The Sino-Indian Boundary Issue continues....

The frontier region between Maharaja Gulab Singh’s Kashmir state, of which the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is the legal successor state, and Chinese Turkestan , was never clearly defined.

The October 1846 agreement between the Dogra kingdom and Tibet merely agreed to respect ‘the old, established frontiers’, without defining them. W. H. Johnson, a junior officer of the Survey of India who visited Khotan in Chinese Turkestan in 1865 and trekked back via Aksai Chin, on his return drew this line as the boundary of Kashmir state with China. This line was published in an atlas in 1868, and has continued in other publications since then.

Major-General Sir John Ardagh, Director of Military Intelligence of the British General Staff in London, had proposed this line as the boundary on 1st January 1897 to the British Foreign Office and the India Office. The boundary between Kashmir state and Chinese Turkestan was shown as running along the Karakoram Range, and then further eastwards up to the main Kuen Lun Range, keeping the Aksai Chin plateau to its south as Kashmir territory. (see map in slides)

However, it never became a formal mutually-agreed boundary between the British Government of India and the Chinese government, and thus remained a matter of usage on Indian maps, till it became a matter of dispute when the Chinese published maps that showed Aksai Chin as Chinese territory.

To be continued...