China posed innumerable geopolitical challenges to the British imperial supremacy in the 1800s. It was somewhat a double dilemma whether or not Britain wished to prioritize China’s internal development, or to consider Chinese relations with other countries, while China’s own western borders shared by the two ‘western’ dominions – of Russia and England, were increasingly strategic to Britain. Borderlands and frontiers being live contact zones of culture, were often affected by local considerations, local migration and movements, intelligence of which, the British based mostly on loose native sources, and cartographic approximation. Along with Britain’s colonial connections with Tibet, Burma and Turkestan, was her territorial connection with Sikkim. The mountain kingdom of Sikkim is currently bound by the states of Bengal, Nepal, Bhutan and China. The negotiations on Sikkim in 1890s, needed to be formalised, to provide a concrete idea of how any future boundary relations could be defined with China. To a much-occupied colonial government like that of India, imperial Britain’s idea of having to negotiate with the Chinese on any subject seemed hazardous to both her administrative officers on duty and her surveyors on field. The Sikkim Question introduced a consideration of China’s relations with, and her policy in the State of Tibet, with which much of her policy on the western frontier was closely associated, giving rise to the idea of creating a buffer zone. Focusing primarily on the heyday of the 1886 Convention between Great Britain and China, this paper with the help of the Survey of India’s cartographic literature, locates the historical shaping of a borderland. It looks at the trajectory of geo-political changes, which were representative of the shared porous border, contextualizing the triple objective of administration, trade and commerce and the establishment of friendly relations with the Tibetans authorities residing in Sikkim’s immediate vicinity.
