Racial and Social Orders

Abstract

As political and diplomatic relations with Tibet moved away from the self-assurance of late nineteenth-century imperialism so did European representations of the inhabitants of Tibet. Throughout the period surveyed in this study Tibetans occupied the minds of European travellers and other commentators both as a racial unit and as a society. What changed after the conclusion of Younghusband’s expedition, and in particular after the end of the First World War, was the degree to which Europeans regarded themselves as superior, more rational and more enlightened as a race and as a society. This chapter will demonstrate that European representations of Tibetan racial and social orders were much less clear-cut during the first half of the twentieth century than they had been before 1904. In particular, they often included deeply searching reflections on the flaws of European societies and the challenges they faced. Tibet and its surrounding areas, as has been argued throughout this book, served as an excellent blank canvas against which these flaws and challenges could be discussed freely and comparatively openly.