Reclaiming the Crossroads between India and China

Recent years have seen remarkable efforts in establishing transport and trade links across south-western China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and north-eastern India. In the ensuing debates among government and policy circles, railways, highways, and seaways feature prominently relative to the rivers. This article suggests that historically rivers have played the key role in economic and transport connections across these regions and therefore deserve a place in the current initiatives.

Iftekhar Iqbal (iftekhar@du.ac.bd) is at the Department of History, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

This article is based on a larger research project generously supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

China and India’s openings through its south-west and north-east, respectively, have put Yunnan, Tibet, Myanmar, Assam and Bangladesh into the spotlight. This is reflected in the scope of theBCIMEC (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor) and BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation). These initiatives, among others, are bold steps to connect south, south-east and east Asia. As China’s former ambassador to Bangladesh recently noted, at least five links are considered in the fields of policy, road, trade, currency, and people (Jun 2014). In a reminiscence of Arthur Cotton’s (1866-67) 19th century idea of connecting “Calcutta to Canton” through the railways, the recent car rally from Kunming to Kolkata brings a lot of hopes and aspirations in and for these vast ecologically contiguous regions of Asia. All of these evoke the historical links of these regions to the “Silk Route” as well as what is recently termed as the “Sea Silk Route”.
What is, however, conspicuously absent in these stimulating trans-regional programmes is any meaningful reference to the river as connector. It is surprising since these regions are home to a number of major rivers that have connected the historic Silk Route with the Sea Silk Route. It is this network of rivers that has made the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea visible participants to the Indian Ocean’s global space. In fact, one can argue that between the land and sea routes, these rivers must have formed part of what we can call the “River Silk Route”. One reason why the rivers are not placed into the current integration programme is that each of the countries concerned are using the rivers as a means of “national development”, which does not sit comfortably with the transnational agenda of economic cooperation. But, such separation between the water regime of the regions and trans-regional economic integration may not prove sustainable in the long-term perspective. The widening gap between the threat of an imminent water war and the sparks of trans-regional integration, therefore, needs critical scholarly and policy attention.
This article argues that a connected history of these rivers could help bridge the gap between national and transnational priorities. And this could be possible by way of pointing to the enormous ecological, economic and cultural commons that the rivers used to be in their pre-national career. The article looks at this question through the examples of three major rivers of Asia: Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy and Yangtze.
The Brahmaputra
In 1765, James Rennell, later the first Surveyor General of India, was employed to find the shortest and most convenient Ganges waterways for transporting commodities from Bengal interior to Calcutta Port. Rennell was soon alerted to the importance of the Brahmaputra and ended up surveying about 400 miles of the river. While Rennell was surprised to discover that Brahmaputra was larger than the Ganges, one message he took home through this exercise is that from the easternmost part of the Brahmaputra, Yunnan was only 220 miles. This demonstrated the earliest imperial interest in connecting China and India through river valleys (Rennell 1781: 28).
Rennell’s suggestions of nearness between the Brahmaputra and Yunnan were more clearly articulated in the context of nearness between the Brahmaputra and the Yangtze by Arthur Cotton in the 1860s. Cotton was a pre-eminent hydrologist of his time, and he is often regarded as the forerunner of India’s recent river-linking project that wants to divert and relocate the waters of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra to India’s northern and southern regions. This is something that China also has been attempting for years in connection to the Brahmaputra. But, it should be noted that Cotton’s ambition about the interlinking of rivers was based on the water of the Ganges. As far as the Brahmaputra was concerned, he was more interested about this river as a commercial high street most capable of connecting India to what he termed the “Chinese heartland of Yangtze” (Cotton 1866-67).
In the meantime, the establishment of tea plantations in Assam from the mid-19th century made the Brahmaputra a more lucrative commercial space. The colonial administration wanted to bring tea and other Assam valley products not merely down to the Bay of Bengal, but also up the river to replace Chinese tea with Assamese tea in Tibet. T T Cooper, acting political agent in Bhamo in Burma, calculated that for many centuries China had supplied Tibet with six or eight million pounds of brick tea annually. In a view to replace Chinese tea trade, which was dominated by the Lamas, Cooper wanted to find an alternative commercial way between Tibet and the tea-growing areas of Assam. He tried both ways: from Shanghai to Tibet, and from Calcutta to Tibet via Assam (Cooper 1873: 2-12). By this time, of course, the lower Brahmaputra became a great transporter of Eastern Bengal’s jute and rice across the Calcutta and Chittagong ports. By the turn of the 20th century, imperial importance of the Brahmaputra took a new turn with the discoveries of oil in upper Assam. In 1903, Burmah Oil Company opened tank storage facilities in Chittagong, and hoped to exclude the Russian and American oil now imported from Calcutta and to divide the Assam market with a subsidiary company near Dibrugarh.
It was in these overall economic and commercial circumstances that the British created a new province, Eastern Bengal and Assam, in 1905. The Brahmaputra was the nerve line of this new territorial reorganisation. In northern Assam, the Brahmaputra was conceived as a facilitator of trade with northern Burma, Tibet and Yunnan. The lower stream of the Brahmaputra was envisioned as collecting the Ganges trade before meeting the Bay of Bengal. Not surprisingly, the new territorial rearrangement made remarkable impact. For example, by 1907, 31 oil wells had been drilled, and the output of crude petroleum gradually increased.¹ The total value of Eastern Bengal and Assam trade in 1906-07 was about Rs 50 million, which was almost one-sixth of the value of the total trade of India (Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam 1910).
Why this province had to be discontinued in just six years’ time, suspending new economic opportunities around the trans-regional gravity of the Brahmaputra, is another story, a story of contests about different spatial imagination between the nation and the empire. This question has assumed greater significance through some recent studies, including that of David Ludden (2012) and Manu Goswami (2004). They have pointed out how global capital was subsumed by territorially delimited national imagination and with grave consequence towards spatial inequality. In the particular focus of this article, it may be suggested that the urge to reach out to China, upper Burma, and Tibet as well as to the Bay of Bengal by means of the Brahmaputra, led the empire to make an unprecedented spatial rearrangement. And, although this did not last long, it has a current resonance as India looks to its east and China looks to its west.
The Irrawaddy
Locating the Brahmaputra in the transregional thrust makes better sense when keeping the Irrawaddy in perspective. The imperial story in Myanmar began with the delta of the Irrawaddy. One of the reasons of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26) was that the Burmese king had given the charge of Rangoon port to a local Muslim merchant, violating a so-called treaty with the British. As they gained control of the mouth of the river, the desire to control more parts of the river valley was stoked further. With the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852, the entire delta region came under British possession.
James Rennell returns at this point. In the late 18th century, when he was alerted about the proximity of the Brahmaputra to Yunnan, he was also prompted to examine the navigability of the Irrawaddy river from the city of Ava to the province of Yunnan. So, the British control of the Irrawaddy delta was the beginning of another quest for reaching out to China. But, unlike in India, in Burma the empire needed to negotiate different stakeholders who also had focused on the Irrawaddy. First, there were the Chinese Muslims or Panthays who were in effective charge of Yunnan since 1853 against the Imperial China. In the 1860s, the British felt that the hold of the Panthays was so “permanent” that it continued negotiations with the Panthay authorities for safe passage to trade items between Bhamo on the Irrawaddy and the Yunnan trading town of Momien. In fact, the British political agent in Bhamo continued supplying weapons to the Panthay administration in Momien until the very end of their rule in 1873. Another stakeholder were the French who eyed Yunnan as they expanded influence on the Mekong river. And, the last king of Burma, Mindon Min, wanted his commercial option open through collaborating with the French. The British cleared both the French and the Burmese influence by annexing the remaining part of Burma in the last Anglo-Burmese war in 1885. With this, the entire 900 + mile course of the Irrawaddy came into British hands.
One example of how these developments affected trade on the Irrawaddy is the well-known Irrawaddy Flotilla. By the turn of the 20th century, the company was termed the “greatest flotilla on earth”. It had around 1,200 vessels and mail steamers – some capable of carrying 2,500 passengers with a bazaar on board. It carried more freight, especially oil and rice, than the 2,060 miles of railways (Harvey 1946).It was carrying some nine million passengers a year at its peak in the 1920s. Steamships in the Irrawaddy, among other items, transported cotton for Yunnan. For example, when the Yunnan-Tibet connection was blocked due to the turmoil of the 1911 revolution, Yunnan tea was first shipped to Burma and then to Tibet (Yang 2008). But, Irrawaddy with its north-western tributary, Chindwin, also provided connecting points between upper Burma and upper Assam, which route was under consideration for more intense connectivity after upper Burma was annexed in 1885. The Irrawaddy was a bridge between China and India.
The Yangtze
The restoration of a traditional route between the Irrawaddy and Yunnan was a sufficient cause of cheering for the British, because with its control the trade of Yunnan and entire Burma came under their grip. But, the British were eager to go beyond Yunnan and to reach the Yangtze valley, despite the fact that there existed difficult mountain passes. Why? Of course, the British wanted to reach central China through the Yangtze, but this looks a little odd as they were already having significant presence at the coastal bases of China, including in Canton and Shanghai; why take an apparently rear and difficult entry through south-western China? This question takes us to our third example: the Yangtze.
The Yangtze and the city of Shanghai are important for two broad reasons as far as the connectivity between India and China is concerned. First, by the 1860s the British were increasingly feeling uncomfortable by the greater presence of other imperial powers, including the United States, in Shanghai and other Yangtze delta regions. So emerged the thought of pursuing pre-emptive efforts of getting to the Yangtze valley from what became known as the “Irrawaddy Corridor”. Second, Shanghai itself became a starting point for efforts to reach out to India.
Shanghai rose to prominence in the wake of the decline of Canton following the First Opium War (1839-42). But, the rise of Shanghai was not going to give the British a free ride. Edward Sladen was the British political agent at the court of the last Burmese king in Mandalay. He was worried that the Americans were soon going to take control of the east coast trade of China. He saw this in the “hot haste” in which the Americans were constructing the Atlantic and Pacific railroads. More significantly, it was seeking an Euro-American consensus about opening a ship canal across Panama to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. Because of the issues, what Sladen termed as “collateral reasons” and “contingency of US predominance”, and in the context of the decline of the opium trade along with the Canton system, Sladen suggested that they should be in a position to find a western doorway to China. In this context, he felt that a route to China through Burma would be of “highest importance” (Sladen 1879).
This denotes that the idea of taking a route through Burma lent not only greater trans-regional importance to the Irrawaddy river, but also a preference to the Yangtze valley in the interior of China than merely on its mouths in Shanghai. As mentioned earlier, Arthur Cotton suggested connecting India and China through Brahmaputra about the same time. And, this could also be understood as a search for multiple locations of importance along the Yangtze.
Although the British imperial policies opted for an alternative route to China away from Shanghai, the city nevertheless remained a springboard for attempts to reach out to India along the Yangtze and other rivers. One early attempt in the late 1860s was by T T Cooper, who first made it through much of the Yangtze from Shanghai to the eastern Tibetan town of Bathang, in a view to find trade routes from Tibet to Assam. As the Tibetan Lamas did not allow him to proceed further, he took another chance to reach the Assam-Tibet border from Calcutta via the Assam side along the Brahmaputra, as mentioned earlier. Another trip from Shanghai to Bhamo was successfully made at the turn of the 20th century by Edward Margary, the first Englishman to traverse the way. Robert Logan Jack also went from Shanghai to Bhamo by the turn of the 20th century. After crossing Bhamo, he came down to Rangoon to take a ship to Shanghai, making his trip a circular one. The turn of the 20th century saw another trip from Shanghai to Burma by William Edgar Geil, whose diary was titled A Yankee on the Yangtze (1904).
Fluid Passages
As the examples of the three rivers suggest, the Brahmaputra led to the creation of a large province in India bordering Myanmar, Yunnan and Tibet. The Irrawaddy Corridor was in the centre of power plays between the British, the Yunnanese, the last Burmese king, the French, and the Chinese. While the British came out clear on the corridor, these efforts were directed not only to retain influence on the Irrawaddy, but also to get to the interior of Yunnan and through it to get hold of China’s mainland via the Yangtze. Similarly, the Yangtze remained a central transregional passage as its both ends were imagined to be capable of connecting India and China. In fact, the pre-national times saw not just the Irrawaddy Corridor, but the “Brahmaputra Corridor” as well as the “Yangtze Corridor”, and there were substantial policy initiatives to connect these corridors.
The formidable presence of the river in the imperial and popular minds was because the river was not just for one way traffic. These were not just a fluid passage from the mountainous hinterland to the Indian Ocean or the Pacific. But, more importantly, traffic of people and products and corresponding ideas and efforts were both towards and away from the seaports. By these processes, the areas that we consider landlocked, such as northern Burma, Yunnan, Assam and Tibet, actually had their own points of opening through the rivers. It was as if the rivers after touching the ocean returned home and with that offered massive transregional mobility. And, with this, the rivers indeed connected the mountains, the plains and the seas.
Conclusions
This article emphasises on the term “transregional” rather than “trans-national”, for there is real scope of revisiting regionalism that exists today in Asia. The current form of regionalism is based on the notion of spatially blocked units of nation states, whose structural set-up has long informed area studies. The regions connecting Tibet, Yunnan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and north-eastern India as well as northern parts of the mainland south-east Asia could become good candidates for a new form of regionalism vis-à-vis “South Asia”, “Southeast Asia” and “East Asia”. Recent interest in geographically contiguous subregional integration is a realistic shift from the above cold war conglomeration. But, this structural policy shift towards geographic proximity would make sense only when the ecology of the regions is placed at the heart of such new transregional initiatives as BCIMEC and BIMSTEC. Rivers are key to such reconsiderations. It is open to further exploration as to how these three, and many other rivers into which branches of the Southern Silk Routes might have merged, could be placed into the discussions about the five connecting issues of policy, people, land, currency, and trade.