Face-off at Sikkim’s Naku La Casts Light on China’s LAC Game Plan Against India Led by the British Empire’s representative in Si...

Face-off at Sikkim’s Naku La Casts Light on China’s LAC Game Plan Against India

Led by the British Empire’s representative in Sikkim, James Claude White, hundreds of troops struggled up the Naku-chu River in the summer of 1902, determined to push the borders of Imperial China back to where they ought to be.

“Near the top of the pass”, White later wrote. “I found the usual Tibetan wall, rather better built than is customary, running across the valley with a block-house on the east, and some smaller blockhouse on a ridge coming down from the east”.

The commander of Tibet’s forces at the fortress of Khamba Dzong insisted the border lay at the wall, put up in the nineteenth century to mark its grazing grounds. White had come armed with a copy of the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1890, which placed the border two kilometres north, on the Naku La pass.