12 Crossing Borders

12

 

Crossing Borders

 

The Indian village of Milam sits high in the Johar valley, a few kilometres south of the border with Tibet and close to the Milam glacier, from where the headwaters of the Gori Ganga, the ‘white river’, begin their journey south. These days Milam is a place of ruins. There are roughly four hundred houses in the village but only a dozen are still inhabited. In India’s 1901 census, there was a population here of almost eighteen hundred. Now it is down to a handful of shepherds, old men and women who bring their animals north each spring for the rich summer grazing. During winter, bears plunder the surviving homes, ransacking them for anything edible while the bitter wind tears at roofless walls. Look closely, though, and you’ll find those walls studded with exquisite hand-carved wooden window frames dating back to the eighteenth century. Milam has been here for a long time and these works of craftsmanship are evidence of more prosperous times. Some of the architecture shows a similar cultural confidence. Ask the locals, and they will show you the bada ghar, the ‘big house’ where their ancestors hid from Gorkha invaders who had heard rumours of the region’s wealth. All this decay among the mountains provokes an obvious and overwhelming question: what happened?

The answer usually offered is communist China’s occupation of Tibet,

the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959 to a sympathetic India and most of all the border war that India and China fought in 1962. Chairman Mao attacked on two fronts, west and east, timing his order to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis, which he knew of in advance from the Soviet premier Khrushchev. India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru soon discovered that potential allies were preoccupied with the prospect of nuclear war. He had underestimated China’s threat and the Indian army was ill prepared. Over the next few decades, while testing each other’s resolve, Beijing and Delhi would bury the Himalayan region’s deep history under the aggregate of modern geopolitics. In the aftermath of the 1962 war, patterns of trade and strong cross-border cultural links that had endured for centuries were abruptly severed. A space became a line.

There are half-deserted villages in valleys either side of Milam and

across the whole Himalaya that tell a similar story of dereliction and sudden loss of purpose. For many people living close to Tibet, it had always been easier to head north to the Tibetan plateau to travel east or west, rather than tack against the corrugated grain of the mountains, climbing and descending endless ridges: after 1962 that option became either impossible or fraught with regulation. It’s also true that people were already drifting south anyway. The village of Milam had been built on trade: salt, borax and wool from Tibet in exchange for grain, a hazardous business with high passes to cross and bandits to fight, but it made the Johar valley the richest in the immediate region. By the twentieth century, cheaper sources of goods from overseas were undermining margins on these trade routes. Reforms brought in after India’s independence also changed Himalayan society as land was redistributed. But China’s hard new border was a violent coup de grâce.

Recognising the economic hardship the conflict provoked, in 1967 the

Indian government added the people of Milam and other Himalayan ethnic groups to the list of ‘scheduled tribes’ established in India’s new constitution. This guaranteed political representation and government jobs to marginalised groups. In the aftermath of China’s aggression, the Himalaya became more heavily militarised and the Indian army was revamped. A new security force, the Indo-Tibet Border Police, was set up: a few are still stationed in Milam. They have bulldozed a short section of vehicle track downstream to the next village along the valley, Burfu, but porters, many of them poor Nepalis, are still needed to bring food from the closest main road up an ancient drover’s road, known as a khrancha. Underemployed men in Kumaon and Garhwal took advantage of their new status as scheduled tribes to join the military, often serving in the Indo-Tibet Border Police, mountain troops who train as skiers and mountaineers and are used to the cold and altitiude. In 1962, both Chinese and Indian troops suffered more casualties from the environment than the enemy. Recruiting from the hardy mountain communities of the Himalaya made sense.

For the people of Milam, becoming caught up in the dramas of powerful

nations was a familiar story. They had found themselves in a similar predicament a century earlier as the British Empire tried to fathom the unknown depths of the country on its northern frontier beyond the Himalaya, Tibet. In 1967 the people of Milam were scheduled as Bhotias, meaning simply people from Bhot, the word used commonly for Tibet by Tibetans. In doing so, the Indian government used a designation that was a legacy of the colonial British, who tended to lump together all ethnic Tibetan groups south of the Himalayan chain as Bhotias. After they acquired Garhwal and the upper part of Kumaon, where Milam is situated, they referred to it as ‘Bhotia Mahal’, meaning simply ‘where the Bhotia live’. As a consequence, there are now ‘Bhotia’ throughout the Himalaya, from Ladakh in the west all the way to Arunachal Pradesh in the east. Similarly, when Indian diplomats were negotiating with the Chinese to settle their border dispute after the 1962 war, they would use as evidence to support their cause the work of George Traill, the so-called king of the Kumaon, who arrived at Milam after the British defeated the Gorkhas in 1816. As we saw, Traill recognised at once the damage done to the people of the Johar valley by the excessive demands of their Gorkhali masters and lightened their tax burden, in the process creating detailed records of the region’s economic activity. In other words, India’s argument with the Chinese relied on British India’s attempts to administer a group of independent mountain people and define its limits against those of an earlier Chinese empire: the Qing.

At the time of British rule, the people of Milam didn’t call themselves

Bhotias and they didn’t regard themselves as ethnically Tibetan either. Inhabitants of the Johar valley called themselves Shaukas, and also Rawat, the first an ethnic description, the latter more political. They saw their origins in the diaspora of Hindu warrior Rajputs that migrated east through the middle hills of the Himalaya as Muslim control spread from the west. This gloss of aristocratic bearing is reflected in the use of Hindu names like Singh among the people of the valley. There is a story about a seventeenth-century Rawat leader called Hiru Dham Singh, a fighter from Garhwal who helped local Tibetan forces drive out Chinese marauders from the Kailas area, just across the border. As reward, he was given trading privileges by the Tibetans and settled here, in the upper Johar valley. That’s one version of Milam’s origin. Yet there are stories that are far older, like Kumaoni folk tales that tell of the fearless heroine Ranjuli and her father, the magician trader Sunapati Shauka, whose spells lift him over the mountains. One legend tells how the chela or disciples of Sakya Buddha settled the valley first, hence the name Shauka. Archaeological evidence certainly supports a more ancient story; Kumaon was known for its gold smelting as far back as the sixth century, an industry that requires borax as a flux, borax which came from Tibet: Milam most likely existed because of its location on the supply route for this material. By the time of the Chand dynasty, firmly established as rulers of Kumaon by the fifteenth century, we know such trade with Tibet existed because it is recorded in tax records.

The hazy outlines of Milam’s past aren’t merely coincidental; they are an

integral part of its story. Different cultures met and fused here. Just as in western Nepal, close by on the other side of the Mahakali river, Khas migrants to Milam encountered indigenous populations, creating new hierarchies and new ways of living. As trade grew, Tibetan and Turkic raiders saw easy pickings along the Kumaon frontier. Traders needed good relations on both sides of the mountains to defend their business and so the ability to blur cultural allegiances could prove useful. Summers were spent going back and forth across high passes in and out of Tibet, buying borax, salt, wool and gold dust, chiefly at Gartok, the dusty main town of western Tibet, and selling grain and manufactured goods. Rawat women would sometimes join the caravans of sheep, goats, ponies and yaks, crossing the border on pilgrimage to Kailas, in reverence to Shiva and Shakti. Winters were spent at established trade fairs in villages closer to the plains, while families stayed at second homes away from the frozen high valleys.

Religion in Milam is ostensibly Hindu but manages to cover many

traditions. The contemporary Indian traveller Chinmoy Chakrabarti observed how the Rawat’s

natural surroundings made them pantheist and animist. In most of their temples that I have visited, there are no idols but stones on which rudimentary sketches are made to bring in a resemblance of the Hindu divinities. On my way to the higher valleys, I have also seen prayer flags tied to trees, which are treated as sacred groves.

Natural objects like mountain peaks, rocks, rivulets [and] trees also represent deities.

The Johar valley in particular was a favoured route from the south over the mountains to Kailas, another reason the Rawats embraced their Hindu identity so strongly: it brought tolerance from the Chand kings and allowed them to prosper. Yet as the British colonial official Edmund Smyth, who spent many years in Kumaon, observed:

they have Hindu names, and call themselves Hindus, but they are not recognised as such by the orthodox Hindus of the plains or the hills. While in Tibet they seem glad enough to shake off their Hinduism and become Buddhists, or anything you like.

Cultural versatility was key; the Rawat could fill the different spaces they entered like water in a bowl and yet always be themselves. As traders they were capable linguists, fluent in Tibetan and Hindustani as well as more regional languages like Garhwali. Their own distinct dialects were of Tibetan origin, which gave them an advantage with Tibetan traders, said to do business only with those who would sit down and eat and drink with them. This caused suspicion among higher-caste Hindus in the middle hills who ostracised the Rawat as beef-eaters, ascribing their prosperity not to courage or business acumen but a willingness to compromise caste boundaries. There were immense risks in Tibet as well; the region was infested with bandits. But it was the Milam traders who held the advantage. Each had their own seal, or thachia, and a Tibetan counterpart, known as a mitra, with whom they dealt directly: the two would split a stone and each kept half. Only Rawat from the Johar valley could sell grain into this corner of Tibet, Ngari Khorsum or the upper Sutlej valley. Only Rawat could dissolve the relationship. They built up immense wealth and used bonded labour to farm their fields. One Rawat trader was said to be so rich that his bags of gold could block the Gori river. There are still a few old stallholders in the town of Munsyari who can remember the thrill of their first caravan, shaking hands with old Tibetan friends arriving at market, sheep laden with salt, gold jewellery flashing in the relentless sun of high altitude.

The British had a relationship with these Rawat, or Bhotias as they called

them, even before the East India Company took control in 1816. Eight years earlier the surveyor William Webb, accompanied by Captain Felix Raper and their minder Hyder Jung Hearsey, encountered Bhotias in Garhwal at the village of Mana in the Alaknanda valley, on the west side of the mountain Nanda Devi, during their search for the source of the Ganges. Captain Raper was enchanted with this markedly different ethnic group.

As soon as we entered the town, all the inhabitants came out to welcome us; and we observed a greater display of female and juvenile beauty, than we recollect to have seen in an Indian village. [He liked the] ruddiness in their complexions, of which the children partook in a very great degree; many of them approaching to the floridness of the European.

Raper also noted how Bhotias ‘profess the Hindu religion, and call themselves Rajputs’, even though

they scruple not to perform the most menial offices; and in the article of food are less nice than the lower class of sweepers. Like most inhabitants of cold climates, the Manah people are much addicted to drinking; and even consider it necessary for their health.

He described the Bhotias’ yaks at length and was, like most travellers since, in terror of their dogs.

One of them was a remarkably fine animal, as large as a good sized Newfoundland dog, with very long hair, and a head resembling a mastiff ’s. His tail was of an amazing length, like the brush of a fox, and curled half way over his back. He was however so fierce, that he would allow no stranger to approach him.

As they turned south from the Garhwal towards Kumaon, Webb, Raper and Hearsey found themselves hustled out of what was then Gorkhali territory: the authorities, having got wind the British were asking too many questions, were determined to make sure they left swiftly. There was only enough time to notice that Kumaoni farms were more prosperous than those in Garhwal and to see the mountains from a distance. Otherwise their impressions were fleeting. Yet for much of their journey, the trio, two British and an Anglo-Indian, had enjoyed the company of a man born in Kumaon: a Brahmin called Har-Balam, whom they’d hired as a fixer at the start of their journey. This man had proved his value many times over and left them well disposed towards Kumaonis in general. It was most probably Har-Balam whom Webb meant when he told his superior in Calcutta about an ‘intelligent native’ who had visited the Tibetan borderlands and described

two great Lakes, only one of which is laid down in any Map extant, viz. Lake Mansurwar [Manasarovar] … The other, by far the largest and most important, named Rown Rudh [Rakshas Tal] remains unnoticed.

Webb’s information was somewhat awry, but the prospect of these great lakes was irresistible. The source of the Ganges might now be clearer but a new prospect for exploration now arose: what might be discovered on the far side of the mountains?

Crossing these mountains demanded a lot from Europeans who took on

the challenge, but they couldn’t do it alone. Their efforts would have been wholly in vain without the mediation of a select group of local people, usually traders, who had the skills and access to move between different Himalayan worlds. From the moment the British arrived at the foot of the Himalaya and began investigating Tibet for the purposes of trade and geographic knowledge, they relied heavily on such people, who were as often as not written out or down in published accounts. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the British still kept out of a large proportion of the Himalaya, these quick-witted, courageous intermediaries would be crucial in gathering intelligence on behalf of their imperial masters. The greatest of these would come from the Johar valley.

*

The broad narrative arc of nineteenth century European exploration in Central Asia could be summed up as a process of creeping institutionalisation. In the eighteenth century, the East India Company was more or less run by adventurers. Forty years later, the free and easy spirit that had sent George Bogle to Tibet in 1774 had evaporated. British control of India had expanded rapidly under the governors general Cornwallis and Wellesley, but the Company was much reformed and under tighter bureaucratic control. With more to lose, it moved cautiously and by increments. At the same time, scientific exploration was becoming hugely popular across Europe. Alexander von Humboldt was among the most famous men of his day and Charles Darwin was circling the world in the Beagle. Public appetite for their tales of adventure and discovery sold books and filled lecture halls. In 1830 the Geographical Society would be founded as a London dining club, receiving its royal charter in 1859. The reputation of an explorer could now be made or broken in London committee rooms. After the 1857 rebellion, alongside Anglican hegemony and racial arrogance, political and institutional control of exploration would also harden. Yet in the first half of the century there was still enough space for mercenaries, mavericks and freelancers to prosper.

Hyder Hearsey had certainly been one of these. After the journey in

Garhwal and Kumaon, he had returned to the family estates near Bareilly. As raids from Gorkhali troops increased through 1811, Hearsey acted on his own initiative, raising troops and laying in weapons and ammunition in early 1812 to take the fight to the Nepalis. This infuriated the East India Company agent in Bareilly, as the British were at this point reluctant to provoke the Gorkha regime. The official had the governor general revoke that portion of Hearsey’s property that was leased from the Company. Another such character was Alexander Gardner, known as Gordana Khan, whose adventures and travels in Central Asia and the Oxus valley in the 1820s were so outlandish that the Scottish orientalist Henry Yule refused to believe them. Born in Wisconsin in 1785 to a Scottish father and a Spanish mother, he later became a mercenary in the Sikh Khalsa, or army. But it was another travelling companion of Hyder Hearsey, a man called William Moorcroft, who, though not at all romantic himself, led the way in the wildest, most romantic phase of Europe’s encounter with the Himalaya.

Moorcroft was, in the historian John Keay’s phrase, an ‘erratic genius’.

‘He still gets described as a horse-dealer, a spy or an adventurer,’ Keay wrote, ‘each of which possess a grain of truth while sadly understating his real standing.’ The only portrait that exists, assuming that it is in fact of Moorcroft, is poorly done, showing him, in the words of the writer Charles Allen, ‘perched uneasily on a rickety chair, a trim, slight man with the face of a spiv – small eyes, long nose, hairline moustache’. He was certainly short and slight, with fair hair and a florid complexion: far from the image of a rugged explorer. But it tells little of the drama of his life, his immense resilience and determination, and more than anything his insatiable curiosity.

The most startling thing about Moorcroft was his age. When he set out

with Hearsey for Tibet in May 1812, he was at least forty-five or so, having already worked for several years in India, a country where life expectancy for Europeans was short even for those who didn’t stray far from their desks. That made him more a contemporary of Bogle than Webb or Raper. Born around 1765, he had started as a medical student at Liverpool Infirmary when he became involved in battling an epidemic among livestock in his native Lancashire. He then followed the suggestion of pioneering surgeon John Hunter to switch to the new discipline of veterinary science, and the only place to study that was France. Having qualified, he set up practice in London and made a fortune that he then lost after investing in the manufacture of cast-iron horseshoes, an investment that soured over patents. For the rest of his life, it seems, there was always a part of him searching for a scheme that would redeem this failure. In the meantime, he needed a job. Moorcroft had served as a volunteer in the citizen army that was raised to meet the threat of French invasion and in the process had got to know Edward Parry, a director of the East India Company. Parry now offered him the job of improving the military stud in Calcutta. The salary was vast and tax free, but it wasn’t simply a question of restoring his fortunes: the older Moorcroft got, the more restless he became.

Arriving in India in 1808, Moorcroft discovered the scale of his task. His

job was to provide the Bengal army with eight hundred horses a year. Given the corrupted and feeble stock he inherited, Moorcroft knew immediately he needed better animals, ‘an infusion of the bone and blood of the Turkman steed’. During the eighteenth century, India had been plugged into Central Asian horse breeding markets, largely thanks to the Rohilla, ethnic Pashtun tribesmen who had migrated from Afghanistan to serve in the Mughal army, settling in northern India. The hills of Rohilkhand, the region they inhabited around the towns of Bareilly and Rampur, had just the right grasses for good horse-breeding. The Lavi fair at Rampur, founded in the eighteenth century to boost trade with Tibet, also included a horse market where traders could buy the famous Chamurthi ponies from the Himalayan region of Spiti. With the decline of the Rohillas, access to Central Asian stock became more difficult and the quality of local breeding declined. Moorcroft also needed a different kind of horse. The weight of a Bengal army dragoon with field equipment was 252 lb (115 kilograms), much heavier than a Mughal cavalryman, requiring a bigger, taller horse. He decided he needed to visit the source of the best bloodstock: the horse fairs of Central Asia, particularly that in the Uzbek city of Bukhara. Moorcroft had a second motive. Having sorted out the day-to-day administration of the Company’s stud, he was bored and looking for an adventure.

And so, to the annoyance of his employers, William Moorcroft spent

much of the cold season of late 1811 sniffing around the horse markets of northern India, which is how he met Hearsey, at Saharanpur, sixty-five kilometres south of the Garhwali town of Dehra Dun, just as the Anglo-Indian was recruiting fighters to clear Gorkhalis off his land. In Hearsey, Moorcroft found someone with the knowledge and contacts to cross the Himalaya, and with the gall too. When this awkward pair sought approval for their journey, the Company agent in Bareilly was glad to be shot of them. They took off for the mountains in search of good horses, as well as Tibet’s famous shawl goats, before Calcutta could get wind of the plan and call them back.

Lacking permission from the Gorkhali authorities, the two men went

disguised as gosain, trader-monks like Purangir, servant of the Panchen Lama, who had accompanied George Bogle to Shigatse almost forty years earlier: the archetype for the sort of intermediary the British would come to rely on. Hearsey, with his Indian blood, looked the part. Moorcroft coloured his skin with walnut juice and the ashes from a fire of cow dung. They took the pseudonyms Hargiri and Mayapuri. With them went an Afghan soldier of fortune called Gholam Hyder Khan, an old friend from Hearsey’s mercenary days, and an older Brahman from Kumaon whom Moorcroft named Harballabh – this was the pandit, or ‘learned man’, who had proved so valuable on Hearsey’s earlier journey towards the source of the Ganges and who had spoken of the two lakes beyond the mountains. Moorcroft called Harballabh the ‘old pundit’ to differentiate him from his nephew Harkh Dev, who also accompanied them. Both these men would help Hearsey and Moorcroft survey their route. Though he lacked a theodolite, Hearsey took a compass and a thermometer to record altitude and Harkh Dev got the tedious job of counting his paces – four feet for two steps – to measure distance. With them went four dozen porters to carry goods they hoped to sell in Tibet.

Hearsey knew the route as far as the junction of the Alaknanda and

Dhauli rivers, where they turned east through a deep gorge. This travels up the west side of Nanda Devi, just as the Johar valley follows the east. These days there is a crumbling jeep track; then there was a crumbling footpath. Moorcroft was impressed at the agility of Harballabh, reminding himself that the ‘old pundit’ had been born in the mountains of Kumaon. But even the pandit had to shelter in a hollow while he summoned up the courage to cross a particularly exposed and dangerous section. Hearsey was almost hit by rocks knocked off the mountainside by bears traversing three hundred feet above him. Moorcroft noted that the path would be much better had not key bridges been washed away, bridges that could be restored for a small investment of no more than a hundred rupees. His account of this journey, published in the Asiatic Journal of 1816, is not only brimming with that eighteenth-century impulse for improvement, as though the remote Dhauli valley was an underperforming English estate, but crammed also with observations on every subject: the weather, crops, forestry, fauna and flora, obviously, but in great detail, listing the herbs he found near villages, the fashionable new subject of geology, hydrology and what we would now call anthropology. He saw how the locals wrote receipts on birch bark, examined a yellow snake Hearsey had killed and noted the differences in how sheep and goats, both used for carrying loads from Tibet, negotiated the steep paths.

Moorcroft’s powers of observation were remarkable. Across the border in

Tibet, he noted the kindness of a Tibetan woman who fetched them water and then described her appearance. Every detail of her dress was recorded, even more so her jewellery, especially that worn on her head:

it was bordered with silver, and from this rim hung seven rows of coral beads, each row consisting of five, which were terminated by seven silver timashas [coins] that played upon the forehead. The crown was studded with small pearls distributed in seven rows, and the low part was decorated with green stones something like turquoises but marbled with coral beads, and many bands of silver and of a yellow metal, probably gold, about a finger’s breadth.

Moorcroft saw the world with such intensity that he might one day have driven himself mad.

It was certainly typical of him to pay close attention to women. Years

later, the French traveller Victor Jacquemont repeated gossip he’d heard in Kashmir about Moorcroft, that ‘his chief occupation was making love’. It wasn’t altogether true. Moorcroft was also writing a detailed treatise on the shawl-wool trade, and Jacquemont himself was no better in that regard. Moorcroft’s interest in women extended far beyond his own sexual appetite. His account of the journey to Tibet is full of telling details about the position of women in the cultures he moved through. He admired the strength and courage of Bhotia women carrying loads. He saw a woman whom he tipped for this service have the coin taken from her by a man he assumed to be her husband; when Moorcroft discovered he wasn’t, he chased him for his ‘petty tyranny’ and recovered the coin for her. He admired women’s skill at weaving, ‘learned from Tibet’, and literally measured how quickly they could produce cloth. He noticed also the widespread practice of slavery, an industry dominated by Gorkhali agents, who sold slaves to rich families of the district. Above all, he noted how women outnumbered men, who were either trading across the border or else had been forcibly recruited into the Gorkhali army, a resentment the British would exploit in their war with Nepal three years later.

When the expedition arrived at Niti, the last village before the pass into

Tibet, Hearsey and Moorcroft were forced to stop and negotiate their way across the border. This left the local Bhotias, known as Marchas to Moorcroft and today as Rong-pa, facing a conundrum. Here were wealthy feringhi – white foreigners – wanting to spend whatever it took to do something that might annoy officials in Tibet, who could make life difficult for them. Their cover story, that they were pilgrims on the road to Manasarovar, was an obvious sham. Pilgrims didn’t go to Manasarovar this way; certainly not pilgrims this wealthy. The obvious answer was to delay, thus stripping the group of money while at the same time hoping they’d give up and go home.

Moorcroft and Hearsey wrote a letter to the deba, or local Tibetan

official, explaining they were pilgrims. The headman of the village told them to expect a delay; the route the letter had to take wasn’t yet clear of snow and it would be weeks before any messenger could travel. Almost immediately, two Tibetans appeared, coming down from the supposedly blocked pass. The letter was sent. Two days later the locals despatched an ambassador, a man so drunk he fell off the yak he was riding four times before he crested the hillside above the village. There was little cause for optimism. Eight days later the deba came back with a firm refusal. There were more meetings, more promises, more rupees spread around to ease concerns. Moorcroft got his medical kit out and used his skills to win friends. Finally a man called Amer Singh, son of the village chief Arjun Singh, told the ‘old pundit’ Harballabh that he could get the foreigners across the pass to Tibet, or Undes as Moorcroft called it.

Even with Amer Singh’s help, Moorcroft and Hearsey were driven to

distraction with prevarication and delay; Hearsey resorted to painting a picture of the village, an image now in the British Library. Eventually terms were agreed but both men knew they had been fleeced. The night before departure, the locals held a party and the foreigners donated a bottle of brandy to raise morale. Yet when they rose early the following morning to start, there was no sign of anyone, just the yaks they had hired. Eventually Amer Singh’s father Arjun arrived, now doubtful about the wisdom of it all. More rupees were spread around and finally the caravan got underway. Then, after an hour, their guides announced there was a ceremony planned for a villager who had died the year before and they were heading back to the village. Two days later, bored with examining the local rhubarb and observing how easily the sun at high altitude burned his face and lips, Moorcroft sent a messenger to find out what was going on. The messenger reported how the villagers were still sleeping off the party, all piled up in a big heap on the floor of a house. They would be along presently.

In the end, worn down by the foreigners’ relentless determination, Amer

Singh led Moorcroft and Hearsey across the pass at the head of the valley and into Tibet. Moorcroft’s account of lying awake at their high camp before the long ascent to the top of the Niti La is one of the earliest descriptions by an Englishman of altitude sickness and what is now called Cheyne–Stokes breathing, and one of the best.

I awoke at a very early hour and was immediately seized with difficulty of breathing and great oppression about the heart, which was removed for a few seconds by sighing deeply. When on the point of falling asleep, the sense of suffocation came on, and the sighing became very frequent and distressing: however, as the air became a little warmer, this affection [effect] somewhat subsided.

Before they reached the pass the caravan met two Tibetans bringing salt down to Niti. Amer Singh told Moorcroft that these traders raised ‘many objections to our proceeding’ and that they should return with them to the main village thirty kilometres over the pass, a place called Daba. At the top Moorcroft found them lighting a fire and burning juniper,

in the midst of which was a statue having a piece of cloth tied to it, and whilst walking, [they] uttered a long prayer. To the East was the sacred mountain near the lake of Mansarovar, tipped with snow, and called Cailas or Mahadeo ka Ling. Turning his face towards this mountain, and after raising his hands with the palms joined above his head, then touching his forehead, [one of them] suddenly placed them on the ground, and going on his knees pressed his forehead to the ground.

It is presumably these two traders that Hearsey later painted in a jaunty impression of this awkward encounter, smoking their pipes astride their Chamurthi mountain ponies with their yaks behind them fully loaded. Hearsey and Moorcroft, wearing their disguise, are riding their yaks towards the holiest mountain Kailas; in the distance is a small group of khyang, or wild asses.

Two days later the party reached Daba, perched on a rocky prominence

that dominates the valley, where Amer Singh incurred the displeasure of the officials who had earlier sent messages denying the ‘pilgrims’ access. Moorcroft reports a meeting between the head lama of the local monastery; the son of the deba; the local big landowner; Amer Singh; the old pandit Harballabh; a man from the Johar valley, whom Moorcroft doesn’t name; and another man, also unnamed, described as a sirdar – a chief, or boss. Everybody understood the stakes: the best advantage for the least trouble and not too many questions asked. Amer Singh had the least power and so had to be the most persuasive, picking his way carefully along a treacherous path, meeting the needs of his employers while not causing himself difficulties with local Tibetan officials whose cooperation he needed for future business. Moorcroft and Hearsey were not fools but neither spoke Tibetan so the course of these negotiations was largely obscured from them. They were almost wholly reliant on their intermediary, who led them the following morning into the presence of the lama and the son of the local chief. Having handed over gifts of three yards of scarlet broadcloth, some sugar and spices, the chief ’s son flourished a letter to the district governor at Gartok that would reassure him that Moorcroft and Hearsey really were gosain traders on a pilgrimage and asking for instructions about what to do with them.

A short while later, the governor, or garpon, sent word summoning them

to visit him. This suited Moorcroft very well. His journey to Tibet in 1812 is best remembered now for his visit to the sacred lake of Manasarovar, the first by an Englishman, and his conviction that it was wholly landlocked, being neither the source of the Indus nor linked, as Harballabh claimed, in any way to its brackish neighbour Rakshas Tal. (In fact, Harballabh was right: there is a link between the two, but it’s ephemeral. Moorcroft speculated that an earthquake had interrupted its flow since Harballabh’s visit.) But while Moorcroft was intensely curious about the region’s geography, it was in fact the possibility of trade – not just horses, but shawl wool too – that was foremost in his mind, and Gartok was the centre of it.

Having left Daba and crossed the Sutlej above the decaying Guge fortress

of Tsaparang, their caravan reached the upper Indus and the vast plateau of Gartok in six days. ‘The intervening plain,’ Moorcroft wrote,

and indeed as far as the eye can reach until it is bounded by a pass to the N.W. is covered by prodigious bodies of sheep, goats and yaks, amongst which is a small number of horses. The number of cattle cannot I think be less than 40000.

Gartok itself was little more than a temporary collection of tents and a rather mean house for the garpon. The rolling hills north from here where the sheep and goats grazed had few permanent villages: this was nomad country. Animals were driven here and then shorn, their wool and hair shipped on. It was clear to Moorcroft that a great deal of money was changing hands. When he met the garpon, Moorcroft paid close attention to his jewellery and when he asked the Tibetan what he could bring from Hindustan should trade between them prosper he was impressed at the precise and educated list of precious objects the garpon requested. The suspicion that they were Gorkhalis or Peling, as the Tibetans called the British, soon wore off, as Moorcroft wryly observed, ‘either by the representations of the Deba, or by the weight of our presents’. There was money to be made.

The following day, Moorcroft and Hearsey put the wares they had carried

over the Niti La on display. The Kashmiri trade agent of the king of Ladakh, there to buy wool, sent word that he was ready to buy the lot if the garpon didn’t want them. When they met, Moorcroft pumped him for information about Central Asia’s trade routes. He learned that Gartok was a vast temporary marketplace plugging the Chang Tang, the northern region of the Tibetan plateau, and its huge herds of sheep, goats and yaks, into the major trading route between Lhasa and the trade hub of Leh, the capital of Ladakh, which the Kashmiri told him was ten days’ journey from there. Kashmir itself, he said, was another ten days beyond Leh. The horse fair at Bukhara, also famous for its carpets, would take a month. The roundabout route to Bukhara from Delhi via Kabul and on to Central Asia ‘he represented as very circuitous’, in comparison to this route across the Himalaya. Moorcroft also discovered that the sparse population of western Tibet relied on the people of the Johar valley and other Himalayan groups for grain, which they traded for sheep wool. The Kashmiris were most interested in the more valuable shawl wool from goats, a trade they had monopolised thanks to their Mughal overlords, trading saffron in return. Ladakh couldn’t produce enough pashmina to satisfy manufacturers in Kashmir so prices in Tibet were high. He also discovered, with some alarm, that trade with Russia was also well established; a Russian trade agent called Mehdi Rafailov, a Persian Jew, had been in Kashmir in 1808. Later a Ladakhi trader showed Moorcroft samples of French woollen cloth and Russian leather that had arrived from Central Asia, now falling under the shadow of the expanding Russian Empire. The implications of this would trouble Moorcroft for the rest of his life, provoking him to fire off prophetic memos to Calcutta about the Russian threat to India at a time when London and St Petersburg were allies against Napoleon.

Before leaving for Manasarovar, Moorcroft and Hearsey had themselves

done a deal with the garpon to buy a quantity of shawl wool. One morning as they prepared to leave a place called Misar this wool arrived on horseback, accompanied by the garpon’s officer, a man called Tharchen. The garpon had sent more wool than Moorcroft had requested and would accept only silver rupees in return. Moorcroft realised this was a test of whether he was in fact a trader or had some other more nefarious motive for coming to Tibet. It also attracted the attention of Johari traders in the village ‘who were troublesomely inquisitive as to who we were, what could be our motives for coming, and why we purchased shawl wool’. The Joharis were at the time the chief conduit for goods from India and had much to lose.

The sight of some of our wares seemed to convince them, that we were what we appeared to be. I consider this day as the epoch at which may be fixed the origin of a traffic which is likely to be extremely beneficial to the Honourable Company.

If Moorcroft had gone to the mountains looking for horses, he left with a grand strategy of Himalayan trade. The final legacy of his journey would prove to be neither.

*

Hearsey and Moorcroft were told to cross back over the Himalaya the way they had come and when they reached Daba the two had an encounter whose consequences would stretch out to the end of the nineteenth century. A Rawat trader called Dev Singh made himself known to Moorcroft. Singh, the son of a powerful landowner from the Johar valley, offered to lend the travellers money; their journey had been unexpectedly expensive and they might need some. Moorcroft demurred, but instead offered to trade a valuable set of coral beads for some shawl-wool goats and sheep. He asked they be delivered to Niti where the ‘young pundit’ Harkh Dev would be waiting to bring them down to Moorcroft on the plains. The deal was done. Having proved himself useful in this and other ways to Moorcroft, Dev Singh asked Moorcroft for a certificate that would essentially allow him to trade in the East India Company’s jurisdiction at the local rate. This Moorcroft was happy to supply.

In providing assistance to Moorcroft, Dev Singh had by chance put his

descendants at the heart of one of the great stories of Himalayan exploration, a story that unfolded some fifty years later and hinged on repeated British failures over several decades to gain access to or build relationships with Tibet. In time, the story would add another meaning to the word pandit, more usually spelled in this case ‘pundit’, one of daring subterfuge and limitless endurance, and its origins are to be found seven years after Moorcroft’s journey, with a sudden catastrophic interruption to the flourishing trade Moorcroft had witnessed at the western Tibet settlement of Gartok.

In 1819, Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire occupied Kashmir and put the valley

under the control of loyal Hindu chiefs, Kishore Singh and then his son Gulab, ethnically Dogra Rajputs who had ambitions of their own. Many Kashmiri weavers fled to the plains. Soon after, William Moorcroft embarked on a second, much longer and ultimately fatal journey to explore Central Asia’s trade routes. He spent two years in Ladakh, developing a deep respect both for the people and Tibetan Buddhism. The Ladakhis knew that following the Sikh occupation of Kashmir they were likely next and Tsepal Dondup Namgyal, the chogyal or king of Ladakh, appealed to Moorcroft, as an East India Company man, for help. Moorcroft drew up a trade agreement that allowed Ladakhis to trade shawl wool directly with India, cutting out the Kashmiri middlemen, and open up Central Asia to the British. This deal not only antagonised the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, it also infuriated Moorcroft’s masters in Calcutta, who suspended Moorcroft’s pay. Calcutta saw no advantage in testing the patience of Ranjit Singh, who was, at least in theory, the Company’s ally.

But Tsepal Dondup, the chogyal of Ladakh, was right to be anxious about

the Sikhs. ‘He is said to be rapacious,’ Moorcroft wrote of Tsepal, ‘but his prevailing qualities are extreme timidity and indolence, and he relinquishes the management of affairs entirely to the Khalun,’ essentially the prime minister. The Ladakhi army was undermined by ‘the cowardice of the soldiery, and the inefficiency of their equipment’. They had lots of bows and arrows but ‘one matchlock for ten men, and one sword for six’. So when, in 1834, the brilliant Dogra general Zorawar Singh, born in the district of Kangra, led an army into Ladakh, Tsepal Dondup was deposed.

Ironically, the consequence of this was to achieve what Moorcroft had

proposed. Rather than deal with the aggressive new Dogra regime in Ladakh, traders buying wool at Gartok stopped taking it to the capital Leh, and began instead crossing the mountains further east to sell their wool at Rampur in the Sutlej valley, now under British control following the Treaty of Sagauli. Enraged by the consequent loss of revenue, Gulab Singh sent Zorawar into western Tibet with a few thousand troops to restore his monopoly on the wool trade. In short order Zorawar had marched through Gartok and was at Purang, known in Nepal as Taklakot, close to the Nepali border, scattering a larger but disorganised Tibetan army ahead of him. Dogra troops also occupied hill-states on the other side of the Himalaya north of the Sutlej.

The complexities of this high-altitude aggression were boggling for the

East India Company, which at the time was suffering its humiliation in Afghanistan. The British were also trying to negotiate better access to Chinese markets. Tibet was under China’s suzerainty and so in theory was Nepal. The Dogras were, at least nominally, the Company’s allies. What would happen if any of these parties assumed Gulab Singh’s move had the approval of Calcutta? It was, in the words of the Kathmandu resident Brian Houghton Hodgson, ‘a most untoward event’. The exiled king of Ladakh sent envoys to Kathmandu seeking support from Rajendra, the pusillanimous Gorkhali king whom Jang Bahadur would shortly depose. Rajendra offered China his support should they wish to intervene but the Daoguang emperor turned him down: Rajendra enjoyed little respect at the Qing court. So Rajendra reversed his position and contemplated an alliance with Gulab Singh instead. This prospect was no less alarming to the British, who were now threatened with an alliance that would span much of the Himalaya.

Luckily for the Company, in December 1841 Tibetan and Chinese troops

attacked Zorawar, who, having made a pilgrimage to Kailas, made the fatal mistake of over-wintering in Tibet. His troops were in a miserable state, forced to burn their musket stocks for warmth and succumbing to frostbite and hypothermia. At Toyo, close to Taklakot, Zorawar was utterly defeated and killed; Tibetans were said to have kept scraps of his hair and flesh as talismans. The victorious Qing and Tibetan forces continued on to Ladakh to besiege the citadel of Leh, but Gulab Singh sent reinforcements and after several months of stalemate a treaty was signed at a small village called Chushul that restored the status quo. None of the parties thought it necessary to involve or even inform the British of this arrangement.

By now Ranjit Singh was dead and his Sikh Empire was fracturing as his

offspring struggled for control. The East India Company accordingly built up its military presence to face the Sikhs. When war broke out, once more threatening the balance of power in the Himalaya, Rajendra wrote again to the Qing ambans in Lhasa, warning them that

the Pilings [British] are now fighting with the Sen-pa [Sikhs], and have already defeated the Sen-pa once; that the said nation [Nepal] is connected with the Sen-pa as a neighbour, and if the Pilings have seized the territory of Sen-pa he [Rajendra] fears their victory will cause [them] to covet Tibetan territory.

The Chinese ambans sent a memo to Beijing pouring scorn on Rajendra – ‘He is impossible!’ – with the implication that as usual the Gorkhali king had his hand out for a donation. They also reassured Beijing that Tibet’s borders were being watched closely and the British would remain on the outside.

During this first Sikh war with the British, Gulab Singh steered a clever

course that kept him out of the conflict without betraying his former masters, the Sikhs. His reward came in the Treaty of Amritsar, signed in 1846, in which the British recognised Gulab as sovereign ruler of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh under the protection of the East India Company: the root of modern Kashmir’s suffering. In return Gulab would pay the Company a small tribute, not employ any Europeans or Americans in his military and refer boundary issues to Calcutta. On that basis, two boundary commissioners, Alexander Cunningham and Patrick Vans Agnew, were appointed to establish the frontiers between Ladakh and Tibet. Tibet was expected to reciprocate by sending equivalent officers of their own, but no one arrived from Lhasa to work with the British, who were consequently unable to proceed. Vans Agnew was reassigned and not long after murdered at Multan in the Punjab, an incident that prompted renewed conflict between the British and the Sikhs.

A second commission was established for 1847, again under the

command of Alexander Cunningham, a military engineer and later the founding director of the Archaeological Survey of India. With him was Henry Strachey, then a lieutenant in the 13th Bengal Native Infantry. (The year before, Strachey had made his illicit journey to Manasarovar while on sick leave from his posting at Chittagong. Following in the footsteps of Webb and Traill, he had visited the Milam valley and met Moorcroft’s old travelling companion Dev Singh, who recommended that to avoid detection he should cross the Lampiya Dhura pass to the east, which Strachey did, disguised like Moorcroft as a pilgrim.) The third member of the boundary commission was the doctor and naturalist Thomas Thomson, who would join the botanist Joseph Hooker on his later explorations in India. They had ambitious plans to explore Ladakh’s trade routes and for Strachey to travel to Lhasa but he found himself delayed and obstructed at the village of Hanle, on the historic Ladakhi-Tibetan border some three hundred kilometres south-east of Leh. Tibetan officials at Gartok on the other side of the border continued to ignore the British. Gulab Singh’s surveyors came late and grudgingly; those of the Qing never arrived at all. The ambitious plans for Cunningham and his men dwindled almost to nothing.

Another pressing issue for the British was the restoration of the shawl-

wool trade from the western Tibetan market at Gartok to their own commercial hub at Rampur, trade that Zorawar Singh’s invasion had so rudely interrupted. A land swap was now done with Gulab Singh that brought the Spiti valley under direct British control: Spiti offered fast access to Gartok and was no more than fifty kilometres from Rampur. Trade agents knew the Tibetans were fed up with the high duties Gulab Singh exacted and sensed there was a deal to be done: but how to reach the Tibetans? Given the experience of Cunningham, it was clear officials in western Tibet would refuse to have anything to do with Europeans. So a local man from Kinnaur called Anant Ram who was working for the boundary commission was tasked with translating and delivering a letter from the governor general to Gartok: another local intermediary working both sides of the mountains. He returned with a long story about how unwelcome the letter was and not to expect an answer until the following year. No one could tell if he was telling the truth; no British officials spoke Tibetan even though many areas of the Himalaya now under British control had significant Tibetan populations.

While Anant Ram was (or wasn’t) trying to deliver the governor

general’s letter at Gartok, a copy was on its way to Hong Kong, to be forwarded to the Chinese. This was the first time the British had tried to influence Lhasa in this way, leverage made possible by their success five years earlier in the first of the Opium Wars with China. The resulting Treaty of Nanking in 1842 had given them greater access to Chinese markets. Yet progress from this direction was also very slow. Throughout the nineteenth century, British colonial officials dealing directly with Beijing judged remote Himalayan border disputes as of peripheral concern. Sir John Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong, sent notes via the trading port of Canton, now Guangzhou, to the Daoguang emperor asking for cooperation in settling the border between Ladakh and western Tibet. Beijing promised to send ‘proper instructions’ to its ambans in Lhasa. These had absolutely no impact. The most influential Chinese official in Lhasa was Qishan, sent to Lhasa in disgrace after mishandling the First Opium War. He had no inclination to ease relations with the hated British. The Tibetan government saw British surveyors as harbingers of invasion. Gulab Singh’s proxies in Leh, knowing the British were after their trade in shawl wool, were no less reluctant to settle the border with Tibet. The British remained shut out.

Despite this passive-aggressive resistance, British officials on the

Himalayan frontier remained hopeful that access to Tibet would eventually be granted. As things turned out, the priorities and politics of the wider British Empire made this almost impossible. It would take British officials in India more than a decade to realise this; but when they did, they turned to the indigenous inhabitants of the Himalaya to cross the border for them, in particular the people of the Johar valley. The descendants of Dev Singh, Moorcoft’s trading partner, would be among them.

In 1858, the Second Opium War between Anglo-French forces and the Manchu rulers of China came to a theoretical end with the Treaty of Tianjin. This gave the Europeans more trading ports and more rights of passage, a further blow to the fading prestige of the Qing Empire. Before it was signed, hawks around the Xianfeng emperor encouraged him to resist, prompting renewed hostilities. The fighting ended conclusively in 1860 when the cavalry of the Qing’s most trusted Mongol general Sengge Rinchen, a Tibetan name meaning ‘lion treasure’, was utterly destroyed at the Battle of Baliqiao. The British then marched on Beijing to loot and destroy the emperor’s summer palaces. The treaty was signed with yet more concessions forced from the Qing. Included in the Treaty of Tianjin was a new right for foreigners to travel in the interior of China. In theory, this opened the way for British explorers to enter Tibet. Acting on this opportunity, Edmund Smyth, education officer in Kumaon, got support from the Indian government for an official mission to Tibet. Although this expedition never got off the ground, Smyth’s involvement would bring the people of the Johar valley to the attention of the British authorities.

Born in Lincolnshire, Smyth was educated at the public school Rugby,

his time there immortalised by his contemporary Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days. Smyth was the model for the character Crab Jones,

sauntering along with a straw in his mouth, the queerest, coolest fish in Rugby. If he were tumbled into the moon this minute, he would just pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets or turning a hair.

He had fought in the same regiment as Henry Strachey during the Second Anglo-Sikh War that followed the murder of Vans Agnew. After that he was in Delhi, from where he was able to indulge his great passion for hunting in the Himalaya. Smyth had no interest in leaving behind an account of his life but from what remains it’s clear almost no other European travelled so widely in Tibet in the nineteenth century. One of his few surviving letters mentions a four-month hunting trip he made to western Tibet in the 1850s with his friend the future explorer John Speke. Another hunting trip to Tibet, made in 1864 after he’d been refused official permission, is recorded in Thomas Webber’s The Forests of Upper India, which makes it clear that Smyth already had deep experience of the northern Himalaya. Webber also claimed to have visited the source of the Brahmaputra, although the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin would later do his best to discredit this. These journeys were trespassing, illicit and potentially damaging, so Smyth and those others who indulged kept them quiet: there was no need to embarrass Calcutta. (Not everyone was so discreet. The Scottish aristocrat Robert Drummond launched a rubber dinghy on Manasarovar, which so outraged Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims that the local governor, according to legend, literally lost his head.)

In 1854, after twenty years of service, Smyth was due his long leave from

India, travelling as far as Aden with his friend Speke, where they met the young Richard Burton, later among the most famous explorers in history. These two went off together to Somaliland and their tryst with the Nile, while Smyth went climbing in the Swiss Alps, where he made a notable first ascent with his brothers Christopher and James, both clergymen. We only know this because the alpinist Edward Whymper wrote Smyth up in a guidebook to Zermatt. ‘The natives used to say that he could climb where birds could not fly, which is the Oriental equivalent for “Monsieur has the agility of a chamois.”’ After that Smyth volunteered for service in the Crimean War, seconded to the Turkish irregular cavalry known as the Bashi-Bazouks, along with Burton and Speke, planning with the latter to traverse the Caucasus, though a lack of passports thwarted them.

By the time his leave was over, Smyth’s old regiment had been

disbanded, having suffered appalling casualties defending Lucknow in the rebellion of 1857. He was appointed ‘inspector of public instruction’ – education officer – in Garhwal and Kumaon, with a remit to establish vernacular schools in the hills. This did two things. First, it took him back to mountains he loved. Second, it put him in close contact with descendants of Dev Singh, who had helped Moorcroft in Tibet, in the Johar valley: Bir Singh and Nain Singh, who was a schoolmaster in Milam, and thus known in the village as ‘pandit’. The renewal of this connection between the Rawats of Johar and British explorers would soon prove instrumental in British exploration of Tibet.

Smyth’s hopes of an official journey to Tibet were raised in the early

1860s when a Kashmiri merchant working between Lhasa and Nepal told the British resident in Kathmandu that a Qing imperial edict had been posted in the Tibetan capital stating that ‘if any English Gentlemen make their appearance there, they are to be treated with courtesy’. If such an edict ever existed, it made no difference. The British representative in Beijing in the aftermath of the Second Opium War was James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin, son of the man who bought the marbles from the Parthenon. It was Elgin who had signed the Treaty of Tianjin and he wasn’t about to jeopardise Sino-British relations by demanding passports for a speculative adventure in an obscure corner of China’s empire. Smyth’s hopes for a passport were dashed. Without the right papers, Smyth was turned back at the Tibetan border in 1863 with the suggestion he apply to Beijing, where, he knew very well, the British representative was not inclined to support him. It was a diplomatic vicious circle that would repeat itself for the next quarter of a century.

An officially closed border made little difference to Smyth, who set off

on another illicit hunting adventure inside Tibet the following year; but it was immensely frustrating to the Great Trigonometrical Survey, which had arrived at the foot of the Himalaya a few years earlier to discover that both Nepal and Tibet were off limits. The superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, James Walker, liked the fact that tribes on the North-West Frontier were hostile, since it allowed for retaliatory military expeditions and an opportunity to do more surveying. That was much better, he thought, than the ‘passive obstruction of the inhabitants of Chinese Tibet’. Walker had used ‘native’ surveyors with some success, and now the surveyor in charge of Kashmir, Thomas Montgomerie, used the same idea as a way of gaining access to Tibet. In 1862, this skilled political operator, who ‘got his honours and made a name of himself with as little personal hardship as any man in the Indian Survey’, sold a proposal for sending ‘native’ surveyors to areas beyond British reach to the Asiatic Society. Montgomerie could see for himself the ease with which Indians moved across borders that seemed impermeable to Europeans. He proposed using ‘Mahomedans’ to survey Central Asia and sent a Punjabi surveyor called Abdul Hamid to Yarkand to test the theory, since the route was partially known already. As for Tibet, Indians fluent in the language who could pass themselves off as traders or pilgrims would be required. Montgomerie’s only worry was that he wouldn’t find enough reliable local men ‘with sufficient nerve’. Thanks to Edmund Smyth he found them.

Knowing that Smyth had crossed the frontier without papers on several

occasions and had needed good local men to do so, Montgomerie wrote to Smyth in Kumaon seeking advice. Smyth recommended his friends at Milam in the Johar valley, the descendants of Dev Singh, who had assisted Moorcroft some fifty years earlier. Not only had Smyth hired men from this valley, the Strachey brothers had also taken Joharis on their adventures. Some twenty years later, Smyth recalled why and how he recommended the Joharis to Montgomerie,

on account of their thorough knowledge of the Tibetan language, and also because they had the entrée into the country. [Montgomerie] asked me to select two, and send them to be trained. I accordingly chose our friend [the teacher, or pandit] Nain Singh, … and the second man I chose was his cousin Manee or Mau Singh, who was Putwarie or chief native official of Johar. Manee was far superior to Nain Singh in position, wealth, and intellect, and might have done well, but unfortunately he was too well off in his own country to take to the rough life of exploration.

The two cousins left their valley in February 1863 for the Garhwali town of Dehra Dun where James Walker had developed a programme of instruction for these secret surveyors: the use of a sextant, taking bearings with a compass, walking with a disciplined pace so that two thousand steps would equal a mile. In this way they could manage a good route survey. They used a rosary to count off their paces and strips of paper hidden in a prayer wheel to record their observations. To maintain secrecy, they were given code names. Mani Singh was known as ‘GM’, a reversal of his first and last consonants. Nain Singh was simply called ‘the Pundit’, for his job as a teacher: it was a name that would extend to all those who entered the service of the British as clandestine travellers.

By December their training was done, but their first attempt to cross into

Tibet via a pass near their home valley was thwarted. Perhaps the border guards who turned them back knew their behaviour was erratic for Johari traders. Perhaps they were recognised. They returned to Dehra Dun where Montgomerie agreed to let them try via Kathmandu, using the confiscation of Nepali goods by Tibetan officials as an excuse to enter the country as intermediaries. (You sense the killing of two birds with one stone here.) They tried first via the Kyirong valley where they came under suspicion from Chinese border officials. They thought of appealing to the local governor, but Mani Singh realised he knew the man from Gartok – to do so would blow their cover. Despondent, they returned to Kathmandu where Nain Singh decided to try again, this time alone.

While Mani returned home via north-west Nepal, surveying as he went,

Nain Singh, pretending to be a Ladakhi trader, managed to cross the border into Tibet. There he met a group of traders from Rampur, in the old kingdom of Bashahr, on their way to Gartok. He joined them for a while and had his first glimpse of the Yarlung Tsangpo, the river which becomes the Brahmaputra. It earned his immediate respect: as he watched, three men drowned when their coracle overturned. Feigning illness, he left the traders and doubled back, reaching Lhasa in January 1866, having covered eight hundred kilometres in thirty-seven days. He spent three months in Lhasa, renting a room and teaching when his money ran out. He also had an audience at Sera monastery with the twelfth Dalai Lama Trinley Gyatso, then just nine years of age. Nain Singh left Lhasa in the spring, slowly making his way west along the main trading route to Gartok before crossing the mountains to arrive back in Dehra Dun on 27 October 1866, his mission complete.

*

Nain Singh’s report included a survey of nearly two thousand kilometres of the trade route to Lhasa, and he defined the course of the Tsangpo to its junction with the Kyi Chu, which flows through the city. The information he provided was a bonanza for the Survey of India, and for the government of India, which released more funds for further journeys. In 1867, Nain and Mani Singh returned to Tibet across the Mana Pass, taking with them Nain’s brother Kalian, crossing the Sutlej at Tholing, once more posing as Bashahri traders, selling coral beads for shawl wool. Their targets were the goldfields of Thok Jalong, still in production despite centuries of exploitation, and the sources of the Indus and Sutlej rivers. Kalian was able to reach the headwaters of the Indus, confirming that it rose north of Kailas. Nain would return for a third mission to Tibet and Central Asia, travelling from Yarkand to Leh via Khotan and Pangong Lake. This time he took with him Kalian Singh and his cousin Kishen Singh, also from the Milam valley and already an experienced pundit.

Kishen’s codename was A-K; he was also, in the estimation of many, the

greatest of them all. In 1878 he left Darjeeling on a four-year mission to survey northern Tibet, an attempt to link what was known of Central Asia with the detailed information the ‘pundits’ had already acquired of southern and western Tibet. Kishen would spend a year in Lhasa, waiting for a caravan to Mongolia he could join in order to reach the eastern end of the Kun Lun range. While he waited he gathered detailed information on the city and the governance of Tibet. Kishen’s record proved useful to the British when they finally did enter Tibet with Francis Younghusband’s mission in 1903.

When eventually he travelled north, the caravan Kishen joined was

attacked and the Mongolians fled. Kishen was robbed and left almost destitute; his companion then absconded taking what little they had left. Despite it all he kept going, all the way to Dunhuang in northern China where he and his remaining companion Chhumbel were detained for seven months, suspected of being spies. An abbot who was visiting the nearby Cave of a Thousand Buddhas hired the two men as his servants for the journey back home to his monastery, far to the south. This brought Kishen and Chhumbel to the eastern Himalaya and into contact with French missionaries, who relayed a message to Kishen’s superiors in India. They had heard nothing from him in three years.

During Kishen and Chhumbel’s subsequent journey home through

eastern Tibet, they encountered an outburst of smallpox at Litang, and took the opportunity to immunise themselves against it using the Tibetan technique of variolation, snorting dried pustules from the bodies of the infected. When the pair finally reached Darjeeling in November 1882 they were almost destitute, their funds gone, their clothes in rags and, in the words of Kishen’s boss James Walker, ‘their bodies emaciated with the hardships and deprivations they had undergone’. Kishen Singh discovered his only son had died in his absence and his house had fallen into dereliction. With a price on his head from the Tibetan authorities, his exploring days were done. Although he received no official recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, he was given a pension and kept a chest full of papers, diaries and books about his adventures, as well as medals from societies around the world. He died in 1921, the year the British arrived at Everest.

Rudyard Kipling would use the myth of the pundits in his 1901 novel

Kim, linking them in his readers’ minds inextricably and erroneously with the struggle between Russia and Britain for Central Asia: the ‘Great Game’. If any of the pundits was the model for his character Huree Chunder Mookerje it was another man, Sarat Chandra Das. At twenty-five he became headmaster of the new Bhotia Boarding School in Darjeeling, opened in 1874 to teach young Tibetans and Sikkimese boys and provide a cadre of interpreters and geographers who would be of use in the British Empire’s dealings with Tibet. Das was much more an intelligence officer, though, born in the port city of Chittagong, a Bengali who learned Tibetan as an adult. By contrast most of the pundits were true mountain people, surveying vast tracts of country, relying wholly on their wits and courage to escape a thousand traps and pitfalls, and more often than not completing their missions without a word of complaint. Michael Ward, part of the successful 1953 Everest expedition, wrote: ‘It is difficult to overpraise Kishen Singh’s epic final journey.’ It seems appropriate that two travellers from the mountains should complete the greatest Himalayan journey of all and grimly typical that they should go under a pseudonym and drift into obscurity.

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