Fifteen

There is a second historical explanation for the Sherpas’ migration. There are those who believe they left Sichuan in search of professional opportunities. They abandoned their shepherding and set off along the road of salt and silk. The course of European commerce, the wake of the commercial greed of the West, which profited by putting spices in the kitchens of Renaissance palaces. According to this other hypothesis, the Sherpa population was born in the heat of the anthropocentric revolution of Dürer, Petrarch, and Francis Bacon. Children of the early bourgeoisie, the Sherpas reinvent themselves as means of transport, as freight for exchangeable goods.