Shahidulla

The Chinese side also cited a passage from the Hsin chiang t’u chih of 1911, stating that the boundary beyond Kan jut turned in an east-west direction, as supporting their claim. The Indian side pointed out that it was the Indian line and not the Chinese line which ran in this manner, and so this passage in effect confirmed the Indian alignment. This work also referred in another passage to Shahidulla being a part of Kashmir; and as Shahidulla was much to the north of the Kuen Lun mountains, Sinkiang did not extend at that time even upto the Kuen Lun mountains, let alone south of it.

1961, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, published 2016, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 66

Thus, embittered and with his career in crisis, Johnson had spent the last season, 1864, rounding off his work in the north-eastern corner of Ladakh. In the process he had again beaten his own world altitude record by reaching a point 23,000 feet above sea level. He had also crossed the Karakoram pass and continued for three days towards Yarkand before turning back. At the time the Maharaja of Kashmir, without apparently consulting the British, had established an advance garrison well beyond the pass at a place called Shahidulla. This excursion of Johnson’s was therefore safe enough and though his survey work there was rather haphazard, he was not censured for crossing the frontier.

1977, John Keay, Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1820-1895, published 1996, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 202

And as there was already a fort at Shahidulla, where the Maharaja’s troops and officials were stationed from 1863, the Johnson Line had included all these territories between the Karakoram Pass and the Kunlun mountains. The British were unhappy with the ‘line’ demarcated by Johnson, but as the Chinese writ then didn’t run as far as these areas, it was apparently never presented to China. When the Maharaja’s soldiers vacated these inhospitable areas by 1866, the Chinese took control of Shahidulla. And with the Russians then exploring ways to extend their reach onto the Tibetan plateau, the British decided on a boundary line — with a few modifications to the Johnson Line — along the crest of the Kunlun mountains, north of the Yarkand River, to limit Russia’s reach.

2020 October 17, “Looking for common ground on the borderline”, in The Tribune, archived from the original on 01 Nov 2020