893.00 Tibet/64
Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Joseph W. Ballantine of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs
Sir George Sansom19 called at my request and I told him that we had received a telegram dated May 15 from our Mission in New Delhi (New Delhi’s 344, May 15, 7 p.m.) in which telegram it was stated (1) that the American representative at Lhasa had informed the British that he was reporting on the situation in Tibet and (2) that Weightman, Joint Secretary of External Affairs at New Delhi, had requested that the substance of that report be conveyed to the British Embassy in Washington. I told Sir George that we had made inquiry of the War Department and had obtained a paraphrase of a telegram which embodied the report apparently referred to (a message from Ferris,20 dated New Delhi, May 16, to the War Department). I let Sir George read the telegram. He said that he had had practically all of the information in the telegram except the statement contained in the last sentence to the effect that according to the British the reincorporation of Tibet was among the objectives laid down by General Chiang Kai-shek in a book recently published, presumably by the Chinese Government.
Sir George then told me that at a Pacific Council meeting in Washington on May 20 Mr. T. V. Soong had said in reply to Mr. Churchill21 that there was not and would not be a concentration of Chinese troops [Page 634] against Tibet though the Chinese Government claimed that Tibet was a part of China; and that the Prime Minister had replied that no one contested Chinese suzerainty and that the essential thing now was to avoid making any new difficulties.
Sir George also let me have an extract from a telegram dated May 25 from the British Foreign Office. He said that the matter was of no importance but he thought that the Tibetan reply quoted therein was rather amusing. This extract was as follows:
“As regards assurance concerning alleged Japanese activities in Tibet, Tibetan reply states in part as follows. ‘Tibet being a country entirely devoted to religion we rigorously guard our frontiers from intrusion and emphatically deny having any dealings or understandings with other foreign powers.’”