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Fit for a King? The Significance of a Gift Exchange between the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and King George V1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2014

EMMA MARTIN
EMMA MARTIN*
Affiliation:
National Museums Liverpool, emma.martin@liverpool museums.org.uk
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Abstract

Britain's tentatively built diplomatic ties with Tibet received a jolt on 28 June 1913 when four Tibetan boys and their chaperone Kusho Lungshar went to meet George V, King of England and Emperor of India at Buckingham Palace. Lungshar and the boys brought with them an extensive range of gifts and letters from the thirteenth Dalai Lama, inadvertently giving the British government a diplomatic headache: not only could this potentially have been interpreted as a breach of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, but what should be given in return? By bringing together recently identified objects and archives now located in the British Museum, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this paper will focus on the products of this encounter: the gifts. They will be considered here as statements of independence, signifiers of ‘Tibetanness’ and as examples of the developing protocols constructed by Britain in response to its encounter with Tibet.2

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 71 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

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Footnotes

1

This article is a much revised version of a paper first presented at the Twelfth Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada. August, 2010.

References

References

IOR, British Library, Political and Secret (External) Files and Collections NAI, Foreign Department General Files and Secret Internal Files

British Museum

The Laden La Family (UK)

The Royal Collection

Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)

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Bell, C. A., “List of Curios”, unpublished catalogue, (Liverpool: National Museums Liverpool, c.1927).Google Scholar
Bell, C. A., The Religion of Tibet, (London, [1931] 1992).Google Scholar
Bell, C. A., Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth, (London, [1946]1987).Google Scholar
Berger, P., Empire of Emptiness, (Honolulu, 2003).Google Scholar
Brauen, M. (ed.), The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History, (Chicago, 2005).Google Scholar
Bushell, S. W., “The early history of Tibet. From Chinese sources”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society XII (1880), pp. 435–541.Google Scholar
Charry, B. and Shahani, G., Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture, (Surrey, 2009).Google Scholar
Cohn, B. S., Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, (New Jersey, 1996).Google Scholar
Das, S. C., Journal to Lhasa and Central Tibet, (London, 1904).Google Scholar
Dewey, C., Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service, (London and Rio Grande, 1993).Google Scholar
Eaton, N. “Between mimesis and alterity: Art, gift, and diplomacy in colonial India, 1770–1800”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XLVI, (1993), pp. 816–844.Google Scholar
Gould, B. J., The Jewel in the Lotus, (London, 1957).Google Scholar
Heller, A., “Archaeological artefacts from the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia”, Orientations XXXIV (2003), p. 4.Google Scholar
Kapstein, M. T., “The seventh Dalai Lama Kalsang Gyatso”, in The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History, (ed.) Brauen, M. (Chicago, 2005), pp. 103–115.Google Scholar
Kawaguchi, E., Three Years in Tibet, (Bangkok, [1909] 2005).Google Scholar
Lamb, A., Tibet, China & India 1914–1950, (Hertfordbury, 1989).Google Scholar
Lamb, A., “Tom Browns from Central Asia” in The History of Tibet, (London, 2003), pp. 325–328.Google Scholar
LaRocca, D., Warriors of the Himalaya: Rediscovering the Arms and Armour of Tibet (New York, 2006).Google Scholar
Michael, B. A., “When soldiers and statesmen meet: ‘Ethnographic moments’ on the frontiers of empire, 1800–1815” in Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India, (ed.) Stewart, G. (New Delhi, 2003), pp. 80–94.Google Scholar
Rahul, R., The Dalai Lama: The Institution, (New Delhi, 1995).Google Scholar
Ranger, T., “The invention of tradition in colonial Africa” in The Invention of Tradition, (eds) Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 211–262.Google Scholar
Rhodes, N. and Rhodes, D., A Man of the Frontier: S.W. Laden La, (Kolkata, 2006).Google Scholar
Richardson, H., High Peaks, Pure Earth (London, 1998), pp. 420–430.Google Scholar
Sperling, E., “Early Ming Policy Towards Tibet: An Examination of the Proposition that the Early Ming Emperors Adopted a ‘Divide and Rule’ Policy Towards Tibet” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1983).Google Scholar
Shakabpa, W. D., Tibet: A Political History, (New York, 1967).Google Scholar
Shakya, T., “Making of the great game players. Tibetan students in Britain between 1913 and 1917”, Tibetan Review, January, (1986).Google Scholar
Toada, T., The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, (Tokyo, 1965).Google Scholar
Williamson, M. D., Memoirs of a Political Officer's Wife in Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan, (London, 1987).Google Scholar
Yang, J., Bartholomew, T. et al., Precious Deposits: Historical Relics of Tibet, China Volume Five, (Beijing, 2000).Google Scholar
Yumiko, I., “On the dissemination of the belief in the Dalai Lama as a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara” in The History of Tibet: The Medieval Period: c.850–1895, (ed.) McKay, Alex (London, 2003), pp. 538–554.Google Scholar