The ghosts of Changlimithang: a brief Anglo-Bhutanese negotiation during the British Expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904

The British Expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904 represented the last major military operation of the Great Game, the broad cultural confrontation between the British and the Russians that contested the geopolitical space of central and high Asia for almost the entire nineteenth century, up until the St. Petersburg entente of 1907. The role assumed by the then Tongsa Penlop, Ugyen Wangchuck, as a mediator between the British and Tibetans during the Expedition, was critical. Among the Bhutanese nobles, Ugyen Wangchuck had emerged victorious from the Battle of Changlimithang in 1885 and in 1907 he was crowned as the first king of Bhutan. In the period between the military victory and his accession to the throne, the power of Ugyen Wangchuck had to be consolidated definitively in a country that was simultaneously involved in the geopolitical space of the Raj, to which it was linked by the Treaty of Sinchula of 1865, and in the cultural sphere of Tibet, its most profound and ancient spiritual heritage. This paper reconstructs through British archival documents an attempt carried out by the Bhutanese with the British — in anticipation of Anglo-Tibetan negotiations — to try to resolve the last internal tensions of Bhutan. Although strongly downsized, some ancient rivalries, like underground rivers, continued to run across the balances of power and the international role of the small Himalayan country at the beginning of the twentieth century.