Spy To Lhasa

Snow Leopard crouched and huddled himself shivering in the piercing cold winds that danced all around him and the glowing woodfire that did its best to give a little warmth in the dead of night at an altitude of seventeen thousand feet close to the Lanak La mountain pass in the Himalayan region. His mission was critical to the success of the Empire’s dominance in this cold and mystical Sino-Indo-Tibetan sierra terrain.

The year is 1900, the beginning of the twentieth century, an era when the British and the Russian Empire of the Tsars were competing for supremacy in Central Asia. This political and diplomatic confrontation between the two superpowers during this epoch was dubbed as ‘The Great Game.’

The Qing Dynasty established by the Manchus in China had been the undisputed overlords of Tibet for the past one hundred and eighty years by then. Their control over Tibet began…