Lamas, Empresses and Tea: Early Twentieth-Century Sino- British Encounters in Eastern Tibet Scott Relyea Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, the Tibetan plateau was a zone of intense imperial contact—and competition— between British India and Qing China. Even before the 1904 Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa, Indian rupees had become the primary currency of commercial exchange across the plateau, and British explorers had gathered detailed knowledge of both the presumed natural resource bounty of eastern Tibet and the lucrative border tea trade traversing it. This article explores models manifested by these interactions between British and Qing officials, merchants and explorers in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet and the role empires played in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global spread of Euro-American norms. Although Sichuan officials directly engaged with administering Kham shared a common perception of Khampa society with their British counterparts, they also recognised the encroachment of Indian rupees and British explorers as challenges to Qing authority, if not a prologue to territorial expansion paralleling the contemporaneous scramble for concessions in coastal China. Beginning with the establishment of the Zongli Yamen in 1861, close Sino-British interaction along two tracks, British ‘lessons’ in statecraft and diplomacy in the imperial capital Beijing and commercial and political actions in the imperial borderland of Kham, provided models for Qing assertion of exclusive authority on the plateau. Two globalising norms inflected in these British models—territoriality and sovereignty—fostered transformative policies in the borderland during the first decade of the twentieth century. Implemented by Sichuan officials, these policies sought to undermine Lhasa’s local challenge to Chinese authority via monasteries, thereby legitimising appeal to international law to repel regional challenges from both British India and Russia. This article analyses in depth two examples of these policies in action: a silver coin modelled on the Empress Victoria Indian rupee and a monopoly tea company partly modelled on British Indian tea firms and the Indian Tea Association. Both contributed to weakening the political, social and economic power projected into Kham by British India and Lhasa. The KEYWORDS Qing China; British India; Kham; imperialism; sovereignty; borderland; currency © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Scott Relyea relyeas@appstate.edu Department of History, Appalachian State University, PO Box 32072, Boone, NC 28608 USA THE JOURNAL OF IMPERIAL AND COMMONWEALTH HISTORY, 2018 VOL. 46, NO. 2, 257–285 https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2018.1431380