Aksai Chin is an arid region divided between India and China, mostly controlled by China as part of Hotan County, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang and partly in Rutog County, Ngari Prefecture, Tibet and constituting the easternmost portion of the larger Kashmir region that has been the subject of a dispute between India and China since 1959. It is claimed by India as part of its Leh District, Ladakh Union Territory.
Name
Aksai Chin is first mentioned by Muhammad Amin, the Yarkandi guide of the Schlagintweit brothers. He explained its meaning as "the great white sand desert". Linguist George van Driem states that the name intended by Amin is Aqsai Chöl (; ) which could mean "white ravine desert" or "white coomb desert". The word chöl for desert seems to have been corrupted in English transliteration into "chin".
Some sources have interpreted Aksai to have the Uyghur meaning "white stone desert", including several British colonial, modern Western, Chinese, and Indian sources. Some modern sources interpret it to mean "white brook" instead. At least one source interprets Aksai to mean "eastern" in the Yarkandi Uyghur dialect.
The meaning of the word "Chin" has been disputed. It is taken to mean "China" by some Chinese, Western, and Indian sources. At least one source takes it to mean "pass". Other sources omit "Chin" in their interpretations. Van Driem states that there is no Uyghur word resembling "chin" for China.
Amin's Aksai Chin was not a defined region, stretching indefinitely east into Tibet south of the Kunlun Mountains. In 1895, the British envoy to Kashgar told the Chinese Taotai that Aksai Chin was a "loose name for an ill-defined, elevated tableland", part of which lay in Indian and part in Chinese territory. Its current localised meaning for the area under dispute between India and China is a post-colonial development through repeated usage.
History
Because of its elevation, the desolation of Aksai Chin meant that it had no human importance. For military campaigns, the region held great importance, as it was on the only route from the Tarim Basin to Tibet that was passable all year round.
Ladakh was conquered in 1842 by the armies of Raja Gulab Singh (Dogra) under the suzerainty of the Sikh Empire. The British defeat of the Sikhs in 1846 resulted in the transfer of the Jammu and Kashmir region including Ladakh to the British, who then installed Gulab Singh as the Maharaja under their suzerainty. The British appointed a boundary commission headed by Alexander Cunningham to determine the boundaries of the state. Chinese and Tibetan officials were invited to jointly demarcate the border, but they did not show any interest. The British boundary commissioners fixed the southern part of the boundary up to the Chang Chenmo Valley, but regarded the area north of it as terra incognita.
The Johnson Line
William Johnson, a civil servant with the Survey of India proposed the "Johnson Line" in 1865, which put Aksai Chin in Kashmir. This was the time of the Dungan revolt, when China did not control most of Xinjiang, so this line was never presented to the Chinese. Johnson presented this line to the Maharaja of Kashmir, who then claimed the 18,000 square kilometres contained within, and by some accounts territory further north as far as the Sanju Pass in the Kun Lun Mountains. The Maharajah of Kashmir constructed a fort at Shahidulla (modern-day Xaidulla), and had troops stationed there for some years to protect caravans. Eventually, most sources placed Shahidulla and the upper Karakash River firmly within the territory of Xinjiang (see accompanying map). According to Francis Younghusband, who explored the region in the late 1880s, there was only an abandoned fort and not one inhabited house at Shahidulla when he was there – it was just a convenient staging post and a convenient headquarters for the nomadic Kirghiz. The abandoned fort had apparently been built a few years earlier by the Kashmiris. In 1878 the Chinese had reconquered Xinjiang, and by 1890 they already had Shahidulla before the issue was decided. By 1892, China had erected boundary markers at Karakoram Pass.
In 1897 a British military officer, Sir John Ardagh, proposed a boundary line along the crest of the Kun Lun Mountains north of the Yarkand River. At the time Britain was concerned at the danger of Russian expansion as China weakened, and Ardagh argued that his line was more defensible. The Ardagh line was effectively a modification of the Johnson line, and became known as the "Johnson-Ardagh Line".