17 Utopias

17

 

Utopias

 

On 16 August 1936, the German-born mountaineer Günter Dyhrenfurth arrived at Albert Speer’s Olympic Stadium in Berlin to receive the International Olympic Committee’s alpinism prize, a gold medal for mountaineering. Recognising the best climb done in the years before each Olympics was a passion for the founder and president of the modern games, the Baron de Coubertin (as were hunting and aviation). Others on the committee were lukewarm: the medal was first awarded at the inaugural winter Olympics in 1924, held at Chamonix in the French Alps, twenty-eight years after the revival of the summer games. That year Edward Lisle Strutt, climbing leader of the 1922 Everest expedition, collected medals on behalf of the British and Sherpas, seven of whom had died on the mountain in an avalanche. The alpinism prize stuttered on thereafter. Dyhrenfurth and his wife Hettie were chosen in 1936 for a successful expedition to the Karakoram two years earlier. Hettie was among the climbers who made the first ascent of Sia Kangri, breaking the female altitude record Fanny Bullock Workman claimed in 1905.

Dyhrenfurth barely made the closing ceremony, which featured a parade

of standard-bearers lowering their national flags under the watchful gaze of Adolf Hitler, his arm raised in the Nazi salute. (This was so similar to the Olympic salute that the latter didn’t survive the comparison.) While he had known about the award for some time, an official invitation, sent by telegram, hadn’t arrived at Dyhrenfurth’s new home in Switzerland until the day before. This was no oversight. Dyhrenfurth was a Mischling, of mixed Aryan and Jewish blood, who had in 1933 quit his post as geology professor at Breslau (now Wrocław) University, as a protest at Hitler’s rise to power. Hettie herself was from a notable Jewish family of Silesian industrialists, a former tennis champion who despite her slight frame was courageous in the mountains. She also hated convention. In 1930, on the boat out to India to take part in her husband’s expedition to Kangchenjunga, Hettie got a ticking off from the British mountaineer Frank Smythe for dancing with Indians, something he deemed ‘impossible for a lady’. She smiled politely and kept on dancing.

Hettie Dyhrenfurth chose not to join her husband in Berlin, partly out of

disgust at German antisemitism. Her son Norman, still a teenager, had faced harassment earlier in 1936 working as an assistant on the film being made of the winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, summer and winter games being held in the same year until 1994. The cameraman on that film was the other reason Hettie stayed away. Hans Ertl, an ambitious young climber turned filmmaker, had also been part of her husband’s Karakoram expedition. Ertl had been there to get high-altitude footage for the production company underwriting the venture. (Their route to the Karakoram led them through Kashmir and past the dramatic Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Lamayuru in Ladakh but despite such vivid locations, the film, Der Dämon des Himalaya, was roundly panned. This didn’t stop the Hungarian-born director Andrew Marton remaking the movie in Hollywood after the war as Storm over Tibet, using the original footage. ‘See the roof of the world cave in … in a billion tons of ice!’) During the expedition, Hettie and Ertl had become lovers but he was mortified at this betrayal of team spirit and decided to confess. Günter Dyhrenfurth, substantially taller than Ertl, clasped the shoulders of his wife’s lover and then reassured him: ‘These things happen, my young friend.’ Dyhrenfurth liked everything to be open: marriages, mountains, borders. That was not how things were in Europe anymore. Now Ertl was in Berlin working for Leni Riefenstahl, another former lover, on her technically dazzling paean to fascism Olympia. Hettie had no wish to run into either of them. A year later, and now separated from Günter, she left for the United States; her son Norman would soon follow.

As the rise of right-wing nationalism permeated every aspect of

European life, even mountain climbing, in India a different kind of political storm was gathering. Gandhi’s movement of peaceful disobedience and other strands of the independence movement were coiling themselves around a weakening British Empire, a struggle that already included political hotspots in the Himalaya like Darjeeling. Change came more slowly elsewhere in the mountains. In Nepal, the Rana dynasty’s iron grip on power had begun to fracture following the death in 1929 of Curzon’s ally Chandra Shamsher, but the absence of a large, educated middle class meant challenging the status quo was both desperately difficult and dangerous.

In Tibet, the political class were wholly absorbed in the search for a new

Dalai Lama following the death in late 1933 of the energetic Thubten Gyatso. Tibet was still reeling from a disastrous border war with the army of China’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, under the command of Muslim warlord Ma Bufang. Since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the declaration of a Chinese republic a year later, China had been mired in civil war and warlordism. The Kuomintang, under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, had spent the 1920s reunifying the country and was now attempting to regain influence in its more distant colonies like Tibet. More border wars followed and the souring of relations between Tibet and China encouraged a thaw between the Indian government and Lhasa – leading in turn to the first Everest climbing permit in nine years.

Despite this, conservative opinion remained powerful. Beyond political

changes in Europe that followed the Great War, the end of empires and the rise of nations, technological advances were making the world a faster, smaller and more materialistic place. When George Mallory went to Everest for the first time, aircraft were made of canvas and travel was expensive. Radio stations were new and rare. Films, like John Noel’s The Epic of Everest, were silent. In ten years all that had changed. If the Wall Street Crash had made the lives of many ordinary working people miserable, modernity carried on creating new futures that seemed alienating and almost inhuman. For a moment, the Himalaya seemed to the West somewhere suspended in time, a lost world of light above dark clouds threatening war. The 1930s would be the golden years of Himalayan mountain travel: a last glance at an old world before the storm broke and it disappeared for ever. To the people who lived there, they were also the last years of outmoded regimes that had held the people of the Himalaya back for far too long.

A few weeks after Günter Dyhrenfurth received his award for alpinism at the Berlin Olympics, Tom Longstaff was on Shetland when a laconic telegram reached him: ‘two reached the top August 29’. The veteran mountaineer, whose career stretched back almost to the beginning of Himalayan climbing, was now in his early sixties, his famous red beard fading to grey, but he was as interested and enthusiastic as ever, and knew exactly what the message meant. Nanda Devi had been climbed. No mountain meant more to him: it had been his ambition ‘years before I set foot in the Himalaya’. Even after a lifetime’s mountain travel, and an expedition to Everest in 1922, he still believed Garhwal, where Nanda Devi was located, to be ‘the most beautiful country of all High Asia’, a ‘sum of delight unsurpassed elsewhere’. The prospect of Nanda Devi being climbed filled him with dread, ‘a sacrilege too horrible to contemplate’. Yet somehow the terseness of the telegram reassured him. No names were mentioned, no conquering heroes identified: ‘here was humility not pride’.

In some ways, Longstaff was typical of his era and class, an Eton and

Christ Church man. On his way to Everest in 1922, for example, he was delighted at Gandhi’s arrest for sedition, ‘which was greeted joyfully by everybody’. Yet when it came to alpinism, he was as thoughtfully progressive as anyone. The juggernaut of the Everest expedition was far less appealing than a small group of friends moving as lightly among the mountains as possible. It was almost an article of faith. In 1905 he had climbed from the Johar valley east of Nanda Devi to reach a ridgeline, from where he could look down into a stupendous hidden valley, a sanctuary as enticing as it was difficult to reach. Longstaff returned in 1907 for another try. He climbed the neighbouring peak of Trisul, believed to be the highest summit reached for the next twenty-one years, but Nanda Devi’s sanctuary remained untouched. There were more attempts in the 1920s but only in 1934 did a party manage to scramble through the difficult Rishi gorge and reach the foot of the peak: two English climbers, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, and three porters, ‘blokes’ as Tilman liked to call them: Ang Tharkay, Pasang Bhotia and a cousin of Ang Tharkay’s, Kusang.

Shipton and Tilman: their names as readily connected for a mountaineer

as Lennon and McCartney, shorthand for a method of adventure that was lightweight but ambitious, a paradoxical combination of the expansive and the understated. Nanda Devi was Shipton’s idea. In 1933 he had been on Everest, the first expedition following the thaw in relations with Tibet. Its leader was a self-effacing former Indian civil servant called Hugh Ruttledge who while stationed in Almora had mounted two expeditions of his own to Nanda Devi. Inspired by Ruttledge, Shipton looked around in vain for a companion to go with him. He had resigned himself to travelling as the only European with Ang Tharkay and the others when a letter turned up from an old climbing acquaintance from his years as a coffee planter in Kenya. Bill Tilman was ten years his senior and had recently returned home after crossing Africa from east to west on a bicycle. He was proposing a fortnight in the Lake District. Shipton’s counter-proposal was an expedition of seven months in Garhwal. A photograph of the pair embarking at Liverpool shows them smartly dressed in the 1930s fashion: wide ties, high collars and fat lapels. Shipton, the taller man, has an overcoat on, his wavy hair at odds with his sharp cheekbones. Tilman has a crisp, military moustache, his hair oiled and scraped flat, his dimpled cheeks offering a glimpse of the humour beneath the terse manner he presented to the world. He had fought in the Great War, turning eighteen during the Battle of the Somme. Unlike the generation of climbers before him, the war had been his formative experience: a burden he carried with him in near silence for the rest of his life.

Shipton was far more affable but in his way even more enigmatic. His

father was a Ceylon tea planter who died when Eric was three. To escape her grief, his emotionally distant mother travelled before settling in the cool relief of Kerala’s Nilgiri hills, a way of life that appealed hugely to an adventurous boy. That freedom ended when his mother remarried and returned to London and a flat in Kensington Gardens. Eric was sent to an uncongenial preparatory school where his slowness to read alienated him further. Although he portrayed himself as dreamy and rather lonely, Shipton had a talent for friendship and unlike Tilman, who is often marked down as a misogynist, he charmed women his whole life. Beatrice Weir, daughter of the political officer who replaced Eric Bailey and negotiated the 1933 Everest permit, met Shipton in 1938 at a garden party in Kashmir when she was seventeen. ‘He had blazing blue eyes everyone used to talk about; he just sat and looked. It was indefinable. I melted like an ice cube.’ They took walks together in the Shalimar Gardens but her mother knew better and squashed the liaison. ‘This man’s a dreamer and just lives on a glacier.’

Shipton had certainly found a way of life that set little store by position

or career, a philosophy that would cost him the leadership of the Everest expedition that made history in 1953. Around the time of his first expedition to Everest in 1933, he realised there was no reason to curtail the things that made him happy: freedom, mountains, exploration. ‘Why not spend the rest of my life doing this sort of thing?’ The obvious answer was money, but while hardly cheap, Himalayan travel, especially the Spartan version Shipton and Tilman practised, was becoming more affordable. Their seven-month expedition in 1934 cost less than £300, including the voyage from England: perhaps £9,000 each in today’s terms. The future war hero Freddy Spencer Chapman and his five-man team of two Europeans and three Sherpas managed to climb the gorgeous peak of Jomolhari for £39 5s: little more than £2,600 now. (This was the peak Sir William Jones had spotted from the plains in 1784; it’s rarely been climbed since Chapman’s day.) Most frugal of all was the Austrian Herbert Tichy, later a reluctant Nazi propagandist, who in 1935 rode a Puch motorcycle to India. Disguised as a pilgrim, he crossed the Lipu Lekh, just beyond Nepal’s western border into Tibet where he made a circumambulation of holy Kailas before attempting the first ascent of Gurla Mandhata. As Shipton wrote during the war, so far as wealth was concerned,

There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.

Tilman felt roughly the same but was cured with irony, like an old leather boot, and would never articulate such ideas out loud: he was better on weather than emotion, his eye most usually on the horizon. Human judgments in his writing were rare and often came from the most oblique angle. He praised Shipton for being ‘one of the first to doubt that in mountaineering the great and the good are necessarily the same,’ by ‘great’ meaning famous. Both men viewed self-promotion by climbers with distaste. Anything that diluted the richness of immediate experience – publicity or reputation – was ditched from their rucksacks. Anything extraneous was cast aside: ‘bagging and scrapping’ Tilman called it. Both preferred lentils and flatbread to hampers from Fortnum’s. Even their friendship was carefully rationed. Tilman was, Shipton once said, ‘astringent company’.

Solving the problem of the Rishi gorge and gaining access to Nanda

Devi’s inner sanctum, which he and Tilman achieved in the summer of 1934, was among the sweetest moments of Eric Shipton’s life. The appeal of a secret or hidden valley like the Rishi gorge is a common trope: for Tibetans, beyul, as they were known, had been part of how they conceptualised their sacred landscapes for centuries. Shipton found in them a kind of psychological relief.

My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment?

With access to the valley impossible for local herdsmen, Shipton had stumbled into a lost world of botanical riches:

the giant cliffs of Nanda Devi rose sheer and forbidding in true Himalayan style; but, bounding the glacier on the right-hand side, beyond a well-defined lateral moraine, an expanse of undulating grass-land stretched for miles, in lovely contrast … Now this pasturage is a sanctuary where thousands of wild animals live unmolested. Long may it remain so!

It did not remain so for very long at all. In the aftermath of China’s border war with India in 1962, Indian and American climbers, with Sherpa support and backing from the CIA, secretly attempted to place an atomic-powered sensing device near the summit of Nanda Devi but had to abandon it in bad weather. The device subsequently disappeared in an avalanche, much to the embarrassment of both governments when the story, if not the radioactive material, leaked out in the mid 1970s. Climbers and trekkers had a more obvious impact, leaving behind so much trash that in 1982 the Indian government banned access altogether. The impacts of climate change can now be added to that list.

Perhaps such degradation was what Tilman had in mind when he reached

the summit of Nanda Devi – not with Shipton but with the geologist Noel Odell – in the summer of 1936. It was late in the day and afternoon cloud hid many of the surrounding peaks, but to the north the brown, sunlit Tibetan plateau stretched far into the distance.

After the first joy in victory, [he wrote,] came a feeling of sadness that the mountain had succumbed, that the proud head of the goddess was bowed.

This was as close as Tilman came to opening a door to his emotional world. Behind it you can make out a world-weariness born in the shadow of war. The expedition itself had been a great success, an energising mix of enthusiastic young Americans and veteran British climbers, brought together almost by chance. Charlie Houston, then a young Harvard medical student, would have stood on the summit instead of Tilman had he not eaten some spoiled tinned meat at their top camp.

The Brits didn’t know what to make of us Yanks, [Houston recalled,] and had some difficulty understanding our form of the language we were supposed to share.

Yet despite their differences, their climbing philosophy was similar, a far more potent connection in the mountains than a shared passport. Nanda Devi, the thirtieth highest peak in the Himalaya, was the highest summit to be reached before the Second World War.

Shipton kicked himself for not being there with Tilman instead of

wasting time ‘on that ridiculous Everest business’: that same summer, there had been a fourth attempt to reach the summit. But despite any private envy, Shipton publicly acknowledged the achievement as ‘the first of the really difficult Himalayan giants to be conquered’. This latest Everest expedition had been another colossal enterprise costing half a million pounds in today’s terms, lavishly equipped and expertly planned. Yet it didn’t come close to matching progress made on the previous three tries. Bad weather and frequent heavy snowfalls shut the climbers down before the expedition could properly begin. In late May Shipton and Frank Smythe had shepherded forty-one porters, an almost grotesque number, to the north col when, in Smythe’s words, ‘the heaviest snowstorm I’ve ever experienced in the Himalayas’ began.

Two feet came down. The camp was half-buried. There was nothing to do but lie up for two whole days in our sleeping bags with the Primus stove between us cooking hot drinks to keep warm.

The team had the latest radio equipment and Smythe was able to talk to base camp and seek advice. He decided to descend despite the avalanche risk. ‘It was a big responsibility – 41 men’s lives – and one I hope I never have to face again.’

The miseries of base camp, pitched in the stony wasteland above the

Rongbuk monastery, preyed on Smythe. ‘So intensely dry is the air that we all suffer from congested throats. Otherwise I’m O.K. and can smoke a pipe all day long.’ His nose, blasted by the sun of high altitude was ‘blotchy red, cracked, raw and covered with congealed blood’. What kept him going were dreams of the English countryside and his newly built Surrey home.

I can picture that very well – the fruit trees out in bloom and Tenningshook wood in vivid green, with a carpet of bluebells drifting beneath the trees. What a contrast to this utter desolation. There is nothing so beautiful as an English countryside.

There was something of the little Englander about Smythe: bristling at the German Hettie Dyhrenfurth dancing with an Indian man or talking loftily of Himalayan cultures he marched past but barely understood. Much of this was insecurity. Raymond Greene had known Smythe at Berkhamsted School where Greene’s father was headmaster and Tilman had been a pupil ten years earlier. Berkhamsted was where Smythe started climbing, ‘a rather frail fair-headed boy who was said to have a weak heart and was not allowed to play football because of a murmur in the chest’. When they went to Everest together in 1933, Greene, by then a doctor, could still hear it through his stethoscope. Smythe may have looked frail but was arguably the best alpinist Britain had between the wars. ‘At great altitudes a new force seemed to enter Frank,’ Greene wrote in his memoirs.

His mind, too, took on a different colour. At sea-level the mistaken sense of inferiority so unfairly implanted by his early experiences rendered him sometimes irritable, a little tactless and rather easily offended.

And despite his Everest dreams of English gardens, Smythe never could quite relax at home. He felt trapped by domesticity and was a remote father.

Smythe found a different sort of sanctuary in the upper Bhyundar valley

of Garhwal, a place so botanically rich he called it the Valley of Flowers, a name the Indian authorities used when they designated the area a national park. Smythe had discovered its riches with Eric Shipton while climbing Kamet in 1931, a peak not far from Nanda Devi and one of the landmark ascents of Himalayan mountaineering. Frustrated at the dismal failure on Everest in 1936, Smythe chose to spend the following summer in what he called his Shangri-La, alone with a small crew of Sherpas.

For the first time in my life I was able to think [he wrote]. I do not mean to think objectively or analytically, but rather to surrender thought to my surroundings. This is a power of which we know little in the West but which is a basic of abstract thought in the East. It is allowing the mind to receive rather than to seek impressions, and it is gained by expurgating extraneous thought…. When this happens the human mind escapes from the bondage of its own feeble imaginings and becomes as one with its Creator.

Smythe was a prolific writer, although as Raymond Greene observed he ‘was always trying to be “literary” and somehow never brought it off because he was trying too hard’. (The old Everester Edward Strutt, by then a vituperative editor of the Alpine Journal and member of the Mount Everest Committee, called it ‘psychological bilge’.) Smythe’s writing has few admirers these days, unlike that of Tilman, yet despite the straining for effect, it’s touching to consider this self-absorbed and scratchy man momentarily at ease with himself in one of the most beautiful valleys on earth.

Tilman might himself have been on Everest with Smythe and Shipton in

1936 but he acclimatised badly the year before, during a reconnaissance put together at the last minute when permission from Tibet arrived unexpectedly. Little new had been learned from that trip, even though the weather remained settled and fine deep into July, more than a month after the monsoon was expected. (Had the weather in 1936 been anything like as good, it’s quite possible Everest would have been climbed before the war.) Instead a large number of lesser peaks were climbed during the reconnaissance of 1935, twenty-six over 20,000 feet (6,096 metres), ‘a veritable orgy’ as Shipton described it. Michael Spender, brother of the poet Stephen, did much surveying work and the expedition also gave work to a young Tibetan-born high-altitude porter called Tenzing Bhotia, better known to the public after 1953 as Tenzing Norgay, or Sherpa Tenzing. It was his first job as a mountain porter, selected at the last moment by Eric Shipton on the basis of his warm smile. At least the 1935 venture had been cheap to organise.

While the team was at Everest, a bleak discovery exposed the raw and

questionable motivation behind their venture. Charles Warren, the expedition’s doctor and later a well-regarded paediatrician, had the shock of finding the body of the adventurer Maurice Wilson, a veteran of the Great War. Wilson had won the Military Cross at the fourth Battle of Ypres but was later wounded by machine-gun fire that struck his chest and left him with a chronic injury in his left arm. Too mentally fractured to continue his old life he emigrated from his native Bradford: first to the United States, then New Zealand, searching for some kind of resolution or purpose. He was in no way a sad or pathetic figure: tall and physically fit despite his chronic injuries, he prospered well enough, but couldn’t settle anywhere for long. On a boat back to England in 1932 he got to know some Indian yogis and discovered a little about fasting and their spiritual practice. When he fell ill after his return and conventional medicine failed him, he used this knowledge to heal, melding it into his strong Christian beliefs. Galvanised by this experience, and wanting to demonstrate his powerful new tool of faith and fasting, he settled on climbing Everest: ‘faith – only faith: the thing that moves mountains you know.’ Wilson had the idea of flying to the foot of the mountain and so joined the London Aero Club. Despite a lack of aptitude he got his pilot’s licence and bought a second-hand Gypsy Moth, which he dubbed Ever Wrest. When the press got wind of his plans, Wilson became a minor sensation, attracting the disapproval of authorities from Whitehall to Delhi and all points between. Despite this, Wilson persevered and finally reached India only to be denied permission to fly over Nepal. Undaunted, he sold his aircraft and in the spring of 1934, disguised as a monk, trekked through Sikkim and Tibet with three experienced Bhotias to base camp. The monks at Rongbuk were a little surprised to see a lone British climber but he told them he was one of the team from 1933 returning to the mountain. The monks handed over food Ruttledge had stored with them for a future attempt. Sadly, Wilson had not prepared himself as a mountaineer as thoroughly as he had an aviator, and he perished in his tent after several attempts to reach the north col. Warren concluded that a combination of hunger, exposure and exhaustion had done for him. The final entry in his diary read: ‘Off again. Gorgeous day.’

Wilson’s fate drew no censure from the men who discovered his

windblown corpse. Charles Warren recalled how after burying him in a crevasse,

We all raised our hats … and I think that every one was rather upset at the business. I thought I had grown immune to the sight of the dead; but somehow or other, in the circumstances, and because of the fact that he was, after all, doing much the same as ourselves, his tragedy seemed to have been brought a little too near home for us.

As fat flakes of snow fell outside the tent, Edwin Kempson, a brilliant mathematician and schoolmaster known as ‘G’, read extracts from Wilson’s diary to Shipton and Warren. Shipton said: ‘it was as if the man himself was speaking to us, revealing his secret thoughts’. He had no doubts about Wilson’s sincerity, even if ‘it was clear that he had little liking for the mountains, and he certainly claimed no spiritual uplift in their presence’. There were plenty in Britain who saw climbing Everest as some kind of metaphysical struggle or a matter of national prestige. The climbers actually on Everest in the 1930s were more sceptical, not least Raymond Greene:

I think a lot too much has been said in the past about the spiritual and mystical significance of climbing Everest and about its possible effects on British prestige…. we go to Everest not for those reasons at all, but either simply because it is fun or in order to satisfy some purely personal and selfish psychological urge.

*

Some of the inspiration for Wilson’s daring plan to use an aircraft to reach Everest came from the dazzling and ultimately successful attempt to fly an aircraft over the summit the year before. Balloons had risen higher than Everest before the Great War and in 1919 the French fighter ace Jean Casale had flown a plane at over nine thousand metres. Using an aircraft to survey the approaches to Everest seemed plausible; the scientist Alexander Kellas had written a paper on the subject. The year before he led the Everest reconnaisance of 1921, Charles Howard-Bury, on his mission to India to acquire an Everest permit, approached the Royal Air Force in India to sound them out. While initially indifferent, an offer was eventually made of an aircraft and pilot with the necessary photographic equipment. Nothing came of it, which was probably for the best, since the aircraft in question, an Airco DH9a, had a ceiling of little more than three thousand metres. In the mid 1920s, the American ‘barnstormer’ pilot Roscoe Turner contacted the Mount Everest Committee. Turner later became famous for buying a lion cub, bred in captivity for Hollywood. He named him Gilmore, for his sponsor, and flew Gilmore around the West Coast in his Sikorsky S29A, at least until Gilmore got too big for his parachute harness. Stunts of that nature were far beneath the Mount Everest Committee’s dignity.

Unfortunately for the committee, aviation had become a lot more

fashionable than mountain climbing. This was the era of world-famous pioneering aviators such as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. In 1931, five British Westland Wapitis had flown past Nanga Parbat shooting spectacular film footage along the way. Why shouldn’t the same be done over Everest, if the Nepali government would give permission? Stewart Blacker was a weapons designer and Great War pilot who had survived being shot down three times. He was also a descendant of Valentine Blacker, a predecessor of George Everest as surveyor general of India. In March 1932 he set up offices at the College of Aeronautical Engineering in order to prosecute this mission. Almost immediately he had the backing of the Royal Geographical Society and a host of aristocratic supporters, both Indian and British, including the novelist and politician John Buchan. Knowing precisely the sort of hero a project like this required, he sought out the dashing young pilot Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale and eldest son of the Duke of Hamilton. Aged twenty-nine, Clydesdale was the youngest squadron leader in the Royal Air Force and a member of parliament for the Scottish constituency of East Renfrewshire. When the economy worsened that summer and several backers pulled out, he approached his friend Lucy, Lady Houston, known as ‘Poppy’, once a wasp-waisted chorus girl and now the colossally wealthy widow of shipping magnate Sir Robert Houston, her third husband. She was sceptical, considering it dangerous and not wanting anything to happen to this attractive young man. ‘I told him I did not want to help him commit suicide.’ Clydesdale reassured her that flying over Everest was safer than a walk around Hampstead Heath on a foggy evening. Lady Houston wrote a cheque for £10,000 with the promise of more if required.

It wasn’t just Clydesdale’s aristocratic charm that persuaded her. The

year before, Houston had given ten times that amount to the aircraft manufacturer Supermarine Aviation where the engineer Reginald Mitchell was developing what would become the Spitfire, after Ramsay MacDonald’s national government had cut funding to the project. This cash allowed the company to continue competing in aviation’s Schneider Trophy, established to boost aircraft innovation, and was part of a determined publicity campaign against MacDonald, whom she regarded as a traitor for leaving the skies above London defenceless. A suffragist in her salad days, Poppy had since galloped to the right and was now a supporter of the fascist Oswald Mosley. Flying over Everest would be another opportunity to advertise British prestige and remind Indians what the mother country could still accomplish. Not surprisingly, the Indian National Congress thought the project an outrage. Along with Lady Houston’s support came new and highly effective management in the form of Air Commodore Peregrine Fellowes whose expert military planning saw the project delivered on time. Clydesdale flew the prototype Westland Wallace with its super-charged Bristol Pegasus engine over the summit on 3 April 1933 with Blacker as observer, craning his neck for any sign of Mallory and Irvine. David McIntyre, an impossibly handsome Scot who later founded Prestwick Airport, piloted a second aircraft with a Gaumont British Films cameraman on board who filmed dramatic footage of the mountains before collapsing when his oxygen tube fractured in the cold. A handkerchief fixed that. The Times celebrated the breathtaking achievement on its front page, illustrating the story with a picture, taken from the cockpit, of Makalu: the wrong mountain.

That such an exciting feat had been managed in so short a time made the

Mount Everest Committee look rather threadbare. Peregrine Fellowes had a genius for planning and achieved in a few months what had taken the committee a decade. The film of this adventure was another matter. Wings over Everest was co-directed by Ivor Montagu, a Jewish communist, Russian intelligence asset and ping-pong champion. (His brother Ewen worked for MI6 during the war, devising Operation Mincemeat ahead of the invasion of Sicily in 1943.) Montagu’s political affiliations can be seen in the cutaway shots of impoverished Indian farm boys looking up from their paddy fields as the gleaming British machines fly overhead on another spurious imperial adventure. With only a very few minutes of footage from the mountains, the film certainly needed padding out. The vituperative Strutt wrote an acid review for the Alpine Journal, barely hiding his resentment that so much attention had been paid to a public-relations stunt, once more missing the point that the public didn’t care about fine detail, just glorious headlines. ‘The films,’ he wrote,

give mostly the appearance of having been taken through a keyhole covered with sheep netting. For this the hopeless construction of the otherwise excellent machines seems responsible. With few exceptions, the successful shots are ruined by wing and stay obstruction.

None of this bothered the Academy of Motion Pictures, which gave Wings over Everest an Oscar in March 1936. That summer, Lord Clydesdale flew his own private aircraft to Berlin, joining a parliamentary group invited by the Third Reich to attend the Olympics.

Less than a century before the Berlin Olympics, Joseph Hooker had sketched the first image of Everest by a European. In Hooker’s world, the European imagination conceived mountains either in the Romantic context of the sublime, or else as somewhere to explore the scientific values of the Enlightenment, as Humboldt had done. With the advent of photography, especially the development just before and after the Great War of lighter, portable cameras, like the Vest Pocket Kodak carried by the British on Everest in the 1920s, the thrilling nature of extreme mountain landscapes was suddenly available to the public in a way it had never been before. This radical new mountain imagery shifted perspectives in a way that photos of the Moon landings would half a century later. Moving pictures only emphasised this impression. Creative artists and thinkers drew on this dramatic new palette to pursue philosophical ends very different to those of Hooker’s era.

In her documentary Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl and her cameraman Hans

Ertl applied lessons they had learned making Bergfilme, ‘mountain films’: Germany’s version of the Western. Her vision of alpinism offered a useful metaphor for Nazi propaganda. The opportunity to capture images of powerful young Aryans conquering nature’s harshest challenges was intoxicating. Climbing itself was drawn inside this philosophy, nowhere better illustrated than attempts by Germans and Austrians to climb Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest mountain, where Fred Mummery had met his end in 1895. As the British struggled on Everest, the Germans mounted five expeditions to Nanga Parbat during the 1930s, a sustained campaign that caused the deaths of twenty-six climbers and Sherpas through a combination of personal arrogance and political ideology. It also tore apart Germany’s sizable mountaineering community as the Nazis fought to take control of a powerful sporting lobby, part of Hitler’s grand strategy of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, the Nazification of every aspect of German life. That struggle would put the very ethos of mountaineering under the microscope.

The Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein, the German and

Austrian Alpine Club, had its origins in the 1860s, when the first Austrian section was set up in imitation of the original Alpine Club in London. Unlike the Alpine Club, which was limited to dedicated alpinists and socially elitist, the German and Austrian version was open to all, regardless of ability or class. As a consequence, by the early 1930s the Alpenverein had a membership of 240,000 compared to several hundred in the Alpine Club. Divisions within the German and Austrian club predated the rise of Hitler but shared common themes. A number of Austrian sections banned Jews in the early 1920s, to the disgust of the Munich-based Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung.

You search for heritage and the shape of a skull and overlook the beating of the heart and the sound of the soul. What is the point and how will things end?

Not all Munich climbers felt the same way, including the lawyer Paul Bauer, who would direct Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung in German mountaineering and extend those fractures into the Himalaya, with deadly consequences. Bauer had joined the German army at the outbreak of the Great War and been captured by the British in 1917. After the war, bitter at what he perceived as the betrayal of ordinary fighting men, he joined the Freikorps and latched onto the idea that climbing could help restore German pride. ‘When the rifle was taken from us,’ he once said, ‘our orphaned hands reached for an ice axe.’ Such revisionist nationalistic rhetoric had inevitable consequences as the fatality rate among the self-styled Bergkamaraden, ‘mountain-comrades’, spiralled on challenges like the north face of the Eiger. Bauer despised the woolly internationalist values of Günter Dyhrenfurth, who invited foreign climbers, including Frank Smythe, on his expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1930. Bauer too was obsessed with Kangchenjunga but his teams would be German only. For Bauer, the team, the Mannschaft, was everything. The Akademischer Alpenverein München, the student club in Munich, had for Bauer been a focus of sanity in the chaos and confusion of post-war Munich, when the things Bauer held most dear were ridiculed. Climbing for Bauer was a way to return to the comradeship of war and

test those qualities which had become superfluous in everyday life but which to us were still the highest qualities in the world: unshakeable courage, comradeship and self-sacrifice.

Although he was a nationalist, Bauer was also an Anglophile who had joined the Alpine Club. ‘One effect of the geographical situation of the Himalaya,’ he wrote in the Himalayan Journal,

is that it brings us into contact with English mountaineers and other people of England and the British Empire; and we thus come, again and again, to enjoy their help and hospitality.

In 1931, Bauer tangled with the rising star of German alpinism Willo Welzenbach over their competing interests in the Himalaya. Bauer wanted the British to give him permission for Kangchenjunga, which lay within their imperial Indian borders. Welzenbach thought Bauer’s plans on the world’s third highest mountain were a pipe dream, and decided to lead his own expedition to Nanga Parbat, where he felt there was a better chance of success, much to Bauer’s fury. But Bauer knew how to handle the British and it was he, with his superior contacts in India, who got permission for that year. In 1932, the International Olympic Committee gave Bauer’s published account of his expedition to Kangchenjunga a medal and after Hitler’s rise to power his position within the German mountaineering establishment grew ever stronger. The Nazi sports minister Hans von Tschammer und Osten wanted the Alpenverein to ban Jews, and he set up a rival organisation with Bauer in charge. German mountaineers wanting to visit the Himalaya now had to accede to the prevailing political climate. Dyhrenfurth left for Switzerland with his wife Hettie because, as the liberal Austrian climber Erwin Schneider put it, ‘the accident of his birth means he will no longer be able to win a flower pot in the Third Reich’.

There were a very few exceptions. In 1934 another expedition to Nanga

Parbat was planned and alongside the climbers a scientific team was brought together to study the mountain’s geology. Hans Peter Misch, a major figure in the discovery of how granite is formed, was among them. Born in Berlin, Misch was the grandson of the influential philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and had just earned his doctorate studying the petrology of the central Pyrenees. Yet his father had been born Jewish, which disqualified Misch from the expedition, under the antisemitic Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. The leader of the expedition’s scientific team, Richard Finsterwalder, appealed against Misch’s exclusion all the way up to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, arguing that ‘an otherwise healthy law had here been applied to a guiltless man’. Misch was allowed to go. Finsterwalder and his team did useful work, and achieved an impressive circumnavigation of the mountain, producing a highly accurate and detailed topographic map. The climbing itself was a disaster. The route selected on Nanga Parbat was not up the Rupal or Diamir faces Mummery had explored but on the vast, sprawling northern slopes of the peak, the Rakhiot face. The climbing wasn’t difficult but the risks were great. In early June, the climber Alfred Drexler died quite suddenly, probably of high-altitude pulmonary oedema. Expedition leader Willy Merkl took photographs and footage of Drexler’s corpse wrapped in a giant swastika, being dragged down the mountain, photographs that were printed in newspapers at home. The Nazi symbolism enraged Erwin Schneider, who was part of the team, but in response to his objections, Merkl threatened to ban him from climbing. Willo Welzenbach wrote of his fears about Merkl’s leadership.

Merkl increasingly acts like a dictator who allows no criticism. He appears to really believe that a stern and uncompromising

demeanour serves to establish his authority.

It wasn’t the best atmosphere in which to attempt such an immense enterprise.

In early July an unwieldy group of sixteen climbers and Sherpas from

Merkl’s expedition were caught in a savage storm at an exposed camp, the eighth above base and located just below the summit. That so many were so high was part of Merkl’s plan: the sanctity of the group. Nine of the sixteen would perish in the maelstrom while attempting to descend in what was the worst Himalayan climbing tragedy thus far. The frozen bodies of Merkl and the Sherpa Gaylay who had loyally remained with him were found four years later. Von Tschammer und Osten had told Merkl when he left, ‘The conquest of the peak is expected for the glory of Germany.’ But with the high death toll and expense, with little to show for it that would thrill ordinary Germans, the expedition had become an embarrassment, especially when the traitor Dyhrenfurth was awarded a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics. Bauer distanced himself from the enterprise, accusing Schneider and his fellow Austrian Peter Aschenbrenner of abandoning Sherpas; they were made the subject of a spurious enquiry. He even criticised Willo Welzenbach, one of the ‘fallen’, as someone interested only in personal glory, unlike Bauer, who was an ‘old soldier’, a favoured term among early Nazis. Bauer told von Tschammer und Osten: ‘For us, Adolf Hitler was already, in 1923, a man we would not impugn.’ Nazi officials ordered the racially suspect Peter Misch, who had acted bravely in desperate rescue attempts, to hand over his research material. Misch refused and fled the country, teaching first in China before war with Japan forced him to emigrate once more. He settled finally in Seattle at the University of Washington where he enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career. Erwin Schneider didn’t return to the Himalaya until after the war, when this brilliant cartographer drew the first maps of Nepal’s mountains, including Everest.

In 1936, a new Nazi-backed Himalayan exploratory organisation, the

Deutsche Himalaja-Stiftung, was founded, with Bauer pulling its strings. That year he led an expedition to Sikkim, where his team made the first ascent of a peak called Siniolchu. One of the successful pair to reach the top was his trusted lieutenant Karl Wien, who was given the task of leading another expedition to Nanga Parbat the following year. But on 15 June 1937 a cornice broke off above Wien’s camp, triggering a massive avalanche that dumped snow ten feet thick on their tents. Seven climbers and nine Sherpas were killed. Bauer rushed to Nanga Parbat from Germany and despite contracting malaria managed to reach the site of the tragedy a month later. When they dug the bodies out, they found the wristwatches the men were wearing had stopped at 12.10 a.m.

After the war, when Bauer had been through the process of

denazification, he applied to rejoin the Alpine Club, having been thrown out after war was declared. This was a quandary for the Alpine Club. In the immediate, chaotic aftermath of war, the Allies had appointed Bauer to run Munich; he wasn’t judged a war criminal. The committee decided to seek opinion from the members. Charles Houston was appalled.

His letters to me during and after the German invasion of Poland so sickened me, and evidenced such a callous attitude towards human rights, that I must strongly protest.

Bill Tilman, who had spent the war fighting with partisans behind enemy lines, first in Albania and later in Italy, disagreed. It was Tilman’s argument that won the day. Bauer died in 1990, at the age of ninety-four.

*

Just as Himalayan climbing was co-opted for dark political ends, Himalayan mythology offered an otherworldly metaphor to set against the spiritual dislocation of modern life. In the summer of 1936, on the other side of the world, the Himalaya was being recreated in Hollywood, as filming of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon got underway. The director was the bankable Frank Capra, whose movie Mr Deeds Goes to Town had just opened and would win him his second Oscar, swept along on the same emotional tide that saw Franklin D Roosevelt re-elected in a landslide. Lost Horizon, on the other hand, would be an expensive failure that could have sunk Columbia Pictures. Later in life, Capra would claim credit for turning the project around, explaining how he threw the first two reels in the studio’s incinerator after a test audience found the movie long-winded. In fact, it was studio boss Harry Cohn who painstakingly cut Capra’s sprawling mess into something that had a chance at the box office. Even so, Lost Horizon was a dud compared to Capra’s earlier work, for reasons that Graham Greene caught perfectly in his review for the Spectator.

Nothing reveals men’s characters more than their Utopias. This Utopia closely resembles a film star’s luxurious estate in Beverly Hills; flirtatious pursuits through grape arbours, splashing and divings in blossomy pools under improbable waterfalls, and rich and enormous meals.

In conclusion, Greene thought it ‘a very long picture … and a very dull one as soon as the opening scenes are over’.

Greene had put his finger on a flaw shared by the novel: Shangri-La, the

lost Himalayan world portrayed, was an idealised version of the West. The set designer at Columbia Pictures, Stephen Goosson produced a late art deco Tibetan monastery for Capra that won him an Oscar but was more stylised Hollywood real-estate fantasy than anything drawn from the immense architectural heritage of the Himalaya. Shangri-La itself was simply mindful consumerism. Capra did hire a consultant on all things Tibetan, the National Geographic journalist Harrison Forman, who had in 1932 interviewed Thubten Choekyi Nyima, the ninth Panchen Lama, when the latter was in exile at Labrang monastery in north-west Tibet. Little of this shows in the film. Beyond its vague Orientalist mysticism, Shangri-La is a colonialist fantasy, with simple ‘Tibetan’ farmers overseen by a cultured and tasteful European elite who guide them like children.

The spiritual philosophy behind Lost Horizon was rooted more in

Theosophy than Tibet. The self-absorbed ramblings of Helena Blavatsky had almost nothing to do with Tibetan Buddhism as it’s practised in the Himalaya, but in the early 1890s, after the publication of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and before Sigmund Freud became a more persuasive draw, Theosophy became fashionable soul food in Europe and North America. The literary hostess Elizabeth Burke-Plunkett, Countess of Fingall, recalled her excitement at meeting Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Theosophist Society’s ‘world teacher’. Her friend W B Yeats described Blavatsky as ‘the most living person alive’. Later in life he was more circumspect:

They had no scholarship and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and simply and unconventionally

as men, perhaps, discussed great problems in the medieval universities.

Theosophy was successful as a catalyst, however. When Yeats visited Stanford University in 1904, he inspired a young student and Theosophist called Walter Evans-Wentz to study Celtic mythology at Oxford. There Evans-Wentz met the young T E Lawrence who recommended he go east. In India Evans-Wentz met Theosophy’s leading figures, including Annie Besant and Krishnamurti, and worked on his famous translation of what is known in English as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Everyone from Carl Jung to Hermann Hesse to Jawaharlal Nehru took an interest in Theosophy. Its ideas about cosmic geometry, the universe rippling out from a single point to infinite complexity, was also an inspiration for generations of abstract artists, including Piet Mondrian, who searched for the utopian and universal in his work, and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky.

Another Russian artist immersed in Theosophy would become firmly

rooted in the actual Himalaya. Nicholas Roerich was born in St Petersburg in 1874, a polymath who studied art at the city’s university and became part of the group orbiting the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Roerich’s early work focussed not on abstract geometrical shapes but Russia’s mythical past and he became famous designing sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In 1901 he married Elena Ivanovna Shaposhnikova, who introduced him to Hindu mystics and writers like Rabindranath Tagore. She also translated Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine into Russian.

Following the Russian Revolution, the politically moderate Roerichs left

Russia for Europe, arriving in London in 1919, where they joined the local branch of the Theosophy Society and befriended the young Christmas Humphreys, a barrister and formidable prosecutor who later founded the Buddhism Society and wrote widely on the subject for the rest of his sometimes controversial life. The civil war in Russia had for the Roerichs a millenarian dimension, as would their interest in Tibetan mythology: both believed that the king of Shambhala would eventually return to destroy the wicked and reignite mankind’s creative spirit. Nicholas continued to work as a set designer in London for the conductor and impresario Sir Thomas Beecham and later in the United States, but what he and Helena (as his wife was now known) really wanted was to travel in the Himalaya and find Shambhala: ambassadors for Western Buddhism returning to the root of the mystical teachings that enriched them. He also offered to do a little light spying for the Soviet Union if the Bolsheviks covered some of his costs on what would be an expensive expedition. The savage suppression of Buddhism in Russia’s eastern provinces was not yet underway, but the Soviets were still suspicious of Roerich’s utopian mission. Nonetheless, they did support him logistically when he came within their sphere of influence.

The journey, which included Helena and their adult son George, a famous

Tibet scholar who studied at the Sorbonne under Paul Pelliot – he of the Dunhuang Caves – and the Indologist Sylvain Lévi, began in Sikkim where Eric Bailey was still political officer. (He called them ‘my Russian artist friends’, but confessed he ‘did not like [Nicholas’] pictures very much’.) Because of the lull in relations between Tibet and British India, news of the Roerichs’ progress on this epic adventure was often patchy; in the summer of 1927 they fell out of contact altogether and remained so for almost a year: they were thought to be dead. In fact, they were merely in prison, detained by the Tibetan authorities despite their passports and passion for Buddhism. After their release in March 1928, the Roerichs hastened to India where they established the Himalayan Research Institute, or Urusvati, the ‘light of the morning star’, first in Darjeeling and then permanently in the Kullu valley in the far north-west of India.

After the Second World War, Helena Blavatsky’s more occultist ideas

resurfaced in a rash of books exploring National Socialism’s esoteric interest in Tibet. The French writer Louis Pauwels claimed communities of Tibetan Geluk monks were living in Germany from the 1920s at the invitation of Karl Haushofer, a German soldier and professor of geopolitics who had taught Rudolf Hess and remained on good terms with him. Haushofer was also the supposed founder of the Vril Society and a friend of the mystic George Gurdjieff. The truth in such stories is almost indiscernible. A few of those at the heart of the Nazi project were intrigued by occultist myths and racial theories involving Tibet. Others were demonstrably hostile. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, was a racial ideologue close to Hitler, a rival of Heinrich Himmler, executed for crimes against humanity. For Rosenberg, Tibetan Buddhism had been a malign influence like Catholicism. If it hadn’t been for the Protestant Reformation, he believed,

Europe today would have reached the condition of holy men of India and Tibet, thick with dirt, a condition of the most complete stultification.

The adoption of the swastika as a Nazi emblem didn’t arise from its ubiquity in the Himalaya. Its status there is more good-luck charm than sacred symbol and was used in Europe before the Great War: Kipling put it on the cover of his books. (In fact, it was the swastika’s discovery at Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann that intrigued Nazi racial theorists: if the swastika represented a link to an ancient past, it was this one.)

Beyond the propaganda value of German mountaineering, Nazi interest

in the Himalaya was restricted to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s ‘research’ group the Ahnenerbe, meaning ‘ancestral heritage’. Himmler himself took an interest in Indian philosophy and was said to read the Bhagavad Gita. His interest in Tibet was likely sparked by his acolyte Karl Maria Wiligut, whose passion for esoteric paganism was matched with mental instability: Wiligut fell from favour when Himmler discovered he had once been committed to an asylum by his own wife. Among Wiligut’s fantasies was a supposed journey he had made to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and a complex network of energy beams linking ancient sites across Eurasia, including Tibet, a geomantic worldview that chimed with Himmler’s own. While scientifically spurious, the purpose of the Ahnenerbe, founded in 1935, was to dress the darkest Nazi policies, including the eventual extermination of the Jews, with some kind of academic respectability. In 1938, it was part-sponsor of a scientific expedition to Tibet, which got permission from the Tibetan government via the British after Himmler’s personal appeal to the Foreign Office in London and the intervention of the pro-Hitler British admiral Sir Barry Domvile.

The leader of this expedition was the naturalist Ernst Schäfer, whose

fascination with Tibet had been inspired by his boyhood hero Sven Hedin. When Schäfer joined the SS in 1936, he had just returned from his second expedition to eastern Tibet with the American academic Brooke Dolan. (Dolan would visit Lhasa in 1942 on behalf of the American intelligence services along with Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of Leo.) Much of the work Schäfer’s team undertook was recognisably scientific: natural history, geophysics and meteorology. Himmler was particularly interested in the meteorological work, since independent reliable weather forecasts were essential preparation for war; his interest extended, for the same reason, to horse-breeding, echoing William Moorcroft’s journey in the early nineteenth century. The exception to all this was the spurious anthropology performed during the expedition by Bruno Beger, a former student of the eugenicist Hans Friedrich Günther, who in the late 1930s was teaching Nazi racial theories at the University of Berlin. (Hitler had four copies of his influential book Racial Science of the German People and put it on his recommended reading list for party members.) Günther held that the ideal of the Nordic type, the Herrenrasse or ‘master race’, would be found most readily among society’s elite. This is why Beger paid most attention to Lhasa aristocrats as the most likely stratum of Tibetan society in which to find evidence of a common Aryan ancestor. Unfortunately for him, Lhasa’s aristocrats all refused to let him take measurements of their heads in the way that he did with hundreds of ordinary Tibetans. (During the war, Beger worked with the SS anatomist August Hirt, selecting victims from various ethnic groups at Auschwitz. They were then gassed and defleshed for the Jewish skeleton collection, a gruesome attempt to display Jewish racial degeneracy. Beger was convicted of war crimes in 1971 and sentenced to three years in prison, reduced to probation on appeal. He died in 2009, aged ninety-eight.)

*

The murderous racial theories of the Third Reich meant about as much in pre-war Lhasa as Hollywood’s version of Shangri-La, or the fertile imaginings of the Theosophists. These were simply orientalist fantasies projected onto the Himalaya. The rise of the nation state on the other hand, in its way another kind of utopia, was a burning issue. It was nationalism that would drive the coming storm and have a lasting impact on the people of the Himalaya.

The thirteenth Dalai Lama and his Buryat follower Agvan Dorzhiev had

once had a vision of a pan-Central Asian Tibetan Buddhist stronghold. Now Stalin’s purges were underway and Buddhism was being supressed in Mongolia. Dorzhiev himself died at the hands of Soviet torturers. The Dalai Lama, prematurely aged, saw the same fate engulfing Tibet itself.

In the future, this system will certainly be forced either from within or without on this land that cherishes the joint spiritual and temporal system. If in such an event we fail to defend our land, the holy lamas, including their triumphant father and son [the Dalai and Panchen Lama] will be eliminated without a trace of their names remaining … my people, subjected to fear and misery will be unable to endure day or night.

After the Dalai Lama’s death in 1933, China sensed an opportunity and the nationalist government in Beijing sent a mission of condolence to Lhasa under the command of General Huang Mu-sung, a member of president Chiang Kai-shek’s National Military Council. He was welcomed with far more ceremony than any British official ever had been and the Tibetan government allowed the Chinese to establish a wireless transmitter, obviating the need for China to use British telegraph wires, which were easily monitored for intelligence. Huang was patient but his aim was clear: to have the Tibetans declare their country a republic and themselves as one of the ‘five races’ and so part of China. He brought with him a large cash reserve to bribe important officials, but despite this the Tibetan leadership politely told him that they had been ruled by thirteen Dalai Lamas and weren’t about to change. Tibet was an independent nation and would remain that way. They also asked about the return of the Panchen Lama, who had been in exile since Eric Bailey’s time as political officer, but without the large escort of Chinese troops that the Kuomintang insisted he bring with him. This show of unity and resolve disheartened Huang Mu-sung and he returned home without achieving China’s overall aim. Yet the direction of travel was clear: since their expulsion in 1912, the Chinese had been trying to reassert their power in Lhasa, no longer as the Qing Empire but as the republic of China. It was only a matter of time before they tried again.

The permanent presence of Chinese officials in Lhasa triggered alarm in

India. Charles Bell had reasoned that the British didn’t need a legation in Lhasa unless China returned: now they had. Huang Mu-sung’s mission, monitored on behalf of India’s foreign service by the long-serving political agent Norbu Dhondup, prompted a new British mission to Lhasa. Like the one from China, it would become a permanent feature without ever admitting that this was its intention. Basil Gould arrived in Lhasa on 24 August 1936, a week after the Berlin Olympics closed and a week before Bill Tilman climbed Nanda Devi. Gould had been political officer in Sikkim since the start of the year and was cut from the same cloth as Charles Bell, under whom Gould had served twenty years previously. Bell had been a presence on the frontier in the mid 1930s, warning the Tibetan government that ‘bit by bit, Britain is giving more power to India, who will hardly show the same friendship … or have the same power to help Tibet’.

Gould now had the opportunity to reignite relations with Tibet and offer

reassurance in the face of increasing Chinese pressure. With him came two telegraph operators, a medical officer and the mountaineer Freddy Spencer Chapman, whom Gould had encountered by chance and invited as his personal secretary. Chapman had with him the latest Dufaycolor film stock and he made a stunning colour record of Lhasa, capturing the city as it was, little more than a decade before the Chinese invasion of 1950 changed everything. The final member of Gould’s team was Hugh Richardson, the new trade official based at Gyantse, halfway between Lhasa and Gangtok, a tall Scot from St Andrews who had developed an interest in Tibet at Oxford. He would spend eight of the next fourteen years in Lhasa, first for the British and then the Indian governments, in the process becoming a valuable and scholarly expert on Tibet as well as a potent champion for its independent status in the maelstrom that was to come. It was Richardson who would monitor the activities of the Schäfer expedition two years later, relieved when Tibetan opinion turned against the Germans for their careless intrusions with cameras and hunting of animals for their zoological collection. Luckily for him, Himmler’s idea for a high-altitude insurgency force, led by Schäfer, aimed at disrupting the British in Central Asia, came to nothing.

As a way to build bridges, Gould encouraged football matches between

the British, the ‘Mission Marmots’, and anyone who wanted to join in. They played a team from the Nepali embassy, another from Lhasa’s longstanding Muslim community and a team of Tibetan soldiers, who offered the toughest opposition, drawing two matches. ‘The Tibetans play [a] hard clean sporting game,’ Gould reported. The teacher Frank Ludlow’s influence had clearly survived. The season only came to an end that November when the goalposts were used for firewood. Jampal Yeshe Gyaltsen, the tulku or reincarnate lama of Reting monastery who, aged just twenty-three, had been appointed regent of Tibet, asked Chapman if he could borrow the football, which Chapman took as a good sign of the mission’s progress. (The resumption of football in Tibet proved popular and there were more than a dozen teams playing regularly in Lhasa when Tibet’s conservative monastic elite blew the final whistle in 1944 and banned it. The fourteenth Dalai Lama’s younger brother Gyalo Thondup recalled ruefully how he was beaten at school along with the rest of his team for playing illicitly.)

Gould’s mission arrived at a hugely sensitive time as the search for the

new Dalai Lama got underway. The period following the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death in 1933 had been predictably traumatic. The most powerful minister at the time was Thubten Kunphel, known as Kunphela, a strong man who had entered the Dalai Lama’s service as a servant and risen through force of personality to lead the most effective military unit in Tibet. He was regarded as sympathetic to the Kuomintang. His enemies, particularly Lungshar, one of four tsipon, state treasury ministers, and who was Tsarong’s rival in the 1920s, used the Dalai Lama’s sudden death to build a coalition against him. Kunphela’s power base melted away and he was imprisoned. His fall provoked rebellion in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham from his allies, the powerful and wealthy Pandatsang family. These rebels, small in number, also fought China’s communists as they struggled through the grinding horror of the Long March, their flight from Kuomintang forces deep into the interior of China and the eastern marches of Tibet. Kunphela and the Pandatsang would soon start an opposition movement in exile: the Tibet Improvement Party.

Lungshar didn’t enjoy his ascendancy for long. Like Kunphela he was a

moderniser. It was Lungshar who had accompanied the four young Tibetan aristocrats to Rugby school and understood that Tibet must change. Yet his attempt to increase state revenues at the cost of Lhasa’s aristocracy and monastic establishment left him vulnerable and he was accused of communist leanings, something Laden La had warned about following their trip to Europe. The ultra-conservative leader of the cabinet – or kashag – Trimon Shap-pe outmanoeuvred Lungshar, who was arrested and suffered the archaic torture of having his eyes put out. No one alive had performed this punishment and it was botched. Soon afterwards Trimon Shap-pe himself resigned from public service, giving up his role in selecting the new Dalai Lama. This process was as usual a fraught enterprise, with divinations vulnerable to political influence. The head of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, lying in state, was seen to turn to the north-west. Reting Rinpoche, the regent, saw a vision in a sacred lake of two letters: ‘A’ and ‘K’, suggesting Amdo and the monastery of Kumbum, far to the north-west of Lhasa in modern Qinghai, at the time under the control of the Kuomintang warlord Ma Bufang. Hugh Richardson reported suspicions in Lhasa that such visions were conveniently helpful for Reting, a deeply controversial figure in this crucial moment of Tibetan history. Tibet’s monastic elite was still vulnerable to sectarian conflict, between the dominant Geluk institutions and those of the Nyingma school. Reting, although Geluk, was seen as too sympathetic to the Nyingma side, which had found protection under China’s rule. Reting may have been indicating that a Dalai Lama from the periphery was needed to challenge the great monasteries of the centre.

In theory, the Panchen Lama also had to be involved in the search for the

little boy, but negotiations for the Panchen Lama’s return from exile had stalled and he remained under China’s control in eastern Kham, on the periphery of the Tibetan cultural world. Kewtsang Rinpoche, the lama from Sera monastery who led the search for the fourteenth Dalai Lama, went to the monastery at Jyekundu, where the Panchen Lama was living, to seek his opinion. The Panchen Lama offered three names, including that of a ‘fearless’ young boy in the village of Taktser, not far from Kumbum. A year later, at the start of December 1937, the Panchen Lama died unexpectedly. At first, the Chinese tried to use the return of the Panchen Lama’s corpse as a bargaining chip in much the same way as they had with the living version. Then the situation changed. As Hugh Richardson put it: ‘Chinese interest in a dead [Panchen] Lama soon gave way to the more promising prospect of a live Dalai Lama.’ That same year, Kewtsang became convinced that the fearless boy from Taktser, called Lhamo Thondup, was indeed the next Dalai Lama.

For a while Kewtsang was forced to remain silent. Taktser and the nearby

monastery at Kumbum were still under the control of the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang. It had been Ma Bufang who had smashed the Tibetan army in the early 1930s, just before the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and annexed portions of Amdo to Qinghai, including Kumbum. Ma Bufang was on the rise and, like his father Ma Qi before him, had a ferocious reputation, especially among Tibetans. He had conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Ngoloks, a Tibetan tribe that resisted his rule, sacking and looting monasteries along the way. Though strongly Islamic, Ma Bufang, now governor of the Chinese province of Qinghai, was a dedicated Chinese nationalist and virulently anti-communist. Should the boy’s identity be announced while under Ma Bufang’s control, there was the grave risk he might arrive in Lhasa with a large Chinese military escort.

Ma Bufang knew Kewtsang had met with several candidates in his

province and knew that if the infant Dalai Lama was declared in his jurisdiction, it would boost his leverage with central government in Beijing and increase his power locally. So he kept three-year-old Lhamo Thondup and his family close at hand. At first, Lhasa temporised, keeping their selection hazy as they negotiated with the Chinese for the terms of the new Dalai Lama’s arrival in Lhasa. Luckily the Kuomintang government was now at war with Japan, a situation of far greater consequence than any problem in Tibet could be. When the Tibetans sent a high-level delegation to fetch the boy from Qinghai there was a deal to be done. Tibet was forced to pay Ma Bufang four hundred thousand Chinese silver dollars as compensation, money the Indian government helped source.

In July 1939, two years after his discovery and now four years old,

Lhamo Thondup and his retinue, together with a small escort of Ma Bufang’s troops, left Kumbum monastery for southern Tibet. As they crossed the border of Ma Bufang’s territory, all vagueness over the identity of the Dalai Lama was abandoned: officials announced that Lhamo Thondup was and always had been the one true candidate. At Lhasa, Reting Rinpoche ordained the boy a monk, giving him the new name Tenzin Gyatso, fourteenth Dalai Lama, embodiment of Chenrezig, bodhisattva of compassion, known to Tibetans as Kundun: ‘presence’. By then the world was at war. Tibetans and all the peoples of the Himalaya stood on the brink of profound and sometimes violent change that would threaten their identity even as it brought the modern world crashing in.

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