7 The High Road to Tibet

7

 

The High Road to Tibet

 

Tucked away in Britain’s Royal Collection is an unusual painting done in Calcutta, now Kolkata, in the late eighteenth century. It is the work of Tilly Kettle, the first well-known English portrait artist to travel to India, and shows Tibet’s Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, sitting cross-legged on a dais. On the left of the picture, standing near a window looking on, is a young Scotsman in Bhutanese dress. Through the window is an idealised version of the Himalaya: the young man, we’re being told, has just arrived from the other side of these high mountains. Two attendants, one dressed as a monk, stand either side of the lama. Another figure bows slightly as he presents the Panchen Lama with a white ceremonial scarf, a kada, signifying purity and compassion. Seated under the window are two further local men, relaxed and informal, puffing on long-stemmed tobacco pipes, rather unlikely in a Tibetan monastery. But while much in this painting is invented or stylised, its significance is unmistakeable: it represents the first meeting between political Europe, in the form of a representative of the East India Company, and one of the most powerful figures in the spiritual and temporal world of Tibet. It was an encounter of genuine warmth and personal friendship, but it came at a pivotal moment in Himalayan history, and marked a shift that would lead inexorably, if not inevitably, towards the invasion and occupation of Tibet by Chinese forces in 1950.

Tilly Kettle’s painting was presented to George III, although it’s unclear

who did the presenting. It was probably not the Scotsman, whose name was George Bogle. At the time it was painted, most probably in 1775, Bogle was facing financial hardship, sending home as much money as he could to service his family’s debts. It’s more likely that Bogle’s patron Warren Hastings, the embattled first governor general of India, acquired the picture. It was useful propaganda in his campaign to wrest back control of the Company’s supreme council in Calcutta, snatched away from him with the passing of the Regulating Act of 1773: the British government’s attempt to get a grip of the management of the East India Company and its spiralling debts.

Many have heard of the Boston Tea Party and the American War of

Independence; few understand the links between these famous events and the financial woes of the East India Company. Its plight was exposed in 1772 when a London banker fled to France, having lost £300,000 shorting East India Company stock. This prompted a credit crunch, which meant the Company couldn’t refinance its debt, ironically devastating its share price. To survive, the Company needed to sell its vast holdings of tea in London as quickly as possible. The Company wasn’t allowed to sell tea direct to the American colonies and had to pay duty on it in London before selling it on to intermediaries. Such a large mark-up put the Company at a disadvantage; American consumers were more than happy to drink cheaper contraband tea smuggled in from Dutch wholesalers, who dealt with the Chinese through their colony at Batavia (today’s Indonesian capital, Jakarta). To protect the nation’s stake in the East India Company and keep it afloat, in May 1773 the British parliament passed the Tea Act, giving it the right to ship tea direct to America without paying duty in London first. This outraged legitimate tea merchants in Boston and other American cities and led to direct action – the so-called Tea Party – to prevent tea being unloaded.

Like a modern global bank, the East India Company had become too big

to fail but was forced to pay a price for the government’s continuing support: the Regulating Act, passed a month later. This was aimed squarely at the East India Company itself, an attempt to cut corruption, limit dividends and reorganise its dismal administration. In return, the Company’s debts were refinanced. Warren Hastings was appointed governor general of not just Calcutta but all three presidencies in India, laying the foundation for British rule over the whole subcontinent. In the blink of an eye, India’s fortunes had been made collateral to the East India Company’s experiment in globalisation. Despite these reforms, the Company still had deep structural problems. Although it had a monopoly on British trade with China, the Company was restricted to one port, Canton, the modern city of Guangzhou, and found itself effectively shut out of Chinese markets and China’s interior. All China wanted in return for its tea and silk was silver, creating a huge trade imbalance for the British. Any route to freer trade with China was worth considering, even one as remote as Tibet.

Bogle arrived in Calcutta as a writer, or clerk, in 1770 in the midst of the

cataclysmic Bengal famine. He wrote to his brother of the nightmarish impact:

There were men employed to pick up the Dead Bodies in the Streets, and throw them into the River, and from the 1st to the 9th of last Month no less than twelve Hundred Carcasses were found – in the streets of Calcutta – that had not died of Pestilence, or Sickness, but absolutely of Hunger.

The situation was even worse in Murshidabad, the once proud Mughal capital of Bengal, where as many as five hundred people a day were dying. The resident there reported cannibalism, something Bogle also mentioned in his letters, and an outbreak of smallpox that deepened the tragedy. Whole villages simply disappeared. The East India Company’s response was to increase taxation to meet a drop in revenues, wealth that flowed abroad to pay shareholders in priority over preventing future disasters. There were allegations of famine profiteering by British employees of the Company acting in their own interest.

Until very recently, the kada, the ceremonial white scarf being offered to

the Panchen Lama in Kettle’s painting was captioned by the Royal Collection as a bolt of cloth, a sales sample meant to lever open the floodgates of trade between Bengal and Tibet, and ultimately China. The mistake was understandable. Bogle did travel to Tibet with samples – European cutlery, Bengali cloth, mirrors, clocks, glassware, a string of pearls (which was of particular interest to a great Tibetan lama), thermometers, telescopes and a toy that gave off a small electric shock – all part of the effort to open new markets and boost profits, a door-to-door salesman on the roof of the world. Hastings had also given him a shopping list, particularly for those goods that were easy to transport through the mountains: gold, precious stones, musk and less obvious items, like plants used to dye fabrics. This was supplemented by a second private request from Hastings to bring back shawl goats and a pair of yaks, ‘cattle which bear what are called cowtails’, meaning yak tails, fresh ripe walnuts and any other seeds that looked useful, ‘ginseng especially’. In fact, Bogle should bring back anything that might persuade ‘Persons of Taste in England’ to open their purses, and anything else he judged of interest to the endlessly curious Hastings.

The Panchen Lama, whose name was Lobsang Palden Yeshe, was both a

great religious leader and a shrewd politician: he understood very well the purpose of George Bogle’s mission and the acquisitive nature of his employers. Bogle mentions this in his despatches, how the lama had been warned against allowing Bogle’s visit, that the East India Company ‘was like a great King and fond of War and Conquest, and as my Business and that of my People is to pray to God, I was afraid to admit any Fringies [from the Farsi farangi, meaning Franks, or Europeans] into the Country’. The lama’s presentation of himself as a simple holy man with little experience of the world, a naïf who had never before seen a European, was cheerfully disingenuous. At the time of Bogle’s visit, with the eighth Dalai Lama in Lhasa still a teenager, the Panchen Lama was the most powerful individual in Tibet.

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Tilly Kettle’s painting showed the Panchen Lama in yellow silk robes, a colour and fabric emblematic of the Chinese imperial court but also of the order of monks the lama belonged to, the Geluk, ‘the virtuous school’, for their strict monasticism, often referred to by Europeans as the ‘yellow hats’; Bogle describes the Panchen Lama wearing ‘a mitre-shaped cap of yellow broadcloth, with long bars lined with red satin’. The idea of a yellow hat had been borrowed from another Tibetan Buddhist school, long defunct, to give the Geluk-pa, the ‘people of Geluk’, their own identity as they established themselves in a crowded spiritual field. The depth of history behind these symbols and the political complexity they hinted at were almost wholly new to the British: how the Panchen Lama came to be the power that he was; the nature of his relationship with the centre at Lhasa; the rival factions that threatened him; the strangeness of reincarnation. It needed a sprightly mind to start unpicking this knot; luckily for the Company, it had Bogle.

By the time Europe – its missionaries, traders and explorers – first

encountered Tibet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Geluk-pa dominated its political scene. When foreign actors dealt with Tibet, they did so through the Geluk-pa. The order’s colossal monastic institutions not only exerted political control but dominated the economy as well. Monasteries were significant businesses in their own right with aristocratic patrons adding lustre to their art and treasures. This was what Bogle witnessed. Yet the origins of the Geluk-pa were a far cry from the pomp and wealth on display at the Panchen Lama’s monastic seat, Tashilhunpo, in the town of Shigatse.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, under the religious

patronage of the Yuan dynasty, the Sakya school of Buddhism had dominated Tibet, eclipsing the other major lineages, the Nyingma and Kagyu. The Sakya was favoured by Kublai Khan, prompting the Sakya leader Phagpa to recruit Newari craftsmen from Kathmandu, including the famous Arniko. Then, as Mongol power fractured in the mid fourteenth century, central Tibet, meaning the provinces of U (including the city of Lhasa) and Tsang, became contested space. As the Yuan faded, and with it Sakya power, Changchub Gyaltsen, a young and charismatic Kagyu leader from the famous monastery of Phagmodru, ‘sow’s ferry crossing’, rose to govern large parts of Tibet from his capital at Nedong, some hundred kilometres south-east of Lhasa, extending his influence to Kham in eastern Tibet and north-east to Amdo.

With the weight of their foreign overlord removed, many Tibetans looked

back with pride to the era of the divine tsenpos, the empire and Tibet’s adoption of Buddhism. Aiming to revive the spirit of Songtsen Gampo, Changchub and his immediate successors built new fortresses or dzong and encouraged a renaissance in Buddhist philosophy and translation, and tolerance also between different Buddhist schools. Among those who emerged from this period of spiritual freedom and renaissance was perhaps the single most influential Tibetan student of Buddhism in history: Tsongkhapa, ‘the man from onion valley’. It was under his influence that the Geluk school was founded and rose to prominence, changing the course of Tibetan history.

Tsongkhapa’s father Lubum Ge was Mongolian. His birth, in the Amdo

town of Tsongkha in 1357, glittered with miraculous portents. Where a drop of blood from his umbilical cord fell to earth, a sandalwood tree emerged. His mother Shingza Acho later built a stupa here and in time the site became Kumbum monastery, among the most important in the Geluk tradition. Aged eight he became a novitiate monk and was given the name Lobsang Drakpa from his tutor Dondrub Rinchen, a master in important Buddhist tantras that would form the basis of the Geluk school and a student in the Kadam school of philosophy founded by Atisa, the translator Changchub O had brought to Tibet during the second diffusion. Aged sixteen, Tsongkhapa left for central Tibet, but he couldn’t settle at one monastery; his restless intellect drove him from place to place in a wide-ranging exploration of Tibetan Buddhism’s different strands. He met a Sakya monk, Rendawa, with the same questioning outlook, who tutored him through his exams and gave him the confidence to continue on his path. To thank him, Tsongkhapa wrote a short verse in his praise. Later Rendawa returned it, having crossed out his own name and replaced it with that of his former student. The verse became known as the ‘Migtsema’:

Avalokitesvara, great treasure of non-objectifying compassion, Manjushri, master of stainless wisdom,

Vajrapani, destroyer of the entire host of demons, Tsongkhapa, crown jewel of the sages of the land of snow …

Most important was Tsongkhapa’s time at a small hermitage called Drowa Gon, near Lhodrak, one of the few Kadam temples that had not been absorbed by the Sakya; here he learned more of Atisa’s teachings with its abbot, Drubchen Namkha Gyeltsen. Later, with his tutor Rendawa, he taught for three months at Reting, the original Kadam monastery founded by the followers of Atisa soon after his death. As his learning deepened, important themes emerged that would help define Geluk philosophy: an adherence to logic and the patient accumulation of knowledge being the groundwork for powerful, intuitive insight. Some of his views remain controversial even now, particularly his interpretation of madhyamaka, the ‘middle way’, which is central to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. His most famous work, written in his mid forties while at Reting, was The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment.

Plagued from youth with a bad back, he found it increasingly difficult to

travel and spent more and more time in Lhasa. By then his tutors had become his students and hundreds flocked to hear him speak about the dharma. In 1409, he instituted the Monlam Chenmo, or Great Prayer Festival, still celebrated around the time of the Tibetan New Year, or Losar. That same year, persuaded by his many followers to commission a permanent home, he founded Ganden monastery near Lhasa, Ganden meaning ‘joyful’. Ganden was followed in 1416 by Drepung monastery and in 1419, the year of his death, Sera: these are the three great Geluk monastic establishments centred on Songtsen Gampo’s ancient capital. Before then, Tibet’s monastic strength had lain elsewhere; now Lhasa was the centre.

At first, Tsongkhapa’s followers were known as Ganden-pa, people from

Ganden, but the name Geluk-pa became popular after his death, meaning ‘virtuous ones’. The behaviour of the sangha, meaning ‘assembly’, the monastic community, had been of intense importance to Tsongkhapa. He is sometimes compared to Martin Luther for his reforming zeal; he certainly adhered to vows of celibacy and abstention from drinking alcohol or eating meat, but he was more ecumenical than Luther. Most importantly, unlike earlier famous schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Geluk emerged from within the Tibetan world and wasn’t directly inspired or fed by scholars in the holy land of India, a Buddhist world that had by Tsongkhapa’s time ceased to exist.

In his lifetime the monasteries founded in Tsongkhapa’s name held a few

hundred monks, but within a century Drepung alone had ten thousand and Sera something similar. Given the small Tibetan population, the size of these vast establishments was, according to some historians, a brake on Tibet’s economic development. They were certainly a brake on population growth, but given the physical limits on Tibetan agriculture that was not necessarily a bad thing. The Geluk monasteries also came to dominate Tibetan politics, which entered a period of civil strife a few years after Tsongkhapa’s death as the Phagmodru dynasty began to unravel. Clan rivalry between the provinces of U and Tsang spilled over into religious sectarianism. Gedun Drub, one of Tsongkhapa’s younger students, took the new Geluk school to Tsang and founded a Geluk monastery at Shigatse: Tashilhunpo. In this way he extended the influence of his order into a place with strong historical links to Sakya and older Kagyu schools: an outpost of the new Buddhist world founded at Lhasa. Here Gedun Drub remained, choosing to be reincarnated after death in the body of a young monk.

The role of reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual lineages can

seem opaque and esoteric, although George Bogle took it in his stride. Reincarnation itself is of course part of Buddhism: the cycle of life, death and rebirth is part of the journey for all living things, returned to earth involuntarily as a consequence of negative emotions and actions, or karma. From around the twelfth century some great Buddhist teachers began choosing to return rather than going on to nirvana and the bliss of self-extinction. They did so, they said, for the benefit of all sentient beings. Such reincarnate lamas, or tulku, would predict the location of their rebirth and even their parents. In the thirteenth century, Rangjung Dorje, leader of the Karma Kagyu school, the largest within the Kagyu tradition, formalised this process, combining his choice of reincarnation with the lineage he led. This innovation would have a profound impact on Tibetan society, lifting Buddhist lineages, in theory if not in practice, beyond the reach of secular power. Religious authorities took charge of selecting and educating their next leader. In this way, they transmitted their particular philosophical strand to the leader of the next generation, who became a temporary host or platform for an enduring ideal.

The long-established aristocratic clans and the country’s immense

religious establishments had now become the two most powerful forces within Tibet, but finding a political structure that met the interests of both proved intractable. Eventually foreign powers were dragged back into the equation. In 1578, Gedun Drub’s third reincarnation, a lama called Sonam Gyatso, accepted an invitation from the Mongol leader Altan Khan to renew the priest–patron relationship his forebear Kublai Khan had enjoyed with the Sakya. Altan Khan gave Sonam Gyatso the Mongolian name Dalai Lama, ‘Dalai’ being a translation of his ordination name ‘Gyatso’: meaning ‘great ocean’. Sonam Gyatso respectfully backdated this new title to include his two previous incarnations and so as a consequence Gedun Drub was counted as the first Dalai Lama. The fourth Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso, conveniently reappeared in the body of a descendant of Altan Khan, but by then Mongol power had faltered and the Geluk-pa were under pressure. This foreign-born Dalai Lama, needing approval, persuaded the abbot of Tashilhunpo, Choekyi Gyaltsen to come to Drepung monastery in Lhasa, where the Dalai Lamas then had their seat. Choekyi Gyaltsen soon became deeply involved in the increasingly turbulent political situation across the region. Lhasa, part of U province, was now under the control of a king from Tsang called Karma Phuntsog Namgyal. His spiritual allegiance was to the rival Kagyu lineage the Karmapa; the Dalai Lama didn’t have remotely the power he would come to acquire later.

In 1617 the fourth Dalai Lama died and for a while Choekyi Gyaltsen

applied a brake to the search for his reincarnation. Two years later, the last vestiges of the Phagmodru regime in U collapsed as the Tsang laid siege to its capital at Nedong. Lacking the support and protection of the Phagmodru, Geluk monks and their Mongolian patrons became restless. To prevent violence, Choekyi allowed the search for the fifth Dalai Lama to proceed. A candidate had already been identified in secret, a boy who had attracted interest from several rival Buddhist schools because of his exceptional promise. And as he himself would later joke, the boy failed hopelessly in one of the crucial tasks that marked out a reincarnated lama: identifying the possessions of his predecessor. Yet this boy, the fifth Dalai Lama, ordained as Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, would be the making of the lineage. It was the ‘Great Fifth’ who built the world famous Potala on the old site of Songtsen Gampo’s palace, which still dominates the modern city of Lhasa. He also recognised Choekyi Gyaltsen as the Panchen Lama, ‘Panchen’ being a portmanteau word from pandit and chenpo, meaning ‘great scholar’. This new lineage was retrospectively extended back to another of Tsongkhapa’s students, Khedrup Je. This calculation made Choekyi the fourth Panchen Lama.

As a boy, the Dalai Lama’s power rested with his regent Sonam

Choephel, a senior monk from Ganden; more than anyone, Sonam Choephel was the architect of the Geluk’s rise to power. Securing that power was Gushi Khan, a Khoshut Mongol leader from the tribe that had superseded Altan Khan’s descendants and defeated rival Mongol supporters of the Karma Kagyu school. In 1642, civil strife ended, or at least paused, as Gushi Khan invested the fifth Dalai Lama with both temporal and spiritual control of Tibet at Tashilhunpo. The Karmapa, leader of the Karma Kagyu, had already fled into exile in Bhutan. The new government, known as the Ganden Phodrang, would govern Tibet until China’s occupation in the 1950s. The impression many in the West have of the Tibetan state is that of the Phodrang, created under the fifth Dalai Lama’s rule: it was during his lifetime that the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in Tibet. So central was the Great Fifth to Tibetan stability that when he died in 1682, his chief minister, or desi, Sangye Gyatso, kept the news secret for another fifteen years, while the succession was managed.

Sangye Gyatso proved a capable young man, acquiring Ngari in western

Tibet, formerly the Guge kingdom, from its rulers in Ladakh, but his attempts to steer Tibet into the future came unstuck. Gushi Khan’s grandson Lajang attempted to reassert Mongol control of Tibet and captured the sixth Dalai Lama, using artillery against Drepung monastery in the process. (Sangye Gyatso himself was decapitated, not by Lajang but by one of Lajang’s wives, a Tibetan noblewoman. Gyatso had, the story goes, offered her as a wager over a game of chess and lost.) When the sixth Dalai Lama died in 1706 on his way into exile, Lajang tried to replace him with a monk of a similar age, widely believed to be his own son. He also behaved warmly towards the newly arrived Christian missionaries in Lhasa, including the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri, who believed Lajang might be converted. The missionaries would bear witness to the catastrophe that followed.

The Geluk monasteries of Lhasa turned against Lajang. Someone who

treated the lineage of the Dalai Lama so casually and flirted with a foreign religion couldn’t possibly be in charge. They welcomed, initially at least, the interest of a rival band of Mongols, the Dzungar, followers of the Geluk school, who fell on Tibet with astonishing ferocity, reigniting sectarian violence and pitching the country into chaos. Lajang was murdered attempting to escape and many Nyingma monasteries were destroyed. Only with the intervention of a powerful new dynasty in China opposed to the Dzungars was order restored.

While the Great Fifth ruled in Lhasa, the Manchu dynasty, the ‘Great

Qing’, had been rising in China, a process completed during the long reign of the Kangxi emperor, each of the dynasty holding their own imperial name. The Qing were not Han Chinese, but part of a tribal confederation from Manchuria in northern China, descended from the Jurchen, closely related to other northern Asian populations, including the Mongols. Lajang Khan had been a proxy of the Kangxi emperor, who had watched in horror as Lajang mismanaged the situation before the Dzungar, his Mongol enemies, set fire to Tibet. He ordered a Qing army to restore order and drive out the Mongols. The Qing then reordered the government, in the process absorbing some portions of historical Tibet into the Qing Empire. (This included parts of Amdo: the rhubarb trade, centred on modern Gansu, was of particular interest to the Qing.)

Unluckily for Tibet’s new government, the Kangxi emperor died in 1722

and Tibet was plunged once again into sectarian war. Opposing sides used alliances with competing Mongol factions and the Qing Empire to snatch advantage. The Qing saw the Panchen Lama as a useful counterweight to the immense power of the Dalai Lama and tried to set him up in his own semi-independent polity: the origin of China’s particular interest in Tashilhunpo. Only in 1751, little more than two decades before the East India Company sent George Bogle to Tibet, was the situation finally settled. The Qing constituted a new government comprising a cabinet, or kashag, of four ministers, with the Dalai Lama as head of state. Two Qing officials, known as ambans, were charged with maintaining Qing imperial interests.

This was the world of the sixth Panchen Lama, Lobsang Palden Yeshe,

one of deep divisions only recently healed and a new foreign overlord to consider. The Qing were deeply suspicious of Europe’s rising power and the Geluk remembered the threat missionaries had presented during the rule of Lajang Khan. Tibet was acutely conscious of the dangers of inviting further foreign intervention. Bogle would witness how China kept an arm’s length control of its western frontiers. The Panchen Lama himself understood the importance of intelligence, keeping abreast of any threat to Tibet’s fragile peace. He managed a complex network of traders and informants who kept him apprised not only of Qing court politics but the world on the other side of the mountains, in the holy land of India, where a new, foreign mercantile power had risen. Among them was Purangir, the man who had led Bogle into his presence and most probably the figure offering a scarf to the lama in Tilly Kettle’s painting.

In Europe, it is still the first Europeans who travelled through the

Himalaya who are given recognition for their sense of adventure and courage. Yet more often than not they relied heavily on the knowledge and negotiating skills of others, travellers speaking several languages whose agendas were consequently concealed from their immediate employers. Purangir was just such a man. Fluent in Mongolian and Tibetan, among other languages, he spent his life travelling the length and breadth of Asia for masters of different faiths, including several assignments for the East India Company, juggling competing interests, seeing everything but giving little away: part monk, part spy, part trader.

Purangir, then in his mid twenties, was a gosain, a sannyasi or monk

ordained into the monastic orders known as the Dasnami, associated with Adi Sankara, the Keralan who had returned Garhwal to Hinduism centuries before. Dasnami means ‘ten names’, or ‘ten schools’: Purangir was a giri, meaning a member of the ‘mountain’ school, and ordained at Joshimath, close to Badrinath, northernmost of the four maths, or monasteries, that Adi Sankar founded. In the sixteenth century, sannyasi had been organised into bands of warrior-monks to defend Hinduism against the Mughals, groups that had in Bogle’s day degenerated into gangs of bandits available for hire: Jaya Prakash Malla, for example, had hired six hundred of them to stave off the Gorkhalis as they closed in on Kathmandu.

These gangs plagued everyone, from Prithvi Narayan Shah to the East

India Company, hiding out in the jungles of the terai before making raids. As we shall see, sannyasi almost killed the Bengal surveyor James Rennell in 1766 on the fringes of the Bhutanese Himalaya. Famine had brought fresh raids from these gangs, so much so that Hastings banned them from the Company’s territory. Sannyasi could be men of integrity and learning, like Purangir, but it’s also possible the gosain’s status – and the fierce reputation that accompanied it – protected Bogle on his journey through the same country where Rennell was attacked.

Gosain were required in theory either to be resident in their monastery or

else on the road, travelling as mendicant pilgrims. The freedom of movement such holy men enjoyed, slipping easily between different cultures, presented huge opportunities for trade and the acquisition of valuable information. By the eighteenth century, they had come to dominate trade across northern India in valuable commodities like silk and precious stones, using their monastic bases as trading houses and diversifying into money lending and land ownership. They were particularly strong at Benares on the Ganges. Tibetan gold and musk, as well as pilgrimage sites like Kailas, drew gosain across the Himalaya, trading coral and pearls in return. Purangir’s currency was information, gathered as he travelled through the mountains: a walking encyclopaedia and a soul of discretion. His relationship with the Panchen Lama was especially close. There were spiritual synergies between Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu monks like Purangir, a shared knowledge of tantric practice, and the Panchen Lama built a refuge for them at Tashilhunpo. For the lama, India was the holy land but like many Tibetans he feared the heat and disease, especially smallpox, to which north Asians were susceptible. The knowledge Purangir imported was worth the expense.

In the spring of 1774, Purangir, accompanied by the Panchen Lama’s

Tibetan servant Pema, delivered a letter from the Panchen Lama to Warren Hastings at Calcutta. It was written in Persian, the diplomatic language of northern India, and accompanied with gifts: Tibetan woollen cloth, gold, both dust and ingots, and musk. The subject of the letter was military action taken by the British to expel Bhutanese fighters from the small Indian state of Cooch Behar in the foothills of the eastern Himalaya. The Bhutanese believed they had the right to appoint Cooch Behar’s ruler: its ousted raja Dharendra Narayan, still a minor, thought otherwise and had sought help from the East India Company to regain his throne. Warren Hastings, sensing an opportunity, had offered to get rid of the Bhutanese, if the raja paid the cost of doing so. He also demanded half the king’s revenues for the Company’s continuing protection. The raja had no choice but to agree; Cooch Behar essentially gave up its sovereignty. To stop the British, the desi, or political leader of Bhutan, a man called Zhidar, sought help from Prithvi Narayan Shah in Kathmandu and from Assam to the east. Before help could arrive a small British force had been despatched, and while its commander and many of his troops succumbed to malaria in the jungles of the terai, the Bhutanese were driven back. In the wake of this setback, Zhidar had been ousted. (His use of forced labour and diplomatic overtures to the Qing emperor had already offended the ordinary Bhutanese.) He went into exile at Tashilhunpo, seat of the Panchen Lama, who was now offering to mediate in the dispute, so recently and decisively concluded, on behalf of the Bhutanese who, he claimed, in a considerable stretch of the facts, were Tibetan subjects. In this way, the Company tripped over the interests of Tibet, just as they had a few years earlier with the abortive Kinloch expedition to Nepal.

This letter was an unexpected but welcome opportunity for Warren

Hastings. As a young man he had been the protégé of Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey had secured the Company’s future in India. Like Bogle, Hastings had started as a clerk, in 1750, a diligent worker who mastered Urdu and Persian in his spare time. His appreciation and understanding of Indian politics and culture had been put to good use in expanding the Company’s influence. (Early in his career he had been appalled at the corruption and greed he had witnessed in his fellow officers. Yet thirteen years after Bogle returned from Tibet, Hastings would be subject to one of the most extraordinary trials in British history, prosecuted by the philosopher Edmund Burke and playwright Richard Sheridan for similar misconduct in what became a public airing of Britain’s conduct in India.) In the mid 1770s, Hastings was in his mid forties, slight, almost ascetic, dome-headed in Tilly Kettle’s portrait of him, magisterially powerful but fizzing too, always curious about his sphere of influence. On the day in late March 1774 that Purangir arrived in his office with the letter from the Panchen Lama, Hastings had his council’s approval for a mission to Tibet. Given British ignorance of the Himalaya (was Bhutan another name for Tibet?) a dependable but open and quick-witted young man was required to lead the mission, someone intellectually dynamic, like Hastings himself, but also an adventurer who could charm his way out of trouble: such was Bogle.

Hastings had a soft spot for young Scots, but there were plenty of other

reasons to like George. The historian Kate Teltscher described him as ‘playful, penetrating, self-deprecating and shrewd’, qualities that shine through his account of his Tibetan adventure. This wasn’t published until a century after his journey, when his descendants handed over a box brimming with papers to the honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Clements Markham. Hastings had sent a copy of Bogle’s manuscript to his friend Samuel Johnson, after Johnson sent Hastings A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, but somewhat undersold it as a mere curiosity. Bogle’s rich story lay among Johnson’s papers, apparently ignored. The Highlander spirit touched both accounts, although Bogle proved far more curious and tolerant of mountain culture than Johnson.

Bogle’s father was the wealthy Glasgow merchant George Bogle of

Daldowie, one of the Tobacco Lords who made their fortunes during the city’s heyday as an elegant commercial centre with comparatively fast links to the American colonies. His education included six months studying logic at Edinburgh University, aged fourteen, before a long apprenticeship in the family business, now run by his elder brother Robert. The family had powerful connections, such as Henry Dundas, Tory politician, pillar of the Scottish Enlightenment and supporter of British influence in India. Jobs in the East India Company were hazardous, as the rapidly filling cemetery at Calcutta showed: around half of those who arrived in Bengal died there. Yet a position with the Company was a golden opportunity for younger sons to get rich quick. That possibility would soon become an issue for the whole Bogle family. After George had been in Calcutta for two years, the same credit crunch that tipped the East India Company towards disaster also ruined the family firm. Bogle’s brother Robert was plunged into despair and attempted suicide. (A servant grabbed his shirt tails as he threw himself out of an upstairs window.) Having recovered the balance of his mind, he took action to secure their ageing father’s grand house at Daldowie and turned to his younger brother as the best hope of clearing the family’s debts. It was now critical to his family’s fortunes that George’s career was a success.

Bogle won promotions and came to the attention of Warren Hastings,

who made him his private secretary. He also fell in with some of the shadier characters then operating in India, living for a time with Lauchlin Macleane, commissary general of the army, a fraudulent speculator whose connections had got him a post in India to clear his mountainous debts. Macleane dazzled those he met with his charm, including Hastings, whose self-absorption left him vulnerable to conmen. Macleane fled India following the Regulating Act of 1773, before his schemes were rumbled. That Bogle navigated such murky terrain with his reputation intact spoke to his affable nature and sharp intelligence. He wrote to his brother Robert that the shameless could prosper in India in ways they wouldn’t dare try in Europe: ‘several People keep the best Company, and are exceedingly well regarded, who are great Rogues, not only from Suspicion, but even by their own Confession.’ Macleane wanted George as his deputy, but Hastings wouldn’t let his young protégé go. The decision saved Bogle from the darker corners of the Company’s corruption and put him on the high road to Bhutan.

His journey to the mountains in 1774 started at the worst time of year, in

the heat of the pre-monsoon, but Bogle proved a doughty and observant traveller. With him went a retinue of more than sixty servants, and a fellow Scotsman, Alexander Hamilton, a tall and robust doctor whose physical presence rather overshadowed the spry Bogle. George kept copious notes, partly at the insistence of Hastings, with the possibility of a book in both their minds. John Hawkesworth’s edited version of Captain James Cook’s journals from the voyage of the Endeavour had proved a racy and contentious sensation. Enlightenment philosophers fed on such tales of exploration as illustrations of their theories about human nature. Bogle’s journey offered to fill in a similar blank on the map and might be similarly rewarded. ‘As none of the Company’s Servants, and I might almost say no European, had ever visited the Country which I was about to enter,’ he wrote to his father, ‘I was equally in the Dark as to the Road, the Climate or the People.’ Tibet, however, was not Australia, and when Bogle finally reached the plateau he would discover the wonders of Europe he brought with him were more familiar than he supposed. The Jesuits had already attuned Tibetans to western philosophy.

Having travelled north across the plains, Bogle arrived at the borders of

mountainous Bhutan. Plans conceived in Calcutta had not prepared him for the scale of the Himalaya, or of their suddenness. ‘It is impossible to conceive any change of country more abrupt or any contrast more striking.’ Everything that caught his eye was noted: the kinds of crops that grew in the fecund climate of Bhutan, the height of waterfalls, vernacular architecture. ‘The earth produces its fruits with an ease almost spontaneous, and every puddle is full of fish.’ He made his own contribution, planting potatoes to assess their viability on his return. With his eye unclouded by the accounts of other travellers, the image he presents is fresh and almost innocent: ‘At the place where the road crosses the mountain, standards or banners are set up, of white cloth, with sentences written upon them. They denote something religious and are common at the tops of hills.’ Bogle was looking at ‘wind horses’, prayer flags printed with the mantra om mani padme hum, familiar to any tourist who has trekked in the Himalaya.

Bogle took careful note of any infrastructure for possible military

advantage, but he didn’t have to be a soldier to realise how difficult fighting would be in these mountains: ‘What a Road for Troops,’ he wrote in his diary. He made a detailed description of the stunning iron suspension bridge at Chukha, in south-west Bhutan, without apparently knowing that it was one of scores of similar structures attributed to the fifteenth century Tibetan Tangtong Gyalpo, known as the Chakzampa, the ‘iron-chain man’, a pioneering civil engineer and blacksmith who built dozens of suspension bridges across the Himalaya. Tangtong would have been remarkable for his civil engineering alone, but was also a great spiritual adept. He was another nyon-pa, a wild one, known as Lungton Nyonpa, ‘wild man of the empty valley’, a name he used to sign his works, cultivating a mythical status like that of the poet Milarepa. Like Milarepa he encapsulates something paradoxical in the Tibetan Buddhist soul: that the illusion of an individual consciousness could be so persuasively real. The bridges he built were as much illustrations of his psychological expertise as they were practically useful: ferries and bridges are frequent metaphors in Tibetan Buddhist teaching.

The Panchen Lama’s letter had not been an invitation to visit Tibet:

Warren Hastings had simply read it that way. So a few days before reaching Tashichho Dzong, residence of the Druk desi, Bhutan’s prime minister, near the modern capital Thimphu, Bogle found himself in a diplomatic impasse. Another letter from the Panchen Lama intercepted him saying it wasn’t possible for the British to visit Tibet: the country was subject to China and he needed the emperor’s permission to let in a foreigner. That would take a year. A second letter, to Purangir, warned that a smallpox epidemic was raging and the Panchen Lama had withdrawn from Tashilhunpo to a more isolated monastery: it wasn’t convenient. Bogle read these excuses as pretexts; he refused to accept the letters or the gifts that accompanied them. Doing so would mean an admission of defeat and a swift return to Calcutta: not the required outcome for a man anxious about his prospects. Sensing that he must put a diplomatic shoulder to the door of Tibet, he despatched Purangir, an enthusiastic supporter of their mission, to visit the Panchen Lama and clear the way.

As he waited for a response, Bogle had time to learn a little about life in

Bhutan.

The more I see of the Bhutanese, the more I am pleased with them. The common people are good-humoured, downright [meaning straightforward], and I think, thoroughly trusty. The statesmen have some of the art which belongs to their profession. They are the best-built race of men I ever saw; many of them very handsome, with complexions as fair as the French.

Unlike the Jesuits and Capuchins who had visited Bhutan and Tibet, interest in Buddhism among the British diplomats who visited in the late eighteenth and nineteenth was limited. Like the missionaries, Bogle recognised similarities between Tibetan monks and their Roman Catholic counterparts and the institutions they served. But as a Presbyterian, such religiosity left him indifferent: the long ceremonies he felt obliged to attend bored him rigid. Yet religion, and religious division, lay at the core of the relationship between Tibet and Bhutan.

The Bhutanese elites Bogle now met could trace their lineage back

almost two hundred years to aristocratic families in Tibet and the exile of their founding spiritual and political leader Ngawang Namgyal. He had been recognised as the eighteenth reincarnated leader of the Druk lineage at Ralung monastery, just north of the Bhutanese border in Tibet, Druk being a branch of the Kagyu school that started with Marpa Lotsawa in the eleventh century. The ruler of Tibet’s Tsang province, the most powerful political figure at that time in Tibet, favoured another candidate. Fearing arrest, Namgyal escaped into the remote and defensible mountains to the south and set about establishing a new kingdom that would eventually encompass modern Bhutan. In his mid twenties and under continuous existential threat from successive Tsang princes, Namgyal, who became known as Shabdrung, meaning ‘at the feet of ’, set about carving out a new semi-theocratic state. In 1621, he founded Chagri monastery high in the Thimphu valley, where he felt sufficiently secure to embark on a three-year retreat. He brought the first known Europeans to visit Bhutan, the Jesuit missionaries Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, to this monastery in 1627. Cacella wrote to his masters:

For two months we accompanied the King through these and other mountains until we reached his house which is situated in the mountain where he went on retreat; he keeps no more than his lamas with him because the place cannot hold more people as in order to build a house one would have to cut many rocks and work very hard to level some space in that very steep mountain; he had chosen that place to protect himself from a King who lives some eight days distance from here, Demba Cemba [Karma Tenkyong], the most important king of Bhotanta [Tibet].

In fact, the main concern of this important king, Karma Tenkyong, lay elsewhere: the Tsang’s struggle with the Geluk-pa and their Mongol supporters. Bhutan was a side issue. But the Tsang-pa still made repeated efforts to crush Namgyal’s new state. To defend themselves, Namgyal’s followers built impressive monastic castles – dzong – to defend their new kingdom from its enemies. The most impressive was at Simtokha, completed in 1629, which dominated a strategic crossroads and the approach to the capital. This was the site of the so-called Battle of the Five Lamas in 1634, when disgruntled local religious leaders combined with Tsang military force to storm the castle. The story goes that the dzong’s gunpowder store exploded unexpectedly, destroying the invaders. In the aftermath, Namgyal was able to establish a new legal code, the Tsa Yig Chenmo, a monastic form of constitution that bound leading landowners to his new Druk state. Bhutan’s tight cultural homogeneity springs from this period: Bhutan’s name for itself is Drukyul, or Druk country, and the state supports the Druk school financially. Some rival schools were banned, including the lineage the bridge-builder Tangtong had founded there. As the new and rising power of the Geluk strengthened its grip on Tibet from the mid seventeenth century, that school too was forbidden. When Ngawang Namgyal died in 1651, the news was kept secret for fifty-four years: the state was too vulnerable to admit the loss of its inspirational leader. Handing on his powers to a similarly capable leader proved impossible. Yet splitting up his different roles ensured two hundred years of factionalism and infighting.

Bogle witnessed an explosive illustration of this as the rivalry between

Bhutan’s exiled political leader Zhidar and the new desi, Kunga Rinchen, was fought out in front of him. A conspiracy to reinstate Zhidar was discovered and his supporters fled to the dzong at Simtokha. Stationed a few kilometres south, Bogle watched from his window as the fighting ebbed and flowed. Many of the soldiers were local villagers and although their weaponry was antiquated – cane helmets and shields – it was effective. Their firearms were antiques but the Bhutanese also used six-foot bows with iron-tipped arrows, sometimes coated in poison. Hamilton was kept busy patching up the wounded. Eventually Kunga Rinchen won control, burning rebel villages and cutting off supplies to Simtokha. The rebels fled over the mountains to Tibet.

A day later Bogle and Hamilton set out to follow them for their audience

with the Panchen Lama, who despite warnings from Lhasa was sympathetic to Purangir’s arguments. The young Dalai Lama’s regent might technically be in charge, but the Panchen Lama was the most senior monk in Tibet and had a personal connection with the Qianlong emperor. He would listen to the British. It was now mid October and the first snows of winter coated the tops of the foothills, but in less than a month the two Scotsmen were face to face with the Panchen Lama. In Kettle’s painting the Lama is imagined as a compact figure, neat and composed. The reality was more corpulent and jovial. ‘His complexion,’ Bogle wrote,

is fairer than that of most of the Tibetans, and his arms are as white as those of a European; his hair, which is jet black, is cut very short; his beard and whiskers never above a month long; his eyes are small and black. The expression of his countenance is smiling and good-humoured. His father was a Tibetan; his mother a near relation of the Rajahs of Ladak. From her he learned the Hindustani language, of which he has a moderate knowledge, and is fond of speaking it. His disposition is open, candid, and generous. He is extremely merry and entertaining in conversation, and tells a pleasant story with a great deal of humour and action. I endeavoured to find out, in his character, those defects which are inseparable from humanity, but he is so universally beloved that I had no success, and not a man could find in his heart to speak ill of him.

Bogle found himself no less a subject of interest, with crowds coming to look at him ‘as people go to look at the lions in the Tower’. The Panchen Lama offered to have them removed, but Bogle demurred, acknowledging that he was just as interested in them. He was a close observer of human behaviour, watching how the lama gave his blessing to the crowds that gathered at his throne. Aristocrats and gyelong, or senior monks, received his bare hand on their heads. Nuns and regular laymen had a cloth interposed between their heads and his hand. The riff-raff were touched as he passed them with a tassel he held in his hand. Bogle noticed too the Panchen Lama’s generosity. Around a hundred and fifty gosain were lodged with him, some on business, others on ‘pilgrimage’, although Bogle noticed these Hindu pilgrims seemed most interested in their monthly allowance of tea, butter and flour, as well as cash. These ‘Gentoo fakirs’ were, in Bogle’s estimation, ‘a very worthless set of people, devoid of principle’. He speculated on the Panchen Lama’s tolerance. ‘This charity to the pilgrims flows, I imagine,’ Bogle wrote, ‘partly from the generosity of the Lama’s temper, partly from the desire of acquiring information, and satisfying his curiosity about Hindustan, the school of the religion of Tibet.’

Bogle comes across as down-to-earth, amiable and pragmatic; he was

culturally open and while he greeted the Panchen Lama in European dress, he soon adopted Tibetan clothing and habits. The metaphysical complexities of the Panchen Lama’s philosophy, however, were not for him. ‘The religion of the Lamas is somehow connected with that of the Hindus, though I will not pretend to say how.’ While acutely observant of religious ritual and social structure, the history of the Panchen Lama’s religious order was of subordinate interest to the matter at hand: trade. The recent political history of Tibet was of crucial importance to his mission and Bogle would later explain to his masters in Calcutta how it was that China had two political agents, the ambans, stationed in Lhasa: ‘About seventy years ago, the Emperor of China acquired the sovereignty of Tibet, in the way that sovereignties are generally acquired, by interfering in the quarrels between two contending parties.’ It was, Bogle knew, a trick the British had mastered in India.

If the authorities in Lhasa had the Chinese ambans looking over their

shoulder, there was a similar distrust in Tibet of the new power to the south. ‘In former times,’ Bogle reported,

when Europeans were settled in Hindustan merely as merchants, there would have been no difficulty in establishing factories and freedom of trade; but the power and elevation to which the English have now risen render them the objects of jealousy to all their neighbours. The opposition which was made to my proceeding into Tibet, as well as the many difficulties I had to encounter in the execution of my commission, arose from this source. The government at Lhasa considered me as sent to explore the country, which the ambition of the English might afterwards prompt them to invade, and their superiority in arms render their attempt successful.

On the other hand, it would have been foolish not to engage with an emerging power in the holy land of India. Furthermore, the new Gorkha regime in Kathmandu had upended centuries of trade and useful relations. Newari art and architecture had adorned the Himalayan Buddhist world for centuries. Good relations with the powerful rival of this unwelcome new neighbour were desirable. The Panchen Lama also showed great interest in establishing a centre for pilgrims in Bengal, re-establishing a connection with Tibet’s spiritual roots centuries after the fall of Bengal’s Pala dynasty.

There was another aspect to Bogle’s journey to Tibet that is easy to

overlook in the broader narrative of trade and diplomacy. He liked Tibet and he liked Tibetans. ‘In their private character they are decent and exemplary, and, if I may judge of others by one under whose roof I lived, they are humane, charitable, and intelligent.’ During his mission Bogle had been anxious to get back to Calcutta but once there he found he missed the Panchen Lama. Bogle performed kindnesses for him from afar, having his watches mended and sending him chess sets. He wrote his book, drifting a little, and then settled into a dull posting as a revenue collector. Diplomacy with Tibet rested now on the capable shoulders of Purangir, who in 1776 oversaw the building of a pilgrim and trade house for the Panchen Lama at Howrah near Calcutta, on the shores of the Hooghly river: the Bhot Bhawan, the ‘Tibet mansion’, a refuge for Tibetan pilgrims visiting the sacred sites of the Buddha’s life. Hastings might have failed to open a trade route with Tibet, but the Panchen Lama had got his listening post in India.

Diplomacy would be the Panchen Lama’s undoing. In the decade before

Bogle’s visit, the Qianlong emperor had commissioned a temple at the Manchu summer capital of Chengde, in Hebei province north-east of Beijing, to celebrate his sixtieth birthday in 1771. Called the Putuo Zhongcheng, it was modelled on the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace in Lhasa, an architectural expression of Qing solidarity with (and superiority to) its minorities. Summoned a decade later to Chengde for the Qianlong emperor’s seventieth-birthday celebrations, the Panchen Lama faced a dilemma: risk a perilous journey and the dangers of smallpox or pass up a golden diplomatic opportunity. There would be a strong Mongol presence at the party, an opportunity too good to miss. Purangir went with him, meeting the Panchen Lama en route at the Geluk monastery of Kumbum. Purangir later told the British that the Panchen Lama had indeed mentioned the matter of trade between the East India Company and China to the Qing emperor, but the Company only had his word for it. By then the Panchen Lama had succumbed to smallpox, the disease he knew was waiting for him. He faced death, in the Tibetan Buddhist way, sitting propped against a wall, cross-legged, meditating his way towards the ‘light of the void’. Purangir was among the few close followers with him at the end.

Four months later, early in 1781, George Bogle, wholly ignorant of his

Tibetan friend’s death, himself drowned, aged thirty-four, while taking his daily bath in a Calcutta water tank. ‘Sunk beneath the water,’ wrote Kate Teltscher, ‘were Bogle’s charm and penetration, his curiosity and ambition, his talent for friendship and diplomatic flair.’ He was buried beneath a massive sarcophagus in Calcutta’s South Park Street Cemetery and then largely forgotten until Clements Markham, who ran the geographical section at the India Office, discovered Bogle’s book in his grandfather’s papers, his grandfather having been a secretary to Warren Hastings. Its publication in 1876 allowed Bogle a little of the fame the Scotsman undoubtedly deserved, albeit posthumously, as did his companion Alexander Hamilton, who died four years before Bogle of fever in the malarial foothills of Cooch Behar.

*

The yaks Hastings wanted Bogle to bring back from Tibet did arrive in Calcutta but not until years later, with the second diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1783, led by Samuel Turner. Only the male survived to make the long journey to Britain, where George Stubbs painted him in a work titled ‘The Yak of Tartary’. The yak was stuffed after death and appeared as an exhibit in the Crystal Palace. Turner’s account of his journey, published in 1798 after he returned to Britain, caused a minor literary sensation. Tibet became what we might now call a meme: Turner’s audience with the young Panchen Lama, the reincarnate of the man Bogle had known, was particularly affecting to a British audience. The Irish poet and lyricist Thomas Moore – ‘Melody’ Moore, friend of Byron – wrote a piece of froth about the boy, ‘The Little Grand Lama’:

In Thibet once there reign’d, we’re told,

A little Lama, one year old –

Rais’d to the throne, that realm to bless,

Just when his little Holiness

Had cut – as near as can be reckon’d –

Some say his first tooth, some his second.

Thus was one of the most enigmatic, complex and culturally rich spiritual and philosophical traditions the world has known bowdlerised for the entertainment of the British public. Some of that twee naïvety suffuses Rudyard Kipling’s Tibetan character in Kim: the Teshoo Lama, the name borrowed from the title of Turner’s account.

There was a coda to Bogle’s journey to Tibet. In 1948 a woman called

Nora Heathcote, outraged at seeing George Bogle described in the Sunday Times as being an Englishman, wrote to the paper to correct their mistake and to claim descent from him through a Tibetan lady said to be the sister of the Panchen Lama, a woman named in the family’s papers as Tichan, perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan name Dechen. Clements Markham, in his 1876 edition of Bogle’s book, mentioned two daughters, Martha and Mary, who were put on board a ship to Britain after Bogle’s death so they could be raised by his family. Whether these were daughters of a Tibetan princess or a Bengali common-law wife is uncertain. Bogle certainly had an affair in Tibet, because his travelling companion, the doctor Alexander Hamilton, was prescribing him a mercury ointment on the trek home, commonly used for venereal disease. The British diplomat and Tibet scholar Hugh Richardson had a correspondence with Nora Heathcote, who was born in 1876, and disentangled the complex family history of the Bogle family. There were likely sons as well as daughters, and while he discounted the idea that ‘Tichan’ was the sister of the Panchen Lama, he thought it probable that Bogle had a child with a Tibetan woman, and that some Himalayan blood still ran in Scottish veins.

Although, like so many of his colleagues and friends, Bogle died a young

man, and the fame he might have enjoyed went to Samuel Turner, Bogle’s diplomatic efforts in establishing trade links with Tibet were successful, if short-lived. Throughout the 1780s, relations between Bengal and Tibet continued to prosper and trade increased. Purangir returned to Tibet with Turner’s mission and again without British supervision in 1785. He described commerce at Tashilhunpo as flourishing, with Indian merchants making huge profits on the advantageous exchange rate available to them in Tibet. This happy state of affairs might have continued but for the bitter trade war that was about to break out between Nepal and Tibet. Purangir spent more and more time at Bhot Bhawan, the temple at Howrah, where he perished in 1795, confronting robbers who had broken in: the gosain was buried in the garden.

Samuel Turner, leader of the second Tibet mission, shared Bogle’s love

of the Himalaya. He took with him a surveyor and artist called Samuel Davis, whose watercolours of Bhutan offer an elegant insight into a world that had barely changed since Cabral’s visit in the early 1600s and wouldn’t much until the arrival of tourism in the 1970s. His own portrayal of the Bhutanese, ‘strangers to extortion, cruelty, and bloodshed’, is similarly positive. Then something changed; the British hardened their minds against the cultures around them. The botanist William Griffith, medical officer on the Bhutan trade mission of 1837, offered a wholly different view of the Bhutanese: ‘they shewed themselves to be ignorant, greedy barbarians, such as should be punished first, and commanded afterwards’. Shortly before the British invaded Bhutan in 1864, Ashley Eden, who had travelled there the year before as special envoy, described the people as ‘an idle race, indifferent to everything except fighting and killing one another’. The enchantment George Bogle had experienced in Tibet, the ‘fairy dream’ as he called it, faded to nothing, replaced with the cold, hard calculation of commerce.

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