R Krishna Das
Peking University Atlas, published in 1925, put the Aksai Chin in India.
Yes, the region that China later forcefully occupied and that now remains a bone of contention for the boiling border dispute has been very much a part of India.
The border was well defined by the Dogra Dynasty rulers and it was accepted by independent India on October 26, 1947 when Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir signed the Instrument of Accession to join the Indian Union.
The boundary coincided with the “Ardagh-Johnson Line” of British India that had been accepted by the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and Tibet. The Ardagh–Johnson Line is a proposed boundary of Kashmir abutting Chinese Turkestan and Tibet. It was formally proposed to the British Indian government by Major General John Ardagh, chief of military intelligence in London, in 1897, based on the surveys conducted by William Johnson in 1865.
The Ardagh–Johnson Line represented the “forward school” that wanted to advance the boundary as forward as possible as a defence against the growing Russian empire. Following the Chinese reluctance to acquiesce to the more conservative Macartney–MacDonald Line, the British eventually reverted to the forward line in the Aksai Chin area, which was then inherited by the independent Republic of India.
In 1865, the then Surveyor General of India, Sir W H Johnson was commissioned to survey the Aksai Chin region. He noted that Khotan’s border was at Brinjga, in the Kunlun Mountains, and the entire Karakash Valley was within the territory of Kashmir. The boundary of Kashmir that he drew, stretching from Sanju Pass to the eastern edge of chang chenmo valley along the Kunlun Mountains, is referred to as the “Johnson Line”.
In 1893, Hung Ta-chen, a senior Chinese official at St. Petersburg, provided a map which coincided with the Ardagh–Johnson line in broad details. It showed the boundary of Xinjiang up to Raskam. In the east, it was similar to the Ardagh–Johnson line, placing Aksai Chin in Kashmir territory.
In 1897 a British military officer, Sir John Ardagh, proposed a boundary line along the crest of the KunLun Mountains north of the Yarkand River. At the time Britain was concerned at the danger of Russian expansion as China weakened, and Ardagh argued that his line was more defensible. The Ardagh line was effectively a modification of the Johnson line, and became known as the “Ardagh–Johnson Line”.
The Xinhai Revolution in 1911 resulted in power shifts in China. By the end of World War I, the British officially used the Ardagh–Johnson Line. From 1917 to 1933, the “Postal Atlas of China”, published by the Government of China in Peking had shown the boundary in Aksai Chin as per the Ardagh–Johnson line, which runs along the Kunlun Mountains. The “Peking University Atlas”, published in 1925, also put the Aksai Chin in India.
Upon independence in 1947, the government of India fixed its official boundary in the west, which included the Aksai Chin, in a manner that resembled the Ardagh–Johnson Line. India’s basis for defining the border was “chiefly by long usage and custom.”
Independent India, post-1947, was absolutely clear that the International Border remained distinctly marked in East as McMahon Line in Sikkim, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh as the present line, and in Ladakh as the Johnson Ardagh Line. But Chinese forces clandestinely occupied Aksai Chin in 1956 and made a 185 km long Highway G-219 joining Xinjiang and Tibet.
Dogra, Dragon and the Border
