Political Missions to Bootan (1865)

Political Missions to Bootan, published in 1865 by the India Office in London under the editorship of Sir Clements R. Markham, is one of the most important documentary compilations for the study of early Bhutanese history and Anglo-Bhutanese relations. The volume brings together the narratives and official reports of six British diplomatic missions to Bhutan spanning nearly a century, from George Bogle's pioneering journey in 1774 through Ashley Eden's ill-fated mission in 1864, which directly precipitated the Anglo-Bhutanese War of 1864–65 and the subsequent Treaty of Sinchula. The compilation was produced at the direction of the Secretary of State for India to provide a comprehensive background to the political crisis that had erupted between British India and Bhutan.^[1]

The volume remains an invaluable primary source for historians of Bhutan, Tibet, and the broader Himalayan region. It provides first-hand European accounts of Bhutanese society, governance, religion, geography, and material culture at a time when Bhutan was largely unknown to the outside world. The observations recorded by these envoys — however filtered through the cultural assumptions and political interests of the British East India Company and later the Government of India — constitute the earliest systematic Western descriptions of the Bhutanese state and its people. Modern scholars, including Michael Aris, Karma Phuntsho, and Thierry Mathou, have drawn extensively on these accounts in their own studies of Bhutanese history.

Sir Clements Markham (1830–1916), the editor, was a geographer, explorer, and historian who served in the India Office and later became president of the Royal Geographical Society. His editorial contributions include a substantial introduction providing historical and geographical context, annotations to the individual mission narratives, and appendices containing correspondence and official documents related to the Anglo-Bhutanese relationship. Markham's editorial framework, while reflecting the imperial perspective of its era, provides useful contextualisation of the individual accounts and their place within the broader history of British expansion in the Himalayan borderlands.^[2]

Contents and Structure

The volume is organised chronologically, presenting each mission's narrative as a distinct section with its own introduction and notes. The principal accounts included are:

George Bogle (1774): The narrative of Bogle's mission to Bhutan and Tibet, undertaken at the direction of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, represents the first recorded British diplomatic engagement with Bhutan. Bogle passed through Bhutan en route to the court of the Panchen Lama in Tashilhunpo, Tibet, and his account describes the Bhutanese landscape, the system of governance under the Desi (secular ruler) and the Zhabdrung incarnation, the dzong architecture, monastic life, and the trade routes linking Bengal with Tibet through Bhutan. Bogle's observations are characterised by a relatively sympathetic and curious tone, reflecting the early phase of British engagement when commercial rather than territorial interests predominated.

Alexander Hamilton (1776, 1777): Hamilton's two brief missions, also under Hastings's authority, are less detailed than Bogle's but provide supplementary observations on Bhutanese trade, border relations, and political conditions. These missions were part of Hastings's broader strategy of establishing commercial and diplomatic links with the Himalayan states and through them with Tibet and China.

Samuel Turner (1783): Turner's mission to Bhutan and Tibet, like Bogle's, was directed primarily at Tibet but produced significant observations on Bhutan. Turner's account is notable for its detailed descriptions of Bhutanese festivals, religious ceremonies, and the physical appearance of towns and fortresses. His narrative also provides information on the political dynamics within Bhutan, including rivalries between regional penlops and the periodic instability of the central government.

Later Missions and the Road to War

William Griffith (1837–38): Griffith, a surgeon and naturalist attached to the Bengal Medical Service, accompanied a mission to Bhutan that marked a shift in the character of British engagement. By the 1830s, the East India Company's territorial expansion had brought British-controlled territories into direct contact with Bhutan's southern frontier, and border disputes — particularly over the Assam and Bengal Duars (lowland districts) — were becoming increasingly contentious. Griffith's account is rich in botanical and natural history observations but also documents the growing friction between British administrators and Bhutanese authorities over sovereignty and revenue in the Duars.

Robert Pemberton (1838–39): Pemberton's mission, undertaken in the context of escalating border tensions, produced a detailed report on the Bhutanese government's administration of the Duars, the treatment of the lowland populations, and the strategic implications of the border situation for British India. Pemberton's account is more overtly political and strategic than earlier narratives, reflecting the shift from commercial diplomacy to territorial contestation that characterised Anglo-Bhutanese relations in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ashley Eden (1864): The Eden mission is the most dramatic and consequential of the accounts collected in the volume. Eden, the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, was dispatched to Punakha with the aim of negotiating a settlement of the Duars dispute and establishing a formal treaty relationship. The mission was a diplomatic disaster: Eden was subjected to humiliating treatment by the Bhutanese court, his hair was reportedly pulled and his face rubbed with wet dough, and he was compelled to sign a treaty under duress that he subsequently repudiated. Eden's account, written in a tone of outrage and injured dignity, provided the British government with the justification for military action. The Anglo-Bhutanese War of 1864–65 followed, resulting in Bhutan's loss of the Duars and the imposition of the Treaty of Sinchula (1865), which defined the Anglo-Bhutanese boundary and established a British subsidy to the Bhutanese government.^[3]

Historical Significance

The significance of Political Missions to Bootan for Bhutanese historiography is difficult to overstate. Prior to the twentieth century, Bhutan produced very few written sources accessible to non-Dzongkha-reading scholars, and the country's traditional historical literature — primarily religious chronicles composed within monastic institutions — did not address the secular political and diplomatic events that the British accounts document in considerable detail. The Markham compilation therefore provides a unique window into Bhutanese political life during a critical period of the country's history.

The accounts are particularly valuable for their descriptions of the dual system of governance (chhoe-sid) established by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal in the seventeenth century, the functioning of the dzong system, the role of the penlops as regional governors, and the periodic instability caused by succession disputes and regional rivalries. They also provide the earliest systematic descriptions of Bhutanese material culture, dress, cuisine, religious practices, and social organisation as observed by outsiders.

However, the accounts must be read with critical awareness of their limitations. The British envoys viewed Bhutan through the lens of imperial interests and cultural assumptions that shaped their observations in ways both obvious and subtle. Their characterisations of Bhutanese governance as "semi-barbarous" or "despotic," their tendency to judge Bhutanese institutions against European standards, and their frequent failure to understand the religious and cultural contexts of the behaviours they observed all reflect the biases of their era. Modern scholars have noted that the British accounts often misunderstand the nature of Bhutanese political authority, particularly the relationship between religious and secular power that was central to the Bhutanese state's self-understanding.^[4]

Legacy and Accessibility

The original 1865 edition of Political Missions to Bootan was published in a limited run and quickly became a rare and sought-after volume. It was reprinted by Manjusri Publishing House in New Delhi in 1971 and has subsequently been made available through digital archives, including the Internet Archive and Google Books, making it freely accessible to researchers worldwide. The volume has also been translated into Dzongkha as part of efforts by the Centre for Bhutan Studies and other institutions to make historical materials on Bhutan available to Bhutanese readers.

The compilation has influenced virtually every major work of Bhutanese history published in English since the mid-twentieth century. Michael Aris's Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (1979), Karma Phuntsho's The History of Bhutan (2013), and numerous doctoral dissertations and journal articles draw extensively on the mission narratives collected by Markham. The volume is also referenced in studies of British imperial expansion in the Himalayas, the history of Tibet-Bhutan-India relations, and the development of Western geographical knowledge of the eastern Himalayan region.

For Bhutanese readers and the Bhutanese diaspora, Political Missions to Bootan holds a particular fascination as one of the earliest attempts by outsiders to describe and make sense of a country that remained largely hidden from the world until the second half of the twentieth century. The accounts, for all their colonial biases, preserve vivid details of a Bhutan that has since been transformed by modernisation, and they constitute an essential part of the documentary heritage of the Bhutanese nation.^[5]

References

Markham, Clements R., ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, and Political Missions to Bootan (London: India Office, 1865). Available at Internet Archive.
"Clements Markham," Wikipedia.
"Ashley Eden," Wikipedia.
Phuntsho, Karma, The History of Bhutan (Noida: Random House India, 2013).
Aris, Michael, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1979).

Contributed by Anonymous Contributor, Portland, Oregon