In 1889, the British Raj dispatched young Captain Francis Younghusband to the Pamirs. Reports of Russian infiltration under Captain Bronislav Grombchevsky in the mountainous lands of what is now Tajikistan had rattled the British. As fate would have it, the two protagonists encountered each other in the Raksam Valley, near the mighty River Yarkand. Yet the meeting did not dissipate their mutual suspicion; the mistrust was deep, and the cauldron of Inner Asia had been alight with Anglo-Russian rivalry since the early 19th century.

Across rugged landscapes, Russia and Britain craftily played out a game of daring espionage and shadowy deception. Their intentions were clear: both empires sought to undercut their rival’s stealthy influence in the heart of Inner Asia. The rolling steppes and snow-capped peaks of the region became the stage for spycraft. This slippery tale is well known. What is perhaps a little less familiar is China’s role in the ménage à trois north of the Himalayas. Indeed, not two but three empires – Russian, British and Chinese – would play an outsized role in determining Tibet’s fate.

During the mid-19th century, Manchu rule in Beijing had become sclerotic. The British inflicted a further blow to Manchu pride in the Opium Wars. At the same time that China was being forced open from the East China Sea, officials in British India sought to open and expand trade with Tibet. China had loosely controlled Tibet by ensuring its security against regional rivals, such as Nepal and the Mongols.

In the latter half of the 19th century, China’s position in Tibet was whittled away – paving the way for Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905, to call for greater British Indian involvement in the Himalayan country. He saw Russia as the conniving intriguer in Eurasia. For Curzon, India’s border with Tibet was an acute vulnerability for the British Raj. In 1903, he assented to Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet to consolidate British interests in the region. The expedition, naturally, caused a huge furore in London and other European capitals. But, as the former Indian diplomat Dilip Sinha has shown, the unlikely beneficiary in this geopolitical drama was China. Exploiting the condemnation of British actions by the United States and other European powers, China proclaimed its overlordship of Tibet and called on Britain to withdraw from the region. Buckling under international pressure and domestic criticism, in 1906 London accepted Chinese ‘suzerainty’ in Tibet in exchange for retaining its commercial rights.

A year later, Britain also signed a convention with Russia recognising Chinese ‘suzerainty’ over Tibet. London and Moscow agreed not to interfere in Tibet’s internal affairs, while accepting Britain’s ‘special interest’ in the region – a euphemism for a British sphere of influence. After informally securing its interests in Mongolia, Russia was content to leave Tibet under Chinese ‘suzerainty’ and British influence. St Petersburg wanted to retrench its geopolitical position in Asia, especially after suffering an ignominious defeat by Japan in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The British were pleased: from their perspective, the Japanese had relieved a significant burden. A rising Asiatic power had tamed the Russian bear. As Ernest Satow, the British minister in Japan, noted, the defeat ‘seemed to knock on the head all Russian schemes of territorial acquisition’. The ensuing 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention effectively ended the British-Russian rivalry in Eurasia. During all this geopolitical merry-go-round, European handlooms were stitching the fabric of Tibet’s geopolitical destiny.

Meanwhile, the situation in Tibet itself was fragile. A blood-curdling repression of Khampas in southeastern Tibet was unleashed by the warlord Zhao Erfeng, the de facto Chinese warden (amban) of Tibet. In 1910, Zhao’s marauding minions invaded Lhasa. By 1912, as the Manchus’ position in China grew precarious, Tibetans reorganised to expel Chinese forces from their region, and the 13th Dalai Lama declared Tibet’s independence from China. In the quest to consolidate this newfound independence, Tibet reached out to Russia and Britain for help. The British in India once again worried that Tibet would become susceptible to Russian intrigues, and so, in order to avert a potential Russian intervention, the British convened a tripartite conference in Shimla from 1913 to 1914. The conference produced two agreements. One signed by Tibet and Britain and initialled by China about the autonomy of Outer Tibet, and another between Tibet and Britain on the India-Tibet border in Arunachal Pradesh.

Before any further developments could clear the political haze in Lhasa, the First World War broke out. By then, China had entered into a period of internecine civil strife. As a result, the Tibet issue became peripheral for all three powers; for roughly the next four decades, Tibet enjoyed de facto sovereignty as an independent kingdom.

After the Second World War, the script flipped. The Chinese Communist Party trounced its Kuomintang rivals in the civil war, declaring the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. While the CCP consolidated its control over China, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947. The partition channeled India’s geopolitical élan vital towards Pakistan, sapping its energy in other directions. While New Delhi looked westwards, the CCP’s forces invaded eastern Tibet in 1950.

By this time, Indian thinking on Tibet had evolved. Despite inheriting British India’s legal obligations, independent India was keen not to let tensions over Tibet obstruct the larger goal of Asian solidarity based on friendly India-China relations. Apart from making some perfunctory noise about China’s uninvited military foray into Tibet, India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, acquiesced to the fact that India lacked the military wherewithal to confront China openly. Over the next few years, Delhi voluntarily forfeited its extraterritorial rights and trading privileges in Tibet. Crucially, Nehru himself did not think that the Chinese, despite their actions in Tibet, had any grudges towards India, while the Soviet Union had supported the Chinese invasion.

Over the next few years, India’s accommodation of China would prove costly. Chinese repression in Tibet intensified as Beijing suppressed local Buddhist traditions, and mass atrocities became a new normal. Fearing for his life, the revered Tibetan leader – the Dalai Lama – sought refuge in India in 1959. Given the close affinity many Indians shared with Buddhism and Tibet, Nehru granted the Dalai Lama political asylum. Consequently, India-China relations grew frosty, and differing perceptions about the disputed Sino-India border further poisoned relations. In Tibet, the CCP accused India of interfering in its ‘domestic affairs’, while India raised alarm about China’s reckless assault on Tibetan autonomy. Meanwhile, as the historian Paul McGarr shows, Nehru also tacitly tolerated the CIA’s spying operations in Kalimpong and looked the other way as the CIA supported the resistance movement in Tibet – using Indian airspace for transit.

Then, in 1962, China invaded India. Addressing his country shortly after the invasion, Nehru called China ‘the greatest menace that has come to us since independence’. The reality of war harmed the cause of ‘non-alignment’ and left a bitter taste in the mouth. Indian illusions about constructing a fraternal ‘post-colonial’ Asian order with China were shattered. Nehru deftly embraced a more pragmatic approach to international affairs. In the end, American and British intelligence played a pivotal role in augmenting Indian security during and after the 1962 war.

After a brief golden period in India’s relations with the Anglophone powers, the overarching logic of the Cold War brought about a realignment. From 1971, the US feted China, which was valued for its role in balancing the Soviet Union, while India drifted into the Soviet orbit. Consequently, Tibet dropped down Washington’s priority list.

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama focused on nurturing Tibetan identity in India, building refugee communities across different Indian states. Today, around 70,000 Tibetans reside in India.

Since 1959, thousands of Tibetans have died as a result of severe Chinese repression in the Tibetan plateau. Countless monasteries, temples, and historical monuments have been plundered and ground to dust. There has also been an overwhelming influx of Chinese settlers into Tibet, and a state-aided policy of ‘Sinicisation’ is being implemented. The CCP and its military apparatus hold Lhasa in a vicious grip.

Now, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, it is too early to say whether the logic of the Asian balance of power is slowly turning in Tibet’s favour. Today, the contemporary major powers active in the region are treading a fine line. Amid the intensifying US-China rivalry, there had been a gradual shift in Washington’s approach on the Tibetan issue, as American presidents sought to shine a spotlight on Beijing’s human rights abuses. However, the US’ strategic focus has shifted starkly under the second Trump administration.

Given its significant power differential with China, India sticks mainly to its cautious stance of recognising Tibet as a part of China while providing political asylum to the Dalai Lama. China’s irredentism and assertive military posturing along the Chinese-Indian border have made matters worse. China’s rapid militarisation of the Tibetan plateau also impinges directly on India’s security interests. Beijing’s mining and dam-building activities in Tibet further threaten India’s ecology. The mighty Siang River originates in the Tibetan plateau and flows through India’s sensitive northeast region.

This year, the venerated Dalai Lama turned 90. His presence in India reflects the continuation of a centuries-old faith, and of an identity entangled with the region’s history. For India, the Tibet question is not just a geopolitical issue but also a matter of shared cultural affinities with its Himalayan neighbours. Over centuries, Himalayan Buddhism has remained alive in the mountainous states of north India, from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. Even today, millions across India revere the Dalai Lama. India’s stakes in Tibet are historic, cultural, and spring from a shared civilisational existence. Indeed, India’s warm relations with Bhutan present one expression of its special relationship with the Himalayas.

In a recent visit to Tibet in August 2025, Xi Jinping emphatically said that Tibet has ‘undergone earth-shattering changes’ under the CCP leadership that have attracted worldwide attention. Indeed. Why not ask the Tibetans themselves?