John Bray, Christian Missionary Enterprise and Tibetan Trade, The Tibet Journal, Vol.39, No.1, 2014.

This essay discusses how Western missionaries such as Desgodins viewed-and engaged with-Tibetan trade between the 17th and mid-20th centuries. It relates to the work of Wim van Spengen in two respects. First, Wim made skilful use of missionary sources in his wide-ranging study on the "geohistory of Tibetan trade" in Tibetan Border Worlds (2000: 96-144) and in his essay on the frontier history of southern Kham (van Spengen 2002). Secondly, he lat-er focussed on mission history as a topic in its own right in his 2009 essay on the activities of the Pentecostal Missionary Union (PMU) on the eastern Tib-etan borders in the early 20th century. My aim here is to take the discussion of Tibetan trade and mission history a stage further by treating them in combi-nation rather than as separate topics. Certainly, the missionaries were observers of Tibetan trade, but to what extent were they participants? In what ways did they engage with the various trading networks that crisscrossed the Tibetan border worlds?   And how far did they adapt their strategies in response to these networks? In posing these questions, I am mindful of a series of conversations with Wim over the past ten years. In the course of my sporadic visits  to his home in Weesp, I discussed my long-term aspiration of writing a book-length comparative study of Christian missions in Tibet and the Tibetan bor-der regions. Wim was always interested, often provocative, sometimes even a little stern when he thought I was veering off course. He wanted me to clarif-y the thematic orientation of my work and, social scientist as he was, challenged me on my theoretical framework. In this essay I offer a partial answer to Wim's probing. Sadly, I failed to complete my long-projected magnum opus in his lifetime. In his memory, and as evidence of work in progress, I now pre-sent a series of explorations on a set of themes that were of interest to us both. The essay ranges widely over time and space, from the 17th to the 20th cen-turies, and from Guge to Lhasa, Ladakh, Kalimpong, Kham and Amdo. It presents not so much a theoretical framework as a narrative one. By adopting a broad comparative approach, I hope to identify common patterns and in this way to suggest insights both into the evolution of missionary strategy and into the wider history of the Tibetan border worlds between the 17th and the 20th centuries.