13 ‘Forbidden’ City

13

 

 

‘Forbidden’ City

 

In late 2014, a cache of documents belonging to the first Englishman to visit the holy city of Lhasa was found in a cupboard at the anti-quarian booksellers Maggs Brothers. Now in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society, the find included four hundred letters, diaries, notebooks and ephemera, as well as the manuscript of his travel narrative, and a tiny sketch of the young ninth Dalai Lama, made in December 1811. The largely forgotten and atypical explorer had a brief touch of fame, resurrecting the nineteenth-century myth of Lhasa as a ‘forbidden’ city, keeping the rapidly changing world at bay.

Thomas Manning was born in the Norfolk village of Broome in 1772,

second son of the local rector. A sickly but intelligent child, he was educated at home and in 1790 went up to Cambridge to study mathematics. There he caught the cresting wave of Romanticism, becoming friends with some of the movement’s leading lights, notably Charles Lamb. According to Lamb, Manning had an exceptional mind,

far beyond Coleridge or any other man in power of impressing – when he gets you alone, he can act the wonders of Egypt. Only he is lazy, and does not always put forth all his strength; if he did, I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.

Though others shared Lamb’s view, the charge of indolence doesn’t seem quite right for this restless, emotionally self-aware man. Disaffection seems nearer the mark. He wrote to a friend about the ‘strange power of thought and sentiments that impel me unswervingly to strange things’. He was a rebel too. On the brink of academic glory at Cambridge, he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Church of England and so forfeited his degree, leaving his bewildered father in a puddle of anxiety.

China became his great passion and reaching it his obsession, to the

amused bafflement of his friends. (‘Read no more books of voyages,’ Lamb teased him. ‘They are nothing but lies.’) In 1802 he arrived in Paris, taking advantage of the Treaty of Amiens that brought temporary peace between Britain and France, one of many radicals and Romantics eager to explore the new French republic. Paris was also one of the few places in Europe he could study Chinese. When war broke out again, English travellers in France were detained, but with patient lobbying, Napoleon himself signed Manning’s passport and he returned to London, training for six months at Westminster Hospital to equip himself further for his travels. He also won the support of Sir Joseph Banks, then president of the Royal Society, for his plan to explore China disguised in local garb.

In 1806 the East India Company took him up the Pearl river to Canton,

then the East India Company’s only port in mainland China, now the modern city of Guangzhou. But the tight restrictions then in place on European freedom of movement thwarted Manning’s ambition. His fellow countrymen ‘with their eyes turned towards their own country, ready to take wing the moment their honey bags are filled’, rarely shared his interest in Chinese culture. He drifted for several years doing translation work and practising medicine, grew a formidable beard and developed a reputation for eccentricity although, as someone who knew him after Tibet wrote: ‘His eccentricities were quite harmless, and concerned only himself personally.’

After a few years trapped in Canton, Manning decided to enter China via

a different route, from Lhasa, and travel east from there. Tibet per se was of little interest to him: China was the goal. The governor general of India was then Lord Minto and he promised Canton that Calcutta would help Manning. By this stage, in the early 1810s, the trade imbalance between Canton and Calcutta had eased: opium exports from Bengal to China had turned the Company’s trade deficit into surplus, at the expense of the health and economy of the Chinese people. But thirty years earlier, Minto had helped his friend Edmund Burke impeach Warren Hastings; experiments in Tibet were part of Hastings’ toxic legacy. Manning got nothing but indifferent tolerance. (‘Fools, fools, fools,’ he complained to his journal, ‘to neglect an opportunity they may never have again.’) So at his own expense, he entered Bhutan in September 1811 on a route to the west of that taken by George Bogle, crossing Tangtong Gyalpo’s bridge into the fort at Paro. Here Manning was kept in a smoky guardhouse with no windows and banned from the market, bickering more than usual with his Chinese interpreter Zhao Jinxiu. (‘A spaniel would be better company.’) After they escaped Paro, Manning discovered Zhao Jinxiu had swapped his silver spoons for pewter and pocketed the difference, a new take on debasing currency. Manning sent him back to get them.

At the frontier town of Phari, where the local official was ‘vastly civil’,

he had to quit their lodgings to make way for a Chinese detachment of soldiers. ‘The Chinese lord it here like the English in India,’ he noted, but Manning was glad of their presence. One of the ambans in Lhasa was a fiercely anti-British Manchu whom Manning knew from Canton: not the sort of man to greet an Englishman with the hand of friendship. Yet thanks to the troops’ Chinese commander, whom Manning befriended, he got permission to leave Phari in early November and arrived at Lhasa a month later, the first Englishman to do so and, in all likelihood, the last until Younghusband’s bloody expedition of 1904. Only two other Europeans would reach Lhasa throughout the nineteenth century.

On 17 December 1811 Manning had an audience with the young ninth

Dalai Lama Lungtok Gyatso, who had just turned six. Manning was utterly charmed.

He had the simple, unaffected manners of a well-educated princely child. His face was, I thought, affectingly beautiful. He was of a gay and cheerful disposition. I was extremely affected by this interview with the lama. I could have wept through strangeness of sensation.

If Manning was aware of the deeply political circumstances of the boy’s selection as Dalai Lama, he gives little hint of it. After the Qing had cleared out the Gorkhali army from Tibet in the early 1790s, the Qianlong emperor had tried to insert the Qing Empire into the arcane process of reincarnation; too often, it seemed to the Qianlong, important tulku, or reincarnate lamas, were emerging from the same influential families. His plan was instinctively bureaucratic: he demanded lists of important lineages and who held them and promulgated the ‘Ordinance for the More Efficient Governing of Tibet’. This featured twenty-nine articles, the first of which was the introduction of the Golden Urn, drawn from the ancient Chinese practice of divination: the Qing ordered the names of likely candidates, written onto slips of ivory, to be put into the urn and for Tibetan lamas and Qing ambans to pick one out. Not for the last time, China was shown to be tone-deaf to the cultural complexities of Tibet. The Panchen Lama had simply ignored this new process when it came to choosing Lungtok Gyatso, and the Qing pretended it was happy about that. The boy would not be Dalai Lama for long, dying at the age of nine having caught a cold during the Monlam festival of 1815. The Golden Urn would and does remain a symbol of Chinese interference: Beijing used it to select its own candidate as Panchen Lama in 1995 after being outwitted by a search party authorised by the Dalai Lama.

Manning’s interpreter had warned his master against trying his limited

Mandarin in Lhasa so an interpreter with a thick Sichuan accent translated the young ninth Dalai Lama’s words into Chinese. The munshi then translated them into Latin, their preferred shared language. This complexity must have added to the sense of disconnection Manning describes often feeling in Tibet. The city was ‘dreamy and ghostly’ but not in a good way. Like many European travellers fantasising about distant Lhasa, Manning found the reality a disappointment. Apart from the Potala itself, there was ‘nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt.’ In Lhasa’s defence, he had said much the same on first acquaintance with Paris. By April 1812, Manning had run out of cash and was on his way back to Calcutta the way he had come, refused permission to enter China.

In the end, Manning did visit Beijing: in 1816 as part of a trade mission

led by the future governor general of India Lord Amherst, a mission that went awry when Amherst refused to kowtow to the emperor. Such high-level political positioning would increasingly impact on Tibet’s future, which is why British officials in India were forced to use the pundits from Milam to survey the north side of the Himalaya. After Beijing, Manning returned to England, surviving the wreck of the navy frigate Alceste and meeting Napoleon in exile on St Helena. He lived for another twenty years, latterly in a barely furnished cottage near Dartford half-hidden from the world, by which time his milk-white beard reached his waist. He never did visit China in the way he wanted, to see ‘the actual degree of happiness the people enjoy; their sentiments and opinions’.

The discovery and sale of Manning’s papers to the Royal Asiatic Society

in 2014 prompted a rash of newspaper stories about this ‘forgotten’ explorer: the first Englishman to Lhasa. But he hadn’t really been forgotten, not altogether. In 1876, when Tibet’s reputation for exclusivity was reaching its zenith, the honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Clements Markham, published Manning’s journal, along with George Bogle’s account, with a detailed introduction and biographical notes.

Markham might have arranged its publication but he didn’t like

Manning’s account very much; in Markham’s opinion, Manning was ‘quick-tempered and imprudent’. In the self-satisfied era of imperial exploration Manning seemed to Markham a dubious sort: he didn’t do geography and wrote far too much about his feelings. Worse, like Samuel van de Putte, who had been in Lhasa almost a century before the Englishman, he travelled for the sake of it, to experience and appreciate people who were different. That was no good: risking your skin should only be done to advance European civilisation. Nor did Manning court publicity: quite the opposite. He left his story untold. But when it did emerge, thanks to Markham, it was no longer the right kind of story. Coleridge would have thrilled to it, but Sir Thomas Holdich, president of the Royal Geographical Society, dismissed him as ‘a bad traveller and a worse observer’ whose journal was ‘a monotonous record of small worries and insignificant details’. Adventure yarns, so crucial in building the myth of empire and racial superiority, required jeopardy and a touch of swagger and absolutely no Romantic introspection.

This truth about the purpose of exploration, or at least that Victorian

imperial version of it, reveals another: where these great adventures took place, at least in the public’s mind, was almost secondary. The location would necessarily be exotic and dangerous. What the public really responded to was the hero who conquered it. The story would be full of local colour and observations, but was most importantly a reflection of the qualities the hero brought to the challenges he (and quite soon she) faced, qualities people from his own world aspired to share. Other cultures were simply constructed for the purposes of the author: an exotic backdrop, a population to be civilised or converted, contrasted unfavourably with the new colonial world order being fashioned across the globe. The complexities of Himalayan politics were an irrelevant bore.

For the adventurers themselves, success and the celebrity success offered

could be transformative. Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who surveyed more of Tibet than anyone else, recalled the origin of his life’s calling in his 1926 memoir My Life as an Explorer. Growing up, his ‘closest friends were Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne, Livingstone and Stanley, Franklin, Payer and Nordenskiöld’. When in April 1880 Nordenskiöld’s ship the Vega returned from its epic Arctic journey, the fifteen-year-old Hedin was there with his family looking down on Stockholm harbour, lit by ‘countless lamps and torches’ as the ship glided into port.

All my life I shall remember that day. It decided my career. From the quays, streets, windows, and roofs, enthusiastic cheers roared like thunder. And I thought, ‘I, too, would like to return home that way.’

Coming home, for Hedin, was no less important than going out. If the path was chosen, the destination was only set when he studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin under the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the Red Baron and the man who coined the term ‘Silk Roads’. The mysteries of Central Asia, lost cities in the desert, ancient trade routes long forgotten, were only now being pieced together – and the greatest mystery of all was Tibet.

Hedin joined the swelling ranks of explorers, spies, adventurers,

missionaries, plant-hunters and mountaineers from industrialising nations in Europe and elsewhere trying to pierce the veil that Tibet had drawn around herself in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early decades, explorers like William Moorcroft and numerous British colonial officials and soldiers had visited remote corners of Tibet such as Kailas. (Hedin, in the interests of his own reputation, would do his best to downplay these explorations.) Then the shutters came down and adventurous British officials probing the southern borders of Tibet found themselves turned away. This was the moment the British began using indigenous pundits for information on the far side of the Himalaya. The myth of ‘secret’ Tibet, and the ‘forbidden’ city of Lhasa was born.

The idea of Tibet as a country determined to keep out the rest of the

world was arresting. What was it they wished to preserve or conceal? What were the secrets Tibet held? These questions provoked two responses in the West’s imagination, responses that even now continue to frame the outside world’s perception of Tibet, as an idea as much as an actual place. First, it provoked a cohort of adventurers willing to accept a perceived challenge and try to lever their way in. They couldn’t do that in Nepal, which was no less restrictive, because the British Empire accepted the ruling party’s wish that foreigners be kept out. To attempt to go to Nepal would be to risk sanction. That wasn’t the case with Tibet, and in particular the city of Lhasa, which is why so many more adventurers tried to go there.

Victorian Britain was primed to the notion of forbidden cities by Richard

Burton’s bold visit to Mecca in 1853. (The notion of penetrating virginal places speaks for itself.) The impression grew that Lhasa, another holy city, wasn’t just currently closed to Europeans but somehow always had been. This was fanciful. For centuries Lhasa had been a hub on trans-Himalayan trade routes with deep religious connections across Asia. It was and remained culturally diverse. Kashmiris, Newars, Mongols, Chinese and Armenians lived permanently in the city. Nor was the Tibetan elite intellectually incurious. As we’ve seen, the Mongols valued Tibet not just for its spiritual expertise but also for its science, and Jesuit mapmakers relied on Tibetan expertise as well. Yet it was routine for European travellers in the early twentieth century to patronise Tibet’s scientific understanding of the world. Tibetans were a simple, otherworldly people who had missed out on the Renaissance. They thought the world was flat and their medicine, known as the Sowa Rigpa, hadn’t progressed beyond the equivalent of Europe’s medieval humours: lung, meaning breath or the air element; tripa, the bile or fire element; and badken, phelgm or the cold element.

There is another story to set against the cliché of Tibet’s superstition and

isolation. During the eighteenth century Jesuit missionaries in Beijing had brought European science to the Qing emperors, who saw its value and sponsored the translation of their works into the languages of state, including Mongolian and Tibetan. Throughout the century, Tibetan lamas at the Qing court rubbed shoulders with Jesuit monks and gradually absorbed the value and accuracy of their astronomical calculations. Until this point Tibetans based their own astronomical understanding, like their medicine, on Sanskrit texts imported from India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly the Kalachakra tantra. Now Tibetan scholars at the Yonghe Gong monastery in Beijing engaged fully with the implications of what the Jesuits were showing them. The Qing court kept tight control of this new learning and how it was used: Tibetan monks had to acquire this knowledge for themselves.

Geluk monks from the Tibetan region of Amdo, a place of diverse

cultures and traditions, were, and remain, especially noted for their intellectual openness. The great monasteries there, Labrang and Kumbum, adopted new calendars based on Jesuit astronomy, simply because they were better. And while the Kalachakra did say the earth was flat, by the nineteenth century a monk from Labrang could write that the ‘earth is spherical’; the monastery even had a large spherical globe painted on the wall. The heliocentric solar system hadn’t quite yet percolated through but the notion that Tibetans refused to accept physical laws was simply wrong. This myth sprang, ironically enough, from a newspaper article published in 1938 by Tibet’s leading intellectual of that era, Gendun Chopel, famous for his excoriating mockery of Tibetan backwardness. By then, Tibetan Buddhism really was reluctant to face the modern world. Chopel had been expelled from Labrang as a young reincarnate lama for his progressive ideas but in this case underestimated his own institution’s historic openness.

Tibetan medicine was not always as conservative as it looked either,

especially when it came to the disease Tibetans dreaded more than any other: smallpox, known in Tibetan as drum ne, ‘the disease of falling scabs’. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri wrote that, ‘Every ten or twelve years an epidemic of smallpox carries off many people.’ The death from smallpox of the sixth Panchen Lama in Beijing soon after his encounter with George Bogle was a shock but no surprise. The panic smallpox provoked was unlike anything else, partly because Tibetans were unusually susceptible to it and knew they were. The Lazarist priest Évariste Huc, who reached Lhasa with fellow missionary Joseph Gabet in early 1846 (the only two Europeans other than Manning to do so that century), wrote: ‘The Tibetan fear of smallpox was extraordinary. They spoke of it with horror as the greatest scourge that could attack the human race.’ Their visit to the Dalai Lama was cancelled when there was an outbreak of smallpox that arrived with the caravan they had joined for the journey to Lhasa. Tibetan officials weren’t averse to using the threat of smallpox as an excuse for keeping out undesirables. Each year, before allowing trade to resume over the high passes, local Tibetan officials would check first whether there was smallpox on the far side of the mountains. In 1869, as the British Empire’s frustration was starting to build, this caution prompted a mocking article in The Times wondering at the ‘amusing impudence’ with which Tibetan officials ‘gravely inquire and decide every year whether Her Majesty’s Eastern empire is worthy of their patronage or lofty recognition’.

Despite the fact that Edward Jenner’s vaccine, developed in the late

eighteenth century, had arrived at Canton in 1805, shortly before Thomas Manning, most Tibetans, unlike sarcastic British journalists, still didn’t have access to it decades later, but it wasn’t simply a case of ignoring foreign expertise. Tibetan doctors knew about the Chinese practice, dating back to at least the fifteenth century, of ‘variolation’, a mild infection that gave immunity, which the pundit Kishen Singh had used during his epic journey. But variolation carried significant risks of full-blown infection, so the traditional Tibetan response was most common: to isolate sufferers, usually by leaving them somewhere remote for several days to see whether or not they recovered. Such treatment cut against the grain of Buddhist teaching, but it was the safest strategy on offer.

During his visit in the middle of the nineteenth century, Évariste Huc told

the Dalai Lama’s regent about Jenner’s vaccine and saw at once that future missionaries might use it as a Trojan horse, to bring about ‘the fall of lamaism and make possible the establishment of Christianity in that pagan land’. In the twentieth century, both Britain and China would also use the smallpox vaccination to win Tibetan hearts and minds. Yet, even though it was not used in Tibet, the vaccine was not, as many assumed, unknown there: some Tibetan scholars had read about Jenner’s vaccine in an astonishing book: The Treasury of All Precious Instructions, a compendium of diseases and their treatments published in Tibet by a Tibetan in the 1830s, more than a decade before Huc reached Lhasa.

Most of the remedies in the Treasury were Indian and Chinese; it

described in detail the process of variolation, essentially inhaling smallpox scabs up the nose. (Right nostril for men, left nostril for women.) A few, however, were from Europe, including a short section on Jenner’s vaccine:

After the cow has been affected by the virus, fluid from the cowpox is taken and then scratched into the arm of the person who has still

not been infected … This is how the Europeans treat smallpox.

The route this knowledge took to reach Tibet and the author of The Treasury is uncertain. It may have come with gosain traders, like Bogle’s guide Purangir. It may have arrived from southern China or even Siberia, where a vaccination programme was underway in the early 1800s, close to the region of Buryatia, where Tibetan Buddhism was practised. Most probably it arrived from Beijing, where a Russian physician, who had vaccinated a group of Chinese, was friendly with the Tibetan author of the Treasury, a man whose achievements – including another book of far greater scope than the Treasury – belie the assumption that Tibet was intellectually incurious and closed to foreign influences.

The Treasury’s author was Jampel Chokyi Tenzin, fourth in a lineage of

reincarnate lamas known as the Tseten Nomonhan, based at the Serkhok monastery in Amdo, far to the north-east of Lhasa. The lineage was politically influential, with seats in Mongolia and Beijing. Following the crushing defeat of the Dzungar Khanate in 1720 and the loss of their Mongolian patrons, the government in Lhasa appointed the second Tseten Nomonhan as ambassador to their new overlords, the imperial Qing court in Beijing. It was a bold decision, because during the war with China the Tseten’s monasteries had been burned and his monks killed. For the first time, China had absorbed parts of Amdo within its own borders. Yet despite fears the lama would simply be a hostage, the Tseten instead became a critical link between Lhasa and Beijing and a tutor within the Qing household. He was offered a permanent monastic residence in the Chinese capital.

The fourth Tseten Nomonhan, Jampel Chokyi, was the son of Amdo

nomads, born in 1789. The year before, as Tibet’s ambassador to China, his predecessor had travelled to Beijing with the sixth Panchen Lama, whom Bogle had known, and died there, soon after the Panchen Lama succumbed to smallpox. Jampel Chokyi was recognised as the reincarnation when he was around two years old and installed at Serkhok, where he studied Buddhism and medicine. In 1806, and not yet eighteen, he travelled to Beijing for the first time. Western explorers might congratulate themselves for making such arduous journeys, but they were a fact of life for Geluk monks like the Tseten. He took up residence in the Yellow Temple, remaining there until an invitation arrived for the enthronement in Lhasa of the ninth Dalai Lama, Lungtok Gyatso. There is no record of their meeting, but Thomas Manning was in Lhasa at the same time as the Tseten, another traveller fascinated by the ‘sentiments and opinions’ of different cultures. And if Manning was not aware of the young Tibetan, the lama was certainly aware of the peling, as Tibetans called the British. He had a reputation for conversation and good humour and given his subsequent career, it seems more than likely the Tseten would have paid Manning close attention.

In 1814 Jampel Chokyi returned to his duties in Beijing where he would

remain for the next three years, dividing his time between religious ceremonies for the emperor in the Forbidden City and his own temple, where he taught monks from Tibet and Mongolia. (In 1816, Manning was also in Beijing with Lord Amherst.) Then the Tseten was sent back to Lhasa for ceremonies connected to the death of the Jiaqing emperor. That same year he completed the first version of what eventually become an immense compendium, The Detailed Description of the World. This substantial text, much expanded, was published in 1830 in Mongolia at the request of monks there and amounts to an encyclopaedic overview of the regions of the world. In essence, it is a book about how Tibet looked out at the world, rather than how the world looked in.

The Tseten’s sources for this immense undertaking are not fully

understood. There were European missionaries in Beijing but the evidence is patchy about who contributed. Jampel Chokyi certainly knew the priest Nikita Yakovievich Bichurin, known as Father Iakinf, who led the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing. Iakinf had seen how a lack of cultural understanding was hampering his mission’s work and set about studying Chinese history, geography and literature. Regarded as Russia’s first sinologist, he also wrote on Tibet and Mongolia, and likely gleaned knowledge from the Tseten. Russian– Chinese diplomacy was conducted in Mongolian rather than Manchu, so as a fluent Mongolian speaker Tseten’s insights were likely useful. This was a time of strengthening ties between the tsar and the Qing emperor and the Tseten had several highly educated Russian missionary friends. He sold them books, some of which were translated into Russian. Another of his sources was the German-speaking doctor and botanist Alexander Georg von Bunge who arrived in the late 1820s and collected plants across Central Asia including Mongolia at the personal request of the great explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt. A third was the sinologist Zachar Federovic Leontevsky, who opened the first museum in Russia dedicated to Chinese culture.

The Tseten had to tread carefully in his pursuit of knowledge and what he

revealed. European ideas on astronomy flatly contradicted the Kalachakra. Other translators concealed the fact that this innovative thinking came from Jesuits so that more conservative lamas wouldn’t censor their work. The Tseten didn’t do this; he sought instead reassurance in a letter to the seventh Panchen Lama, who agreed there were problems but encouraged the Tseten to continue his work, particularly on the European calendar, which was clearly superior to the Tibetan. Geography at least was less controversial: the Buddhist cosmology, originating in India, that Tibetan monks studied put a great mountain at the centre of the world and four continents around it, a fairly accurate representation of the region. And thanks to guidebooks written to locate sites mentioned in ancient Buddhist texts, better-educated lamas knew the geography of places like Nepal, western China and northern India quite well. The Tseten’s text worked from within this tradition.

In a modern context, The Detailed Description of the World seems naïve

although it has its moments. Britain, the Tseten wrote, was divided into three regions: England, Scotland and Ireland. The ‘shape of their faces looks like that of Indians, but they are as white as snow…. The people are rich, but they like to drink, and they are more dissolute than other Europeans.’ Poles on the other hand were ‘beautiful, intelligent, and honest. They are especially nice to people from outside their country.’ (One of the Tseten’s interlocutors was an ethnic Pole.) He also described the North Pole, taking seriously the possibility that part of the earth could be perpetually in darkness, an idea ridiculed by other Tibetan scholars. Africa was ‘a big continent, and its shape is like a triangle’. Some African animals had Asian equivalents and were familiar: lions, elephants and rhinoceroses. The giraffe, ‘an animal called da po’, was wholly strange:

a horse’s head with a donkey’s tail in different colours such as yellow, brown and green. The animal is very big and its neck is four or three arm spans long.

The continent of Europe was of particular interest, since some Tibetan scholars had identified it as the location for Shambhala, the utopian realm in the west where Buddha had taught crucial initiations to those who lived there. The sixth Panchen Lama, who had written guidebooks himself, had asked George Bogle to look for clues to its location when he went home so the lama could visit. The idea of a mythical land where transformative knowledge lies waiting, so strong within the Tibetan tradition, is reflected in the Tseten’s general comments about Europe. The British were a tangible threat just across the border but in magical Europe there was ‘no such thing as treating each other badly, accusations, the powerful taking over the weaker, or corruption’. Europe was a wonder house, like Kipling’s ajeeb ghar in his Himalayan novel Kim, with

lights that have oil and clothing that generates light … mirrors that recognise thieves, hide one from the enemy, and burn the enemy … many different stunning things such as celestial and global maps … There are also machines that are mechanised by fire, water, air and wood.

As the Tibetan historian Lobsang Yongdan writes: ‘It is ironic that Western writers created a mysterious land called Shangri-La in Tibet while Tibetan scholars were looking for Shambhala somewhere in Europe.’

Written from a Buddhist perspective, The Detailed Description of the

World might seem fanciful to European readers but in the 1830s so were the few accounts of Tibet published by Europeans. Most of those that came later either amused or frustrated educated Tibetans. And the Tseten had a much firmer grip than any European on the geography of the north side of the Himalaya, not least that the Yarlung Tsangpo was the same river as the Brahmaputra, something the British would sweat over for decades to come. Tibetans’ knowledge of their own country was extensive, hardly surprising for a culture that had been printing books for a thousand years and liked to travel. The big monasteries drew students from all over Asia and those in Amdo stood at a crossroads of influences from all points of the compass. While the Tseten held a seal from the Manchu ruler in Beijing, he described Tibet as outside the limits of the Qing Empire: a place with its own identity meeting the world on more or less equal terms.

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Given all that, what was it that made Tibet so reluctant to allow European visitors? Tension between the emerging British Empire and the Qing is one answer, but it ran deeper than that. There are clues in the reception Thomas Manning got when he reached Lhasa in 1811: although he was curious about Tibetan temples, it took him a while, he wrote, to find someone who could show him around them. His interpreter Zhao Jinxiu had asked him a few times whether he intended to visit these temples, and when Manning finally announced that he would, Zhao was relieved. Manning discovered that Chinese mandarins and Tibetan authorities had also been asking about this.

The mandarins, he said, were aware that the Catholics refused to pay these respects; consequently, if I went it would wipe off their suspicions of my being a missionary.

It had been over sixty years since the Capuchin friars had left Lhasa and yet the memory of their threat retained its potency.

Had Pope Clement XI preferred the Jesuits as missionaries to Tibet over

the Capuchins then it’s conceivable Tibetan history would have followed a different course. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri had spent five years in Lhasa from the early spring of 1716. More than any other missionary to Tibet, he was engaged and intelligent enough to pierce the outer layers of Tibetan Buddhism and grasp its core philosophy, learning Tibetan and writing works of real insight. These were left unpublished in a Vatican archive until their rediscovery in the 1870s, and were only finally published in the 1930s. His obscurity lies in the victory of the Capuchins who had been awarded control of the Catholic Church’s missionary work by the Vatican in 1703. Over the next four decades they sent three missions to Lhasa. The first had ended in expensive failure, having spent a small fortune to baptise two adults. The second arrived in Lhasa a few months after Desideri in 1716, prompting the protracted long-distance argument with Rome that ended with Desideri’s departure. Thereafter the Jesuits would continue to pour scorn on the Capuchin mission’s shortcomings and their overly optimistic reports to Rome. They had a shrewder idea than their competitors how things would go in Tibet.

The Capuchins in Lhasa would follow a similar arc of experience as

Father Andrade and his Jesuits had in the west Tibetan kingdom of Guge a century before. Both groups saw similarities between the Catholic Church and Tibetan Buddhism, equating the Dalai Lama with the pope and drawing comparisons between monastic institutions. They were also struck by the liberty they were given to practise their faith, wearing their robes in public ‘just as in Paris or Rome’. For their part, the Tibetans regarded Christianity as essentially good, showed reverence to Christian symbols and were grateful for the missionaries’ medical skills. The Mongol ruler of Tibet at the time of the Capuchin mission to Lhasa, Lajang Khan, was equally curious about western science; he knew what the Jesuits had brought to the Qing court in Beijing and hoped these missionaries would do the same for Lhasa.

The missionaries were encouraged by this tolerance and openness. The

Qing state was deeply hierarchical and xenophobic; political relationships were about dominance and subservience. Tibet wasn’t like that at all. Tibetan nobles played down their rank to encourage openness, treating the Capuchins as equals. The Christian friars, with their tonsured heads, were even given a nickname: ‘the white-headed lamas’. Mindful of the huge expense of their mission, the Capuchins reassured their masters in Rome that progress was good and influential Tibetans were on the brink of converting. It was a fundamental misjudgment.

Lhasa aristocrats valued the concept of yarab choesang, being respectful

and polite to others, a trope that resonates in modern Tibet just as it did for the eighth-century dharma king Songtsen Gampo, whose sixteen human laws can be characterised as a more affable version of the Ten Commandments. Kindness to neighbours and moderate behaviour are at the heart of this value system. (The fourth Tseten Nomonkhan was a little more cynical. His world encyclopaedia included laconic judgments on Tibetans from different parts of the country: those from Kham were aggressive enemies but loyal friends, too trusting in the view of the Tseten; ‘the people of Tsang’, meanwhile, referring to the region of Shigatse, ‘are honest, polite and cowards. Although smart, they are not deep…. They love money, but are generous toward the Dharma’s purpose.’ People in Tsang might judge such wisecracks typical for an Amdo intellectual.) This is why the Capuchins were given residency permits, tax exemptions and allowed to buy property. The prefect of the Capuchin mission Francesco Orazio della Penna, who had joined Desideri in mastering Tibetan at the Sera monastery, was even allowed to conduct masses there. With the invasion of the Dzungars and the death of their patron Lajang in 1717, the missionaries faced a grave setback: Armenian and Russian traders who had given them a sympathetic Christian network fled the city; their hospice was plundered and their funds taken. Yet after the Qing Empire had restored order, the Tibetan elite remained tolerant and welcoming, even when the Capuchins made it clear they wanted to convert Tibetans to Christianity. They were allowed to buy land for a church, and when the local population turned against them, seeing the missionaries as a malign foreign influence disturbing the balance of nature, the Dalai Lama issued a statement saying they must be allowed to continue.

The mistake the Capuchins made was to confuse generosity of spirit with

spiritual surrender. They saw tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Yet the Tibetans were not naïve. They liked the Capuchins for their medical skills, respected their faith and had no wish to convert them. (The powerful regent of the seventh Dalai Lama, Polhane Sonam Topgay, wrote to the Capuchins at the end of their second mission that ‘despite the fact that we do not know [your] religion, we give credence and pay respect to all religions, ours and yours; moreover, in the past we have not slandered it and we do not slander it now.’) They were interested in the knowledge and technology the foreigners might offer and were disappointed when it didn’t materialise. Mostly the Tibetan state was too busy with a continuing storm of political unrest to pay much attention. The Capuchins on the other hand saw the Tibetans as backward heathens; it was their job to bring them to Christ. Unlike the Jesuit Desideri, they saw little value in studying the complexities of Buddhist metaphysics. They took from Tibet only what they needed to undermine what they regarded as its central defining feature: Buddhism.

During their third mission, beginning in 1741, the Capuchins finally

managed to convert some Tibetans to Christianity. It was a sign confirming that God wanted Buddhism destroyed. The Dalai Lama, the missionaries claimed, was not the embodiment of Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion, after all. They demanded a special regulation so their converts could celebrate Christian holidays. The converts refused to perform u lag, a much-resented tax in the form of labour levied by monastic institutions. They also refused to receive blessings from the Dalai Lama. The Tibetans might have been tolerant of other faiths but this was now about more than freedom of religious expression: it was regarded as disloyalty to the Tibetan state. At the insistence of the religious establishment, legal charges were made not against the Capuchins but against the converts. They in turn refused to respect the legitimacy of the court since its authority rested on false religion. The secular and the religious had become so intertwined in Tibet that to pull at the threads of one was to unravel the other. Five converts, two women and three men, were convicted and publicly flogged.

The Capuchins were advised in future to confine their preaching to

foreigners. They replied that their only purpose in Tibet was to preach the gospel and demanded freedom of conscience. The Dalai Lama’s regent Polhane was incredulous:

Kashmiri, Newari, Azaras [meaning Indians], Chinese, Turkish, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and other peoples living in Tibet adhere to their own religions and are supported as much as possible and not harmed. But you have spoken evil of the Tibetan religion. If any of us were to go to your country and preach our religion to you in the same manner as you have done with us, would you punish him? Destroying other religions implies nobody may follow his own religion. We have to defend our religion as you are defending yours. You came here of your own accord, we did not call you; as a consequence it is up to you to decide where to go and what to do.

Orazio della Penna and the rest of the mission withdrew from Lhasa in the spring of 1745. He died at Patan, in the Kathmandu valley, that June and was buried in a grave now lost. Soon after came news from Lhasa that their church had been levelled to the ground. All that survived of the Capuchin mission was the small bell the friars had cast in the Newari city of Bhaktapur, which still hangs in the Jokhang temple. They also left behind a sour taste, a suspicion not only of Christian missionaries but also their political intent.

When Huc and Gabet, ‘the lamas of the western heavens’, arrived a

century later, just as keen as the Capuchins to provoke the fall of Buddhism, Lhasa was in Huc’s words still ‘the rendezvous of all Asiatic peoples … with an astonishing variety of features, costumes and languages’. The political map of Asia, on the other hand, had changed dramatically. Tibet had for centuries triangulated itself between the Mongols and China, nurturing patron–priest relationships that allowed its people to maintain their identity and a deep measure of cultural independence. The arrival of British armies and missionaries on Tibet’s southern border was regarded as a new and uncertain threat. According to Huc, a Kashmiri merchant in Lhasa told him how ‘Pelings’, meaning the British,

are the most cunning of men. They are getting control of all parts of India, but it is always by trickery rather than by open force. Instead of overturning the authorities, they cleverly try to win them over to their side and share the spoils with them. In Kashmir there is a saying: ‘The world is Allah’s, the land is the Pasha’s, but the East India Company rules.’

The Tibetan elite, from the Dalai Lama down, shared that view and Huc was at pains to reassure anyone who mistook him as British that he was in fact French. ‘The Tibetans have got it into their heads, for some reason, that the British are an aggressive people of whom they had best beware.’ That fear was heightened in 1864 when Calcutta sent troops into Bhutan and took control of Bhutan’s territory on the plains. The Tibetans had every right to be anxious.

Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet faced an accelerated version of the fate of

the Capuchins. The Tibetans were friendly and allowed them to open a chapel; the Qing amban, Qishan, was far less tolerant. Qishan was a Mongol who had enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Qing hierarchy and then been humiliated for his negotiations with the British to settle the First Opium War. A death sentence had been commuted to a posting in Lhasa. The French had arrived from Mongolia via Amdo, spending time at Kumbum, but they planned to leave Tibet for India, in the footsteps of the legendary Chinese Buddhist traveller Xuanzang. Yet that would have left the impression that the marches of the Qing Empire were becoming a free-for-all. Furthermore, should the Qing seem to act in support of Christian missionaries whose intention was to subvert Tibetan Buddhism, then Chinese power in Lhasa would be weakened. Qishan wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice and expelled Huc and Gabet back to China via Sichuan with an escort to see them off the premises. By the time Huc reached Canton, his death had already been reported in the newspapers. He remained there for three years writing an account of his travels. When it was published in Paris in 1850 the book was an instant bestseller. Neither Bogle nor Manning had published anything and Desideri’s writings on Tibet were languishing in Rome. Huc’s account was the first time many Europeans and Americans had read much of significance about the mysterious land north of the Himalaya.

Huc’s intention had been to produce something brimming with

missionary zeal but he couldn’t resist packing it with wonders and narrative drive. It was more a religious adventure story; a simplified version was given to French schoolchildren much as the works of Alexandre Dumas would be. William Hazlitt, son of the essayist and radical, translated Huc’s account into English and it was published in London a year after the French edition. Other European editions soon followed. Suffering a breakdown in health, Huc returned to a hero’s welcome in Paris, where Napoleon III gave him the Légion d’ honneur. But he fell out with his order, which judged his narrative as too sympathetic to the Tibetans and placed it on the Catholic index of prohibited books. His health never recovered from his years in China and he died in 1860, aged just forty-seven.

Death saved Huc from watching as his reputation took a battering in the later decades of the century, principally at the hands of the explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, a Russian imperialist whose judgment concerning Asians frequently tipped into racism. (Suggesting Moscow should annex Mongolia and Qinghai, he said: ‘A thousand of our soldiers would be enough to subdue all Asia from Lake Baykal to the Himalayas.’) Przhevalsky denounced Huc as a fraud, partly because he had been thwarted in his own desire to visit Lhasa. Luckily the Frenchman had his champions too, particularly the American diplomat William Woodville Rockhill, who read Huc’s book as a teenager in the 1860s, and in doing so set the course of his life. Rockhill would help rescue Huc’s reputation and become involved in Tibetan affairs himself just as the United States became politically engaged in the region for the first time.

French missionary interest in Tibet didn’t end after Huc and Gabet’s epic

journey. In 1846, the year they reached Lhasa, the Capuchins finally gave up their missionary interest in Tibet, which the Vatican then awarded not to the Lazarists, who were in Mongolia, but to the Paris-based Société des Missions Étrangères. One of their priests in China, Charles Renou, almost immediately visited Kham, despite a prohibition on travel to the Tibetan interior under the terms of China’s trade agreements at that time with France. In 1854 Renou established a small mission in a remote village near the border of Kham and began translating Christian texts into Tibetan and growing food, introducing new plants to the area, including the potato. Yet as in Lhasa, when local Tibetan Buddhist authorities began to understand what Renou and his fellow priests were doing, hostility grew. They had to abandon their first mission and while the Missions Étrangères remained on the fringes of Tibet for a century, they were never able to settle in areas where Lhasa’s influence was strong. After the Treaty of Tianjin was signed in 1860, and freedom of movement for Europeans markedly improved, Renou was still not able to visit Lhasa. In theory the treaty gave them the right to do so, but as with Edmund Smyth, the change in rules didn’t make any difference in Tibet. The Manchu dynasty was struggling to extinguish the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history: Qing officials weren’t going to enforce passports for missionaries to the remote western provinces. The French had the support of their government, and the British asked the Gorkhali strongman Jang Bahadur to send a letter to Lhasa requesting the French passports be honoured, but the Missions Étrangères never got there.

As the nineteenth century wore on, Christian missionary efforts gathered

strength. Protestants began to arrive, including Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, founded in 1865, which sent nineteen missionaries to eastern Tibet before 1900. Among them was Cecil Polhill, an Eton and Cambridge-educated Pentecostal, whose missionary work featured in a book by his sister-in-law Annie Westland Marston that she titled The Great Closed Land: A Plea for Tibet. A Moravian missionary called Benjamin La Trobe wrote the preface, reflecting the evangelical excitement at opening up Tibet:

A cordon of missionary posts is being drawn around Tibet. Already it extends westward from Kashmir along the northern frontier of India and Burmah, and reaches up to the north of China. True, it is thin and weak as yet, and there are long gaps in the ranks. Yet, if the missionaries be ‘few and far between,’ each occupies his post in the name and at the bidding of an omnipotent Prince and Saviour, with whom there is no restraint to save by many or by few.

The arrival of Protestant missionaries created opportunities for adventurous women to bring the word of the Lord to the roof of the world. Isabella Bird was the daughter of a curate who travelled to Ladakh in 1889 and wrote Among the Tibetans. She was also the first woman to lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Like a surprising number of the first Western women to travel to the Himalaya, Bird had suffered from chronic poor health as a child but seemed much healthier riding a pony across the plateau of Tibet. The first Western woman to reach Tibet proper was Hannah or ‘Annie’ Royle Taylor. Born in Cheshire in 1855, she was the daughter of a shipping company director. Like Bird she suffered poor health as a child; aged seven, doctors diagnosed a heart problem that would likely prove fatal before she reached adulthood. She thus escaped formal education and her rebellious instincts went unchecked. Aged thirteen Annie declared herself an evangelical Christian and at sixteen, having heard a missionary lecturing about his work, discovered her life’s calling. Against the wishes of her family, Taylor had medical training in London and then in her late twenties joined Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. Posted to Lanzhou in the modern province of Gansu she found herself on the fringes of the Tibetan world.

Taylor described herself as a ‘lone wolf ’ who struggled to work well in a

group; it was hardly surprising she didn’t fit in with her colleagues in Lanzhou. So instead she used her family’s money to launch her own one-woman mission to Tibet. She moved to Darjeeling, where a young Tibetan called Puntso was brought to her house for treatment on his damaged feet. Born in Lhasa, Puntso would be her connection to Tibet for almost two decades. Having moved to Sikkim in 1890 to study Tibetan at a monastery, she and Puntso, by now a Christian (at least nominally), travelled to Gansu where she shaved her head and adopted Tibetan dress. Trekking for weeks over the high plains of Amdo, she slipped unnoticed past Gyegu, a hub for the tea trade from China, but was then intercepted outside Nagchu, just three days from Lhasa. Forced out of Tibet, Taylor became briefly famous on her return to London and leveraged her fame – ‘God’s little woman’ as one journalist dubbed her – to launch another mission to Tibet. The China Inland Mission weren’t prepared to support a project based in India or a woman leading men in the field, so Taylor once more set up her own, establishing the Tibetan Pioneer Mission in Sikkim and recruiting thirteen missionaries from Britain and Scandinavia, but the project soon foundered on the shoals of her abrasive personality.

Determined to remain in the Tibetan world, Taylor discovered a rather

clever loophole. The British had recently signed the Convention of Calcutta with the Qing authorities and in 1893 were allowed to install a trade agent just across the border at Yatung. Using the terms of this treaty, Annie Taylor moved there with Puntso and his wife Sigu and opened a shop, selling Tibetan objects to museums in Scotland to keep her head above water. The locals called her ani, meaning nun; the British customs officer there, Captain McDonnell Parr, thought her a ‘perfect nuisance’. She was still at Yatung in late 1903 when Younghusband reached the village at the start of his campaign in Tibet, intercepting him at the stone arch at the entrance of the village, dressed as a Tibetan: ‘Is this Colonel Younghusband?’ she demanded before interviewing him at length about his religious views. Initially supportive of Younghusband’s campaign, she offered her medical skills at Younghusband’s base in the Chumbi valley but the disruption and violence seems to have upended her mental health, often fragile, and she ended her days in an asylum.

In contrast to Taylor, a missionary who sought medical training, Susie

Carson was a doctor who became a missionary. She was born in Ontario to Methodist parents in 1868; her father, a superintendent of schools, encouraged her to go to medical school. She practised as a doctor with her sister Jennie until her mid twenties, and then in 1894 heard a Dutch-born missionary called Petrus Rijnhart lecturing about China where he had recently been working with the China Inland Mission. It’s unclear whether Susie knew his whole story: that he’d worked for the Salvation Army in the Netherlands and then been sent abroad to Canada after allegations of sexual misconduct. His initial application to join the China Inland Mission had been turned down, but he spent three years working for them in Lanzhou before being thrown out. He was back in Canada raising funds to lead a mission to Tibet when he met Susie, who as a girl had dreamt of missionary work. They soon married and within a year were in China at Lusar, the village of the vast Geluk monastery of Kumbum, close to the city of Xining, treating victims of the Dungan Revolt, a largely forgotten Sufi Muslim uprising that was brutally suppressed by Qing and Tibetan troops with the deaths of a hundred thousand men, women and children.

Soon after, the Rijnharts moved to Tankar, also in the Tibetan province of

Amdo, and opened a dispensary, hosting the British cavalry officer and explorer Montagu Wellby who had just crossed northern Tibet from Ladakh, been refused access to Lhasa and was now almost penniless. (His book, Through Unknown Tibet, was prefaced with the honest suggestion that it was written ‘that some future traveller may learn, not so much what he ought to do, as what he ought not to do’.) Wellby was not the only explorer who dropped in. While Petrus Rijnhart was guiding him to Beijing, Sven Hedin arrived in Tankar. Susie was able to correct his impression of the caravans passing through Tankar from the monasteries of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas: they were not carrying tribute for Beijing, as Hedin believed, but goods to trade.

Although popular in Tankar, the Rijnharts had always intended to reach

Tibet’s capital. ‘We knew that if ever the Gospel were proclaimed in Lhasa,’ Susie wrote, conveniently putting to one side the Catholics who had already been there, ‘someone would have to be the first to undertake the journey, to meet the difficulties, to preach the first sermon and perhaps never return to tell the tale – who knew?’ In June 1897, Susie had given birth to a son, Charles, and so they delayed until the following summer. Their journey started well but after two months and just north of Nagchu everything began to fall apart. Charles died suddenly and was buried in their emptied drugs case, wrapped in ‘white Japanese flannel’. Then Tibetan soldiers blocked their path. At Nagchu, just a hundred and sixty kilometres short of Lhasa, they were told to go no further and put on the caravan route to Kangding, a thousand kilometres to the east. At this point, their reliable guide Rahim headed home to Ladakh. Attacked and robbed by bandits, the rest of their crew fled. Ten days later, Petrus Rijnhart forded a river to seek information from a band of nomads they had seen nearby and was never seen again. Two months later, without husband or child, Susie Carson staggered into Kangding penniless and dressed in rags to be greeted by a missionary called James Moyes who years before had been part of Annie Taylor’s mission. Moyes and Carson later married and had a child, but Susie died only days after the birth. Her account of her travels, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, is well observed but heartbreaking.

Not all the women travelling to Tibet were missionaries. The remarkable

Teresa Littledale, like Susie Carson born in Canada, came closer to Lhasa than any western woman before the French spiritualist and explorer Alexandra David-Néel reached the city in 1924. Unlike these others, she had no need or compulsion to write about her adventures; she wasn’t spreading the gospel or filling lecture halls. Born in London, Ontario in 1839, Teresa met her second husband St George Littledale in Japan in 1874, when he was twenty-two, thirteen years her junior. At the time, she was still married to an older man, a Scottish landowner called Willie Scott, whom Teresa’s mother once described as ‘the reverse of handsome’. St George, on the other hand, was young and rather beautiful, the son of a much respected mayor of Liverpool. Like his father, St George was also noted for being affable, self-effacing and hugely determined. On his majority he inherited his father’s wealth and took off to travel the world and indulge his passion for hunting. Having befriended the Scotts in Japan, he travelled with them through Kashmir, by which time he and Teresa were having an affair. With consumate and generous timing, Willie Scott died of typhoid on the voyage home leaving St George and Teresa free to marry.

For the next thirty years they explored the world together, most usually

collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum or plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Their greatest journey was crossing Tibet in 1895 when they came closer than any European since Huc to reaching Lhasa. It was, St George wrote in a rare article for the Geographical Journal, ‘the same party as usual’: he and Teresa, now aged fifty-five, and their plucky fox terrier Tanny, but also St George’s muscular nephew Willie Fletcher, who had rowed stroke for the Oxford boat in the early 1890s. (He was gassed at Passchendaele in the summer of 1917 and never recovered, dying of pneumonia two years later.) ‘My scheme,’ St George wrote,

was to strain every nerve to reach Tibet, and, if possible, Lhasa, with plenty of food and animals to carry it. Most of the other expeditions had failed owing to their arriving in a more or less destitute condition, and then, of course, the Tibetans could dictate their own terms. We also relied upon bribery, and went well prepared with the sinews of war for wholesale corruption.

They reached Kashgar in western China in January 1895, where they entertained the ubiquitous Sven Hedin, then in the middle of his first four-year expedition, and were relieved to see the handful of Pathan bodyguards they had requested ‘in case of a scrimmage’ finally arrive after a snowy crossing of the Karakoram. The expedition then headed south to Yarkand and east to Cherchen before crossing the high passes of the Arka Tagh mountains – ‘the most absolute of frontiers’ – in bitter conditions in order to reach the northern fringes of the Chang Tang on the Tibetan plateau. Here things got even worse. Their pack animals died like flies: only eight of 170 would make it through to the other side of the Himalaya. One night the small flock of sheep they brought for food was allowed to wander; wolves tore out the throats of every one. Teresa suffered from dysentery, confessing to her diary that ‘I feel afraid to look at the future of this trip. It is not bright for me.’ To St George she said not a word of complaint. The wind was almost constant and bitterly cold. Her husband, now responsible for shooting their food, found his aim put off by his heavy breathing in the thin air. Only Tanny was happy, nestling in Teresa’s thick coat for warmth.

By mid summer they had crossed the Chang Tang and were in striking

distance of the Himalaya. Yet below the Goring La, just eighty kilometres short of Lhasa, they were blocked by a hundred or so Tibetans armed with matchlocks. St George waved their Chinese passport, which luckily the Tibetans couldn’t read, since it prohibited travel through Tibet. He tried threats, promising that if any of them were hurt three thousand Indian sepoys would march on Lhasa, a shadowy prefiguring of the British invasion nine years later. He tried ‘the golden key’ of ‘wholesale corruption’. Nothing worked. The religious official responsible for keeping them out was almost in tears as he told the Littledales he would be executed if he let them through. Teresa, who had just turned fifty-six, demanded St George’s Mannlicher rifle and presented it to the lama, asking him to shoot her rather than send her back across the Chang Tang. It was finally agreed they would be escorted west to Ladakh and return home from there.

Back in London, St George was feted. ‘My greatest traveller,’ Edward

VII called him, conveniently forgetting about Teresa. The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their patron’s medal, but again, excluded Teresa. In 1893, two years before Teresa was in Tibet, the Royal Geographical Society had been at war with itself over female membership; Punch magazine had run this satirical doggerel:

A lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts?

The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic:

Let them stay and mind the babies, or hem our ragged shirts.

But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic.

The publisher Edward Arnold offered St George a good advance to write up their adventures but the article had been enough; Littledale didn’t care much who knew what they had done and he slipped quietly beyond the reach of bibliographers. Teresa went on a final expedition to Mongolia and then retired from the expedition life. In January 1928, a few months before she died at the age of eighty-nine, the elderly couple had a small house party for Tibetan friends old and new: Francis Younghusband, who by then had solved the problem of entering Lhasa by kicking down the door, and Sir Charles Bell, the former special ambassador who had lived a year in the city and steered British policy in a more constructive direction. Younghusband also brought two Tibetan friends to meet the Littledales, one of them part of the Lhasa government thirty-three years earlier when St George and Teresa had come so close.

He knew all about us. He said that he thought the risk was too great for any of them to have taken a bribe. It meant forfeiture of land & banishment if discovered. How Willy would have enjoyed it hearing the other side.

The Littledales were exceptional in leaving their story untold. Almost everyone else visiting Tibet in the late nineteenth century published books. The stories they brought back, taken at face value by the public, were often compromised: by a lack of Tibetan, the difficulties of functioning at high altitude in a hostile environment, and often just naked prejudice. Henry Savage Landor’s In Forbidden Tibet was one particularly egregious example: in its excoriation of Tibetans and their way of life, not much more than fantasy. (‘The Lamas are said to have a great craving for human blood, which, they say, gives them strength, genius and vigour.’) Needless to say, the reviewers loved it. ‘Why should people write falsehoods about us,’ wrote the Tibetan emigré Rinchen Lhamo in the 1920s, fed up with the steady flow of twisted perspectives on her country; ‘why should they write at all of things they do not know?’

In the absence of Tibetan voices, and with proper scholarship on the

Himalaya still emerging, it was these versions of Tibet that would have primacy in the public imagination, skewing the world’s understanding even now. For some, Tibet was a mystical blank on the map, a place about which you could say almost anything because there was almost no one to contradict you. Tibet became an otherworldly place that promised ancient, esoteric answers to a spiritual dislocation provoked in Europe by rapid industrialisation. As Martin Brauen put it in Dreamworld Tibet:

In the late nineteenth century, in non-missionary literature Tibet was able more and more to signify a mountain towering above the sorrows and problems of the world, an island of seekers.

The woman who did more than anyone else to foster this image of Tibet was Helena Blavatsky, the Russian-born occultist and chief spiritual architect of the Theosophical Society, a synthesis of ‘science, religion and philosophy’ that would revive a lost and ancient system of knowledge. Essentially an occultist, Blavatsky started her esoteric travels in Egyptology and then moved on to Tibet which appeared to be a much less crowded field. Central to her arcane belief system, which had some rather dark notions about evolution, were the Masters of Ancient Wisdom, also known as the Mahatmas. She claimed to have been instructed by two of them, called Mourya and Koot Humi, in the monastery of Tashilhunpo in Tibet, although neither of them was Tibetan. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Blavatsky ever went to Tibet, although she did travel in the Himalaya, causing a minor sensation in Simla. Rudyard Kipling’s father Lockwood described her as among ‘the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors’ he had ever met.

Her genius, if that’s the right word, was blending together disparate

ingredients, some fact, many others fiction, into a chimera of spiritual feeling that would comfort isolated and anxious individuals with the promise of redemption, that modern life was not as mundane and meaningless as it seemed. Take for example the concept of ‘vril’, an ‘all-permeating fluid’ which first appears in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s proto-science-fiction novel The Coming Race, published in 1871. At the time Bulwer-Lytton was a hugely popular novelist and a politician, the man who coined the phrase, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. Vril was a kind of power or strength, and it briefly caught on. A Scottish butcher called John Lawson Johnston used the name to market his nutritious beef stock: Bovril. Blavatsky cheerfully scooped up vril and wove it into the complex spiritual fantasy-world she created. ‘The name vril may be a fiction;’ she wrote. ‘[But] the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.’

Unlike Savage Landor’s portrayal of Tibet, full of cannibalistic monks

and sexual depravity, Mahatma Koot Hoomi showed Blavatsky a very different Tibetan world:

For centuries we have had in Thibet a moral, pure hearted, simple people, unblest with civilization, hence – untainted by its vices. For ages has been Thibet the last corner of the globe not so entirely corrupted as to preclude the mingling together of the two atmospheres – the physical and the spiritual.

This was the Tibet that would fix itself in the Western imagination and remains influential, as though we were still to assess modern Africa through the prism of the Tarzan legend. When Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to resurrect Sherlock Holmes following his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, it was only natural that he should emerge from mystical Tibet; the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu wrote a pastiche of what the detective got up to in The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.

Blavatsky was not the only fantasist to weave Tibet into her story. George

Gurdjieff, the mystical ‘man of the fourth dimension’ who came to prominence in the early 1920s, also claimed to have lived in Tibet, although there’s no evidence that he did either. Neither did the Hungarian-born con man and former Liberal member of parliament Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, who founded his own Geluk-pa monastery in Shanghai and promised to help the Nazis turn Asia’s Buddhists against the British. Nor had Cyril Hoskin, a plumber from Devon who under the name Lobsang Rampa wrote The Third Eye, a wholly fictitious account of growing up as a monk in Tibet, which became an international bestseller following publication in 1956 despite being quickly unmasked as a fraud. Hoskin simply said that like Blavatsky he had been inhabited with the spirit of Lobsang Rampa. It was these fictional versions of Tibet that filled the vacuum, tilting the world’s understanding at significant cost.

The myth of the ‘forbidden’ city of Lhasa and the fantasies invented

around its ‘secrets’ would have dangerous consequences. As the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya wrote:

The Western perception of Tibet and the images that have clustered around Tibet have hampered the Tibetan political cause. The constant mythologisation of Tibet has obscured and confused the real nature of the Tibetan political struggle.

When the Tibetan state finally threw off the last shreds of Qing hegemony, those misconceptions would skew western engagement with an old nation resuming its place on the world stage.

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