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as to word their part of their treaty with Great Britain much more cautiously, promising only "not to permit any other foreign state to interfere with the territory or internal administration of Tibet." This was in fact what the British had sought all along, since it created a common ally against the possibility of Russian influence in Tibet. The 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention goes further, however. The traditional Tibetan provinces of Amdo and eastern Kham had already been merged into Qinghai, Gansu, Yunnan, and Sichuan in the previous century by the Yongzheng emperor, and these new boundaries had been de facto maintained by subsequent Chinese emperors, and would later be tacitly absorbed by the Chinese Republic, and then by the People's Republic of China. In the new convention, Britain explicitly recognises the "suzerainty of China over Thibet" and promises "not to enter into negotiations with Tibet except through the intermediary of the Chinese Government." (It would break these promises six years later by demarcating the McMahon Line, which had the effect of annexing a considerable percentage of Tibetan territory for Great Britain, without consulting China. To this day India and China disagree over the legal border between Indian-annexed Tibet and Chinese-controlled Tibet.) The Qing government immediately followed up the tacit approval of the British Empire by establishing direct rule over Tibet; nor have the successive governments of China ever renounced sovereignty over Tibet. For the first time, the Dalai Lama (13th) was forced to flee his own country.

Ironically, it was the birth of the Republic of China in 1912 which finally allowed Tibet to restore independent rule and the Dalai Lama to return from exile, at least for a few decades. Upon the abdication of the emperor, the local garrison chose to surrender to the Tibetans, rendering moot the original Chinese plans to make its leader the new Tibetan representative. A disputed Tibetan-Mongolian treaty one year later reaffirms Tibetan independence. Although eastern Kham and Amdo still remained under direct Chinese governmental control, the internal Chinese unrest which would eventually lead to the Chinese civil war ironically allowed Tibet relative peace for the first half of the twentieth century.

Thus, as of 1950, centuries of Tibetan heartland rule, of autonomy or outright independence, had only ever been disrupted for less than two years; with independent rule being restored before the eruption of World

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