Periodically, from the 12th century onwards, Europe found cause to revive the myth of Christian kingdoms in Cathay and their legendary king known as ‘Prester John’. Despite the advancing Mongol hordes, missionaries such as Friar John Carpini and merchants, of whom Marco Polo was but one, penetrated far into Asia in a futile effort to discover the whereabouts of these communities. Partly as a by-product of this quest, some of these travellers reached Northern Tibet.
In 1324 the Franciscan ascetic, Odorico of Pordenone, set out from Canbaluc (Peking) with the intention of returning home to Europe overland. In 1330 he completed this remarkable journey, claiming to have passed through Tibet and other fabled lands and implying that Lhasa was on his route by giving a description of it. This was probably gleaned from fellow travellers as noted by MacGregor. His journal contains reports of the Tibetan Plateau, which were to be the last to reach Europe for nearly three hundred years.
During the 16th century Portuguese merchants established themselves in Goa, on the west coast of India. They were followed by Jesuit missionaries who, in the course of their work, came to hear of Tibet and its inhabitants. They discovered that the Tibetans were given to pious works and carried out religious rites which bore a strong resemblance to those of the Catholic Church. Speculating that there might be enclaves of Nestorian Christians surviving beyond the Himalaya mountains, the Pope supported several expeditions to explore the region, known then as Cathay, with the purpose of reclaiming these isolated Christian communities for the Church.
During this period, in 1590, Father Anthony Montserrat produced the first reasonably accurate map to the Himalaya. He had accompanied Rudolph Aquavivas on a mission to the Moghul Court of Akbar the Great, who ruled most of Northern India from 1556 to 1603 and had invited the Jesuits into his domain in a spirit of friendship and academic enquiry. Curiously, this was at a time when, in England, Elizabeth I was putting Jesuits to death.
In the 17th century there was great confusion amongst European geographers as to whether or not Cathay and China were separate entities or one and the same. Benedict Goes, who made the first of these great Jesuit journeys from the south (1603–7), finally linked China with Cathay and also defined, approximately, the region of Tibet. He travelled north from Kabul through Badakhshan and crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains to Sinkiang. Thus he was able to connect India with Cathay and the Jesuits of Peking. Sadly, the hardships of the journey resulted in his death at Suchow, several hundred miles west of Peking.
Several more journeys were made by these intrepid churchmen, who suffered great privation and physical danger in the crossing of the great Himalayan divide. In 1624, Father Antonio de Andrade and a lay brother, Manuel Marques, set off from the Mogor Mission to convert the Tibetans to Christianity and to find the lost flocks of Nestorian Christians which they still believed to be in Tibet. Four months after leaving Agra, and after imprisonment in the Garhwal, floundering through snowdrifts and fighting off blizzards, dehydration, frostbite and snow-blindness on the Mana Pass (18,400 feet), they crossed into Tibet where they were greeted with surprising friendliness by the Tibetan authorities. Andrade eventually established a permanent mission at Tsaparang. This was possibly the first crossing of the main Himalayan divide by Europeans, and the first authentic penetration into Tibet. On his return Andrade was able to outline, first hand, some of the problems of Himalayan travel. Of mountain sickness he noted: ‘according to the natives, many people die on account of the noxious vapours that arise, for it is a fact that people in good health are suddenly taken ill and die within a quarter of an hour … ’ [1] This sounds like pulmonary oedema, although Andrade thought the sickness was due to ‘the intense cold and the want of meat which reduces the heat of the body’. Between 1624 and 1640, 12 more missionaries were to repeat the crossing.
The Jesuits at the Tsaparang Mission gradually pieced together something of the geography of Tibet, sometimes from their own observations but mostly from the tales told by passing merchants. Andrade was ambitious to extend the Jesuit influence to the province of Utsang, to the south of Tibet, some six weeks’ travelling east of Tsaparang.[2] It was at his prompting that Father Estevão Cacella and Father João Cabral approached Utsang from Bengal. In doing so, they were the first Europeans to set foot in Bhutan, and the first to journey to the land of the Dalai Lama. By 3 January 1628, they had made their separate ways to Shigatse and were well received by the king of the province and by the Great Lama. At first they were allowed to preach and were given ample food and shelter but, over the next two years, their position weakened in the face of opposition from individual Lamas. Several journeys made from the Shigatse Mission brought Europeans close to the Mount Everest Region for the first time. In all their writings, the missionaries make little of the Himalaya mountain ranges, referring to them only as lofty mountains’ and they also make light of the terrible hardships they must have endured. In trying to establish a more suitable route to their mission stations in India, Cabral, young and strong, set out on a journey to the south-west and crossed over the Himalaya divide, probably passing through Nyalam and Shishapangma. He did this in early February, when the Himalayan wind and cold are at their worst, travelling on down to Kathmandu and Patna and continuing south to Hugli in India. In the course of this remarkable journey, he had made the first European traverse of Nepal.
During 1630, Cacella made a return journey south, and then back north to Shigatse via the Chumbi Valley. This brave missionary died from the rigours of his journey seven days after his arrival. Cabral repeated the journey the following year. In 1640 the Tsaparang Mission failed because of the vagaries of local politics and was abandoned.
In 1661 the German Jesuit, John Grueber, and Albert d’Orville from Belgium were the first Westerners to cross the High Plateau of Tibet from the north to the south – and probably the first, discounting Odorico’s implications, to visit Lhasa, which they did on 8 October. They were received there, as elsewhere in Tibet, with typical Buddhist tolerance of strangers and hospitality to travellers. Their journey, which had begun in Peking, was to continue south towards India. On the way to Kuti (Nyalam), when only four days’ journey from Lhasa, they came to: ‘the Mount Langur. This hill is of unsurpassed altitude, so high that travellers can scarcely breathe when they reach the top, so attenuated is the air. In summer no one can cross it without gravely risking his life, because of the poisonous exhalations of certain herbs.’ Langur is a local generic term for mountain and Grueber is probably referring here to the heights of Katambala, which are about 57 miles from Lhasa, as Perceval Landon points out in his book Nepal. Landon also notes that: ‘the rarefication of the air … is always put down by the Tibetans to the existence of maleficent dragons and things which breathe out foul odours and miasms.’
Grueber and d’Orville continued westward, most likely over the Tsong Pass (17,981 feet) to the town of Nyalam under the great peak of Shishapangma. Grueber commented upon the difficulties of the route here, where they had to traverse the tremendous precipices of the gorge. The fathers then followed the Bhote Kosi south, into Nepal on their way to Kathmandu. They eventually completed their journey at Agra during March 1662. Their notes have survived to show the route they followed which, unfortunately, is not the case with Cabral’s earlier journey. It is only guesswork to suppose that he took the same route, although Nyalam would have been the logical way.
D’Orville died at the Mogor Mission at the age of 39, but Grueber went on to Rome, travelling across Persia and Turkey, to make his report. It has proved to be a considerably full and accurate contribution to geography although, surprisingly, he did not describe the landscape or say much about the ordinary Tibetan people. Most of all it was, and remains, an astounding journey accomplished in the face of every difficulty imaginable. They passed within some 15 miles of Shishapangma in mid-winter. It was not until Father Wessels unearthed these and earlier notes from the Archives of the Society of Jesus in 1921 that the real importance of these great missionary travellers was fully appreciated.[3]
Forty-six years were to pass before the next missionary attempt was made. The Capuchin Fathers d’Ascoli and de Tours arrived in Lhasa in 1707 and were also hospitably received. In 1716 the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri crossed over from Kashmir to Ladakh and then followed the Upper Indus and Tsangpo rivers to Holy Lhasa. He was accompanied by a Portuguese Jesuit, Emanoel Freyre, who had been appointed official leader of the expedition. However, he left Lhasa after only a month’s stay. Desideri commented, ‘My companion had always lived in hot climates and feared the intense cold and thin air.’ Once there he discovered that the Capuchins had temporarily abandoned Lhasa ‘for want of the necessaries of life’. Six months after Desideri three Capuchin fathers entered the capital via Nepal. He looked after them for the next six months, although they made it plain that only they had the right to convert the natives. In fact, they sent messages to Rome requesting confirmation of their exclusive rights. After five years the affirmation arrived from Rome, and Desideri, sadly, had to depart.
During the waiting period, however, Desideri had not been idle. Having agreed not to take part in ordinary missionary work, he set about learning the Tibetan language, at the time gaining an insight into the Tibetan religion and customs which was not equalled for two hundred years. In 1721 his work was finished and he showed it to the Tibetans. Basically it was a studied condemnation of Buddhism and a justification of his own faith: the work caused a great stir and: ‘My house suddenly became the scene of incessant comings and goings by all sorts of people, chiefly learned men and professors, who came from the monasteries and universities ... to apply for permission to see and read the book.’ He had written it in the Tibetan language. He found the Tibetans: ‘By nature kindly, virtuous and devout … they speak about [their belief] often with great affection and conscientiousness … they have the greatest esteem, veneration and respect for their Lamas and monks; would to God that the Christian Catholics showed one-hundredth part of such sentiments to the Prelates, Ecclesiastics and Religious of our Holy Catholic Church.’ [4] He confessed that he was: ‘Ashamed to have a heart so hard, that I did not know, love and serve Jesus ... as this people did a traitor, their deceiver.’ At this time the Buddhist faith was going through another period of revival and it remains something of a golden age for Buddhism and for Tibetan culture and influence generally.
Leaving Tibet via the Kuti (Nyalam) road, Desideri entered Nepal. He wrote an interesting description of his crossing of the ‘Langur’ mountain, which probably took him across the Tsong La (17,981 feet), lying between Dmgri Dzong and Nyalam and only 30 miles west of Shishapangma. This route had now been taken many times by the Catholic fathers.
Everyone [Desideri writcs] [5] suffers from violent headache, oppression in the chest and shortness of breath during the ascent, and often from fever, as happened to me. Although it was nearly the end of May there was deep snow, the cold was intense and the wind so penetrating that, although I was wrapped in woollen rugs, my lungs and heart were so affected that I thought my end was near. Many people chew roasted rice, cloves, cinnamon, Indian nuts, here called Sopari and Arecca [Areca nuts] by the Portuguese and others in India.[6] As the mountain cannot be crossed in one day, there is a large house for the use of travellers. But the difficulty of breathing is so great that many cannot remain indoors and are obliged to sleep outside. Only a short time before our passage, an aged Armenian merchant, who was on his way to Lhasa, died in this place in one night. All these ills cease when Mount Langur has been left behind. Many believe such discomforts are caused by exhalations from some minerals in the bowels of the mountain, but as until now no trace of these minerals has been discovered, I am inclined to think the keen penetrating air is to blame; I am the more persuaded of this because my chest and breathing became worse when I met the wind on the top of Langur, and also because many people were more affected inside the house where the air is made still thinner by the fire lit against the cold, than when sleeping in the open air. It would have been the reverse had the illness been caused by exhalations from minerals or pestilential vapours from the earth.[7]
Desideri left Nepal after gathering more information for his book,which also contained a short account of the Kingdom of Nepal. He continued into India and Agra, arriving there seven years and seven months after first setting out for Tibet. He then sailed from Madras to Europe for a well-earned rest after suffering years of physical hardship. He died in Rome, aged 48, in 1733, leaving a legacy of monumental intellectual efforts.
Desideri must stand as one of the great Asian explorers of all time. Though only a young man of 27, he displayed all the qualities of a veteran, gathering every scrap of information available at the start of his journey in Kashmir and displaying great drive and qualities of leadership amongst his travelling companions.
Unfortunately, his manuscripts were not unearthed until 1875 and were not actually published until 1904. It was only in this century, therefore, that this and other great missionary journeys were fully appreciated.
The Capuchins were finally expelled from Tibet in 1745 because their rather strong, inflexible attitude to religion upset the Tibetan monks.[8] They left few – if any – converts among the ‘heathen’ Tibetans. After 1720 the Chinese had tightened their grip on Tibet through the new-found power of the Manchu Emperor. Foreigners found access to Tibet increasingly difficult and two generations were to pass before the next Europeans entered Lhasa.
The famous Capuchin cartographer, d’Anville, did, however, produce a rough sketch map of the country to the north of Lhasa, placing a mountain named Tchomolungma in exactly the same position as that of the Everest Group. Whilst the true significance of Tchomolungma would not have been realized, it is, nevertheless, remarkable how much information of Southern Tibet the fathers accumulated.
During the 18th century the political problems of access to Tibet grew worse as Chinese xenophobia increased and they tried to create a buffer state between themselves and India. They were troubled by warlike Indian emperors, the aggressive Gurkhas of Nepal, as well as by the British, who were already spreading their power and influence towards the Himalayan regions of their newly-acquired domain.
The East India Company received its Charter from Queen Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600. The company was originally set up to tap the riches of the East Indies, formerly a monopoly of the Portuguese but gradually acquired more and more trading stations which were fortified against Portuguese and, later, French competition as well as against the native Indian Princes.
After Clive’s triumph against the French and the Moghul Viceroy, Suraj-ud-Doula, at Plassey in 1757 the power and influence of the Company moved north, towards the Himalayan states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, and only 10 years after the Battle of Plassey, a small military expedition under Captain Kinlock entered Nepal at the invitation of the King of Patan. The King and the Newari Kingdom were under attack from the expansive and warlike Gurkhas, and the British, fearing a disruption of the profitable trade from India through Nepal to Tibet and worried about Gurkha territorial expansion, agreed to help check the Gurkha advance. However this British intervention ended ignobly with the soldiers suffering horribly from malaria in the fever-ridden Terai region a few miles inside Nepalese territory. They never came to blows with the Gurkhas, who went on to overwhelm the Newari Kingdom.
Nevertheless the Company remained eager to see ‘whether trade can be opened with Nepaul [sic] and whether cloth and other European commodities may not find their way thence to Thibet, Lhassa and the Western parts of China’.
The year 1772 marked the start of Warren Hastings’s forward policy. As Governor of Bengal he displayed an active interest in promoting Company affairs north of the Himalaya. After a suc¬cessful military encounter in the little buffer state of Cooch Behar, where a Bhutanese army was defeated, Hastings followed through with a trade mission to the Deb Taja of Bhutan and the Panchen Lama in Tibet. For this delicate operation Hastings selected George Bogle, a 28-year-old Scot, one of the Company’s employees, and instructed him to investigate trade relations with Bhutan and with Tibet, as well as to make notes on the lie of the land, the customs of the people and their form of government.
It is difficult to ascertain how much prior knowledge of the proposed journey Hastings and Bogle were able to glean from the Jesuits. Desideri’s account remained locked away in Italian archives until two years after Bogle’s departure but snippets of information had been published, mostly in French and Italian but also, by the mid-18th century, in English, as in Astley’s Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1145–7.
The reports of the Capuchin Mission in Lhasa, Alphabetum Tibetarum, were published in Rome in 1762. An English version of Father du Halde’s monumental work Description de I’Empire de la Chine (Paris 1733) had appeared in 1742. This, together with a volume of 42 maps prepared by Jean Baptiste d’Anville, the French geographer, and produced in 1735, remained the standard work until well into the next century, although the sheets covering the southern part of Tibet were largely based upon the work of Lamas trained to survey and proved to be not so accurate as the more northerly sections. They were reasonably accurate so far as the river Tsangpo was concerned, but other rivers and also mountain ranges were not so well placed. But for the bare bones of the layout of the country, Bogle would have to go and discover the details for himself.
He went through the Assam Himalaya to Paro Dzong in Bhutan, along the Chumbi Valley and over the Tang La to Gyantse and Shigatse, returning in 1775 by the same route. Although Bogle was not able to proceed to Lhasa and had not taken surveyors in order to avoid upsetting the Tibetan authorities, he did nevertheless bring back a detailed report on the structure of government and religion as well as interesting notes on the customs of the people and Hastings expressed his ‘perfect satisfaction’ with the results of his mission. Strangely, Bogle never had a chance to follow up his first visit and renew his friendship with the Panchen Lama for both died within a few days of each other, Bogle of cholera and the Panchen Lama of smallpox, in 1779.
This same route was again followed by Ensign Samuel Turner in 1783. He was a first cousin of Hastings, who saw in Turner the ideal envoy to follow up and strengthen the rapport which Bogle had begun with the Panchen Lama. However, the course of history was to overwhelm Hastings’s plans for free trade. After the newly-united Nepalese invaded Tibet, the Chinese drove them out and tightened their grip on the Tibetan frontiers. The British-Tibetan initiative was at an end and the Company seemed to have given up any hope of reviving it. By the early 19th century they showed so little interest in Tibet that Thomas Manning, the eccentric British traveller and scholar, was unable to obtain much assistance for his proposed Tibetan visit and received little acknowledgement when he achieved what Bogle and Turner had failed to do and visited Lhasa in 1811. He was the first Briton to do so, and the last until 1904.
However, the notes and journal which Bogle, Turner and Manning left were valuable contributions to the geography of Southern Tibet and were used in the 1860s, when Britain revived its interest in this now ‘Forbidden Land’.
The Gurkhas, in 1791, had foolishly raided deep into Tibet. A force of 18,000 men marched up and through the Himalaya at Nyalam, one of the most difficult roads in the world on to the plateau. They attacked and plundered the venerated monastery of Tashi Lunpo by the town of Shigatse 200 miles away. Here resided the Tahi Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama himself in the Tibetan hierarchy. The Chinese retaliated in strength; hordes of them poured through the Himalaya via the Aran Gorge into Nepal in 1792. The Gurkhas appealed to the Company for military help and the envoy William Kirkpatrick was dispatched with a small escort under Ensign John Gerard. By the time they arrived, the Gurkhas had been decisively beaten only 12 miles from Kathmandu and the Chinese troops then withdrew before winter closed the passes. The terms were that the Nepalese would send a tribute of elephants, peacock plumes and rhinoceros horns to Peking every five years. Thus, as far as the Manchu Emperor was concerned, Nepal was now a ‘dependent nation’.[9]
Although Kirkpatrick remained in Nepal, under orders from the new Governor-General Cornwallis to negotiate a workable trade agreement, all official Tibetan correspondence had to be shown to the Chinese Governors, known as Amban, who were to be informed, on pain of death, of the presence of foreign travellers.
With trade and exploration impossible during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain organized Indian spies to unravel the mysteries of Tibet and to keep them informed of political developments between the Chinese and their unwilling buffer state. Meanwhile extensive surveying and exploratory work was carried out on the southern side of the Himalaya since the Surveyor-General of Bengal, Robert Colebrook, encouraged infantry officers to map any new country visited during campaigns and whilst on tours of duty. John Gerard, the Scotsman in charge of Kirkpatrick’s escort, had already sketched a map of the route to Kathmandu in 1792; now, between 1801 and 1803, Charles Crawford produced a map of the Kathmandu Valley from his own observations and a smaller scale map of the rest of Nepal from enquiries amongst the local inhabitants.
Crawford was the first to announce the great height of the ‘snowy range’ [10] while in 1810 Captain William Webb fixed the height of Dhaulagiri at 26,862 feet. This made it the highest mountain then known and the claim was ridiculed by contemporary geographers, who still held that the highest mountains were in the Andes of South America.
William Moorcroft, the great visionary explorer, was one of the first to work out the topography of the north-western boundaries of the Indian subcontinent. In 1812, disguised as a ‘fakir’, he was the first Englishman to see Mount Kailas and the sacred lakes that mirror its image. Whilst returning through the Kumaun district, he and his companion, Hyder Young Hearsey, an Anglo-Indian, were captured and mistreated by the Nepalese. They were released after the intervention of two influential Bhotia brothers, Bir Singh and Deb Singh. Their sons were to do a great deal more for the British Empire by way of exploring Tibet.
John Gerard had two nephews in the Survey Department, Dr J.G. Gerard and Captain Alexander Gerard, who proved to be every bit as adventurous as their uncle. From 1817 they travelled the Himalaya for four years, crossing nearly ‘every pass from Simla into the Baspa Valley’.[11] In an attempt on Leo Pargyal (22,280 feet) in the Zanska Range, they reached a height well over 19,000 feet at a time when there had only been a handful of ascents up Mont Blanc, and when Pillar Rock in the Lake District was still unclimbed. Their route was, according to Marco Pallis who climbed the peak in 1933, probably all on scree, but he thought that to have braved such an altitude in those days was remarkable, especially at a time when travel was so difficult and the peaks more isolated than now. They seem to have been motivated by a keen curiosity to see and to learn. ‘They published a diary which shows them to have been honest observers.’ [12] They went on to climb several peaks over 18,000 feet and thus became forever associated with the embryonic development of Himalayan mountaineering.
At the close of the Nepalese War the British agreed to respect the newly-established boundaries of the country with the exceptions only of a British resident at Kathmandu, and later British Gurkha recruiting officers and, infrequently, a survey officer to make specific calculations. So it was not until 1949 that mountaineers were given the opportunity of approaching Shishapangma from the south.
It was possible, however, to survey the Nepalese peaks from the Indian Plains and to calculate the highest summits. This was achieved by George Everest (1790–1866) who, from 1830 until 1843, was Surveyor-General and Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. During this period George Everest, with very few assistants, completed the measurement of the great meridional arc passing from Cape Comorin through the centre of India to the Himalaya which his predecessor, William Lambton, had begun in 1802. From the primary triangulations associated with his arc, it was then possible to work out a framework of triangulation covering the Himalaya, and to plot accurately the positions and estimate the heights of the main peaks without having to visit them.
Everest completed his Great Arc of the Meridian in 1841. It was, as Kenneth Mason, himself a former Superintendent of the Survey of India, says, ‘a stupendous achievement. He was a great organizer, a fine administrator and a tireless worker.’
In the second half of the 19th century, with a large and prosperous settlement of British in India, interest in the Northern
Frontier and curiosity about Tibet increased. There was concern too about the possibility of the ever-expanding Russian Empire spilling over into the Indian subcontinent. In 1864 Russia had taken Tashkent and it was only a matter of time before they would move up into the Pamir Mountains. It was estimated that during the previous hundred years the Russians had been expanding east and south into Asia at the rate of 55 miles a day. For all these reasons, the British took active steps to explore and survey Tibet.
In 1862 General J.T. Walker, the Superintendent of the Great Trigonomical Survey, encouraged Captain Montgomerie to train native Indian explorers in the use of surveying instruments and in the art of practical reconnaissance. When fully trained, it was proposed to send them beyond the Himalaya to carry out clandestine surveys disguised as merchants or holy men. Montgomerie, who was now one of the most experienced frontier explorers, undertook their training at Dehra Dun. He selected two Bhotias, Nain Singh and his cousin Mani Singh. It was their father (and uncle) who had secured the release of Moorcroft and Hearsey in 1812. They were not only ‘safe’ but also experienced travellers, for they had both explored with the Schlagintweit brothers. They also had the advantage of being closely allied culturally with the Tibetans, both in customs and in speech. During their two-year training, they were not only instructed in the use of the sextant pocket compass and how to observe latitude and estimate altitude, but also shown how this might be accomplished and recorded surreptitiously. They were drilled to count every step, using the beads in their rosaries and to keep records hidden within their prayer wheels. They were equipped with hollowed-out walking sticks to carry a boiling point thermometer and a compass disguised as an amulet, worn round the neck. Special travelling boxes were made with false bottoms to take the other instruments and materials with which to change their identity if they were under suspicion.
After many adventures Nain Singh reached the Tsangpo and then joined a caravan that helped him reach Lhasa on 10 January 1866. He returned, crossing out of Tibet into Kumaun, having paced most of his 1,200 mile route.
By 29 June 1866 he was back at Mussoorie. From his calculations and traverse notes, Montgomerie was able to complete a map 16 miles to the inch of Tibet’s main southern trade route, including 600 miles of the Tsangpo River. So successful had the experiment proved that other native explorers were despatched northwards to feed information to the British. They were the ears and eyes of the Indian Empire and became known as the Pundits. Kenneth Mason writes (in Abode of Snow, p. 86):
To my generation, the story of this is fascinating. Kipling has completely caught the spirit of the pundit period, when Harree Baba the Pathan horsedealer and the Indian Civilian were real and adventurous characters, when the Great Game in Asia was on and when the frontier mists were almost impenetrable. These characters are not overdrawn and Kim himself is a type of youth born in India, adventurous, loyal and devoted, who learnt to do great things.
Not only did the Pundits travel in great secrecy, their training was conducted in the same manner, they were never referred to by name but only by numbers or letters. Nain Singh was ‘No. 1’ or simply ‘The Pundit’. He went on to check out goldfields in Western Tibet and then helped in the training of several more Pundits.
In 1871 Hari Ram, alias No. 9 or M.H., made the first modern circuit of the Everest Group. Starting at Darjeeling, he then went on to cross the Singalila range, following partly in Sir Joseph Hooker’s footsteps. After crossing the main Himalayan divide by way of the Tipta La (16,740 feet) he continued over unknown ground and, after many adventures, reached Shigatse. Then he turned south-westward to Sokya Dzong and Dingri Dzong, mapping all the way. He crossed the Tsong La (an early Jesuit route) and followed the Po Chu of Tibet through Nyalam into Nepal, where its name changes to Bhote Kosi, and continued south, through Nepal, to reach India before the end of the year. Hari Ram, therefore, contributed a good deal of information from behind the highest part of the Himalayan range.
In 1903 Curzon resolved to settle any fears of Russian incursion by setting up the Younghusband mission to Tibet, ostensibly to clear up trading problems and end border disputes. The mission was strengthened in the face of Tibetan intransigence until, finally, in 1904 some 12 hundred British and Indian soldiers, 16 thousand pack animals and 10 thousand coolies, armed with artillery and Maxim guns, crossed the 14,000 foot-high Jelap La and engaged a force of Tibetan soldiers, armed only with matchlocks and swords, at the tiny village of Guru. Although Younghusband was hoping for a bloodless victory, fighting broke out as the Sikhs tried to disarm the Tibetans. Only minutes later, half the Tibetan army were dead or wounded and the slaughter continued even as the Tibetans slowly walked away, heads bowed, ignoring the bullets that continued to crash into their ranks. The British forces suffered six minor casualties. This, the last throw of the dice in the Great Game, was not a glorious chapter in British Empire history.
After a further skirmish near Gyangtse, when the Tibetans were again routed, Younghusband was free to march into Lhasa, the first Englishman to do so since the time of Warren Hastings. Whilst the mission had been conducted with great distinction and determination, often in desperately cold weather, the British were unable to find any Russians nor to negotiate with the ruler of Tibet, for he, the Dalai Lama, had fled to Buddhist Outer Mongolia. The treaty that was drawn up with the monks of the Buddhist Hierarchy in Lhasa quickly lapsed in the face of political pressure in Europe and, later, with the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907. Younghusband, however, showed great moderation during negotiations and established, for the first time, a bond of friendship and trust between the British and the Tibetans. Although it would require several years of political manoeuvring before the way was clear for mountaineers to visit the north side of the Himalaya and to make an attempt on Mount Everest in particular, at least the door was now partly ajar.
One direct result of the Younghusband mission of 1903–4 was the survey journey along the Tsangpo under the leadership of Captain Rawling. Captains Rawling,[13] Ryder[14] and Wood and Lieutenant Bailey were the first Europeans to traverse the upper Tsangpo since Desideri in 1716, yet they never mention the Italian Jesuit.
The closest point they reached to Shishapangma was the ferry crossing at Lelung, 14,400 feet high, by the Tsangpo, although they did make a visit south from their east-west Tsangpo Valley route and establish that the grassland plateau seemed to stretch right up to the Himalaya, giving relatively easy access. A vast area to the south of the Tsangpo watershed remained unsurveyed and almost unknown except for the sketch maps made by the explorer Hari Ram (known as M.H.) in 1871–2 and 1885. However, the surveyors attached to the 1903–4 mission had carried out a detailed survey of the lines of communication through Sikkim, the Chumbi Valley and Tibet, south of Lhasa. During the course of exploring and surveying some 40,000 square miles of territory north of the Himalaya they showed conclusively that there was no mountain higher than Everest. Also Younghusband had gained a tentative agreement from the Tibetan authorities to allow mountaineers into Tibet. He obviously had Everest in mind. All of this was to be of value for the first Mount Everest Expedition, which took place 17 years after Younghusband’s mission withdrew.
1. See MacGregor, pp. 25-74[back]
2. See Filippi, pp. 19-26[back]
3. See Wessels[back]
4. See Filippi, p. 191[back]
5. See Filippi, pp. 309—12 and notes to the Fourth Book, pp. 426-7[back]
6. See Rockhill, p. 149. (Rockhill says that in Central Asia everyone attributes the painful effects of the altitude to pestilential vapours from the soil. The Tibetans call the sickness ‘La dug’ or ‘pass poison’ and account for it partly by the quantities of rhubarb that grow on the mountains. Chewing garlic or smoking tobacco are supposed to be antidotes; garlic is even given to the animals affected by the sickness.)[back]
7. See Messner, p. 159. (Messner writes: ‘I ate a lot of garlic before I set off for Nanga Parbat, as I had read that it increased the elasticity of the vascular walls.’)[back]
8. See MacGregor, pp. 92-111[back]
9. In Lhasa a memorial commemorating the campaign was erected. The inscription, translated by Sir Charles Bell early this century, reads: ‘The glorious Chinese Army crossed the mountains as if they were traversing a level plain; they crossed rivers with great waves and narrow gorges as though they were mere streams; they fought seven battles and gained seven victories.’ (See Morris, p. 185)[back]
10. See Mason, p. 630[back]
11. See Mason, pp. 69-74[back]
12. See Pallis, p. 64[back]
13. See Rawling, pp. 212-15[back]
14. He became Colonel C.H.D. Ryder, Surveyor-General of India.[back]