). My paternal grandmother passed away in the last month of my writing. I would like to remember all of them.

I would like to thank everyone whose labor has made my privilege of leisure possible.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents. I simply would not be who I am without their love. It goes beyond words. I also thank my extended family for their understanding and support.

Needless to say, all errors are mine.

REN Chao

Dongying, China

8/17/2016

Hong Kong, China

1/10/2017

111