16 Everest Diplomacy

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Everest Diplomacy

 

‘I sometimes think of this expedition,’ George Mallory wrote from under the shadow of Everest in the summer of 1921,

as a fraud from beginning to end, invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man, Younghusband; puffed up by the would-be wisdom of certain pundits in the A[lpine] C[lub]; and imposed upon the youthful ardour of your humble servant.

If climbing Everest was a fraud, then it was one Mallory paid for with his life. Three years later, in early June 1924, he disappeared while attempting to reach the mist-shrouded summit, leaving behind one of the enduring legends of exploration and a mystery too: did he reach the summit before he perished? That question will likely remain unanswered; even the discovery of his body in 1999 failed to produce definitive evidence. That most expert opinion concludes Mallory didn’t reach the top only adds to the enduring image, as potent now as it was then, of a human striving against all odds to realise a seemingly unattainable dream. His friend and mentor Geoffrey Winthrop Young, in a letter to the recently widowed Ruth Mallory, called it ‘that magnificent courage and endurance, that joyous and supreme triumph of a human spirit over all circumstances, all mortal resistance’. Mallory himself recognised such talk as a kind of propaganda. In his letter from 1921, he wrote with cynical weariness:

The prospect of ascent in any direction is almost nil, and our present job is to rub our noses against the impossible in such a way as to persuade mankind that some noble heroism has failed again.

There were three expeditions to Everest in the early 1920s, a drama in three acts with Mallory the star. Born in Cheshire, the son of a clergyman, his mother the daughter of a clergyman, he was, in author Patrick French’s words, a ‘public schoolmaster and minor Bloomsbury groupie’. Mallory balanced his restless streak of self-absorbtion with bourgeois respectability. As a Cambridge undergraduate Lytton Strachey lusted after him. (‘Mon Dieu! – George Mallory! – When that’s been written, what more need be said?’) But beyond some unsatisfactory fumbling with Strachey’s brother James, Mallory generally stuck to the rails. As the decade of flappers and modernism dawned, he was a married teacher in his mid thirties with three young children, not quite matching the dazzling brilliance of his more famous friends at Cambridge; the ‘label of Everest’, as Geoffrey Winthrop Young called it when persuading him to go, was an opportunity to stoke the embers of his early promise.

Sir Francis Younghusband, imperialist, mystic and president of the Royal

Geographical Society, had as a young man forty years earlier thrilled the British public with his daring traverse of the Mustagh Pass. Climbing Everest was a chance for him to rekindle that youthful fire, if only by proxy. He needed an arrow to aim at the mountain, and Mallory was the best available in a quiver half-emptied by the Great War. (Or as Tom Longstaff put it in a note to the editor of the Alpine Journal: ‘Owing to the War the supply of young climbers is less than formerly.’) Younghusband thought Mallory ‘good-looking, with a sensible, cultivated air’. Later, after Mallory’s death, he was more critical, complaining that Mallory had never grasped the scale of Younghusband’s vision, judging it all to be ‘a bit of sensationalism’. Mallory, prone to striking arch poses in letters to friends, wrote how Younghusband ‘amuses and delights me’. The Everest reconnaissance planned for 1921 had ‘become a sort of religious pilgrimage in his eyes. I expect I shall end by sitting at his feet, hearing tales of Lhasa and Chitral.’ That quasi-mystical strand remains a key flavour in Mallory’s enduring myth, a narrative deliberately frothed up by Younghusband, who had a flair for publicity and was helped in that side of things by the novelist John Buchan and Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who dubbed Mallory the Galahad of Everest.

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The Everest expeditions of the 1920s, the first in 1921 an exploratory

reconnaissance and then two full attempts in 1922 and 1924, have been characterised as a coda to the horrors of the Great War. Many of those involved had fought, including Mallory. Yet the cultural inspiration was not the sorrow of war and its modernist aftermath; it was instead an attempt to recapture the self-assurance of the Edwardian era. Naturally enough, those, like Younghusband, who drove the project, were older, but the average age of those who went on the 1921 reconnaissance was forty and the average for the specialist climbers was even higher. They may have fought in the war but they weren’t formed in it.

This atmosphere of late imperialism was meshed in Younghusband’s

mind with an ill-defined spiritual yearning that preoccupied him throughout the 1920s, years the old soldier spent writing increasingly self-indulgent mystical tracts. Such apparent contradictions were his hallmark. In 1904, just before he marched into Tibet at the head of a potent military force to wage war on a hopelessly outgunned Tibetan army, he had read a book by the Theosophist and political campaigner Annie Besant, whom he had recently met, called Cosmic Consciousness. It offered, Younghusband told his wife Helen, ‘a most intensely beautiful and peaceful idea of the Universe’. It was typical of Younghusband to hold inside his head two potent but contradictory myths about Tibet, as a lost spiritual haven and the imperial adventurer’s blank canvas. In fact, the early Everest expeditions as a whole can be understood both as mystical feats of tragi-heroic mountaineering and part of a decades-long campaign of military and diplomatic intervention by the British in Tibet.

Younghusband wasn’t the only powerful Victorian adventurer with an

interest in Tibet. His predecessor as president of the Royal Geographical Society was the more prosaic surveyor Sir Thomas Holdich. In 1906 Holdich had published Tibet the Mysterious, one of several such books published in the aftermath of Younghusband’s invasion. Holdich’s Tibet was in fact not at all mysterious.

Now that our mission to Tibet has returned to the Indian border, [he wrote,] we know how very little there is in Lhasa to justify that

mystic fascination … The veil has been torn aside and the naked city has been revealed in all its weird barbarity.

Yet it was on Holdich’s watch that pre-war dreams of an attempt on Everest were resuscitated. Before Holdich was the Himalayan explorer Douglas Freshfield, president during the Great War, whose grandfather’s fortune had been made working for the East India Company. Before Freshfield was the political titan Lord Curzon, who as viceroy not only sent Younghusband into Tibet but offered early and powerful support to the Everest adventure. ‘It has always seemed to me,’ Curzon wrote to Freshfield in 1905,

a reproach that with the second highest mountain in the world [Kangchenjunga] for the most part in British territory and with the highest in a neighbouring and friendly state we, the mountaineers and pioneers par excellence of the universe, make no sustained and scientific attempt to climb to the top of either of them.

When the British did finally make their first visit to Everest in 1921, the enterprise was not only launched from within the imperial worldview these men shared, it followed a physical route made viable by Curzon’s aggressive policy and the 1904 invasion. Permission for the expeditions required considerable diplomatic effort, bringing into play high-ranking political officers. While the climbers got the headlines, it was the intervention of these singularly placed diplomats that gained them access to the mountain. After Mallory’s death, there would be no further attempts in the 1920s. Ostensibly, this was because of offence caused to the Tibetan government. The true reasons for this rupture went far deeper, revealing a structural fault-line in the British Empire’s strategy on its Himalayan frontier, a strategy whose origins emerged from the smouldering wreckage of the rebellion of 1857.

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On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria’s proclamation appointing Lord Canning as her first viceroy in India was published at Allahabad, formalising the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British crown. Victoria promised toleration of race and creed and acknowledged herself bound by ‘obligations of Duty’ to her new Indian subjects, a new contract built on justice, an attempt to turn the page on the horror of civil war. Another commitment was aimed at India’s elite.

We desire no extension of Our present territorial Possessions; and while We will permit no aggression upon Our Dominions or Our Rights, to be attempted with impunity, We shall sanction no encroachment on those of others.

That pledge reassured Indian princes anxious about their future status. It also signalled a shift in perspective. The Company’s violent struggle for control of India was ended, beginning a period of consolidation under the aegis of a just and protective monarch. This didn’t prevent millions of Indians dying miserably in a sequence of famines, particularly those of the late 1870s, when laissez-faire economics devastated southern India. The then viceroy Lord Lytton was more anxious about external threats, particularly the Russian Empire: the Great Game, although the term hardly existed before Kipling popularised it in 1901 with the publication of Kim. The bulk of this confrontation took place in Central Asia, to the north-west of India, but as years passed and British policy developed the Himalaya was drawn in. Victoria’s promise to avoid the acquisition of new territory wouldn’t prevent the British Raj from consolidating its influence in the hodgepodge of states along its Himalayan marches, whether they liked it or not.

Viewed from Lhasa, the British arrival in the Himalaya in the early

nineteenth century must have looked like a wildfire spreading out of control. The Dalai Lama, whom the Qing had made temporal head of state in 1750, was boxed in by China’s ambans in Lhasa, the demands of an ancient and often fractious aristocracy and the immense power of Tibet’s enormous monastic institutions, which controlled much of the economy. Buddhist Tibet’s instinct was simply not to engage with the belligerent power occupying the holy land where the Buddha had preached. And with the East India Company anxious not to antagonise the Qing, British dealings with Tibet had been almost non-existent in the first part of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s it was a different story. War with Nepal had given the Company control of Kumaon and Garhwal. The bullish militaristic regime in Kathmandu might have dragged the Company into further damaging and expensive wars. Instead, a combination of geography, internal rivalries and diplomacy meant Nepal, unlike Afghanistan, became a model frontier state, at least from the British point of view.

Things looked different from Tibet. Far from being pacified, Nepal’s

charismatic leader Jang Bahadur sought to recover lost prestige elsewhere. In the early 1850s, with the Qing Empire embroiled in its devastating civil war with the Christian millenarian Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and Tibet distracted by the death of the eleventh Dalai Lama, Jang invaded Tibet, swiftly occupying the familiar mountain trade routes through the Kyirong and Bhote Kosi valleys. Thousands of Tibetan troops retreated to the desolate plain of Tingri, so familiar to early Everest climbers, to defend the approaches to Lhasa. Although Jang faced stiffer resistance than anticipated, he forced the Tibetans to sign the Treaty of Thapathali, restoring a good proportion of Nepal’s old trading privileges and returning a Nepali ambassador or vakil to Lhasa, a diplomatic presence that would become immensely beneficial to the British.

Fears about Jang’s reaction to the 1857 rebellion were eased after his

intervention on behalf of the British at the siege of Lucknow; in subsequent decades, dynastic struggle among his successors gave the British a useful lever. In 1885 Jang’s younger brother and successor Ranodip was assassinated. It was, as so often, a family affair. Four of the seventeen sons, the satra bhai, of Jang’s youngest brother Dhir, entered the palace on the false pretext of delivering a message from the governor general in Calcutta. Bir Shamsher, the eldest, remained a floor below, where the king had his apartments; the others, including another future prime minister Chandra Shamsher, continued upstairs. Here, in the words of the campaigning journalist William Digby, he ‘requited his uncle’s confidence by basely murdering him’. The first bullet grazed Ranodip’s forehead. The second hit him squarely. Digby had written a passionate exposé of British failures during the famines of the late 1870s and was a powerful critic of the Raj who worked for a while for the Indian National Congress. He wrote an account of Anglo-Nepali relations criticising Calcutta for doing nothing in this crisis to help Ranodip’s dynasty, despite his support during the 1857 rebellion.

No public department in any country, despotically or constitutionally ruled, ever had so short a memory, or one more

oblivious to history and the claims of justice, than the Calcutta Foreign Office.

For Calcutta’s foreign office, it was simply a question of expediency. For generations the British had wanted to recruit Gurkha troops inside Nepal, something Jang Bahadur and his brother Ranodip had resisted. Bir’s bloody coup gave the British the necessary leverage to negotiate that access.

As far as Tibet was concerned, the British were looking through a glass,

darkly. The East India Company had brilliant scholars at its disposal but none of them spoke Tibetan. The Company had invested precious little in studying the vast country to the north. Years before it had given a small allowance to the Hungarian philologist Sándor Csoma de Ko˝rös, who had met William Moorcroft in Kashmir in July 1822. The two men, both prodigious travellers, became friends: the ever-curious and bullish Englishman and the quiet Hungarian, a born scholar, shy but dedicated. Moorcroft suggested Csoma de Ko˝rös travel with him to Ladakh to study and translate manuscripts in the Buddhist monasteries there. With Moorcroft’s introductions, the Hungarian became the first European to visit Zanskar, the hauntingly wild region south of the Ladakhi capital Leh, studying with a lama called Sangey Phuntsog at the palace of Zangla on the banks of the Zanskar river. Sangey Phuntsog wasn’t a monk, but an amchi, a medical practitioner and also an astrologer. The two men sat on a sheepskin rug huddled against the cold in the Hungarian’s tiny cell, ploughing through the great encyclopaedias of Tibetan Buddhism.

Csoma de Ko˝rös also visited Zongkhul monastery where he learned

more about the practice of Buddhism from the abbot Kunga Choeleg. The abbot wrote a book based on the questions the Hungarian asked him: The Questions of European Skandar, Sándor being the Hungarian version of Alexander. After years of study and intense labour, latterly in Kinnaur on the banks of the Sutlej at the Buddhist centre of Kanam, Csoma de Ko˝rös travelled to Calcutta where in 1834, he published the first Tibetan grammar in English. He was welcomed into the Asiatic Society of Bengal, working as their librarian for several years before setting out for Lhasa in 1842 at the age of fifty-eight. Crossing the terai on his way to the mountains, he contracted malaria and died at Darjeeling, where he is buried.

Work like that of Sándor Csoma de Ko˝rös might have seemed peripheral

to the business of government but what Calcutta lacked in its dealings with Tibet during the later years of the nineteenth century were precisely his soft skills. The focus in Calcutta for dealings with princely states and foreign powers was the Indian Political Department. Reformed by Lord Ellenborough in 1843, its officers, known as ‘politicals’, were responsible for managing relationships with the leaders of princely states loyal to the British and with regional foreign countries such as Tibet, Bhutan and Nepal. Men like Traill in Kumaon and Hodgson in Kathmandu had proved immensely effective in these roles but building the personal networks required to broker deals and read the complexities of each political crisis, as they had done, required years of dedicated service. George Bogle in Tibet had understood this very clearly and built a good working relationship with the Panchen Lama. Had both men lived, British relations with Tibet might have developed in a more constructive direction. A handful of more perceptive diplomats consulted Bogle’s account of his journey both in manuscript and after it was published in 1876. Yet it took British officialdom until the early years of the twentieth century to appreciate its message. By that time a century had passed and great damage had been done.

A clearer understanding of Tibetan culture might also have answered one

of the questions the government in Calcutta found most perplexing: the relationship between China and Tibet. Even as late as the 1890s there were few informed European views of contemporary Tibet, and opinion as to the status of the Chinese there was contradictory. Many of the observers were Christian missionaries who took a dim view of Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual practice they were attempting to subvert. As a teenage boy in the mid 1860s the US diplomat William Woodville Rockhill had read Évariste Huc’s account of his 1846 expedition to Lhasa and been inspired to learn Tibetan, the first American to do so, using inherited wealth to explore western China and eastern Tibet while working at the legation in Beijing. ‘Whenever China sees the necessity of doing so,’ he wrote in his account of those travels,

it can effectually assert its supremacy in Tibet, for it is absurd to say that China is not the sovereign power there and that Chinese officials are only there to manage their own people, and are tolerated, as it were, in the country.

Yet there were opposite views. General Sir Hamilton Bower had, as a young cavalry officer, performed a number of intelligence missions in Central Asia in the late 1880s and early 1890s. He had looked for the killer of a Scottish trader, Andrew Dalgleish, murdered on the road between Leh and Yarkand, and bought the ancient Sanskrit text, written on birch bark, that had galvanised interest in the lost Buddhist culture of the Silk Roads in eastern Turkestan. After that, Bower crossed Tibet from west to east, without attempting to visit Lhasa. ‘My own impression,’ he wrote in his account of that journey,

is that the Chinese suzerainty is very shadowy, though the Tibetans in exclusiveness are quite willing to take shelter behind the Chinese in negotiations with foreign powers. If China really has power in Tibet, and if it is a part of China then by the treaty of Tien-tsin [Tianjin], Englishmen can go there on passport, but every one knows that the Chinese are not in a position to issue a passport which the Tibetans would consider valid.

By 1858 and the end of the Indian rebellion, there were several reasons for Tibetans to mistrust and dislike the British. Tibet’s powerful monastic institutions dominated trade, especially the import of tea from China, and didn’t want their revenue streams interrupted by interfering foreigners. Nor did they wish to offer a route in for European missionaries gathering on Tibet’s borders. French Lazarist priests in Tibet’s eastern fringes would prove expert in winding up international opinion for a more open Tibet. More urgently, the British were perceived as allies of the Gorkha regime in Kathmandu, which since its inception had been at odds with Lhasa. Tibet feared Gorkha’s military aggression and resented the Treaty of Thapathali they had signed with Nepal following Jang Bahadur’s invasion of 1854, involving not just the restoration of a Nepali resident to Lhasa but also the payment of tribute. True, in the early nineteenth century Nepal had been an enemy of British India but the relationship had over the decades altered dramatically. In the minds of Tibet’s rulers, Gorkhali support for the East India Company during the 1857 rebellion completed the picture.

In that context, when in the 1860s the British began building roads in

India close to the Tibetan border, particularly in Sikkim, Tibet considered such activity a security threat. Tibet also feared any strengthening of the relationship between Kathmandu and Beijing. Jang Bahadur had resumed Gorkha’s tribute missions to Beijing in 1866, although more for trade than an expression of obedience. In return Beijing sent ambassadors to Kathmandu, but this apparently cosier arrangement provoked anti-Nepali riots in Lhasa. China’s ambans were swift to reassure the Dalai Lama’s government, and as a gesture of support instructed their troops to use the Nepali resident’s house for musket practice. Relations between Beijing and Kathmandu soured further when China helped Tibet fortify its border with Nepal; by 1873 war between the two small neighbours seemed almost inevitable. That it didn’t happen says a great deal about the relative weakness of all concerned. Nepal feared a repeat of 1792, when Chinese troops came close to Kathmandu. China knew that while it still had a couple of thousand troops in Tibet, it could no longer attempt that kind of boldness. Tibet was almost paralysed, its leaders invested in a theocratic system that seemed unwilling and incapable of facing the immense political and cultural changes that industrialisation and global trade had brought.

Britain was at the forefront of both and looked with interest at how it

might exploit this conflict. The Indian army officer and administrator Owen Tudor Burne wrote in 1874 that tension among India’s Himalayan neighbours

cannot but be productive of advantage to ourselves, as whatever the issue, it must tend to improve our relations with Nepal and Tibet which are now closed doors, and will ever remain so as long as we rely on Mr Wade and Sir Jang Bahadur.

Mr Wade was Thomas Francis Wade, ‘Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary and Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China’, and as such was not inclined to push the almost negligible issue of trans-Himalayan trade at the cost of good relations with the Qing. To Wade, Tibet was picturesque but unprofitable and consequently not worth the bother. British officials in Darjeeling were left to make educated guesses about the political situation across the border from the frequent interruptions to trade between Tibet and India.

Pressure to improve this trade nevertheless remained strong, a weight of

opinion galvanised by the self-styled ‘pioneer of commerce’ Thomas Thornville Cooper. The eighth son of a ship-owner from County Durham, Cooper was a sickly teenager who on medical advice escaped Britain for the sunshine of Australia. At nineteen he was working for the Arbuthnot bank in Madras, then travelled throughout India before embarking for Shanghai, where he became mixed up in the hugely destructive Taiping rebellion. With that ended, he set out to travel to India via Tibet with support from European traders in the city. Cooper considered joining the Nepali tribute mission as it returned home to Kathmandu, but was denied permission to enter Tibet even before he’d left Shanghai. So in early 1868 he set out on his own. Reaching Batang in China’s Sichuan province on the main trade route between Chengdu and Lhasa, he met the town’s Lazarist missionaries, who, sensing an opportunity, offered their help. They persuaded the governor of Sichuan to give Cooper a passport for Tibet, hoping that Cooper would be arrested by the Tibetans, forcing the British to act and so open up Tibet to missionaries, including them. Cooper played along but when he reached the border his passport was simply refused: the pioneer of commerce was forced to turn south and approach India across the Hengduan mountains, again unsuccessfully and he returned to Shanghai. Cooper later attempted the same journey but in reverse: reaching China from the Indian state of Assam. Once again he was turned back.

Despite these reversals, Cooper became a champion of trade between

India and western China. He read a lengthy memorandum on the subject to the Calcutta chamber of commerce after returning from his second attempt, describing the state of trade running between Chengdu and Lhasa via the border town of Kangding, historically known as Tachienlu. At the heart of this trade was tea. Cooper estimated that Tibet consumed annually more than two thousand tons of the stuff, largely imported from Sichuan. Why should that tea not come from the gardens of Darjeeling instead? Cooper knew Tibet’s monasteries held a near monopoly on this trade and took a cut of the taxes paid on it. They weren’t about to give up that interest without some kind of intervention. As far as Cooper was concerned, nothing would change until a ‘British Minister resides in Lhasa and the Lamas have been taught their utter helplessness when actually brought into contact with a British force’. In 1873, as Tibet and Nepal came close to war, Cooper helped put together a powerful lobbying group of old Himalayan stagers that included Brian Houghton Hodgson and Joseph Hooker. Their proposals for improved roads, trade fairs and British representation inside Tibet would become the policy of the Indian government. Pressure came too from chambers of commerce in northern English industrial towns, which even before Cooper’s entry on the scene had petitioned the India Office to do something about access to western China’s markets. The prolific author Demetrius Charles Boulger, an imperial cheerleader writing in the 1880s, looked forward to the day when ‘the people of Szechuen [Sichuan] wear Manchester goods and use Sheffield cutlery’.

The conduit for such trade was to be via Sikkim’s Chumbi valley into

Tibet, which Younghusband would call ‘the only strategical point of value in the whole north-eastern frontier from Kashmir to Burma’. In March 1860, Archie Campbell, still smarting a decade on from his humiliating imprisonment, took a company of native troops into Sikkim to protest against infringements of British jurisdiction but was himself attacked and forced to retreat so hastily that the baggage of his small force was abandoned. Once again clearing up Campbell’s mess to maintain British prestige, Calcutta retaliated with a much larger force led by John Cox Gawler. With him went the political officer Ashley Eden who on conclusion of a swift campaign signed the Treaty of Tumlong with the chogyal. Restrictions on trade were lifted and the British were given the right to build roads inside Sikkim.

Some of Calcutta’s enemies in Sikkim fled to Bhutan, the catalyst for an

escalation of tension that had been brewing for decades. Eden was despatched to reach some kind of settlement but was treated rather like Campbell had been in Sikkim. This time Calcutta didn’t hesitate in sending troops. Bhutan was destabilised by civil war and its military was armed with antiquated matchlocks and bows and arrows. Some of its soldiers still wore chain mail. Yet they offered stiff resistance and British Indian forces suffered embarrassing reversals. When they eventually prevailed in 1865, Bhutan ceded the duars, the plains at the foot of the mountains, to the British in return for rent. Calcutta concluded that buying Bhutan’s cooperation would be easier than enforcing it. The violent civil unrest that plagued Bhutan for the next two decades offered the British little hope of using the country as a route to Tibet. With western Tibet closed, Nepal off limits and a proposed railway to China through Assam little more than a distant dream, the focus for liberalising trade across the Himalaya really did fall squarely on Sikkim.

The assumption remained throughout this period that the riddle of Tibet

would be solved in Beijing. And at times it seemed as though progress was being made. In 1875, the British translator Augustus Raymond Margary was murdered returning through Yunnan to Shanghai from a mission to explore trade routes between China and Burma. (Violent death was an occupational hazard for colonial servants in such remote locations: three years later, the trade lobbyist Thomas Cooper, by then serving as political agent in Burma, was also murdered.) Thomas Wade, Elgin’s successor in Beijing, used Margary’s death to win more concessions on freedom of movement from the Chinese, in the Chefoo Convention of 1876, making sure Tibet was covered too. It didn’t make any difference. Trade across the border at Sikkim was no easier and Tibet remained forbidden ground, whatever passports were issued in Beijing.

In 1883, the Bhutanese, buoyed with British subsidies and resentful of

Lhasa’s suzerainty, looted the Tibetan frontier town of Phari, close to the Sikkimese border. That interrupted trade across the Jelep La, the pass separating Tibet from Sikkim, which in turn was noticed in the bazaar at Darjeeling. An official called Colman Macaulay, financial secretary of the government in Calcutta, was despatched to Tibet to investigate. An Ulsterman with a Protestant father and Catholic mother, Macaulay sensed an opportunity. At Khamba Dzong, an administrative centre on the road to Shigatse, a local official told him of pent-up demand in Tibet for European goods and how ‘whenever a man gets an article of English manufacture, a hundred people come to look at it’. It was the conservatism of the great Lhasa monasteries that stood in the way: a sizable chunk of the laity would welcome warmer relations. The Panchen Lama at Shigatse, he hinted, might offer a route in. Macaulay had read George Bogle and adopted his strategy: the Indian government should offer the Panchen Lama a piece of land in Calcutta, as Bogle had done. The monasteries at Lhasa, which he described as ‘the national party in permanent opposition to the Chinese’, could be paid off. The Panchen Lama for one seemed delighted at this prospect, sending Calcutta a long shopping list that included English–Tibetan dictionaries and photographic equipment. The prospect of exporting Indian tea and English manufactured goods to Tibet and western China seemed within reach.

Not everyone was so optimistic. The chargé d’affaires in Beijing was

another Irishman, Nicholas O’Conor from County Roscommon. O’Conor warned London that the Qing still regarded Tibet as an integral part of its empire but could not impose its wishes on the Dalai Lama, or at least his government, since the Dalai Lama was then a boy of nine. There was the real risk of a violent reception for any British mission, especially if it went armed. Macaulay pressed ahead, winning the approval of Randolph Churchill, then secretary of state for India, while on leave in London. Churchill sent Macaulay to Beijing to get the necessary Tibetan passports. With him went Sarat Chandra Das, counted among the pundits for his secret journeys within Tibet. In Beijing he stayed at the Yellow Temple, where the Tseten Nomonhan, Tibet’s ambassador, had his residence, and from where the Tibetans kept a close eye on Macaulay’s negotiations. Das realised the Tibetan establishment was determined to block Macaulay, that the Panchen Lama had simply been looking for leverage against Lhasa and that the Chinese were anxious to avoid a repeat of the Margary affair. Should something happen to Macaulay, they reasoned, the British would have an excuse to annex Tibet much as they were doing in Burma. Nor was there much enthusiasm for Macaulay’s plan in Calcutta. The viceroy Lord Dufferin was acutely aware of public hostility at home to the Burmese campaign and only too happy to cancel Macaulay’s mission in exchange for China recognising the British position in Burma. A more astute diplomat than Macaulay or Churchill, the last thing he needed was another unpopular and expensive war on the fringes of the empire.

Dufferin’s decision came a shade too late. Some within the Tibetan

government were reluctant to antagonise the British but the monastic power behind the Dalai Lama thought otherwise. The Nechung, Tibet’s state oracle, advocated military action and in the summer of 1886 Tibetan troops crossed the Jelep La into Sikkim where they fortified themselves against attack. This wasn’t an isolated show of strength. For years and all along its Himalayan frontier, Tibet had been asserting itself, as much to show its independence from China as in defiance of British India. Two years later, with Calcutta’s patience at an end, a British force finally cleared the Tibetans out of Sikkim and a protracted series of negotiations began. In 1890 a new treaty was signed with the Qing dynasty that tightened Britain’s grip on Sikkim. John Claude White became the first British political agent at the Sikkimese capital Gangtok and a trade agent was stationed at Yatung close to Sikkim’s border with Tibet. Trade talks continued and further regulations were agreed in 1893. A year later the scholar Herbert Hope Risley, author of the Sikkim Gazetteer, wrote that Tibet ‘lies on the other side of a great wall, which we, as rulers of India, have not the slightest ambition to climb’. Any attempt to make that climb would be, Risley concluded, ‘a piece of surpassing folly’.

Despite Risley’s warning, within a decade the Indian government would

send Francis Younghusband and a military expedition across that great wall to occupy Lhasa.

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For half a century the British had tried to regulate its Himalayan border with Tibet through China but Tibet’s invasion and brief occupation of Sikkim had now made it clear that China could no longer guarantee the terms of any treaty it signed with relation to Tibet. In 1895, the Qing were defeated at the hands of imperial Japan. It was now starkly obvious that the balance of power in East Asia was shifting towards Japan and away from the Western European powers, a process accelerated by the Boxer Rebellion, the anti-imperialist and anti-Christian uprising that began in 1899. In the tiny world of Sikkim, less than a rounding error in the business of empire, John Claude White discovered the Tibetans reluctant to adhere to the agreement signed in 1890; trade remained paltry and border disputes continued. Two men, both charismatic and ambitious, now emerged to galvanise this uncertain scene: Lord Curzon and the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Antagonists who never met, both men can be judged to have failed, but only one of those failures, that of the Dalai Lama in his attempts to modernise his country, would prove a tragedy.

Lord Curzon of Kedleston became Queen Victoria’s last viceroy of India

in January 1899, at the apogee of the British Raj, fulfilling an ambition he had held throughout his adult life. Talented, industrious and widely disliked, Curzon’s name is almost shorthand for the dismissive arrogance of the British upper classes. At Balliol College, Oxford, the doggerel written for him stuck:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

I am a most superior person.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

His second wife recalled how in the Curzon household, foot servants were chosen for the elegance of their wrists while holding a plate. Even as a young man his friends predicted he would be foreign secretary; before he entered politics he had a passion for exploratory travel, despite a chronically injured back, that would echo in his enthusiasm for the Everest adventure. The fact that in 1919 he realised his friends’ prediction by actually becoming foreign secretary also helped the prospects of an Everest expedition.

There is a photograph taken in 1901 that captures Curzon, his brilliance

and his vanity, and the world he moved through. He stands in neatly creased plus fours, pith helmet in his right hand, among a group of British staff officers and officials, Nepali colonels and turbaned bearers proudly looking down at the corpse of the gigantic tiger he has just shot. Hunting, or shikar, was the imperial equivalent of a businessman’s round of golf, beloved of British aristocrats and Indian potentates alike. It was a chance to do business, and Curzon had an agenda.

The viceroy wasn’t altogether welcome in Nepal. Bir Shamsher Rana,

nephew of Jang Bahadur and still maharaja following the assassination of his uncle Ranodip in 1885, had been unwell when Curzon requested an invitation to visit Nepal and was initially reluctant to accede. Then, after the invitation had been made but before Curzon arrived in March 1901, Bir Shamsher died, to be replaced by his younger brother Dev. Among the satra bhai, the seventeen brothers, Dev had been closest to the marginalised sons of Jang Bahadur and was consequently distrusted. Worse, he had reforming instincts. Dev wanted universal primary education for Nepali children and wider engagement in politics. So Curzon’s visit, a fortnight after Bir Shamsher’s death, was inconvenient. Dev’s younger brother Chandra, head of the army, volunteered to take Curzon hunting but from what happened next it seems unlikely they talked only of tigers. Three months later, in June 1901, Chandra deposed Dev in a coup and with lightning speed Calcutta recognised his government, congratulating him on how it had been achieved without the usual bloodletting. Queen Victoria might have promised the British would not acquire more territory in the subcontinent but that didn’t exclude regime change.

What Curzon got from Chandra in return was support for his Tibet policy.

Nepal, under the terms of its 1856 treaty with Tibet, was technically obliged to come to Lhasa’s aid if attacked by a foreign power. Curzon needed to anchor Nepal firmly to his side before moving forward. He was determined to end the drift on the border with Tibet where agreements signed in good faith were being ignored and his letters to the Dalai Lama were returned unopened. More importantly, Curzon was determined to stop what he perceived as a Russian threat to absorb Tibet into its empire as China’s power waned. It was true that Russia had benefitted from the collapse of the Qing Empire by taking territory in Manchuria. And the British had known for a century that Russian influence could be felt in the Himalaya: George Bogle and William Moorcroft had both seen it. What Curzon feared was altogether different. He believed that the other great figure in this drama, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, was falling under the political control of St Petersburg. Yet while there was some mutual interest between Russia and Tibet, it wasn’t remotely sufficient to justify military intervention. As with the weapons of mass destruction not found in Iraq in 2003, serious politicians were convinced a Russian threat existed, but it was more or less fiction.

For most of the nineteenth century, the Dalai Lamas were little more than

political pawns, boys whom the progressively more conservative religious establishment could control and who died shortly before or after they reached their majority, not always of natural causes. Trinley Gyatso, the twelfth Dalai Lama, had been enthroned in 1873 at the age of sixteen but died of a ‘mysterious illness’ two years later. This sequence of underage national leaders meant the Panchen Lama at Tashilhunpo and senior monks in the great lamaseries at Lhasa kept a tight if not always harmonious grip on the political helm under the watchful eyes of China’s ambans. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, was different. First, the Panchen Lama at this time was a child too. Second, as Chinese influence waned, Thubten Gyatso had been presented as the only candidate for Dalai Lama to the Qing, signalling Lhasa’s growing confidence to act independently of the Golden Urn. As a boy he survived an outbreak of smallpox, leaving him with a mildly pitted complexion, and he grew up in an atmosphere of spiritual seclusion, insulated from the growing tension with British India. While most Dalai Lamas assumed political control by the age of eighteen, Thubten Gyatso requested he continue his studies for two more years. Even then he remained anxious that he was too inexperienced to face the growing crisis developing across the mountains and was persuaded to take up the reins of power only after consulting the Nechung Oracle. He also faced threats from within, surviving an assassination attempt by his former regent.

What worried Curzon was the Dalai Lama’s long-standing friendship

with a Buryat Mongol monk called Agvan Dorzhiev. More than twenty years his senior, Dorzhiev was a teacher and debating partner of the young Thubten Gyatso. He told him about his homeland and the growing influence of Russia. With China signing treaties with the British that the Tibetans neither wanted nor approved, and increasingly incapable of securing Tibet’s borders, the Dalai Lama used Dorzhiev as a contact with the imperial capital of St Petersburg, explicitly requesting the support of Russia as a diplomatic counterweight to the increasing British pressure. As much as this shocked the British, it was an obvious move. As the Russian Empire established itself in Siberia, the tsars treated those of their subjects that practised Tibetan Buddhism relatively well, whereas the British appeared hostile to Buddhism and supportive of Christian missionaries. The notion of Russia sending an army to Tibet was fanciful, but Curzon used Dorzhiev’s mission as the foundation on which to stack every half-baked rumour of Russian influence that emerged from the bazaars of Simla and Darjeeling. He was aided in this by his friend the maharaja of Nepal, Chandra Shamsher, who relayed to Calcutta any anti-Russian gossip that arrived from Kathmandu’s representative in Lhasa: passing on news of Russian arms shipments arriving in the Tibetan capital spurred the British to supply the Nepali army. Chandra promised Curzon when they met at the Delhi coronation durbar in 1903 – the ‘Curzonation’ – that Nepal would disregard any obligations to Tibet but only in return for compensation.

The point man for Curzon’s policy in Tibet was his loyal friend Francis

Younghusband. They had met when Younghusband returned on leave to Britain in 1892 and again in Chitral, in modern-day Pakistan, two years later. Having been something of one himself, Curzon took a shine to explorers, and frontiers obsessed him. Younghusband could see Curzon’s faults but knew he was on the fast track to greatness and admired his assurance and drive. He would have no better friend, at least professionally. When Curzon arrived in India as viceroy, Younghusband’s glittering early promise had rather stalled. He was a colonial administrator in Rajasthan dealing with a horrifying famine and had witnessed desperate Indians eating roots and leaves, or else ‘seizing burnt remains from the funeral pyres and gnawing at them’. Curzon invited him to Simla for a rest and gave him a more prestigious posting, reassuring Younghusband he was still regarded ‘as an old friend and fellow-traveller’. When Curzon decided to force Tibet’s hand he had already singled out Younghusband as the perfect man for the job.

In July 1903 Younghusband crossed the Tibetan border at the head of a

diplomatic mission to make clear to the Tibetans that Curzon was determined to resolve the situation. With him went the political officer Claude White, ‘a little god’ in Sikkim, according to Younghusband, but ‘worse than useless in dealing with high officials of an independent nation’. Younghusband himself got almost nowhere. The Tibetans maintained their stony indifference to British demands. Camped uselessly outside the fort at Khamba Dzong, Younghusband in desperation passed on rumours to Calcutta from Annie Taylor, the missionary at Yatung, that twenty thousand Russians were marching on Lhasa. ‘We have merely to burst the bloated bubble of monkish power,’ he wrote to Curzon, ‘and we shall have the people with us, and be able to oust that Russian influence which has already done us so much damage.’ As a misreading of the situation in Tibet it was hard to beat.

In late December, as winter settled its bitter grip on the high Tibetan

plateau, Younghusband set out once more for Tibet, this time at the front of a column of a thousand troops, mostly Gurkhas and Sikhs, with a vast baggage train featuring thousands of yaks, mules, bullocks and ponies most of which would perish in the harsh conditions of a Tibetan campaign. The military force was commanded by Major General James Macdonald, a seasoned if rather dull engineer with long experience of Africa. More recently he had been building roads in Sikkim and was the senior officer on the spot when Curzon ordered military intervention. Macdonald fretted about supply lines and constantly urged caution. In frustration, Younghusband turned to the younger officers around him, especially Captain Frank O’Connor, born in County Longford, who had arrived in Darjeeling as a young artillery officer and fallen in love with the high, unexplored country to the north. O’Connor was the first and at the time only British officer in the whole of the Indian army capable of holding a conversation in Tibetan and had been appointed to Younghusband’s mission as interpreter. O’Connor’s presence in British Himalayan diplomacy would be understated but seemingly ubiquitous for the next twenty years. Another was Frederick Marshman Bailey, discoverer of the blue poppy. Known as Eric and then in his early twenties, Bailey was born in Lahore, the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Indian army and a friend of O’Connor who followed his example in learning Tibetan. He caught Younghusband’s eye as just the sort of man the empire needed on the frontier.

The Tibetan winter was no less brutal for the British than it had been for

Zorowar Singh’s Dogra army sixty years earlier. At the British encampment at Tuna, marooned five kilometres high on the wind-blasted plateau, troops huddled round yak-dung fires; a dozen Sikh Pioneers died of pneumonia. Lieutenant Arthur Hadow of the Norfolk Regiment, who commanded the column’s pair of Maxim guns, used rum and kerosene to keep their cooling system from freezing up in temperatures that sank to minus 30 °C. (It was the Maxim guns that revealed the bullying nature of the British mission in Tibet.)

Near the hot springs of Chumi Shengo on the last day of March 1904, as

the British column resumed its march towards the important town of Gyantse, their path was blocked by two thousand Tibetan troops, many of them dob-dob, monks who kept order in the sometimes turbulent monasteries. There was a brief meeting between the Tibetan general Lhading and British commanders; then British troops outflanked their opponents to make surrender inevitable. Not a shot had been fired. As Sikh Pioneers began disarming the Tibetans, British officers had time to photograph their exotic-looking enemies with their matchlocks and swords. Then a moment’s misunderstanding and the shooting began. A Sikh was hit in the jaw and the Maxim guns opened up. Macdonald reported to Curzon the following morning that his men had used fourteen hundred machine-gun rounds and over fourteen thousand rounds of rifle ammunition, as well as fifty shrapnel shells from the column’s artillery. A dozen on the British side had been injured, mostly from swords and slingshots, while Campbell counted the Tibetan dead at 628. Many had been shot in the back, walking away. The Daily Mail journalist who witnessed this slaughter asked, ‘Why, in the name of all their Bodhisats and Munis [sic], did they not run?’ As for modern Russian weapons: almost nothing, just a handful of old breech-loaders and later some hunting rifles likely traded decades before.

Younghusband himself was appalled by what he told his father was ‘pure

butchery’. The blame, however, he shifted elsewhere, to the Tibetan general Lhading for his ‘crass stupidity and childishness’ and the Tibetan troops themselves for their ‘inability, even when our troops absolutely surrounded them, to take in the seriousness of the situation’. He blamed the Dalai Lama too, who was, ultimately, ‘at the bottom of all the trouble and deserves to be well kicked’. Such excuses were Younghusband’s myth creation at its most grotesque. He had no comprehension of the struggles within the outmoded Tibetan political system: the rising tide of nationalism and unwillingness to compromise that beset its leaders. All he wanted was to ‘smash those selfish filthy lecherous Lamas’. Such naked prejudice was rooted in a particular strand of English evangelical anti-Catholicism, which saw in Lhasa echoes of Rome. Younghusband’s argument, shared by Curzon, had been that Tibetans were a religiously oppressed people gasping for liberty, but this was simply a fiction, and one used to justify the use of modern weaponry against troops who genuinely believed that magic amulets would ward off bullets. Even after the slaughter of Chumi Shengo, the naïve courage and sacrifice of the Tibetans continued, impressing the urgently needed British reinforcements who witnessed it. That didn’t stop them looting and shopping their way to Lhasa, sending back four hundred mule-loads’ worth of artworks and souvenirs, some of these still in British museums and private collections. What was supposed to have been a demonstration of British authority had become a rather squalid smash and grab.

As Younghusband neared Lhasa in triumph, ‘the greatest success of my

life’, Curzon was in London, defending the mission against an increasingly hostile British cabinet. A day before the city fell, the Dalai Lama, the physical and spiritual embodiment of Tibetan identity, fled with Dorzhiev to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, at that time called Urga. The choice had political significance: in avoiding China, he made an expression of independence; there was also a Russian consulate he could consult. (The presence of the Dalai Lama alienated Mongolia’s spiritual leader, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, himself a Tibetan, being the son of a steward in the Dalai Lama’s retinue, and Mongolia’s most senior Geluk monk. He was an equivocal figure, described by the doughty British traveller Beatrix Bulstrode in 1919 as ‘a man of middle age, already decrepit, in appearance bloated, dissipated, uninspiring’. The Polish traveller Ferdynand Ossendowski thought him ‘clever, penetrating and energetic’. The monk’s blindness in old age has been ascribed to both syphilis and alcoholism.) In September 1904, Younghusband signed a treaty at Lhasa in the absence of the Dalai Lama. It would be abandoned at the end of the following year by Britain’s newly formed Liberal government amid distaste at imperial meddling. (This was less to do with human rights and more that foreign meddling was expensive.) By that time, Curzon had resigned as viceroy. The missionary Annie Taylor, although snidely dismissed by British officers, put the outcome rather neatly:

far from being strengthened, the prestige of Britain has been weakened all along the border between Tibet and India, the only gain in this respect being on the part of China.

Russia and Britain effectively ended their rivalry in Tibet with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, agreeing to deal with Tibet only through China. The Dalai Lama now had little choice but to deal with Beijing. He moved back to Amdo for a while and then decided to travel to Beijing, despite fears that he might be detained there. On the way, he paused at the Wutaishan monastery, where he sent invitations to foreign diplomats to visit, including the British. It was part of a deliberate effort to change Tibet’s course of determined isolation to one of engagement. He told the American diplomat William Woodville Rockhill about his struggles against the Chinese and how Tibet had ‘no friends abroad’. Rockhill told the Dalai Lama he was wrong, that Tibet had around the world many well-wishers who wanted to see Tibetans prosper. Rockhill wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, then serving his second term as president, that the meeting was ‘the most unique experience of my life’. The Dalai Lama was a man ‘of quick understanding and of force of character’.

A day later, the Dalai Lama met the future president of Finland and

Russian imperial army officer Gustaf Mannerheim while the Lama’s attendants ensured that the Chinese agent watching the Finn was kept out of the room. Mannerheim, ostensibly travelling but in reality a spy, was keeping notes in Swedish of his travels through Central Asia for his masters in St Petersburg. The Dalai Lama asked if Mannerheim had a message for him from the tsar, which he didn’t, but gave him his pistol for protection – a Browning, not a Russian weapon – and showed him how to load it. He also noted the lively intelligence Tibet’s exiled leader showed in foreign affairs, writing that he

does not look like a man resigned to play the part the Chinese Government wishes him to, but rather like one who is only waiting

for an opportunity of confusing his adversary.

When the Dalai Lama finally arrived in Beijing in September 1908, he refused to kowtow to the Guangxu emperor and the dowager empress Cixi, who nevertheless made it clear he must return to Lhasa and obey the ambans there.

Both the emperor and Cixi were dead within days, the Guangxu emperor

poisoned at the age of thirty-seven. The Dalai Lama was forced to remain for the obligatory period of mourning but his presence in Beijing made him available to European diplomats for the first time. By chance Frank O’Connor was there, accompanying the young prince of Sikkim on a world tour. He thus became the first British government representative to meet the leader of Tibet, as well as his Buryat adviser Agvan Dorzhiev. The meeting was cordial, even friendly; it helped that the British had by then almost completely withdrawn from Tibet. The Dalai Lama, aided behind the scenes by the American Rockhill, also managed to see Japan’s ambassador, despite Chinese objections. Fascination in Japan for Tibet had been sparked with the publication of Three Years in Tibet, the experiences of the traveller Ekai Kawaguchi who had met the thirteenth Dalai Lama in Lhasa while posing as a Chinese monk. When the Dalai Lama finally returned to Lhasa, Japanese military advisers arrived to help modernise the Tibetan army. It was too little, far too late.

*

Not long before Curzon quit as viceroy he had set the ball rolling for an expedition to Everest with his letter to Douglas Freshfield. During the Younghusband mission, two army captains Cecil Rawling and Charles Ryder, later surveyor general of India, had got clear views of Everest from around a hundred kilometres away, which had put the issue firmly in Curzon’s mind. There are two approaches to Everest, from the north through Tibet and from the south through Nepal. Curiously, in his letter Curzon explicitly suggested approaching the maharaja of Nepal Chandra Shamsher to request access to the southern route and made no mention of Tibet. He may have felt that despite Britain’s military intervention, access from that direction would be unlikely and they were better off asking his friend Chandra.

The Alpine Club were delighted at such powerful support and began

putting together an expedition for 1907 in time for their golden jubilee, banking on the Tibetan route since it seemed more practical and better known. The wealthy publisher and Alpine Club member Arnold Mumm offered to underwrite the attempt if he and his Swiss guide could be part of the team. With him would go the Himalayan veterans Tom Longstaff and Charlie ‘Bruiser’ Bruce with two Alpine guides and nine of Bruce’s Gurkhas. Alas, the alpinists had hitched their wagon to a political faction that almost immediately came off the rails. The new secretary of state for India was the dry and bookish John Morley, not a man sympathetic to romantic adventure; even his own prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman once described him as a ‘petulant spinster’. Negotiations with the Russians were continuing and Morley wasn’t prepared to allow a mountaineering expedition to muddy the waters. Sir George Goldie, the Cecil Rhodes of Nigeria, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote a caustic letter to The Times but there was no shifting Morley; a leader in The Times rather took his side.

Morley also blocked Curzon’s suggestion of trying from Nepal. In 1908,

while the Dalai Lama was heading to Beijing, Chandra Shamsher arrived in Britain, where he was given an honorary degree at Oxford, awarded personally by the university’s vice chancellor Lord Curzon, now in the political wilderness. Chandra also got an honorary award from the Royal Geographical Society, but when he met privately with Morley, the secretary of state told him that ‘a very important society, the Geographical Society demanded a pass from me to explore Everest. I refused it. Is it not as you wish me to do?’ Chandra concurred. Nepal’s isolation maintained the good reputation of the British among ordinary Nepalis flocking to join its army. If mountaineers were allowed in, then others would follow. And ‘all Englishmen, Your Lordship, cannot be expected to be gentlemen’. With Chandra’s consent, however, the India Office did allow one concession, a sop to Curzon: in 1907 Nathu Singh from the Survey of India became the first outsider to explore the south side of the Everest region in Nepal, including the Dudh Kosi, the ‘milk river’ that flowed from its glaciers. Mumm, Bruce and Longstaff went not to Everest but the Garhwal and made their creditable first ascent of Trisul.

In the face of official disapproval, approaches to Everest became a

clandestine affair. Alexander Kellas, the Scottish chemist who would perish on the 1921 reconnaissance, had a secret plan to try from the north and in 1913 Captain John Noel of the Machine Gun Corps made a clandestine journey across the border from Sikkim that got a little closer than Rawling had. It was a lecture on this enterprising adventure in March 1919 that Younghusband, soon to take over from Holdich as the new president of the Royal Geographical Society, used as a spring-board for the attempts of the 1920s. In October, Curzon was made foreign secretary, just the sort of ally in government to get things moving. Yet it was ironically another invasion of Tibet that would prove to be the key in unlocking the gates of Everest and which would send British policy in Tibet in a new and wholly more constructive direction under the expert guidance of one man: Charles Bell. It would be Bell’s presence in Lhasa that would bring the necessary permission for Younghusband’s adventure to move forward.

*

Soon after the British left Lhasa in late 1904, the Qing magistrate Zhao Erfeng had arrived in western Kham where the Qing had been trying to establish Chinese farming colonies among indigenous Tibetans. This had led to riots and the murder of the official responsible for implementing the policy. Zhao had begun a vicious campaign to reassert China’s control, provoking further retaliation. A group of rebellious monks had taken refuge behind the stout walls of the monastery at Chaktreng but Zhao had finally tricked them into opening the doors in the belief reinforcements had arrived. He then executed the survivors. Zhao’s success in pacifying Kham won him promotion and in 1909 he repeated his tactic in the formerly independent kingdom of Derge, ‘the land of mercy’, a significant polity in the Kham region, destroying the historically important Drakyap monastery in the process. The atrocities his troops committed earned him the soubriquet ‘Butcher Zhao’; the destruction of Tibetan culture prefigured the far darker shadow of the Cultural Revolution. In February 1910, only weeks after the Dalai Lama’s return, Zhao arrived in Lhasa with two thousand men. The official reason was to police trade marts established by the British under the terms of a new treaty signed in 1908, but the Tibetans read it as an aggressive statement of intent. The sight of Halley’s Comet burning through the night sky was taken as an ill omen. The Dalai Lama, now in his mid thirties, was forced to flee once again, this time heading for Sikkim, beyond the reach of China.

The British trade agent at Yatung, on Tibet’s border with Sikkim, was

David Macdonald, a civilian veteran of the 1904 Tibet mission who had taken over as interpreter when Frank O’Connor fell ill. Macdonald’s father had been a Scottish tea planter who abandoned his mother, a local Lepcha woman, when David – born Dorje – was small. Macdonald had been warned by telegraph that the Dalai Lama was coming and had orders to help him while remaining ostensibly neutral. Chinese officials in Yatung, waiting for the arrival of Zhao’s troops, demanded that the Dalai Lama be handed over. That night in the midst of a winter snowstorm, he escaped across the Jelep La into Sikkim. From there he went on to Darjeeling where the urbane and sympathetic political agent Charles Bell welcomed him. Bell accompanied his new guest to Calcutta where the viceroy Lord Minto greeted the Dalai Lama with deep respect and listened to his pleas for help. The secretary of state John Morley, back in London, wasn’t the least interested. Echoing Younghusband, he dismissed the Dalai Lama as nothing more than a ‘pestilent animal’ and one who ‘should be left to stew in his own juice’. Morley assessed China’s invasion as simply the natural assertion of its sovereignty. There was no question of British support, not least because it contravened the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Morley told Minto to maintain a position of strict neutrality. Given the surprisingly warm welcome the Dalai Lama had enjoyed so far, this sudden reversal of his hopes was a bitter blow. Bell recalled how the news left the Dalai Lama ‘so surprised and distressed that for a minute or two he lost the power of speech’.

With a brutal Qing army occupying Lhasa and the British apparently

indifferent, the Dalai Lama approached the Russians, but the political winds had changed and he got a polite rebuff. He considered travelling from India to Beijing to make a direct appeal but the situation in China was fast deteriorating and he had little option but to remain under British protection, going on pilgrimage to Kapilavastu, where the Buddha had lived as a child, and Bodhgaya, where he achieved enlightenment, before settling at Kalimpong, just east of Darjeeling.

One of those who joined the Dalai Lama in exile was the diplomat and

military leader Dasang Damdul, who had held up Chinese troops at the Chaksam river crossing as the Dalai Lama fled through Tibet, killing around seventy of them. Then in his mid twenties, the humbly born Dasang Damdul would later marry into the powerful Tsarong family, taking the name and the titles that went with it, particularly that of Shap-pe. He rapidly became the most influential political figure in early twentieth-century Tibet. The Dalai Lama called him ‘Chensel’, meaning visible, because he was always there. More than anyone, Tsarong Shap-pe as he became known, shared the Dalai Lama’s vision of a modernising nation more able to face down foreign threats. He would become Britain’s best friend in Tibet, ‘the one man who is really wide-awake in Lhasa’, according to the Gyantse-based teacher Frank Ludlow. In the autumn of 1911 he was sent to Shigatse to lead a rebellion against the Qing as the centre in Beijing crumbled, opening the way for the Dalai Lama’s return.

While exiled in Kalimpong, the Dalai Lama developed a real friendship

with Charles Bell. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Bell was deeply sympathetic to Tibetan culture. He understood as well as the Chinese that the Dalai Lama was, as the incarnation of Chenrezig, Tibet’s protective deity, the crucial figure in Tibetan politics, no matter what his boss Lord Morley might think. Born in Calcutta in 1870, Bell was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford before following his father Henry into the Indian Civil Service. As such he was one of the minority of ‘politicals’ drawn from civilian ranks and regarded by military colleagues as a ‘babu’, a pen-pusher, not the sort of daring fellow the frontier demanded. He had previously been in Bihar and Orissa but the galvanising moment of his career was his posting to Darjeeling, where he was wholly captivated by the Tibetan world. Bell not only became fluent in the language, he wrote a book about it: A Manual of Colloquial Tibetan. When under the terms of the treaty signed by Younghusband the Chumbi valley came under British control, Bell was put in charge before taking over as political agent for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet from Claude White, who was more interested in his pension than the political fate of the Himalaya. The Dalai Lama’s exile in 1910 was a moment of serendipity for all concerned. Bell would become the sympathetic architect of a new British policy in Tibet.

In September 1913, Bell arrived in Simla to advise the Indian foreign

secretary Sir Henry McMahon as he oversaw the latest attempt to delineate the boundaries between India and Tibet. Negotiations were tortuous and China ultimately refused to sign, but Tibet did, and the agreement bore the hallmarks of Bell’s ideas. The trade agencies the British had fought for were retained. Bell also persuaded the Tibetan chief negotiator Longchen Shatra, a veteran diplomat with long and sometimes bitter experience of the British, to cede the strategic town of Tawang, previously acknowledged as part of Tibet, to the government of India. Although the Tibetan government got rifles and ammunition as compensation, officials in Lhasa were outraged. The Tibetans continued to administer the town, but the status of Tawang, now in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, has remained a flashpoint ever since, and was one of the causes of the conflict between China and an independent India in 1962. It also reveals that while Bell was pro-Tibetan, ‘Tibetanised’ was his word, he still worked for the Raj. After Simla, he continued to support the Dalai Lama’s attempt to modernise Tibet and its army, although the Great War put constraints on further military support. A more effective army with British backing was a threat to the monastic establishment: a harbinger of the modern world and an alternative powerbase.

What Bell really wanted was to visit Lhasa, something no British officer

had done since Younghusband’s mission. When he retired in 1918 to focus on his Tibetan studies, it seemed he had missed his chance. The Dalai Lama was on a lengthy retreat and the Simla Convention, signed in 1914, seemed to have neutralised British concern in the region. Then the implications of the Russian Revolution became clearer. The Bolsheviks tore up Tsarist treaties, opening the door once again to another British visit. Bell’s replacement as political agent stepped down unexpectedly and Bell, who had remained in the region, was reappointed. Best of all for the Everest expedition, Curzon was made foreign secretary in October 1919 and Bell’s patient and carefully thought-out arguments for a mission to Lhasa were given a sympathetic hearing. Then, while Bell was waiting in the wooded surroundings of Yatung to hear if he had been granted his wish, a representative for the proposed 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition arrived to press the case for the mountaineers.

Charles Howard-Bury was a wealthy Irish landowner and senior British

army officer and consequently had the money and prestige for a successful lobbying campaign. Having served on the Somme and then been captured in the German spring offensive of 1918, Howard-Bury had been free for barely three months when he wrote to Arthur Hinks, secretary of the Everest committee, offering his services – at his own expense. A year later, as Younghusband pushed the issue, he had been approached to take up the challenge of changing minds in India. Things did not start well. When Howard-Bury arrived at Simla in July 1920 to confer with the British Indian authorities, he sensed a great decision was pending and that Everest was a distraction. It was clear also that Charles Bell, preoccupied with his own mission to Lhasa, held the key to Tibet but was unsympathetic. ‘The more I hear of Bell, the less I fear he will help us,’ Howard-Bury reported to Younghusband. ‘They all say he is a most tiresome man to deal with because he is very slow and cautious and does not make any mistakes.’ By the end of July, the India Office in London had formally denied permission, but Younghusband instructed Howard-Bury to visit Bell in Yatung anyway.

It was the question of weapons that had made the issue so tense. As

Howard-Bury understood it, the Tibetans were anxious for the British to sell them more guns for its army. In fact, the issue of weapons was desirable but not critical. Bell understood very well how to get what he wanted from the system, using requests like this as bargaining chips, to be discarded when required. When Howard-Bury joined Bell for lunch,

he said that he could ask the Tibetan government today and he was quite certain that they would allow the expedition, but that he did not think that it would be advisable at the present time.

Bell was quite possibly using Howard-Bury to send a message via Younghusband to Curzon, who had publicly supported the Everest project, that if His Majesty’s Government wanted British climbers in Tibet then it should send Bell to Lhasa. In mid October Bell got his permission and on 17 November 1920, a day carefully chosen as auspicious according to Tibetan astrology, he arrived in the holy city, fulfilling an ambition he had worked towards for more than a decade.

Within a month, the mountaineers had their permission for Everest. The

leader of the 1921 reconnaissance would be Howard-Bury rather than the mountaineer Charles Bruce, a more obvious candidate, reward for Howard-Bury’s patient efforts and acknowledgment that there might be a diplomatic angle to the exploration: Bruce was no diplomat. Mallory now entered the scene and the legend of those early Everest expeditions was born. ‘The accomplishment of such a feat,’ Younghusband had told the world in his inaugural address to the Royal Geographical Society,

will elevate the human spirit. It will give men a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the Earth, that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings.

In the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history and against a rising modernist tide of alienation and urbanism, his message seemed like an echo from another world.

Charles Bell remained in Lhasa for a year, long after the footnote of permission to attempt Everest was dealt with and against the expectations of his superiors. In that time he reframed relations between Britain and Tibet, cementing his friendship with the Dalai Lama. Bell would always stress how he inhabited the Tibetan world to advance his agenda, quoting a monastic official as saying:

When a European is with us Tibetans I feel he is a European and we are Tibetans; but when Lönchen Bell is with us, I feel that we are all Tibetans together.

That did not mean that Bell went unchallenged. Conservatives associated him with the modernising influence of Tsarong Shap-pe, the head of the army. At the great prayer festival, Monlam Chenmo, during the Tibetan new year in early 1921, Bell saw placards demanding his assassination. Bell’s sly acquisition of Tawang for British India under the terms of the Simla Accord had also annoyed monks from the powerful Drepung monastery who lost an outpost that earned them revenue. As Britain developed a closer relationship with Tibet, it found ways to put money into the monasteries and buy off some of this opposition. The army, and later a new police force, remained targets for discontent. Yet these were the very institutions Bell felt necessary for Tibet to secure its status as a nation independent of China.

Education was another source of friction. The Indian government, at the

request of the Dalai Lama, had experimented with introducing British public school values to Tibet. In 1913, four Tibetan boys, all from powerful families, had been sent to Rugby School and each was trained in practical skills that would prove useful in the process of modernisation at home. One, Khyenrab Kunzang Mondo, studied mine engineering at the pit village of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire, but later as a local governor in western Tibet was notorious for exploiting the local population. Rigzin Dorje Ringang stayed in Britain the longest, studying electrical engineering, and returned home with sufficient equipment to build a small hydroelectric scheme that brought electric light to the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, the Norbulingka. Ten years later and as a consequence of Bell’s visit, a new approach was taken, this time inside Tibet. A teacher called Frank Ludlow from the Indian Education Service arrived at the trade agency in Gyantse to open a small English school.

Ludlow was a sensitive and capable man, a trained naturalist who studied

under the father of the plant hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward at Cambridge. He would spend his life on the frontier, mixing diplomatic service, natural history and exploration. He arrived in Gyantse in August 1923 full of optimism, but it took patient persuasion to attract sufficient pupils to such a foreign innovation; the school finally opened that December with thirteen boys, a number that would eventually double. One introduction that did catch on was football. Ludlow had brought a few balls with him from India but the boys soon wore them out and he had to send for more. He also bought them a football strip in the monastic colours of yellow and maroon, since the long Tibetan coat, or chuba, wasn’t practical for running around. Ludlow himself stuck to refereeing, finding that in the high altitude ‘I couldn’t run more than twenty yards without getting hopelessly out of breath.’

Ludlow’s school would fall victim to a souring in the relationship

between British India and Tibet that would stall the progress Charles Bell had made and interrupt access to Everest for several years. As we shall see, the 1924 expedition would be blamed for this break in relations but its true cause ran far deeper. While the deaths of George Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine caught the public’s attention, 1924 was unusually dramatic in other respects. At the start of the year, the Panchen Lama, so often a rival to the Dalai Lama’s authority, fled the Tashilhunpo monastery at Shigatse for exile in China. Then conflict broke out in Lhasa between the modernising faction, associated with the British, and the Lhasa monastic establishment, increasingly resistant to the growth in military capability that the British wanted in order to make Tibet an effective buffer state. And at the heart of this intricate struggle for control was the new British political officer in Sikkim, a man steeped in intelligence work and political manipulation: Frederick Marshman Bailey.

Eric Bailey, known as ‘Hatter’ to his friends, had little time for Charles

Bell’s method of ‘Tibetanising’ himself to advance British interests. Although softly spoken, Bailey was a military man, who maintained an unyielding dignity, one of Younghusband’s young officers during the campaign of 1904, and an explorer too, making a celebrated journey to the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra. During the war he’d been badly wounded on the Western Front, served with the Gurkhas at Gallipoli and was then sent on an intelligence mission to Tashkent to assess the intentions of Moscow’s new Bolshevik government in Central Asia. When Bailey needed to get home, he posed as an Albanian army clerk and persuaded the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret service, to help him look for British spies in Bukhara. En route, he received a telegram from his handler requesting he keep a look out for a notorious British agent called Bailey.

Bell had dismissed the idea of Soviet influence in Tibet, but Bailey and

his former boss and ally Frank O’Connor were convinced the new Soviet Union would seek to undermine British interests in the region: the Russians certainly had their spies in Lhasa. They were both proponents of a more aggressive ‘forward’ policy, like their old patron Younghusband. Perhaps Bell feared what impact this would have on his painstaking efforts at closer relations; when Bailey arrived in Sikkim in 1921 anxious to visit Tibet, Bell, who was still in Lhasa, kept him out. This snub provoked a deep loathing in Bailey, one that he largely kept to himself but revealed in a letter to his mother: Bell, he wrote,

is a hopeless fraud and has got on entirely by writing himself up. He did all he could to make the work for me here difficult – as he was jealous of giving it up after 15 years. I wanted to go to Lhasa in 1921 and for him to introduce me to the Dalai Lama and others in Lhasa but he would not let me go there … after retiring he has been trying to continue his correspondence with the Dalai Lama which makes things difficult for me here as they hardly realise that when a man has retired he is finished.

Bailey was writing in November 1924, soon after returning from Lhasa himself and at the start of a sudden cooling in diplomatic relations between Tibet and the government of India, a process that scuppered the good work done by the despised Bell. This reversal would result in a pause in the British attempts on Everest, but its cause lay in Bailey’s efforts at steering the Tibetan elite towards British imperial interests and away from the threat of communism. At the centre of those efforts was Tibet’s security apparatus, which Bailey was keen to assess and influence. Unlike Bell, he lacked the necessary permission from his superiors to visit Tibet for himself. To influence Tibetan policy from a distance was difficult and Bailey had to be creative, just as he had been in Tashkent.

In October 1922, George Pereira, a former British army general, arrived

in Lhasa having crossed China and the Tibetan plateau. Pereira, known as ‘Hoppy’ because of a childhood riding accident, had been military attaché in Beijing before the war and was fluent in Chinese, but the old soldier had taken a shine to Tibet on his way to the capital.

I have seen the children running about, playing games, and heard the laughter of the elders, and there seemed to be a freedom of care about the Tibetan peasantry, very different from village life in China.

Officially termed a ‘private traveller’, Pereira was in fact an old friend of Bailey, who had arranged Pereira’s journey personally, without informing his superiors in Calcutta. Pereira was doing his old job of military attaché, reporting back to Bailey on the state of the Tibetan military and meeting with the head of the army Tsarong Shap-pe. The day after Pereira left Lhasa, on a return journey that proved fatal, the Tibetan government requested help from the government of India in establishing a modern police force, an idea Bell had planted but hadn’t seen bear fruit. Bailey’s policy, on the other hand, seemed to be making progress.

A few weeks later, however, another white man arrived in Lhasa, this one

uninvited. This man’s presence would reveal how tenuous British influence in Lhasa remained. William McGovern was a young American lecturer teaching at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He had been part of an official research group that had arrived at Gyantse but was then refused permission to continue to Lhasa, largely at Eric Bailey’s insistence. The India Office in London had cabled Bailey to warn him that although the party comprised Oxford University graduates, they ‘clearly show the cloven hoof ’, meaning they were sympathetic to communism. Bailey wasn’t going to stand for that and the group were recalled to India. McGovern refused to accept this decision and later recrossed the border without permission and in disguise, reaching Lhasa in February 1923. When monks got wind of his presence in the city, they stoned his accommodation and McGovern was soon escorted back to India. Bailey and other political officers, including Bell, were furious when the American published an account of his journey, an account that revealed the existence of a pro-China faction in Lhasa. Bailey asked the secretary of the Everest committee, Arthur Hinks, for help, in rubbishing McGovern’s reputation through the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, a ‘quid pro quo’ for supporting the Everest expeditions.

The person charged by the Indian government with helping the Tibetans

establish a modern police force was another veteran of the Younghusband mission of 1904. Sonam Wangfel Laden La, now forty-six, had grown up in the intelligence world of the British in the Himalaya. The nephew of a famous pundit, his first job, aged eighteen, had been for another one: Sarat Chandra Das, who was compiling his Tibetan dictionary. After that Laden La joined the Darjeeling police and performed a number of sensitive tasks, like keeping an eye on the Panchen Lama as he made a pilgrimage to India, at a time when the British were contemplating support for a breakaway state based on the Panchen Lama’s seat at Shigatse. Later Laden La was security officer for the Dalai Lama during his period in exile and one of those chosen to accompany the four Tibetan boys to Rugby School. When Laden La arrived in Lhasa in August 1923, the factionalism McGovern had witnessed was coming to the boil and Bailey must have hoped the policeman’s presence in the city would strengthen the British position.

Laden La soon built an embryonic police force and developed a bond

with the head of the army Tsarong Shap-pe. Quite what that involved is controversial but there is some evidence that either early in the summer of 1924, while Mallory was on Everest, or a few weeks later, the two agreed to topple the established religious government in favour of a more progressive secular version, with the Dalai Lama remaining as a national figurehead running the monasteries. Although he claimed ignorance, it seems likely Eric Bailey, a deeply experienced intelligence officer expert in the region, knew of this plan. He arrived in Lhasa himself later that summer and held meetings with both Tsarong and Laden La. Whether he knew about what Tsarong and Laden La were contemplating in advance is another matter. But years later, when a version of what happened finally leaked into the British press, Bailey defended Laden La to his superiors, something he might not have done had the policeman acted alone.

When Bailey left Lhasa, Tsarong did so too. But when he returned that

autumn, Tsarong found he had been dismissed as head of the army and his favoured junior officers dispersed to remote corners of Tibet. He had been replaced by a shrewdly political aristocrat called Lungshar, who was already a senior treasury minister, or tsipon. Lungshar and Laden La had history; Lungshar had been to Europe with the Rugby schoolboys and without Lhasa’s approval had met China’s ambassador, which Laden La had reported to his superiors. Understanding the fragility of his position, Laden La now returned to India, where it was said he suffered a nervous breakdown. As the purge of the Tibetan army got underway, a Bhutanese monk called Pema Chandra, who had been working for Laden La in Lhasa, also fled. Tibetan soldiers caught him before the border; his head was brought back to Lhasa and put on public display, together with a note accusing him of embezzlement and speaking ill of the Dalai Lama. Frank Ludlow, still teaching in Gyantse, now began hearing rumours that his school would be closed. The axe finally fell in 1926, partly because of what Ludlow described as the ‘tom-foolery on the part of Laden La, Tsarong and others in Lhasa in 1924’. Whether or not Tsarong and Laden La’s talk of a coup had been serious, it had been enough to turn the conservative Tibetan establishment against British support for the modernisers. Bailey’s efforts had been in vain and he was now out in the cold.

The unwitting victim of this frost in the diplomatic air was the Everest

adventure. In November 1924, Arthur Hinks wrote to Bailey asking for his help in securing permission from the Tibetans for another try in 1926. Having helped Bailey out by denigrating the American academic McGovern, he would have hoped for a positive response. But Bailey cabled back saying permission for Everest was unlikely. He claimed offence had been taken in Lhasa from John Noel’s film of the expedition, The Epic of Everest, in particular a sequence of an old Tibetan eating lice from a child’s head. He followed this with a letter explaining that Lhasa was also upset at Noel hiring a group of lamas from the monastery at Gyantse. Noel had then brought them to Britain to perform dances, an attempt to add an exotic human dimension to screenings of a film that seemed austere and harsh. The sight of lamas using thighbone trumpets at cinemas in the British provinces was hardly the stuff of diplomatic nightmares – they regularly did such tours in India – but Bailey insisted that what became known as the ‘affair of the dancing lamas’ had made things impossible. When he realised that the lamas hadn’t been given the correct passports, despite Noel’s insistence, Bailey saw his chance. He had the India Office in London fall on the Mount Everest Committee with icy fury. There would be no more Everest expeditions in the foreseeable future.

John Noel knew perfectly well it was Eric Bailey who had blocked the

Everest application and not the Tibetans. What he didn’t understand was why. Bailey had been Younghusband’s protégé and Everest was Younghusband’s dream. His friend Henry Morshead, with whom he’d shared the Tsangpo gorge adventure, had been part of the Everest reconnaissance in 1921. Bailey was usually so helpful to fellow explorers, no matter what he thought of them privately. In the summer of 1924 he had supported Frank Kingdon-Ward and Lord Cawdor as they prepared to follow in Bailey’s footsteps and solve the riddle of the Tsangpo gorge. He had welcomed the mystical French traveller Alexandra David-Néel to the residency at Gangtok after her clandestine journey to Lhasa. No one understood that the affair of the dancing lamas was the best excuse available for the real story: that Bailey’s policy had failed and relations with Tibet had almost collapsed.

It would be another two years before any news of the alleged coup

attempt that summer reached the outside world and by then Bailey was nearing the end of his posting. In October 1928 his replacement arrived at Gangtok. Leslie Weir had been trade agent at Gyantse when the Dalai Lama was in exile and knew Tibet. He was also an admirer of Charles Bell, describing him as ‘his guru’. Settling into his new job, Weir discovered that ‘our prestige … has gone back woefully since I was last here’. By then, Eric Bailey, a man with many secrets, had moved on: to the plum posting of Kashmir and then his final job, as the British envoy in Kathmandu.

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