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On March 14, 1899, this ambiguous arrangement was formalized in a memorandum sent to the Qing Government by Claude MacDonald, the British Minster at Peking. Echoing the East India Company’s language to the 1846–48 boundary commissioners, MacDonald wrote to the Zongli Yamen73 proposing “that for the sake of avoiding any dispute or uncertainty in the future, a clear understanding should be come to with the Chinese Government as to the frontier between the two States.” Yet the memo also went on to assert that “it will not be necessary to mark out the frontier. … The natural frontier is the crest of a range of mighty mountains, a great part of which is quite inaccessible.” It was sufficient from the British perspective to outline the prominent features of the Indus watershed in the memo, and to cite this line described on a map of the “Russo-Chinese frontier brought by the late Minister, Hung Chun, from St. Petersburg, and in possession of the Yamen.”74 The vague description in the letter, which generates to this day much debate between India and China, suggested a line that largely followed what the British understood to be the Indus watershed limit, though they still did not have a satisfactory map to represent the whole region. As the viceroy, Lord Elgin, had earlier written to the Secretary of State for India, “we regret that we have no map to show the whole line either accurately or on a large scale.
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Kyle J. Gardner (The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962)