THE TIBET EXPEDITION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12524, 17 March 1904, Page 5

THE TIBET EXPEDITION.

TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS. By Telegraph Press Association Copyright. (Bocelred March 10, 10.9 p.m.) ■ •';: London, March 16. Twenty men of the Twelfth Mule Corps and thirty of the 23rd Pioneers attached to Colonel Younghusband's Tibetan expedition, in escorting a convoy between Fort Phari and Tuna, were frostbitten, and underwent terrible sufferings. ■

Tho advance of the mission into Tibet is proving, as was expected, a slow business. Tho smallness 0* the British force, the distance from the base of supplies, and the seventy of tho climate compel caution. At Guru, close to the British encampment at Ohumbi, tho Tibetans, accumulated a force of 4000 men, about a quartoi of whom are, it is said, armed with guns. Their loaders remain as much disinclined to yield as oyer, and refuse to carry out their treaty obligations in the direction of encouraging trade. The British advance'into Tibet _is causing anxiety in Russia. "It is sufficient," says the Biraboviya Vyedomosti, "to glance at a map of Asia to be able to understand what far-reaching modifications in the social, commercial, and industrial life of China and all Eastern Asia would result from the construction of a railway linking India, through an Anglicised Tibet, with the Yangtse Valley at present accessible to the British from Shanghai but closed to them by land. Besides, the construction of a railway towards the Yangtse Valley has already been started by our allies the French, who are better ab! a . to reach this rich valley by advancing through Yunnan than are the English." The journal goes on to show the strategic importance '.t a British railwav across Tibet, arguing that it would place China at the mercy of an English military coup do main, destroy the Strategic value of the Trans-Siberian railway, inflict irretrievable injury upon RussoChinese commerce, and make Great Britain arbiter of the fate of the Celestial Empire.