Four Rugby Boys

The 1910s saw an attempt to turn four young Tibetans – the Four Rugby Boys – into the vanguard of "modernisers" through the medium of an English public school education.

"[4] Historian Alastair Lamb concurs: “the experiment […] can hardly be described as a success", adding that the boys were side-tracked by the Tibetan establishment and "made no significant contribution in later life to the development of Tibet".

[5] In August 1912, the Dalai Lama proposed that some "energetic and clever sons of respectable families" in Tibet should be given "first-class educations at Oxford College, London".

In early 1913 the youths selected turned up at the British Trade Agency at Gyantse, where their companion, a Tibetan official called Lungshar, presented Gould with a request from the Dalai Lama for four first-class educations at Oxford College, London.

The youngest of the lot, Ringang, stayed in England for a longer period and studied electrical engineering at the Universities of London and Birmingham.

[10] Tibetologist Alex McKay observes that the three surviving Rugby boys formed, together with their fellow countrymen that had been educated in British India or at Frank Ludlow's English school at Gyantse (1923–1926), "a growing circle of generally progressive thinkers, in whose company Europeans visitors felt comfortable" and who were recognised by the British cadre as "a major propaganda channel".

[14] In 1946, when Austrian war prisoner Heinrich Harrer reached Lhasa, there was only one of the Rugby boys still alive, namely Kyipup, then a high official at the foreign ministry, whose meeting he recalls in his 1954 book Seven Years in Tibet.