Peace in Tibet

On 13 December 1903, Colonel Francis Edward Younghusband, Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, British Commissioner for Tibet Frontier Matters, once more crossed over from Sikkim to Tibet, this time over the Jelap (Dzelap) La. True to his Edwardian heritage, his personal luggage alone filled 29 containers and included 67 shirts, camp suit, camp dinner suit, an assortment of coats and hats, a prodigious supply of underwear, an umbrella and a campaign bath. This is the story of the British invasion of Tibet, the negotiations with the Tibetan government and the eventual signing of a peace treaty on 7 September 1904, told through excerpts from official correspondence between the Commission and India and from diaries kept by Colonel Younghusband and Captain O'Connor. The transliteration of names, in the text and in the maps, follows the usage of the period.