8 Trade Wars

8

 

Trade Wars

 

The remote frontier settlement of Rasuwagadhi lies on the border between Nepal and Tibet, at an altitude of 1,800 metres. Immediately beneath it is the Trisuli river, called the Kyirong in Tibet; to its west is the Himalayan giant Langtang Lirung: on a clear autumn morning, it’s this mountain, over sixty kilometres away, that dominates the Kathmandu valley’s northern skyline. Nearby is the Tibetan peak of Shisha Pangma, fourteenth highest mountain in the world. A rail link between such a remote high place and India’s network on the plains at near sea-level may seem fanciful but that is exactly what is currently proposed: a branch line on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s global plan to recreate the Silk Roads. ‘We hope,’ China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi said in 2018, ‘that such cooperation can contribute to the development and prosperity of all three countries. Personally I have a dream, to travel to China from Nepal across the Himalayas in a modern train, enjoying the scenic beauty.’ This growth in traffic will change the Himalaya for ever, perhaps to the disappointment of romantics, and certainly at some environmental cost. But the potential for economic development in an impoverished region makes such schemes almost inevitable.

Already, China has built a high-speed rail link to Shigatse, the seat of the

Panchen Lama, some three hundred kilometres from Rasuwagadhi, whisking Chinese tourists to the monastery of Tashilhunpo, these days a nexus in China’s influence on Tibetan Buddhism. A new road and dry port facility has already been built in the narrow Kyirong valley at the border. Damaged by the 2015 earthquake that struck Nepal, it was repaired and reopened two years later. More recently, China and Nepal have agreed that the railway to Shigatse will be extended to Kathmandu through the Kyirong, among the most beautiful and sacred valleys of Tibet.

Exploiting the tension caused in Delhi by its closer ties with China,

Nepal has also signed a deal with India to connect Kathmandu with the subcontinent’s extensive rail network. Nepal already has access to India’s railways. Less than thirty kilometres up the line from Sagauli Junction is the border crossing between the frontier towns of Raxaul, on the Indian side, and Birgunj, now the second-largest city on Nepal’s terai. At the start of the twentieth century, Birgunj was little more than a handful of villages but its location, directly between Kathmandu and British India, made it the obvious place to build a customs post. The town’s significance grew in 1927 when the British completed a narrow-gauge railway into Nepal, improving connectivity between an ally who had sacrificed its sons during the Great War and markets south of the border. Although much of that line is now defunct, the section at the border has recently been upgraded to the modern Indian network’s broad gauge, linking Indian Raxaul to Nepali Birgunj’s new container storage facility. Many obstacles lie in the path of both these schemes. But even if they don’t come to fruition, there is already a strong economic and political argument to re-energise the ancient trade route that once linked India to the Tibetan plateau. Whether China will permit this ancient road’s other role of cultural artery, drawing the lifeblood of Indian creativity onto the Tibetan plateau, is another matter.

Across the Himalayan belt, since before recorded history, pilgrims,

artisans and above all traders travelled the high country north to the Silk Roads of Central Asia and south to the plains of India, using those Himalayan valleys and gorges that were amenable to pack animals, their belongings and goods carried by yaks at altitude and mules, or else on the backs of human porters. Much of the conflict and political tension in the Himalaya coalesced around these lucrative pinch points, the narrow ‘money rivers’ of this wild, remote country. The British historian John Pemble has described such trade in the eastern Himalaya as ‘a feeble trickle’ and ‘a peddling business in luxury goods, carried on mainly at the behest of the wealthy and curious’. In the context of nineteenth-century global trade, this is arguably true; the East India Company was initially curious about grabbing a share of this trade but concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble, finally preferring instead to use the mountains as a protective barrier. Yet the wealth this ‘peddling’ generated underpinned the spectacular artistic legacy of Himalayan centres like the Kathmandu and Yarlung Tsangpo valleys. Trade also funded an immense cultural transfer, the importation of Buddhism to the Tibetan plateau and along with it Indian and Chinese art and technology. In the western Himalaya, there was also huge trade in what was called shawl wool or cashmere, since Kashmir is where Europeans first encountered it, more commonly now pashmina, Persian for ‘woolen’. The best source for this was the Chang Tang of Ngari Khorsum, the high country north of the old Guge kingdom where nomads with terrifying mastiffs drove goats and sheep to wool marts with close access to Himalayan trading routes, particularly at Gartok, west of Kailas. The Indus and Sutlej rivers offered ready access to Ladakh and Kashmir in the west and Indian hill-states to the south, where the people of Lahaul in particular dominated the trade, taking shares in the immense flocks on the high plateau.

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Alongside this international exchange is a quieter story: most Himalayan

trade routes and the products that were carried along them were local and of negligible value to the wider economy: grains, foodstuffs and salt, breeding animals, medicinal herbs. It might not have looked valuable to the wider world, but this trade also formed the bedrock of a vibrant and complex cultural exchange that characterises the Himalaya no less than grand temples or exquisite statues. If you measure success in turnover, then you could perhaps judge this Himalayan trade as trivial: in terms of the societies it fostered, it was vital.

The fault line in this web of ethnicity and trade was always between

ethnic Tibetan populations, genetically adapted to life at high altitude, and those from the south; to paraphrase the Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Tucci, the ‘rice–lama line’, between rice-growers from the south and Tibetan Buddhists from the north. Growing food at altitude is difficult and limited to particular crops, and so the risks inherent to trade become more worthwhile. For most of Himalayan history, traders could make a small fortune in the space of a few harvests. Trade also encouraged a more cosmopolitan outlook; hospitality in a tough environment like the Himalaya is not desirable, it’s essential. The anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described ‘a system of hospitality ideally suited to the needs of long-distance traders not only in need of shelter in an inclement climate but dependent for their business on relationships of personal trust established and strengthened by occasions for conviviality’. It was on the trade routes of the eastern Himalaya that the Sherpa reputation for hospitality was born.

In the modern era, China’s occupation of Tibet in the 1950s casually

brushed away most of this delicate web from its high, dusty corner, a loss the wider world hardly noticed. Many of the customary local trade routes, which had existed long before nation states, were abruptly closed. The borderlands of the Himalaya turned from a space into a line: something fluid and magical turned to stone. On top of that, the human ‘boundary’, the ‘rice–lama line’ between those adapted to altitude and those not, was offset from the political boundary, which ran along the crest of the mountains. As a consequence, large populations of ethnic Tibetans, such as the Sherpa, people who had since time immemorial relied on freedom of movement, were trapped on the wrong side of a new and seemingly arbitrary line, more or less cut off from their root. The consequences were predictably distressing, and not just materially: Tibetans, with their strong nomadic tradition, like to travel. Even in remote Tibetan villages, it was once common-place to find individuals who had crossed the length and narrow breadth of the Himalaya. Now they travel to India to study or for an audience with the Dalai Lama, and often at great personal cost in terms of harassment and worse from China’s security forces.

Inside Nepal, the results were equally dramatic but also intriguing,

sometimes prompting a realignment of identity to suit the new prevailing conditions. In the early 1970s, little more than a decade after the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet prompted the hardening of the border, Fürer-Haimendorf met ethnic Tibetans living in the old Nepali frontier village of Mugu, far to the west of Kathmandu, part of what had once been the medieval Khasa kingdom centred in the Sinja valley. This group had been trading from here across the border into ‘official’ Tibet for centuries; their distant ancestors helped build the Buddhist monastery in the Limi valley to the west. Now they were presenting themselves as Chhetri, a Hindu caste, turning their Tibetan faces away from the high plateau towards the more Hindu-oriented middle hills where they were now confined. (On the flip side, the Tibetan diaspora, which China’s occupation created, led to a spiritual resurgence in Buddhism south of the Himalaya wherever exiled Tibetans found sanctuary, a resurgence that sparked interest from foreign tourists, spreading that resurgence even further.)

While much Himalayan trade was for centuries local and small-scale,

some was of immense value and sometimes extraordinarily distant. It was this trade that underpinned the artistic brilliance of Kathmandu and attracted the attention of the East India Company. We have already seen how gold financed the expansion of the Tibetan Empire and the acquisition and translation of Buddhist texts. (‘Like a spring of precious gold bursting out upon the ground,’ wrote the eleventh-century tantric master Nirupa, ‘all the learned Indians come to Tibet.’) Trade in rhubarb, prized in Chinese medicine, flourished on the Silk Roads in the first millennium; Marco Polo saw it growing in its native habitat, on the north-east fringes of the Tibetan plateau. As we have seen, more unusual items, like yak tails, used as flywhisks in Indian temples, were recorded in ancient Rome. But the most important luxury product was musk: glandular secretions from deer used in the manufacture of perfume and traditional medicine. This is still one of the most expensive animal products anywhere in the world, to the detriment of modern musk deer. In antiquity its value was astronomical.

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As early as the ninth century, Arab doctors were writing in praise of Tibetan musk, on sale in the souks of Mecca. The smell of it was so strong that when ships arrived at the old port of Basra, in modern-day Iraq, customs officials knew if musk was on board. It had been exported to the Middle East since at least the third century, long before the rise of Islam, but its role in Islamic culture undoubtedly boosted trade. When Arab and Persian poets wanted to evoke the fragrance of their beloved, they turned to musk. In Shiraz during the tenth century the Persian author al-Tha‘alibi described a debate at court in which one contestant, the globetrotter Abu Dulaf, made his selection for the finest products and services available to mankind through the munificence of Allah: silks from China; Kyrgyz squirrel fur; Greek eunuchs; slave girls from Bukhara; concubines from Samarkand: ‘may he let me eat the apples of Syria, the fresh dates of Iraq, the bananas of the Yemen, the nuts of India … And may He let me breathe the musk of Tibet.’

Tibetan musk, and that of Kashmir, was prized over its Chinese

competition, in part because of the Himalayan aromatic herbs, including spikenard, which the musk deer browsed. Tibet was also closer to the Middle East, and Tibetan merchants had the habit of leaving the musk pod unadulterated. Chinese producers would open them to add other materials, and traders weren’t averse to passing off the inferior Chinese version as Tibetan, a process made easier because Tibetan traders didn’t travel far beyond their plateau: musk was sold on to traders operating along the fringes of the Himalaya. The Sogdians were the great trading group of the Silk Road, and letters in their language from the fourth century, recovered from the Dunhuang Caves, mention musk acquired from the Tibetan borderlands of modern Gansu. There are documentary traces of its journey through Central Asia to the Arab port of Daybul on the Indus delta in modern Pakistan, from where it was distributed throughout the Arab world.

Jewish merchants also had a significant role in the musk trade. The

Sephardi traveller Benjamin of Tudela travelled throughout the Middle East in the second half of the twelfth century and wrote a book about his experiences, a century before Marco Polo. He too writes of Tibetan musk, the first European reference. Translated later from Hebrew into Latin for the European market, The Travels of Benjamin became another tributary feeding the stream of travel compendia that permeated Western scholarship.

There are fewer literary clues about the musk trade at the start of its

journey, in the Himalaya, although deer have a spiritually symbolic presence. There is a story from a Tibetan hagiography about the mahasiddha Padampa Sangye, a contemporary of Milarepa from the eleventh century, born in southern India but closely associated with the Tingri region of Tibet, close to Everest. It tells how he built his monastery around a stone thrown by the Buddha to indicate where his teachings would flourish north of the mountains. Padampa Sangye found the stone at Tingri with musk deer circling around it, and then dissolving into it. The potent medical properties of musk are associated with Padampa’s teaching.

Another reference, this one in the Blue Annals, written in the fifteenth

century, captures an illuminating example of how trade and tantric teaching collided to transform Tibet in the eleventh century. Kor Nirupa, quoted above, was born in 1062, an inauspicious year, as the fifth son, an inauspicious number, and sent off to Lhasa to be a monk. (His sister threw a handful of dirt after him as he left, a sign of ostracism.) In Lhasa he met two students of Atisa, the great Indian scholar, who had died a few years before. One of them was a Newar, Anutapagupta, who taught him Sanskrit for a year and then sent him off to collect a book from the widow of a translator. Nirupa, still only nine years old, ended up working at a gold mine, where his belongings were stolen. So he cast a magic spell, a move very much from pre-Buddhist Tibet, and discovered enough gold to meet his obligation to the Newar. Not long after, his father died and he went home to pay his respects, where he dug up a chunk of turquoise his sister had hidden. This he sold for a weight of gold, ‘one roll of gold embroidered silk and musk worth one golden zho’, around five grams. With this he set off for Kathmandu with his two friends, to be initiated into the mysteries of tantric Buddhism.

Arab sources give us clues about the species of deer involved – the

favoured animal, they reported, was small and lived in forests, presumably at lower altitudes – and how it was collected. The ninth-century geographer Ahmad al-Ya‘qubi, in the Kitab al-Buldan, the Book of Lands, born at the time of Tibet’s tsenpo emperors, centuries before Benjamin of Tudela, wrote that

it was well known that the origin of musk was in Tibet and elsewhere. The local traders there build something like a little tower, which has the height of a forearm. The animal in whose navel the musk is produced comes and scratches its navel on this tower so that the navel falls off [meaning the musk gland]. The traders go there at a certain time of year, which is known to them and gather the navels freely. When they bring it to Tibet, they have to pay tax on it.

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We know just how important the duties paid on musk were thanks to the extraordinary records of an Armenian merchant called Hovhannes Joughayetsi, who spent five years living in Lhasa from 1686. This was only twenty-five years after the Jesuits Johann Grueber and Albert d’Orville, commonly regarded as the first Europeans to reach the Tibetan capital. Their interest was theological: their mission to save souls. Hovhannes went to make money. Both wrote about their experiences, but Hovhannes’s account was simply that: his accounts. There are precious few references to the colour or drama of the road he travelled, no burning zeal to save souls. When Hovhannes mentions God, it’s to ask his protection from bandits, not to speculate on the metaphysics of tantric Buddhism. When he arrives in Lhasa, he is required to pay duty on the goods he has imported, totalling eleven and a half kilos of silver, a handy revenue stream for the government. A rupee at this time was worth around eleven grams of silver; Hovhannes was paying his servant forty rupees a year, less than half a kilo. For every litre of musk he bought, he had to pay the Tibetan treasury thirty-eight grams of silver.

What an Armenian was doing in Lhasa in the 1680s is another matter. In

the early seventeenth century, the region that is modern-day Armenia was split between Persia and its bitter rival the Ottoman Empire. In 1604, Persia’s Safavid leader Shah Abbas invaded western Armenia and then withdrew, burning towns and villages as he went, bringing home with him a huge population of Armenians. The peasantry was put to work growing silk; the merchant classes, well known for their commercial acumen, were set up in Nor Jougha, a suburb of the Shah’s extraordinary new capital at Isfahan in central Persia, tasked with building trade networks across Asia and the Middle East. Armenian merchants were known as khoja, a respected class of Christians in the eyes of Islam, part of the religiously tolerant world Shah Abbas encouraged. In 1683, two such merchants hired Hovhannes to trade for them in India. They would get three-quarters of the profit, Hovhannes the rest. Their range of operations was impressive, extending all the way from Western Europe to the Levant and into East Asia. When he left Nor Jougha for India, Hovhannes carried with him hundreds of yards of red and green English broadcloth to sell.

For reasons unknown, the accounts ledger Hovhannes kept while living

in Lhasa surfaced in Lisbon. It’s possible he died there after returning to Europe. It lays out the Armenian’s profit and loss in painstaking detail, necessarily so since his well-being relied on its accuracy. Hovhannes had studied all aspects of trade in Isfahan, from foreign weights and measures, to taxation law and accountancy, so he knew that if he didn’t provide an exact reckoning of how he’d spent his masters’ money as soon as he got home he could be jailed and whipped every day for a year. His understandable attention to detail offers a dry but hugely revealing insight into the complex world of Himalayan trade, the sophisticated financial instruments it relied on, how important it was to the local economy and just how international the Himalaya has been for much of its history.

In the late seventeenth century, trade in much of the subcontinent was

still regulated by the Mughals, and although Agra was no longer their capital, it remained a crucial hub with a thriving Armenian population that worshipped at their Orthodox church. Hovhannes based himself here for more than two years, travelling around India, buying goods and then selling them on. In 1684 for example, he bought two tons of indigo at Khurja, weighed, pleasingly, in charms, and travelled to the Gujarati port of Surat in Western India to ship a portion back to Isfahan and Basra in modern Iraq. Like all merchants, he relied on the sophisticated Mughal banking system that allowed large sums to be remitted across the trading network that he and his colleagues inhabited, a system that had impressed and inspired earlier European financiers.

By early 1686, Hovhannes had built up his own capital and signed an

agreement establishing a new company with a partner from Shiraz to embark on a far more adventurous trading mission, to the country he described as Butand, meaning Bhot, or Tibet. He was still working for his masters in Isfahan, but now he had his own stake in the game. If Jesuit missionaries were bringing the word of God to the Buddhist holy land, Hovhannes used the new company’s capital to take things to trade: amber and pearls, bolts of fabric and much more besides, goods worth over eight thousand rupees, equivalent to about ninety-four kilos of silver. He also hired servants to travel with him and bought gunpowder and bullets to protect them all on the road. He left Agra on 12 February 1686 for Shikohabad, in the modern state of Uttar Pradesh, named for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s brother, and there joined a caravan east to Patna, in Bihar on the south bank of the Ganges, with its important Armenian population, where he bought more cloth to trade.

The choice of route was revealing. Although he had contacts in Patna,

Hovhannes also knew that war had badly affected trade in the western Himalaya in the early 1680s. The fifth Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had sent an army to Ladakh in 1679, partly because Ladakh’s Druk Kagyu Buddhists were giving support to their co-religionists in Bhutan, and partly to challenge Druk intolerance of Geluk monks. In response, the Ladakhis asked the Mughals, their new and powerful neighbours in Kashmir, to help them out with some military brawn under the leadership of the Mughal general Fidai Khan. At the most westerly point of the Tibetan plateau and bordering Muslim countries, Ladakh’s Buddhists had faced the greatest challenge from Islam in the high Himalaya: their chogyal, or king, had recently promised to build the first mosque in the Ladakhi capital Leh to placate the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. In response, the Tibetans allied with Dzungar Mongols to drive their common enemies back. A peace treaty was signed in 1684 but Ladakh paid a heavy price. The kingdom lost a huge amount of territory to Kashmiri Muslims, and trade in wool and goat’s hair, around half the Ladakhi economy, became their opponent’s monopoly. Significant numbers of Muslims relocated across the Zoji La, the pass linking Kashmir to Ladakh, to establish themselves at Leh and other major Ladakhi towns, marrying local women and altering Ladakh’s demography for good. They came to dominate this western trade route all the way to Lhasa, where a sizable Kashmiri population also settled. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri met Kashmiri merchants at Leh on his way to Lhasa in 1715. (They claimed he wasn’t a priest at all but a wealthy foreign merchant carrying pearls, gems and other precious merchandise.) By the late nineteenth century, after Ladakh had been absorbed into Jammu and Kashmir, Leh had more than a hundred Kashmiri shops in the main bazaar, where caravans from all over Central Asia and the Himalaya converged.

In April 1686, Hovhannes journeyed north from Patna to reach the

Kathmandu valley, having paid tax at the border to import his goods. For three months he rested in Bhaktapur, where the king Jitamitra Malla was adding to the city’s architectural lustre, expanding and beautifying its palaces and temples – all paid for by currency trading with Tibet and duties from merchants like Hovhannes, who along with the usual bribes, was asked to hand over the English spyglass he carried with him. The Armenian took more than two months to reach Lhasa, travelling up the fast-flowing Bhote Kosi, the ‘Tibet river’, and across the mountains to Kuti, known now as Nyalam, where he kicked his heels until the local chief returned to seal the goods for onward travel. He visited Shigatse, seat of the fifth Panchen Lama, Lobsang Yeshe, who was becoming embroiled in the provincial wars that would plague Tibet in the early eighteenth century. When Hovhannes reached the capital in September, there to welcome him was a small Armenian merchant community largely overlooked by history. The Jesuits Grueber and d’Orville and those missionaries like Desideri that came after are the ones remembered: adventurous servants of God piercing the veil of a hidden world behind the mountains. Hovhannes was more of this world. He short-changed his servants, but not too badly, and wasn’t averse to a little smuggling, avoiding duties on some of the precious stones he carried. As a non-Muslim in the Mughal Empire, he was required to pay a poll tax, called the jizya; this he dodged with a false certificate.

The Tibetan world Hovhannes encountered in Lhasa must have felt very

different to that of the Christian missionaries who followed. He arrived four years after the fifth Dalai Lama’s death, but before that fact had been made public or the Qing Kangxi emperor had been informed. During the almost five years he spent there, Hovhannes learned Tibetan and dealt with all the complexities of operating a business in a foreign country: adjusting to local customs, breathing the thin air, dealing with crooked officials, paying taxes and arguing his case in commercial disputes. Although he stayed put in the city, he used other Armenian and Tibetan merchants to trade for him in Xining, some eighteen hundred kilometres to the north-east, on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, now the largest city in historical Tibet. He did deals with Newars living in Lhasa, and came into contact with merchants from other ethnic groups: more Kashmiris, known in Lhasa as Kachee, soon to build their first mosque in the city, and the Hindu gosain so familiar to George Bogle. With the money he made from selling the goods he brought from India, Hovhannes mostly bought musk, gold and tea. This had been traded for centuries via the so-called Tea Horse Road that linked Sichuan, immediately to the east of Tibet, with the plateau, with Tibetan ponies being sent in return to China. Musk was his most lucrative concern. By the time he left Lhasa in 1692, Hovhannes had bought almost half a metric tonne of the stuff, worth a fortune in the souks of the Middle East. The duties he owed the Tibetan treasury must have totalled tens of thousands of rupees.

Achieving such success had required a monumental effort of concentration. Lhasa was not an easy place to do business. Not only were his partners and competitors trying to trick him, the government did its best to extract as much of his profit as possible, using weights and measures that cheated the merchants. Another scam to which Hovhannes fell prey would ultimately become a cause of war between Nepal and Tibet. Three days after he arrived in Lhasa, Hovhannes was required to pay import duties on the goods he’d brought from Patna, just as he had in Nepal. This was done in kind to a particular value of silver and a promissory note given to the Armenian guaranteeing he would be reimbursed a proportion of this heavy tax in silver coins. When they came, the coins were found to be impure: the silver the Tibetan authorities were using was debased. Yet the purchase tax Hovhannes paid on the musk he was buying had to be paid for in pure silver. The Himalayan economy was becoming a clear illustration of Gresham’s law: bad money driving out good.

It was a system guaranteed to infuriate your trading partners, except that

Tibet was on the receiving end of the same scam: the Newari kings who minted Tibet’s coins were also at it. They had started supplying Tibet with its coinage earlier in the seventeenth century during the reign of the fifth Dalai Lama. Tibet would send pure silver to be minted and the Newars would send back coins of the same weight alloyed with a certain amount of copper; the balance of silver was their profit. How closely they stuck to the agreed amount was carefully scrutinised. The Tibetans experimented with minting their own coins in the 1660s and 1680s, just before Hovhannes arrived, but they remained reliant on the Kathmandu valley for their currency for another hundred years. However, when the Gorkha raja Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered the Kathmandu valley in 1767, eighty years after Hovhannes returned there from Lhasa, Nepal’s new ruler wanted the Tibetans to phase out its compromised coins. ‘Keep the mint pure,’ he told his people in his political testament, the Divya Upadesh. He asked the Tibetans to replace their compromised coinage with his dynasty’s new and purer version, something the Tibetans were reluctant to do on the terms Prithvi was offering. Since the Qing Empire was now backing the Tibetans, there was no way militarily that Prithvi felt able to prosecute his aim. As a consequence, trade with Tibet collapsed.

Then, in 1775, while George Bogle was living at the Panchen Lama’s

seat of Tashilhunpo, news arrived there that ‘the tyrannical and faithless’ Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah was dead. The Panchen Lama immediately wrote to Prithvi’s successor in a bid to restore trading relations with Kathmandu.

I have heard of the death of your father, Prithi Narayan. As this is the will of God you will not let your heart be cast down. You have now succeeded to the throne, and it is proper that you attend to the happiness of your people, and allow all merchants, as Hindus, Mussulmans, and the four castes, to go and come, and carry on their trade freely, which will tend to your advantage and to your good name. At present they are afraid of you, and no one will enter your country. Whatever has been the ancient custom let it be observed between you and me.

Those ancient customs would not be observed. On the contrary, trade continued to be a source of friction. The Gorkha regime that now controlled much of the southern Himalaya needed to fund its military, through a restoration of trade or else new conquests. That friction would in the late 1780s erupt into war between Nepal and Tibet, a war that would entangle China and the East India Company, and bring the full might of armies of the Qing Empire to the fringes of the Kathmandu valley.

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When the mountain explorer H W Tilman visited Rasuwagadhi in 1949, a year before China invaded Tibet, he found a desolate spot: an old fort and a few soldiers on the Nepali side and on the Tibetan just a stone slab inscribed with some Chinese characters. Translated a few years later by a second traveller, Duncan Forbes, this turned out to be a marker post defining the border that had been erected, on 26 November 1792, after the ‘victory over the Gorkhas accomplished by General Fu, the Great General for the Pacification of the West’. It commemorated the Qing victory on behalf of Tibet over the Nepalis, a consequence of these trade wars and achieved in the face of incredible physical challenges as the Qing crossed the towering mountains as ‘though they were moving over a level plain’. The stone didn’t lie: the Qing victory was a swaggering expression of Chinese power, but it came at great cost, absorbing such huge amounts of treasure that the Qing concluded that in future the same ends should be achieved through diplomacy rather than war. The question is: why did they bother in the first place?

Until the end of the eighteenth century, Himalayan geography limited

economic opportunities and put a brake on the size and influence of the region’s political structures. It was trade that connected the Himalaya’s distinct cultural spheres of influence with the outside world. Otherwise, the Himalaya had been a bulwark around which the tides of history flowed; set against the hazards of the mountains, not least the thin air of the Tibetan plateau, the available rewards had not persuaded outsiders to stay for long. By the end of the eighteenth century, this was changing. Foreign colonial powers were extending their influence deep into the mountains.

Warren Hastings judged the trade routes of the eastern Himalaya to be a

way for the East India Company to reach China, sending George Bogle off to explore the idea. In the long run it proved little more than romantic speculation: the Company would solve its trade imbalance with China by other means. New global trading patterns were emerging that would make the old caravans Hovhannes Joughayetsi knew seem a charming anachronism; the mountains would become simply the East India Company’s northern wall against the Qing Empire. While the Himalaya was a region with its own identity, where influences arrived from all directions to create a distinct and remarkable culture, for the emerging global powers, it would be made into a buffer zone, somewhere on the margins, a useful space to absorb the shocks and tension of geopolitics formulated hundreds and even thousands of kilometres away. The diverse peoples of the Himalaya would find themselves, just as Prithvi Narayan Shah predicted, sandwiched between two giant competing interests. Himalayan trade might have been of critical importance to kings in Kathmandu or the abbots of Tibetan monasteries. It would be of only marginal interest to the region’s new masters in Calcutta and Beijing.

Prithvi Narayan Shah had seen this future and tried to find a balance

between fierce self-reliance and a need for trade. In the last years of his reign, his army, though tiny by Indian or European standards, almost tripled in size and was equipped with firearms and artillery. The cost of this expansion couldn’t be met from productive farmland alone; only restoration in trade could ease the immense pressure on Nepal’s exchequer. Prithvi was pragmatic enough to recognise this. ‘Whatever his conduct as a conqueror,’ wrote William Kirkpatrick, the East India Company man who arrived in Kathmandu in 1793 and reported so attentively on its brickwork, ‘or however severe his nature may have been, he was not inattentive to the means of conciliating those on whose support he principally depended.’ Although the Kinloch expedition of 1767 – when the British attempt to intervene against the Gorkhalis had ended in malaria for Kinloch and humiliation for the Company – had soured Prithvi’s relations with the British and persuaded him to expel Kathmandu’s Capuchin missionaries, Prithvi was prepared to patch up relations with Warren Hastings, who tacitly allowed Prithvi free rein to expand his kingdom eastwards, if it brought stability. Hastings wanted Gorkha’s help in ending the predations of sannyasi bandits then plaguing Bengal.

Likewise, in his final letter to the Panchen Lama, a man with whom

Prithvi had bitter differences, the king made an offer to restore trade through the Bhote Kosi and Kyirong valleys. As George Bogle observed, ‘the wealth of Nepal’, meaning its former trade with Tibet, had ‘furnished the Gorkha Rajah with the means by which he rose’. However, Prithvi had ‘neglected to cherish the source’. We have seen already how in his political memoir the Divya Upadesh Prithvi had preached the values of self-reliance and autarky. Kashmiri merchants and Indian gosain had been forced out of Kathmandu, either expelled directly or driven out by tariffs that had risen sharply to meet the Gorkhali regime’s increased costs. Prithvi was now trying to recover his position. His advance east towards Sikkim, located between Nepal and Bhutan, also allowed Gorkha to exert pressure on another major trade route for Tibet, through the Tista valley to the Jelep La, a route of strategic interest to the British as well. Control Sikkim, Prithvi assumed, and the Tibetans would be forced to negotiate.

After the death of Prithvi Narayan in 1775, his successors in the Shah

dynasty became more aggressive, constructing themselves as the dominant military power along the southern flank of the Himalaya. Gorkha swept up statelets and mini-kingdoms that had resisted Prithvi in the west and far west of modern Nepal: the Gandaki river basin and the old Khasa Empire of the Karnali valley. His eldest son and successor Pratap Singh and the sixth Panchen Lama together tried to re-establish the ‘ancient custom’ that had enriched both Kathmandu and central Tibet, as the Panchen Lama requested in his letter. The privileged position of Newari merchants in Lhasa was confirmed and Tibet agreed only to do business with Bengal through Kathmandu. That was also the hope of George Bogle, who told his masters in Calcutta:

The opening of the road through Nepal, and obtaining the abolition of the duties and exactions which have lately been imposed on trade in that country, appears an object of great importance towards establishing a free communication between Bengal and Tibet. The death of Prithi Naraya, the late Rajah of Nepal, seems to afford a favourable opportunity of effecting this point.

The deaths of all three men – Pratap Singh, the Panchen Lama and Bogle – within the space of a few years meant it didn’t work out that way. Since conquering Kathmandu, discipline among the Gorkhalis had begun to fracture. With Prithvi’s death, intrigue and feuds began eating into the Gorkha regime’s coherence. When Pratap Singh died aged twenty-six, only two years after his father, a power struggle began between his widow, acting as regent to their son, and Pratap’s younger brother Bahadur Shah, particularly over territorial expansion. When the Panchen Lama died of smallpox at Chengde, and with his reincarnation still a child, Tibet’s political centre of gravity moved firmly towards the Dalai Lama and the system of government imposed by the Qianlong emperor, whereby any policy developed in Lhasa had to meet the approval of the two Qing ambans stationed there. China was suspicious of foreign involvement in its sphere of influence, and the British, however much they wanted to improve trade with Tibet, were reluctant to antagonise their most important trading partner. Tibet continued to offer support to its tiny neighbour Sikkim, a Buddhist kingdom with an important trade route to Bengal, much to the annoyance of Nepal, which had only agreed to back away from occupying Sikkim in return for a monopoly on trade.

This fraught situation would have been explosive enough without the

interventions of the abrasive Gorkhali regent Bahadur Shah, whose instinct was to act and whose goal was to expand as fast as possible the proto-empire he was building. Apart from the issue of debased coinage, the Gorkhalis chafed that the Tibetans were exploiting them, mixing dust with the salt they exported and imposing heavy import tariffs on Nepali flour. In early 1788, Bahadur infuriated Lhasa by appointing as head of Kathmandu’s Tibetan affairs the Shamarpa, a dissident reincarnate lama (tulku) from the Karma Kagyu school, who had recently fled a dispute in Tibet over the property of his half-brother, the former Panchen Lama. Lacking the wiliness of Prithvi Narayan, the regent threatened to occupy Kuti and Kyirong, that is the two ancient trade routes into Tibet from Kathmandu, until his grievances were resolved. The Tibetans response was to shut the border, suggesting that ‘if the Goorkha wished for war, he was welcome to advance.’ The Gorkhalis appealed to the Chinese emperor but the ambans in Lhasa chose not to tell Beijing what was happening. In short order, thousands of Gorkhali troops were crossing into Tibet through Kyirong and Kuti, their objective the riches of Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of the Panchen Lamas.

The seventh Panchen Lama was still a boy, but his regent issued appeals

for help to the Qing emperor and also to the governor general of the East India Company. From the latter, he also requested secrecy: Beijing would not appreciate Tibet turning to the region’s other great power. The governor general was Lord Cornwallis, who ten years previously had been the commanding officer at Yorktown, where the British surrender set the stage for the loss of its American colonies. Not antagonising the Chinese was foremost in his mind during this crisis, lest something similar occur. At home, the impeachment of his predecessor Warren Hastings was underway, another unwelcome fate for Cornwallis to ponder. Concluding that Beijing would be infuriated at British interference, he told the Panchen Lama he would not offer any assistance. Nor did he agree to keep their correspondence a secret. The Company wanted the ear of the Qing emperor on the matter of its parlous trade imbalance and nothing must interfere with business.

For their part, the Chinese sent officials to investigate. The Tibetans were

happy to fight but the Chinese weren’t confident of military success. They pressed the Tibetans to negotiate, a difficult task with an occupying army threatening destruction. To the east, Gorkhali troops had also occupied Sikkim, taking control of the crucial Jelep La and the Chumbi valley beyond, cutting off a trade route they felt the Tibetans had opened against the spirit of their earlier agreement, breaking Nepal’s monopoly. Thinking they could get better terms from Tibet with Qing mediation, the Gorkhalis negotiated what became known as the Kyirong Treaty, which granted territory, including the frontier town of Kuti, and commercial concessions; it also addressed directly the complex issue of Tibet’s debased coinage. An exchange was agreed, one good coin for two bad, and an annual tribute of fifty thousand rupees a year, a phenomenal sum. The Gorkhalis could be forgiven for thinking they had won.

This generous settlement might have been a humiliation for the Qing

emperor had his representatives been entirely open with him about its terms. They chose instead to be economical with the fine detail, telling Beijing that Nepal, not Tibet, would be paying a form of tribute and that their troops had returned home without the loss of a single Chinese soldier, both of which were only more or less true. When Gorkhali ambassadors visited Beijing in the autumn of 1789, Nepal’s young king was honoured with a feudatory title and his regent, the pugnacious Bahadur Shah, became kung, or duke.

Then Lhasa began to wriggle on its expensive hook, stirring up trouble in

far western Nepal and offering asylum to the deposed ruler of Jumla, one of the mini-kingdoms of far-western Nepal that had resisted the advance of the Gorkhalis. The Dalai Lama then told Kathmandu that further payments would be suspended. There were bad-tempered and fruitless negotiations at Kuti, where the divisive figure of the dissident Shamarpa led the Gorkhali side; soon after, thousands of Gorkhali soldiers were marching back into Tibet under the command of two of Nepal’s most able generals, one of them Damodar Pande, son of Prithvi Narayan’s favourite general Kalu Pande, who had died besieging Kirtipur. The Panchen Lama was whisked away to Lhasa under the protection of his regent and the Tibetans appealed once again to Beijing. When the Gorkhali force arrived at Shigatse, its leaders demanded gold and a hundred thousand rupees, and having been refused, they sacked the monastery of Tashilhunpo.

News of this latest humiliation revealed the true nature of the situation on

the Qing Empire’s western border. The official who had promised the Qianlong emperor that the conflict had been resolved committed suicide even before he could be summoned to the imperial presence. The Qing ordered a punitive expedition under the command of Fuk’anggan, the nephew of the empress, then in his late thirties and with deep experience of quashing rebellions, having pacified Sichuan and put down insurrection in Taiwan. Fuk’anggan led a huge force, including ten thousand troops from the elite Eight Banners, which he marched across the plateau from Qinghai in the depths of winter. The Qianlong emperor also sent an envoy to Kathmandu, demanding the return of the Tashilhunpo treasures and the surrender of the Shamarpa to Tibetan custody. In Lhasa, Newari tradesmen, whose business had suffered since the Gorkhalis took power in Kathmandu, were encouraged by the Qing to travel home to Nepal and stir up resentment there. One of them was detained at the Nepali border and personally interrogated by the regent Bahadur Shah, who learned that Fuk’anggan’s army was bearing down on Nepal.

Not for the last time, a Nepali ruler now attempted to play their giant

neighbour to the north against the one from the south. Bahadur sent a letter to the Chinese explaining his grievances but also warning of British interest in Tibet. He also signed a commercial treaty with the British, hoping this would bring with it their political and even military support, a notion Calcutta didn’t rush to contradict. Fuk’anggan also wrote to the British, however, informing them of Qing plans to invade Nepal, a move Bahadur had thought unlikely, given the terrain. This was a sobering development. That said, should China occupy Kathmandu, the Qing armies would be adjacent to the East India Company’s richest possessions, which might persuade the British to Bahadur’s side. But if Bahadur Shah genuinely thought the British would help him in his hour of need, he would be disappointed. The British were planning a major and costly diplomatic mission to the Qing court, led by Lord Macartney, to raise British grievances over trade. Nothing could jeopardise that.

Facing the might of Fuk’anggan’s army on the plateau would have been

suicide, so the Gorkhali troops withdrew to the border where they could more easily defend the approaches to Kathmandu in the narrow river gorges cutting through the mountains. But the Gorkhali force at Rasuwagadhi was outflanked by a brilliant piece of mountain warfare. Fuk’anggan himself led three regiments to bridge the Lende river, which meets the Kyirong near Rasuwa and forms the modern boundary between Tibet and Nepal. While the Gorkhali forces resisted this move, a second Chinese force crossed the river upstream and circled behind their enemy’s position to attack them from above. The Gorkhalis were routed and only managed to stop the Qing army’s advance thirty-five kilometres from Kathmandu at the Betrawati river, just north of Nuwakot. At this point Bahadur Shah appealed directly to the British for military aid, particularly artillery, but at the same time the Company received a letter from the Dalai Lama, requesting neutrality. Mindful of commerce, Lord Cornwallis offered to mediate, sending the young Scottish envoy Captain William Kirkpatrick to Kathmandu (where we met him in Chapter Five): a diplomatic way of sitting on his hands and hoping Nepal wasn’t destroyed.

That the Gorkhali crown survived might seem surprising. The Qing’s

ambition had been to split Nepal apart and the Chinese certainly battled on, breaking through Gorkhali lines to reach Nuwakot. But the fighting season was almost over and the cost in material and men was steepening. Fuk’anggan’s lines of communication were stretched. How would he resupply in the bitter winter months across the highest mountains on earth? How much was conquering Nepal really worth? Better to agree terms and head for home before the temperature fell. The scale of China’s investment in its Nepali adventure was not immediately appreciated, either by the British or the Gorkhalis, but it was colossal and would not be repeated. Expensive wars and corruption at court were draining the treasury and the Qing would soon face expensive rebellions closer to home. The Qianlong emperor, whose armies had crushed enemies around the whole perimeter of the empire, abdicated in 1796; he warned his successor, the Jiaqing, to be wary of intervening in Gorkha affairs. It was advice the new emperor would follow.

The treaty the Chinese signed with Bahadur Shah seemed punitive

enough: the loot from Tashilhunpo was handed back and tribute demanded; Nepal agreed to renounce any ambitions north of the Himalaya and to send ambassadors every five years under diplomatic conditions illustrating Nepal’s junior status. In return China offered to help if Nepal should be invaded. Otherwise the status quo held. Nepal was free to resume its conquest of the west and negotiate on its own terms with its southern neighbour. Bahadur Shah had judged Calcutta’s hesitation in offering Nepal support as a form of betrayal, which is why William Kirkpatrick received such a chilly welcome when he arrived in Kathmandu in 1793. The Chinese were also bitter at the East India Company. Fuk’anggan believed incorrectly that Company sepoys had helped the Gorkhalis. When Lord Macartney’s diplomatic mission to the Qing court eventually failed, he believed it was this imagined intervention that persuaded the Qianlong emperor to dismiss his embassy.

In the long run, it was arguably the Tibetans who lost most. While they

got back the glories of Tashilhunpo, the political price was high. The Qing emperors had been forced to make several critical military interventions throughout the eighteenth century to prop up an often fractious and sectarian Tibetan government and keep dissidents from conspiring with those Mongol groups that remained a threat to China. Tibet hadn’t just been protected: it was swallowed up. Dalai Lamas in the nineteenth century would be both short-lived and heavily controlled: Tibet’s borders were maintained at the pleasure of the Qing dynasty. Only as the Qing fell in the twentieth century did the Dalai Lamas emerge again as great leaders.

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The disaster at Rasuwagadhi and the terms of the treaty between Gorkha and China would lead almost inevitably to conflict with the East India Company. With Tibet so ruthlessly put off limits by the Qing, Nepal’s expansionist ambitions were restricted to areas south of the Himalaya. The immediate loser was the Gorkhali regent Bahadur Shah. Under his rule, Nepal had expanded quickly; between the invasions of Tibet in 1788 and 1791, Gorkhali troops had moved into Kumaon, west of the Mahakali river. Now he had overreached. The king’s courtiers, or bharadar, blamed him for recklessly endangering the regime. The king, Rana Bahadur, reached his majority soon after the Chinese invasion and sought to exert his authority. Bahadur Shah was murdered in 1797. Even so, the factionalism continued, drawing in Nepal’s neighbours as competing interests conspired with one or other for advantage. Rana Bahadur, a capricious and debauched individual who borrowed huge sums from his courtiers, first abdicated in favour of his infant son and then in 1800 went into exile in Benares, under the control of the East India Company. The British were swift to exploit the worsening political situation in Nepal, signing a treaty with the Gorkha state in 1801 at Danapur, close to Patna, promising peace in return for trade relations and the establishment of a British residency in Kathmandu.

A large faction of the Gorkhali court was bitterly opposed to the presence

of a British resident and appealed to the Qing, warning them that the British were using the exiled Rana Bahadur to extend their influence in Nepal and threaten the regime. Instead of intervening, the Chinese advised the Gorkhalis to get their ex-king back. Meanwhile, the governor general Richard Wellesley told the newly appointed British resident of Kathmandu Captain William Knox to ‘direct your attention as to the means of opening a beneficial trade with the countries of Bootan and Tibet either directly with the Company’s Provinces, or through the medium of the merchants of Nepal’. Knox’s mission arrived in the spring of 1802 and for a time was tolerated, but at the end of the year power shifted again. Damodar Pande, the man who had led the attack against the Qing a decade earlier, was made chief minister. As a consequence, relations with Knox became increasingly sour and Wellesley recalled him. The Company had become preoccupied with fighting its second war with the Maratha confederacy in India; it had no wish to antagonise China on its far western marches. Trade with the Qing was much too important. Knox withdrew and in short order the trade agreement with Nepal was torn up. The exiled Gorkhali king Rana Bahadur was told to go home.

With him came an ambitious and capable minister called Bhimsen Thapa.

Many already regarded Bhimsen as the controlling influence behind Rana Bahadur’s actions. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, who had been part of Knox’s mission, described him as a

very vigorous rash young man, who, owing partly to the moderation of the Company’s negociations [sic] with Rana Bahadur, by him attributed to fear, and partly to the hope of protection from the Chinese, seems to have beheld the British government with contempt.

Bhimsen promptly had Damodar Pande beheaded and took control of the king. The dynasty that Prithvi Narayan had built so ably a few decades before had become, and would remain for the next one hundred and fifty years, a token to be squabbled over.

Bhimsen would dominate Nepal’s political scene for the next four

decades, a brilliant tactician who learned from his mistakes, his greatest being to misread the British. With the failure of Knox’s mission in 1804, which in some ways was merely a prologue to the Company’s forthcoming war with Nepal, Bhimsen renewed Nepal’s westward expansion, sending his father to occupy the still independent kingdom of Palpa and taking over the important trading town of Rerighat, now Ridi Bazar. That year the Gorkhali army also invaded Garhwal, the kingdom to the west of Kumaon. There was little prospect of trade being normalised with the Gorkhalis tightening their grip on the Himalaya.

In 1806, Rana Bahadur was murdered at the hands of his half-brother and

Kathmandu was plunged into a brief period of extreme bloodletting: the Bhandarkhal massacre. Ninety-three people died, seventeen of them women, all of them in some way obstructive to the interests of Bhimsen Thapa, who emerged intact and in control. Nepal continued its conquests, absorbing territory between the Yamuna and Sutlej rivers.

To pay Gorkha’s troops for this renewed aggression, Bhimsen

nationalised land gifted to religious institutions, a risky move in an increasingly conservative Hindu polity. The reward was the Gorkha government taking an even firmer grip on the region at the expense of its neighbours. The East India Company looked on with growing concern. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, who had been with Knox, observed how the Gorkhali conquests placed a chill over trade:

besides the military point of view, they are desirous of having few passages as a point of economy in collecting the customs. Accordingly, so far as they can, they have stopt every pass, except that by Butaul [Butwal], which of course, has become a considerable mart, although most inconveniently situated.

There seemed little prospect of mutually beneficial trade with a neighbour so aggressively acquisitive and so resistant to outside influence. Something would have to change.

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