COMMENTARY

Reclaiming the Crossroads

between India and China
A View from the River
Iftekhar Iqbal

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.

This article is based on a larger research

project generously supported by the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.
Iftekhar Iqbal (iftekhar@du.ac.bd) is at the
Department of History, University of Dhaka,
Bangladesh.

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hina and Indias 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 the recently formed subregional
platforms such as BCIM-EC (BangladeshChina-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
Chinas 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 Cottons
(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
Oceans 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
december 20, 2014

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).
Rennells 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 Indias recent riverlinking project that wants to divert and
relocate the waters of the Ganges and
the Brahmaputra to Indias 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 Cottons ambition
about the interlinking of rivers was based
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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.

Map: The Rivers of South and South East Asia

The Irrawaddy

Source: Kazi Ahmadul Islam, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Dhaka.

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 Bengals 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
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december 20, 2014

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
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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 AngloBurmese 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
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COMMENTARY

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 YunnanTibet 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
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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
december 20, 2014

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 AssamTibet 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 Chinas 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
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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 northeastern India as well as northern parts
of the mainland south-east Asia could
become good candidates for a new form
of regionalism vis--vis South Asia,

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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 BCIM-EC 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.
Note
1

Till the end of 1911, a total of 32.4 million gallons

of crude oil was refined. This was matched by a
more extensive production in the Yenangyaung
field in Burma which produced 1,400 million
gallons in that period (Saikia 2011: 52).

References
Cooper, T T (1873): The Mishmee Hills: An Account
of a Journey Made in an Attempt to Penetrate
Thibet from Assam to Open New Routes for
Commerce (London: Henry S King & Co).

vol xlIX no 51

Cotton, Arthur (1866-67): On Communication

between India and China by the Line of the
Burhampooter and Yang-tse, Proceedings of
the Royal Geographical Society of London, 11(6):
255-59.
Goswami, Manu (2004): Producing India: From
Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam (1910):
Report on the Trade Carried by Rail and River in
the Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam
1909-10 (Shillong: Eastern Bengal and Assam
Secretariat Printing Office).
Harvey, G E (1946): British Rule in Burma, 18241942 (London: Faber and Faber).
Jun, Li (2014): BCIM-EC Should Be on Top of
Agenda, The Daily Star, 20 March, viewed on
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Ludden, David (2012): Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and
Assam, Modern Asian Studies, 46(3): 483-525.
Rennell, James (1781): An Account of the Ganges
and Burrampooter Rivers (London: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London).
Saikia, Arupjyoti (2011): Imperialism, Geology
and Petroleum: History of Oil in Colonial
Assam, Economic & Political Weekly, 46(12):
48-55.
Sladen, E B (1879): Official Narrative of and Papers
Connected with the Expedition to Explore the
Trade Routes to China via Bhamo (Rangoon:
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Yang, Bin (2008): Between Winds and Clouds:
The Making of Yunnan (New York: Columbia
University Press).

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