20 Claiming Chomolungma

20

 

Claiming Chomolungma

 

It was gloomy in Liz Hawley’s Kathmandu apartment but nicely so, a drowsy refuge from the hot pre-monsoon sun and the chaos outside in Dilli Bazar. Everything was precisely arranged, the papers on her desk and the cushions on chairs that looked severe but were surprisingly comfortable. This was in 2015, when Liz was ninety-one. When I met her first in the mid 1990s, she was like one of the city’s sparrows, flitting busily between hotels to meet the leader of every climbing expedition in town, recording what they planned to do and afterwards what they had or had not done, before jumping in her sky-blue Volkswagen to move on to the next one. And like the city’s sparrows, crowded out these days by construction and pollution, Liz was nearing the end. She was frail, and cross about it, but pushed this unwelcome development aside with a wry twist of her mouth. When she sank onto a small sofa across from me, her face became lost in the shadows but her voice was as firm as ever. I closed my eyes and listened.

Liz was reminiscing about B P Koirala, the Nepali prime minister whom

King Mahendra had arrested and imprisoned in December 1960, not long after she settled in Kathmandu and began stringing for American news outlets. She had planned to go trekking with B P that month to write him up for Life magazine: Nepal’s democratic visionary in the mountains of his homeland. Her story about him had had to wait more than twenty years. In July 1982 she was at Bangkok airport for her flight to Kathmandu, heading home from her annual trip to see her mother, when she spotted B P’s brother Girija at the airline’s desk. B P, she discovered, had been told his throat cancer was out of control and Girija was taking him back to Nepal to die. He was laid on the floor in business class and Liz spent the flight making notes for an article, going forward to check facts with both of them. B P died that night, even before Liz had finished her piece, which she filed with Reuters. At the age of fifty-eight, she’d made the front page of the New York Times.

Despite half a century in Nepal, you could still hear New England in her

voice, an accent her mother had been determined Liz acquire after her years as a young girl in the Midwest. Her manner was direct and rather grand and could topple into rudeness. I liked to imagine Liz in 1950s Manhattan, on her way from her Midtown apartment up Fifth Avenue to the Rockefeller Center, where she worked for eleven years as a researcher for Fortune magazine: a formidable background in the sanctity of facts but also the glass ceiling for a woman in that era. Realising this and becoming a little bored, in her mid thirties she elected to travel for a while and do some reporting. Nepal was at first one more stop on a long itinerary that began with observing communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, then afterwards Beirut, where she met the double agent Kim Philby and his father John, who had known her hero, the great Middle East explorer Gertrude Bell. In Cairo, she climbed the Great Pyramid by moonlight. Karachi was just another ugly South Asian city that had grown too fast; Kathmandu, when she arrived in February 1959, was a peaceful contrast, green and beautiful, ‘a kind of fairy-tale mirage’ as Liz described it, the myth of ‘timeless Asia’.

In Delhi she had picked up an assignment from Time magazine’s bureau

to cover Nepal’s first general election, which B P Koirala won handsomely. Mahendra had agreed to the vote reluctantly and only because he was sure it would result in a divided parliament he could easily dominate. Liz moved among Nepal’s political elite with Cyril Dunn of The Observer and Elie Abel, a friend from the New York Times who as Delhi correspondent would cover the Lhasa Uprising that spring. It all seemed so much more exciting than researching other peoples’ stories in the archives of Fortune. When she got back to New York, she wandered round Union Square eating a chocolate sundae and watching the crowds. ‘This is great,’ she told herself, ‘but it’s not the real world.’ She imagined herself instead in Nepal, ‘a place where you can see what the world is becoming’. A place also where she could live cheaply and still employ staff: stretch out a little. Eighteen months after her first visit, and with a couple of freelance contracts in her pocket, Hawley was back in Kathmandu, this time for good.

She had chosen an auspicious moment to set up as a journalist and

researcher in the Himalaya. During her absence, following China’s ruthless crackdown in the aftermath of the Lhasa Uprising of March 1959, tension had risen steadily. Nehru had offered shelter to the Dalai Lama but not much else – certainly negligible political support – believing as a consequence he could ride out China’s annoyance without damaging his strategic interests. He was wrong about this. Beijing was infuriated when the Dalai Lama was allowed to give a press conference from his Indian exile. Despite his youth, he was showing himself to be a capable political leader and began to attract positive global media attention. Mao was struggling in the spring of 1959 with the negative consequences of the Great Leap Forward; Nehru had pressed on an open wound, pain that was reflected in aggressive anti-Nehru articles in the People’s Daily, personally overseen by Mao: ‘The Indian big bourgeoisie maintains innumerable links with imperialism,’ the paper warned. Any goodwill generated from India’s acceptance in 1954 of China’s rule of Tibet evaporated. Nehru’s response was that of a disappointed teacher:

I have been greatly distressed at the tone of the comments and the charges made against India by responsible people in China. They have used the language of the cold war regardless of truth and propriety.

Such loftiness annoyed China; Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger in 1973 that China wanted ‘to keep down his [Nehru’s] cockiness’. The joke in India was how the optimistic slogan Hindi-Chini bhai bhai, the ‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’, had been replaced with ‘Hindi-Chini bye-bye’.

If Tibet provoked this tension, as Mao later told Nepali diplomats, the

Himalayan border between China and India was the trigger for conflict. After the communists came to power in 1950, Chinese maps started showing large tracts of the Himalaya, whose borders had been regarded as settled for generations, now belonging to the People’s Republic. In south-west Xinjiang, cadres who met inhabitants of Ladakh, until then an Indian region, told them their home was now also part of China. In 1953, to link the remote western province of Xinjiang with Tibet, China began driving a road across the Aksai Chin, desolate country north-east of Ladakh that Delhi regarded as within the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The following year, India and China had signed a treaty legitimising China’s position in Tibet, the preamble of which is famous for articulating Nehru’s ‘five virtues’, the basis for India’s peaceful coexistence with foreign powers. Mao read this as complacency, a gift China could exploit, and the communists continued with their plans: the road was completed in 1957. In fact, American and presumably Indian intelligence had known about it from the start, thanks to spy networks in Kashgar, but Nehru, mindful of his earlier pronouncements about socialism and the rise of Asia, kept the road’s existence a secret from the Indian people; as late as April 1959, even after the Lhasa Uprising, Nehru was still denying the Aksai Chin road crossed Indian territory.

Although after 1950 there were Chinese troops in Gartok in western

Tibet, many regions of the Tibetan Himalaya, including Dingri, north of Everest, saw little of the communists in the following years. That changed after the Lhasa Uprising, as units of the People’s Liberation Army arrived to restore order. Facing them in India were lightly armed border forces. With gathering speed, China’s true intentions in the Himalaya were revealed. On 26 August 1959 there was an exchange of fire between Chinese and Indian troops at Longju on the McMahon Line in the eastern Himalaya and an Indian soldier was captured. Chinese troops had made incursions across the border before but the Indian public got to hear about this one, raising the political temperature. Then a letter arrived in Delhi from Zhou Enlai laying claim to 130,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in the Himalaya. (‘I must frankly say,’ Nehru replied, ‘that your letter of 8 September has come as a great shock to us.’) Indian patrols were ordered along the Ladakh frontier, even though Nehru had explicitly prohibited them, and a group of Indian reserve police officers were ambushed near the Kongka La, roughly a hundred and sixty kilometres east of Leh. There was a brief, dramatic stand-off, as the Indian officer Karam Singh stooped to pick up a handful of dirt and let it fall from his hand, implying this was Indian soil. The Chinese officer did the same. (The irony was that this territory had once been part of a greater Tibet and was still culturally Tibetan.) Then Chinese heavy machine guns opened up from the hillside opposite, catching the Indians in a deadly crossfire. Eleven policemen died, one from untreated wounds; others were captured, including Karam Singh, who was tortured into signing a confession that the Indians had been on Chinese territory and were consequently responsible for the violence.

The impact of these killings on Indian public opinion was immense;

crowds of protestors demanded that the defence minister Krishna Menon, a pro-China influence, should resign. Nehru ordered that the Indian army take over responsibility for the border, authorising outposts north of the McMahon Line, bullishly staking India’s claim without committing the forces necessary to discourage an attack. The Chinese would cleverly spin this ‘forward policy’, with its echoes of Curzon and the British, into a hostile act: previously, they argued, colonial-era borders in Ladakh to the west and Tawang in the east had robbed China of its possessions; now China simply wanted what already belonged to her.

Throughout the summer of 1962, skirmishes and encounters raised the

temperature but until the last moment Indian strategists discounted a full-blown conflict. Even so, on 20 October 1962, with negotiations stalled and using the Cuban missile crisis as cover, the PLA attacked on two fronts, east and west: Indian positions north of the disputed town of Tawang were overrun and the inhabitants evacuated. The Indian army dug in around the pass of Se La. At the other end of the Himalaya, Chinese troops drove out those Indian troops still in the Aksai Chin and swept into eastern Ladakh, surrounding army posts that were insufficiently manned or supported to resist. After four days, China had secured its objectives in what appeared to British observers to be a limited border skirmish. There was no declaration of war and negotiations for a settlement were soon underway as Zhou Enlai wrote to Nehru offering terms.

President Kennedy was alive to the dangers of China’s invasion,

wondering aloud ‘which crisis [the Indian or the Cuban] would be the more significant in the long run’. In the immediate aftermath, however, the existential threat to the United States meant it was left to Kenneth Galbraith, American ambassador in Delhi, and the National Security Council staffer Robert Komer to develop US policy in regard to the Sino-Indian war. When fighting resumed, on Nehru’s birthday, with an Indian attack on Chinese positions at Walong in eastern Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese retaliated with an assault on the Indians at Se La and in Ladakh at Chushul, where huge superiority in numbers resulted in heavy Indian losses. Galbraith was amazed the following day when news of these reversals reached a panicked Delhi, ‘the first time I have ever witnessed the disintegration of public morale’. Nehru appealed to the Americans for a dozen squadrons of jet fighters to drive back what was looking for a moment like a full-scale Chinese invasion, one that threatened ‘not merely the survival of India, but the survival of free and independent governments in the whole of the sub-continent’. Despite Nehru’s panic, China soon called a halt, happy with consolidating its position in the Aksai Chin and thus securing its new road. The Indian defence minister Krishna Menon quit and the Indian military began a period of rapid modernisation. The Americans tried to use the military aid they were now providing to India as leverage, hoping to force India into a resolution of the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. Delhi resented this, but soon afterwards China signed a deal with Pakistan recognising their mutual border, which undermined the Americans’ strategy. This brief conflict, which cost a few thousand lives, many of them through the bitter conditions of the Himalaya, traumatised Sino-Indian relations for decades to come.

Galbraith, ignorant of the famine then unfolding in China, had been an

admirer of Mao’s economic reforms. He also considered the Tibetan resistance movement, Chushi Gangdruk, to be little more than ‘dissident and deeply unhygienic tribesmen’; America’s support for them was for Galbraith ‘a particularly insane enterprise’, a view shared by the CIA’s Indian station chief Harry Rositzke. Discovery of American involvement would enrage Nehru and damage relations with India. It certainly annoyed Mao and Zhou, who assumed Nehru knew the CIA was training Tibetans to fight the Chinese. As it was, the supply of arms was insufficient and far below expectations. (The Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup, the link between Tibetan resistance fighters and the CIA, later wrote: ‘Mao was not the only one to cheat the Tibetans. The CIA did, too.’ This was true, but dodged Gyalo Thondup’s own responsibility.) When China invaded India, Galbraith could come clean about the CIA’s support for Tibetan rebels and fall in line with the strategy of the White House and Langley.

Even by the start of 1960, two years before China attacked India, Tibetan

armed resistance to China’s occupation had been in disarray. In the wake of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, the Chinese had cracked down on it with brutal intensity. Chushi Gangdruk’s base at Lokha had been overwhelmed; fighters, including those trained by the CIA, had been killed or else fled, many to Kalimpong and Darjeeling, swelling the region’s reputation as a crossroads for agitators and spies. Many of these men were put to work building roads in Sikkim. In Darjeeling, the leader of Chushi Gangdruk, Gonbo Tashi, a wealthy trader from the historically important Kham town of Litang, now in western Sichuan, called a meeting of his senior cohorts to discuss setting up a new base. Who it was that chose Mustang, a region in northern Nepal, as its location is disputed. Some historians believe it was the CIA’s idea; they could lean on King Mahendra to turn a blind eye. Given the Americans were more interested in intelligence on China than liberating Tibet, Mustang had the advantage to the CIA of being within striking distance of the road the Chinese had built across southern Tibet, now designated the G219. If that was the case, it proved a shrewd choice; the following year, Chushi Gangdruk fighters captured highly sensitive information after a raid on this road from their Mustang base revealing plans for new troop deployments in Tibet as well as the rift in Sino-Soviet relations. For Tibetan fighters, although Mustang was inconveniently distant from Lhasa, it had advantages for them, too. The local Mustangis, essentially ethnic Tibetans, were supportive. Lhamo Tsering, deputy to the Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup and one of those the CIA had trained abroad, was put in charge of organising a base there. Gonbo Tashi, meanwhile, got on with recruitment and it didn’t take Delhi long to figure out why hundreds of Tibetan road-workers in Sikkim were suddenly quitting their jobs. Yet even before this new Tibetan force arrived, tiny Mustang was the cause of an international incident that would embroil Nepal’s young democracy.

*

The threats facing Nepal’s new prime minister B P Koirala and his elected government were mostly domestic: principally, the king’s faction and communist opponents. Yet China also worried him. Although he abstained from the vote at the United Nations in the autumn of 1959 that censured Beijing for its actions in Tibet, Koirala was instinctively pro-India and saw Nepal’s future as closer to its southern neighbour. India, he said, should support Nepal’s democratic experiment lest it wake up one day and find China in its backyard; Beijing was already leaning on Koirala to allow them to extend Tibet’s road network over the border to Kathmandu. The same Chinese maps worrying Delhi with their implied claim to large chunks of the Himalaya had alarmed the Nepali government as well. Among these were the entire Everest massif and the district of Khumbu, in which the Nepali portion of Everest is located. This affront to national dignity prompted demonstrations in Kathmandu, where many believed the whole peak, not just the south side, was Nepal’s. A mountain no one in the capital had heard of a century earlier was now a piece on Asia’s strategic chessboard.

By 1960, China understood the political value of Everest very well,

thanks in large part to mountaineers from the Soviet Union. Climbing had been an elite pastime in Tsarist Russia and after the Revolution in 1917 mountaineers had needed to work hard to create a proletarian framework strong enough to convince the Soviet authorities. During the 1920s, alpinism became a kind of socialist ideal, a team without individuals prepared to face anything to succeed. After the Second World War, as competitive sport became a cultural front in the Cold War, climbing was made more conventionally competitive, garnering not only the state’s permission but its funds. Despite this conformity, Russian mountaineers weren’t trusted to travel abroad and remained isolated within the mountains of the Soviet Union.

That began to change in 1953 with the death of Stalin and the ascent of

Everest. At first, the Soviet Union ignored the success of Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but ordinary Russians were interested and journalists had eventually to find an acceptable line on this imperialist success. In 1954, the sports journalist Evgeny Simonov solved the problem by showering praise on the Sherpas: ‘Innocent and honest, enduring and fulfilling their deed to the last! Such are these sons of the mountains.’ Tenzing had shown ‘what new powers are maturing among the people of rising Asia’. Tenzing’s role allowed Simonov to stress a timely political message, of how the Soviet Union was helping Asia throw off the shackles of colonialism. Despite the word ‘Everest’ having been in common usage throughout the 1930s, Russian writers began using the indigenous ‘Chomolungma’, the name preferred by China in its Sinicised form ‘Qomolangma’. Khrushchev had authorised a colossal aid effort to China, building industrial and military capacity, and sport was part of the relationship.

In 1955, Russian climbers introduced the Chinese to mountaineering on

Soviet turf, first in the Caucasus and then at high altitude in the Pamirs of Central Asia. A year later the two countries organised an expedition to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, climbing Muztagh Ata and Kongur Tiube, both over seven and a half thousand metres. The encounter between these two groups is instructive. In theory, they had the same political ideology but it was clear to the Russians that they were at different stages of their journey. ‘When I looked at them more closely,’ one of the Soviet climbers recalled, almost forty years later,

I understood that our brothers were not only no mountaineers, but no sportsmen at all. The party had directed them to this work front, strength and mountain experience had been replaced by political conviction and literacy by devotion to the party.

In May 1958, the All-Chinese Committee of Physical Culture and Sport extended an official invitation to Soviet alpinists to join them in an attempt on the north ridge of Everest, the same route taken by George Mallory and all the other British mountaineers before the war. At a meeting in Beijing it was agreed to try in the pre-monsoon season of the following year. The Russians, cautious about what they might find, suggested a reconnaissance that autumn. The Chinese promised to think about it and preparations got underway. With such a prize on offer, both governments threw considerable resources behind the project. Russian engineers began developing oxygen equipment and the People’s Liberation Army started work on an unpaved road so trucks could bring supplies to base camp. In early October Beijing told the Russians that the reconnaissance was on.

On 23 October, Evgeny Beletsky, who had become famous climbing in

the Pamirs before the war, and two colleagues, Lev Filimonov and Anatoly Kovyrkov, arrived in Lhasa, where unrest was building. The Russians reported meeting the deputy chair of China’s Preparatory Committee of the Autonomous Region of Tibet, Zhang Guohua, who told them: ‘The people here do not understand us.’ They were warned of clashes between Chinese and Tibetans and instructed not to tell anyone they met what they were doing there. Even the expedition’s Tibetan porters were hand picked from the communist youth league. The fear something might happen to their Russian guests was palpable. A very secret Everest team – three Russians, ten Chinese climbers, three meteorologists, four topographers, four radio operators and the ten porters – set off for Shigatse with a substantial military escort armed with mortars and grenades. The Chinese told the Russians that the Tibetans particularly feared the mortars since a soul leaving a body torn to pieces would not find peace.

At Shigatse they switched to pack animals, since the promised road was

still under construction. Frustrated at the slow pace and with winter approaching, Beletsky raced ahead of the main column, to reach Rongbuk monastery at the foot of the mountain, where seventy monks were still in residence, on the brink of China’s brutal suppression of monastic life. In just twelve days, Beletsky’s small team was able to explore both approaches to the North Col; having photographed the key sections to the North Col himself, Beletsky began to descend and almost immediately discovered the body of one of the seven Sherpa and Tibetan porters who had died in 1922. Like many of the Russians, Beletsky didn’t think much of using large numbers of porters in the mountains and didn’t like the vast expedition the Chinese were proposing. Even so, as they left Rongbuk optimism was high about the prospects of the full attempt the following spring.

After a winter training camp, the Russian Everest team gathered in

March at a leaving party in Moscow only to see their leader Kirill Kuzmin arrive, head bent, his eyes filled with tears. The Chinese had cancelled. No explanation was given and only later did the rest of the expedition learn of the Lhasa Uprising and the chaos in Tibet. China would extend another invitation to the Soviet climbers for the spring of 1960 but by then relations between Mao and Khrushchev were souring. Compounding the blow, that spring, the Chinese reported they had climbed Everest on their own.

According to their account, they struggled for hours to overcome the

vertical cliff of the Second Step, the climber Qu Yinhua even taking off his boots and socks to try, all to no avail.

What was to be done? Turn back like the British climbers had done before? No! Certainly not! The whole Chinese people and the Party were watching us. The moment we thought of the big send-off we got at the Base Camp with the beating gongs and drums and loud cheers, the solemn pledge we had taken before we started out, and the national flag and the plaster bust of Chairman Mao which we took along, we felt all powerful again.

Qu, still barefoot, stood on the shoulders of his companion Liu Lianman, banged in a piton and hauled himself up, pulling his three companions after him. Liu, now exhausted, remained behind while Qu continued on with Wang Fuzhou and a Tibetan called Gonbu leading the way into the gathering dark. It would take another eleven hours to reach the summit, at 4.20 a.m. on 25 May. There were no photographs – it was still dark – and the Maoist rhetoric, praising ‘the unrivalled superiority of the socialist system of our country’ (as opposed to that of the Soviet Union), undermined the plausibility of official accounts; their former Russian climbing partners wouldn’t believe it. The frostbite was real enough, though: Qu lost all his toes and six of his fingers. He received a hero’s welcome in Beijing. Thirty years later, when the former Soviet climber Evgeny Gippenreiter met Gonbu, by then a sport official in the Tibet Autonomous Region, any lingering scepticism was gone.

In March 1960, as Chinese and Tibetan climbers were beginning their

climb on Everest, B P Koirala travelled to Beijing for talks about the border and China’s claim on what the Nepalis regarded as their territory. The Chinese were reasonably sympathetic. Both sides agreed they would not allow troops within twenty kilometres of the border and a boundary agreement was signed that was mutually acceptable. Mao had not shown much concern about where the border ran, except when it came to Everest. Mao wanted the summit to be common ground, ‘a friendship summit’, but Koirala demurred, claiming the whole mountain for Nepal. Mao pointed out that Nepal didn’t even have a name for Everest. In fact, a Nepali name did exist: Sagarmatha, meaning ‘one whose brow touches the sky’. The name had been offered to the world in 1939 by the historian Baburam Acharya, who wrote an article for the Nepali paper Sharada explaining that he had consulted various locals and porters. That story was a fig leaf; Sagarmatha is a deeply Sanskrit term and one coined to annoy the Ranas, which it did, as being anti-British. Koirala struggled to recall the name ‘Sagarmatha’, so pointed out to Mao that the Chinese didn’t have a name either, since ‘Chomolungma’ was Tibetan. Mao said: ‘Tibet is China.’ In the end, Mao and Koirala agreed to split the mountain down the middle, although Koirala kept this news to himself when he returned to Kathmandu, knowing it would be unpopular. Only when Zhou Enlai returned the visit a few weeks later did the agreement to split Everest become clear. Soon after Zhou’s visit came the news that Chinese climbers had reached the summit, infuriating Koirala: it was clear that even before negotiations were complete China had pressed ahead. In a news briefing, Koirala tried to reverse his position and claim the whole mountain for Nepal but it was too late. The new reality – that China could and would do as it pleased – was unanswerable, stoking fears of Chinese hegemony.

Then, a few weeks later at the end of June, the Indian military radio post

in Mustang, part of the network of such stations that Nehru had demanded from Nepal after independence, sent a message from the local raja that a large group of Chinese troops was gathering across the border. China’s ambassador in Delhi told the Nepali military they were on the hunt for Tibetan rebels. The Nepali officer attached to the Indian radio post sent an unarmed patrol, out of uniform, to assess the situation; a soldier was shot dead by Chinese troops and Kathmandu erupted in nationalistic anger.

*

These two events, the expedition to Everest and the fatal shooting in Mustang, coming as they did within weeks of each other, became linked in the minds of several historians. Was it simply coincidence or were they part of a pattern illustrating China’s ability to control Nepal’s borders as it saw fit? (‘You cry murder even when we do nothing,’ Mao had told Koirala, ‘and no one believes our protestations. Everybody prefers to believe you, the smaller states.’) Koirala responded to the crisis with calm authority, impressing the British ambassador with his leadership, while at the same time milking the situation for any political advantage over his opponents, the nationalist Gorkha Parishad party and the communists, who tended to side with China. Koirala had been regularly accused of being weak in foreign affairs, so his strong performance now was welcomed. In assessing Nepal’s situation that year, the Foreign Office concluded: ‘There is little doubt that this Government represents Nepal’s best hope for the future.’ Koirala’s administration certainly had its problems – a level of corruption, splits in his party and threats to public order – but Koirala had shown ‘a welcome determination to tackle the difficult problems with which they are faced’. Unfortunately, his government proved short-lived. Koirala met regularly with Mahendra, who had a fascination with his prime minister’s popularity as well as a fear of his agenda. ‘Once,’ Koirala wrote,

the king asked me to explain my aspiration. I told him they were to provide a standard of middle-class living, such as that of my family,

for all the people. ‘How long will that take?’ he asked, and I replied that it would require me to win elections three times, and that I would work towards that.

Mahendra didn’t give him the chance: in December 1960, only months after the shooting in Mustang, he had Koirala and his cabinet arrested, chopping down Nepal’s democracy before it had spread its leaves.

Koirala, back in a prison cell, couldn’t complain he hadn’t been warned.

In the early 1950s Mahendra had fallen out with his father Tribhuvan over whom to marry after the death of his first wife Indra. (This was more like a squabble between brothers than between father and son since both Mahendra’s parents were only thirteen when he was born.) Indra had been a granddaughter of Juddha Shamsher, the autocratic maharaja who had done his best to smash political opposition and humiliate Tribhuvan into the bargain. Rather than choose, say, a royal princess from India’s former princely states as his new wife, Mahendra chose to marry Indra’s sister Ratna. He was aligning himself once more with the influential Rana dynasty from which Tribhuvan had wrested control of the country and which still dominated the army. Tribhuvan knew what this meant and refused to attend the wedding, so Mahendra had sent B P Koirala to persuade him. Tribhuvan was having none of it, telling Koirala that the royal family should sever all links with the Ranas. Later, when Koirala had left, Tribhuvan warned those around him: ‘mark my words this crown prince will make you all sob; he will make you weep. I know him, and he will make you weep.’

In the weeks before he ousted Koirala, Mahendra had been in Britain. He

and Queen Ratna stayed at Buckingham Palace for a lavish four-day state visit and then toured the country on Queen Elizabeth’s royal train. His son Birendra, the fifteen-year-old crown prince, then at Eton, was given leave to accompany him. There were aircraft factories to inspect and agricultural centres, but the highlight was a visit to Oxford. Mahendra was angling for an honorary degree just like the one Chandra Shamsher had been given half a century before. Alas, Oxford was no longer so pliable and there was no Lord Curzon as chancellor to square things. To rub salt in the wound, the university invited Mahendra to inspect the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts Chandra had donated to the Bodleian Library and then take tea with Chandra’s great-grandson Pashupati Shamsher. The Foreign Office thought this would be nice, since Pashupati and Queen Ratna were cousins, but there was a sour rivalry between the descendants of the two brothers Chandra and Juddha. (This rivalry would prove toxic. In June 2001, when the crown prince Dipendra massacred ten of his family, including his father Birendra and his mother Aishwarya, ordinary Nepalis knew the history: Aishwarya was a granddaughter of Juddha while Dipendra’s girlfriend Devyani, whom he wanted to marry, was the daughter of Pashupati and thus a descendant of Chandra.)

Just before he left London in early November 1960, Mahendra had lunch

at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister Harold Macmillan, at Queen Elizabeth’s personal request. If Mahendra offered any clue to what he was planning when he got home there is no recorded hint of it. Those Nepali politicians he confided in warned Mahendra he might face a backlash from abroad; he should at least delay in case his grab for power jeopardised Queen Elizabeth’s return visit planned for late February. As things turned out, almost no one, at home or abroad, turned a hair. The Nepali writer C K Lal noted how

Not a dog barked in Kathmandu when Prime Minister B P Koirala, commanding a two-third majority in the parliament, was whisked away by the military from a public program of the youth wing of his party in the centre of the city.

The British were indifferent. Harold Macmillan loftily waved away concerns about Her Majesty visiting a king who had recently locked up a competent democratic government.

Queen Elizabeth’s four-day visit was one of the first big stories Liz

Hawley covered. Looking for a local human-interest angle, she wrote about a heavily pregnant Sherpa woman who had walked from Khumbu to Kathmandu to see the queen; she had stopped for a couple of hours along the way to give birth. (It was a boy, named Philip, after the Duke of Edinburgh.) Having made such a success of Mahendra’s coronation, it was left to Boris Lissanevitch of the Royal Hotel to manage things: the horse-drawn carriages, the picnics and parades, and the tiger hunt. The latter involved more than three hundred elephants – ‘nobody thought on the same scale as Boris’ – which raised their trunks in salute one by one as the queen departed. Prince Philip, soon to become a founder member of the World Wide Fund for Nature, got round the expectation that he would personally kill a tiger by feigning a trigger-finger injury. (That didn’t stop his aide Rear Admiral Christopher Bonham-Carter from bagging one, the foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home having missed twice.) Newsreels showed Mahendra in his trademark dark sunglasses, like a despotic Roy Orbison, greeting the young queen; narrators revelled in the exotic clichés of Kathmandu – ‘crossroads of Asia’, ‘land of contrasts’ – but failed to mention how the vast crowds had so recently been denied their government. Newsreels showed the queen cruising in an open-top limousine through the fresh, unpolluted streets of Kathmandu waving at thousands of recently disenfranchised voters.

The people of Nepal had not forgotten their brief taste of democracy. If

opposition to Mahendra’s coup had been muted, it soon began to build. As the US ambassador Henry Stebbins pointed out, in getting rid of B P Koirala and the Nepali Congress, Mahendra had ‘created a new set of problems’ and had no real idea about how he might solve them. In October 1961, Mahendra was in China to sign the completed border agreement that Koirala had negotiated. Mahendra had a reputation for playing his vast neighbours off against each other, a policy he dubbed ‘positive neutralism’, but he went out of his way to avoid saying anything that might annoy the Indians further. Then, right at the end of the visit, Mahendra found himself bounced into agreeing to China’s request to link Kathmandu and Tibet with a motor road: no road, no border agreement. If this was ‘positive neutralism’, Delhi didn’t much like it. That same month an armed insurgency against Mahendra’s regime was launched from inside India, formed from Nepali opposition parties that had joined forces to restore democracy. Mahendra was already contemplating compromise when India began an unofficial economic blockade in late September. He told his advisers he was prepared to release B P Koirala; they told him to wait for a couple of weeks.

Lucky Mahendra. On 20 October 1962 China launched its full military

offensive on India’s borders and in the aftermath of India’s humiliation, Nehru suddenly needed a compliant Nepal. He switched off the insurgency and ended the blockade. Mahendra was free to promulgate his new constitution based on the ancient South Asian Panchayat system, ‘the assembly of five’: a system that left him entirely in control. Indian aid continued to flow into the country. B P was left to rot in jail.

To keep the Americans sweet, Mahendra burnished his anti-communist

credentials by allowing Tibet’s resistance fighters to maintain their base in Mustang, even travelling by helicopter to meet their leader Baba Yeshi. Kennedy reciprocated by making Nepal one of the first countries to receive Peace Corps workers. But while Chushi Gandruk managed a handful of raids inside Tibet, they were never enough of a threat to rupture Nepali relations with China. In early 1964, the New York Times reported that twelve thousand ‘Nepalese farmhands’ were hard at work carving out the Nepali side of the road to Lhasa, backed with Chinese money and expertise. There were two traditional trade routes through the Himalaya from Kathmandu, one up the Trisuli valley and through Kyirong, the other to the east, up the Bhote Kosi to the village of Kodari. When China asked Mahendra which of these they should survey, he chose the Bhote Kosi route, since the country was more difficult and the road would take longer to build. Chinese engineers moved at lightning speed, finishing their side of the road by 1963. Vehicles were using the road later that year and the whole of it was fully operational by the spring of 1967.

For the rest of his reign, which ended unexpectedly in early 1972 with a

fatal heart attack, Mahendra was able to feed off the residual tension created by China’s move against India. By 1968 he was confident enough of his position to release B P Koirala and his ally Ganesh Man Singh from prison, although B P soon escaped into exile when his political campaigning went too far. Mahendra’s son Birendra was a milder king: his Nepal was a ‘zone of peace’, a gentler version of

‘positive neutrality’. That didn’t save his kingdom from the shifting

tectonic plates of geopolitics. In 1972 President Nixon went to China to meet Mao and restore relations between their two countries. American support for Tibet was turned off like a tap. The following year, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into Sikkim, at the invitation of the ethnically Nepali prime minister, to quell a rebellion there; the semi-independent kingdom was swallowed whole. The three-century rule of the chogyal, Sikkim’s Tibetan monarchy that had once enraged the British Raj by capturing Joseph Hooker, was ended. Neighbouring dynasties in Bhutan and Nepal took careful note. Soon after, in June 1975, India itself was plunged into its own autocratic darkness, with Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency, which allowed her to rule by decree and saw widespread human rights abuses. Dissidents like B P Koirala found they were no longer welcome, and he was forced to return to Kathmandu and face arrest.

Despite such setbacks, Nepal’s course was a steady if slow return to

democracy. Rapid population growth was filling the country with young people eager for change. The convulsive events of 1989, when Eastern Europe shrugged off decades of Soviet repression, galvanised Nepali opposition to the Panchayat rule imposed by Mahendra. Facing an Indian economic blockade and an irresistible popular uprising, the jana andolan, or ‘people’s movement’, Birendra agreed to restore multi-party democracy. By then B P Koirala had been dead for eight years.

Liz Hawley was a great admirer of B P: ‘one of the few remarkable men

that we had in Nepal and one political leader who stuck to his beliefs’. In Liz’s eyes, the lost opportunity of his 1959 government cast a long shadow over the democratic administrations of the 1990s, which saw the Nepali Congress and various communist factions mired in infighting and corruption; frustration among Nepal’s poorest communities grew. In 1996, a small splinter group of Maoist political leaders began a People’s War, using Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare as its textbook. Nepal’s leaders, political and military, stewed together unhappily in the introverted bowl of the Kathmandu valley as the Maoists spread their influence over the rest of the country. The crown prince’s massacre of his family in 2001 seemed symptomatic of a nation being hollowed out from the inside. The new king, Birendra’s brother Gyanendra, was much more like Mahendra. In 2005, he repeated his father’s bold decision to take power away from democratically elected politicians and faced a similar backlash. This time there was no international crisis to save him. When Gyanendra returned power to Nepal’s politicians, among them B P’s younger brother Girija Prasad ‘G P’ Koirala, they had the backing of the people to do away with the monarchy altogether. Mahendra might have got away with betraying democracy; his dynasty did not.

*

As well as stringing for Time Inc. and then Reuters, Liz had made ends meet working in Nepal’s embryonic tourist industry, doing administrative tasks for an ex-Gurkha called Jimmy Roberts, sometimes called the father of the trekking industry, and his company Mountain Travel. Both of them had a reputation for being at once shy and rather waspish, but she learned a great deal from him about recent mountaineering history. She did a similar job for John Coapman, the burly, charismatic, unreliable and widely disliked founder of the Tiger Tops wildlife lodge in western Nepal, modelled on African safari camps and their equivalents in India established after the Great War by the big-game hunter turned naturalist Jim Corbett. Coapman had bonded with Mahendra over big-game hunting and been with the king when he suffered his fatal heart attack. Foreigners couldn’t get far working in tourism without some kind of royal patronage. The 1960s was when Nepal’s tourism industry really caught fire and Liz had been a shrewd witness to it all. She was there when the first jetliner landed in 1967, watched the hippies come and go: the Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert tripping on mescaline, learning to ‘be here now’, the title of his book; Cat Stevens smoking hash at the Cabin Restaurant and writing three albums’ worth of material. She was there for the boom in adventure travel that followed, enduring the huge and sudden growth of the city that buried its gem-like temple squares in concrete and tangles of telephone wires.

Although Liz had tried to learn Nepali when she first arrived, she

concluded that anyone she needed to speak to already spoke English. She was certainly well connected to the elite, the royals and Ranas she met at the Royal Hotel, where she quickly became part of the scene around Boris Lissanevitch. Her introduction to the mountaineering world came on her first New Year’s Eve in Kathmandu when she met Ed Hillary for the first time. Two years earlier, almost to the day, Hillary had reached the South Pole in a converted Massey Ferguson tractor, the third party to do so after Amundsen and Scott, ignoring the furious demands of his expedition leader Vivian Fuchs, approaching from the other side, that he slow down. Hillary’s behaviour, politely ignored in Britain, had earned him a reputation elsewhere for arrogance. The French journalist Raymond Cartier, a columnist at Paris Match, wrote: ‘Few men have come into contact with [Hillary] without having reason to complain of his egocentricity.’

Rather bruised, Hillary had retreated to New Zealand and resumed his

old occupation of beekeeping, until ambition and restlessness drove him from home again. When Liz met him he was in the middle of a landmark medical research expedition based in the Khumbu region of Nepal on the slopes of Ama Dablam. The scientific leader was the physiologist Griffith Pugh, from the 1953 Everest expedition, but Hillary had got crucial funding from a Chicago encyclopaedia company who wanted him to find the yeti. Scouting around the high valleys of Khumbu for mythical beasts, he had visited the desperate refugee camp below the village of Thami sheltering thousands of Tibetans who had fled the Lhasa Uprising and the security crackdown that followed. Back in Kathmandu he was helping a Swiss pilot deliver relief aid to the refugees; in return the pilot had promised to fly in materials for a school building in the village of Khumjung. The idea of helping the Sherpas had come to him sitting around a campfire with his sirdar, or lead porter, Urkein. Hillary had wondered aloud what the future held for the people of Everest. Urkein had told him they suffered from the absence of schooling. ‘Our children have eyes but they cannot see,’ he said. The school was the first project in what would become a lifelong mission for Hillary: the development of Khumbu through the charity he founded, the Himalayan Trust. Liz was one of many friends he brought in as collaborators and as the years passed they developed a strong bond. When Hillary’s first wife Louise and their daughter Belinda were killed in an air crash at the end of May 1975, it was Liz who flew to where Hillary was working in the mountains to give him the news.

It was her friendship with Hillary that also sparked her interest in

mountaineering as a subject. Politics had featured heavily in foreign news coverage of the Himalaya in the post-war period, with China’s occupation of Tibet and the postcolonial optimism of Indian independence. By the 1960s that interest was fading; adventure was a much easier sell to editors than confusing local politics, especially with the Americans trying Everest in 1963. But there wasn’t much to report after their success, at least not for a while, not least because in March 1965, a few days before an official visit by China’s foreign minister Chen Yi, Nepal announced a ban on climbing that lasted for the next four years.

Why they did so is not altogether certain. A Chinese engineer working on

the Friendship Highway to Lhasa had recently defected to Taiwan, claiming the road’s Nepali bridges were designed to bear the weight of Chinese tanks. Tensions were also high in Kashmir as India and Pakistan drifted towards war. A more likely reason was an unauthorised television documentary shot in 1964 focusing on a group of fighters based in Tsum in Nepal, not far from the main force of four thousand in Mustang. The man responsible was George Patterson, a Scottish missionary dedicated for many years to the cause of Tibet, who reported on the Lhasa Uprising for the Daily Telegraph. By the mid 1960s he was a well-respected journalist based in Hong Kong and in 1964 he travelled to Nepal with a film crew to meet the Tibetan rebels based there, persuading a small group of Tibetan resistance fighters based in the Tsum valley to mount a raid on Chinese forces for Patterson to document. Once the footage was safely out of Nepal, he had confessed all to the British ambassador, Antony Duff, a former submarine captain and later head of the British intelligence service MI5. He in turn passed the news to Mahendra. Up until that point, Nepal’s government had chosen to deny the presence of the Tibetan fighters and China had chosen to believe it. Mahendra now warned Duff the film would be ‘a big headache for us and for you’. Although the documentary itself wouldn’t be aired until 1966, Patterson published an article shortly before China’s Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, was due to visit Kathmandu, describing what had happened, which was quickly picked up by Indian newspapers. It seems likely Mahendra imposed the mountaineering ban to placate China and prevent anything similar recurring.

When mountaineering did resume in 1969 a new generation of climbers

arrived, with new ideas and huge ambitions: Reinhold Messner, Chris Bonington and the charismatic Polish expedition leader Andrzej Zawada, whose team were first to climb Everest in winter. These were the sorts of mountaineers Liz admired, larger than life, the kinds of people who could dominate a press conference. Under the force of these personalities, her record of mountaineering in the region gathered momentum, becoming a database of human achievement, suffering and loss unparalleled in the history of adventure. It occurred to me soon after meeting Liz for the first time in the mid 1990s that, having arrived in 1960 at the tail end of the fashionable, moneyed era of Nepali tourism, she now found herself in a less attractive, more demotic age. She seemed a little bored with it all. Commercial expeditions, with paying clients on familiar routes, were becoming more and more common and there wasn’t so much juice there. Her wry sense of humour and the integrity of her record keeping kept her going. Given the often self-admiring but brittle nature of elite mountaineers, I took her lack of personal interest as a positive advantage. She could be imperious and beady, staring impatiently over the frames of her glasses. It was no surprise to discover her accountant grandfather had been part of the fight against organised crime in Chicago in the 1930s.

Liz was laughing when the phone rang. We’d been talking about the

assault of three European climbers the year before at camp two on Everest, among them the Swiss Ueli Steck, then one of the stars of world mountaineering. When a team of Sherpas fixing ropes had kicked ice onto them, Steck’s Italian companion Simone Moro had called them ‘motherfuckers’ in Nepali. The cell-phone footage of Sherpas striking a European climber had gone round the world. Liz rolled her eyes and then struggled to her feet to get the phone. I half-listened to the conversation at first, and then more keenly. ‘Eleven dead,’ she said. Then: ‘At least eleven.’ In fact the number was sixteen: sixteen high-altitude workers, most of them Sherpa, buried in ice that had fallen from high on the shoulder of Everest as they carried loads to camp two in Everest’s Western Cwm. In all her long career this was the worst climbing disaster Liz had ever encountered. An hour later, once Liz had generously shared all she’d learned, I left to organise a flight to Lukla, the closest airport to Everest, for the following morning and start the trek to base camp. That was the last time I saw her.

Five days later I was at Everest, much too quickly for an unacclimatised journalist with a story to write. Nursing a headache, I took in the sprawling village of tents staked out on the shifting ice of the Khumbu glacier. Each time I returned to Khumbu I was amazed at the changes tourism had brought. In 1964, the psychologist Jim Lester, who had done fieldwork during the American Everest expedition the year before, had spotted the first advertisement Jimmy Roberts had run for his new trekking business. He mentioned it in a letter to the American mountaineer and writer James Ramsey Ullman, who had covered the climb for National Geographic. ‘All the jokes we made about the lemonade concession at Namche etc etc, may yet turn out to be prophetic.’ And how. Namche Bazar, the largest town in Khumbu, now has an Irish pub and a German bakery serving the sixty thousand or so trekkers who now pass through each year. Cell-phone reception at base camp is better than many mountain towns in Britain or the United States. Helicopters were coming and going with astonishing frequency, ferrying climbers back to Kathmandu over country that had once taken weeks to traverse. Huge mule trains clog the trails, bringing food supplies for the tourist lodges, creating another waste problem that adds to the environmental pressure.

The narrative the year before, when the fight on Everest had been

reported, was either that arrogant Westerners had abused Sherpas or that Sherpas had lost their cheerful naïvety in a rush for business. (The businessman Tashi Sherpa, who owns a famous clothing brand named Sherpa, employing fourteen hundred local Nepalis, mostly women, snorted at that one: ‘Do you still want the Sherpas to be the same, uneducated, simple folk? No. We want our children to be educated, to go out into the world.’) This year it was simpler: the selfish ambition of pampered foreign climbers, ‘blithe cretins’ as one British columnist put it, had cost sixteen fathers and sons their lives. The same columnist also claimed that Everest was becoming more dangerous for Sherpas. This wasn’t quite true. Liz Hawley’s statistics, tabulated with Richard Salisbury, showed that since 1950 the death rate among high-altitude workers in the dangerous Icefall had more than halved. Yet it was absolutely the case that local staff, mostly Sherpas, faced a much higher risk than foreign clients, who make very few trips through this dangerous terrain. It seemed grotesque that men and occasionally women should risk their lives in this way to meet the overambitious aspirations of foreigners, who mostly couldn’t cope without their support.

It was a confused scene at base camp, as you would expect following a

tragedy of that scale. I had watched footage of a spreadeagled body slung beneath a helicopter being flown out of the Icefall, like a darker version of the opening scene in La Dolce Vita. Groups of Sherpas hung around looking angry or bereft; many foreign climbers were deeply sympathetic while a few wondered if they would still get a chance to climb. Most had spent many tens of thousands of dollars to get there. There had been demonstrations and even a few threats of violence against any Sherpa continuing with the climbing season, threats that were exaggerated in the media but passed around base camp by those reading news online. Some climbers were shocked at this, still believing in the romantic portrayal of Sherpa culture they had read in books by their heroes.

Change had come quickly to Khumbu. Tashi Sherpa’s grandfather

Gyalzen recalled in later life how before the expeditions began most of them led lives of extreme poverty. ‘There were few houses. Most Sherpas worked as coolies transporting loads for the few rich traders that lived here. The expeditions changed that.’ Ed Hillary’s schools, the boom in tourism and the soaring value of real estate in Khumbu gave the Sherpas who were born there an opportunity they took with both hands. The Austrian-born Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was the first anthropologist to visit Khumbu in 1953 and got to know the important village of Khumjung well. He returned in the 1980s to research a second study he called The Sherpas Transformed. By then the closure of the Tibetan border had wholly disrupted ancient trading patterns and the economy was now driven by tourism. Revisiting every house in Khumjung, he tracked how pervasive trekking and climbing work had become. The rate of change only accelerated after that and Khumbu experienced a construction boom. Sherpas used the cash from climbing to build trekking lodges or open restaurants. The next generation went to private schools in Kathmandu and to college in Australia or the United States. This generation chose to live in Kathmandu for much of the year, or else migrated abroad. There are now as many Sherpas in New York City as Khumbu.

Media coverage of Everest leaves an impression that climbing is all

Sherpas do, but for most of them, Everest had simply been a spring-board for their kids to do something safer: becoming businesspeople, pilots or doctors. They don’t have to farm their fields any more: they can use migrant labour to do that, providing fresh food for their trekking lodges. In the late 2000s, following Nepal’s civil war – when Maoists were busy pulling down statues of the old Shah royal dynasty – tourism began to recover and has since been booming. Sherpas comprise just half of one per cent of the Nepali population but their economic impact has grown out of all proportion to their numbers. Namche Bazar is among the very wealthiest parts of the whole country, despite not having a road. Yet for every pilot or doctor, there are still a hundred more Sherpas, not born on the trekking route to Everest, desperate to get their foot on the first rung of the tourism ladder, even if that ladder is bridging a crevasse.

Out of the confusion at base camp, two themes emerged that I soon

realised applied across much of the Himalaya and not just to this small group living in the shadow of Everest, and not only now but through history. Western media tended to focus on the rich people who pay for the Everest industry but paid little attention to what was in effect an industrial accident. Much more could have been done to keep workers safe. Some victims recovered from the Icefall were found to have been carrying loads far above the legal limit. Some weren’t sufficiently trained to deal with the challenges of the job. It isn’t hard to imagine the panic, struggling under a monstrous weight, hearing the ice crack and the rumble above your head, the rush of adrenalin, and all this for twenty dollars a day. Yet those asking high-altitude workers to carry more than they should or accept more danger than necessary were Nepali, not foreigners. The Nepali regulatory system is weak and riddled with corruption, which is as true for construction workers or truck drivers as those working on Everest. A week after the accident in the Icefall, another sixteen men were buried, this time in a landslide at a hydropower construction site north-east of the tourist town of Pokhara. This time there was a happier outcome: thirteen men, including three Chinese engineers, survived. But police had to cordon off the site when the families of the dead and injured staged a protest demanding compensation. Unions called on the government to punish construction companies not following the law: the same case could have been made on Everest. It was a cruel irony that Dorje Khatri, one of the most effective and honest union leaders in the trekking and climbing industry, was killed on Everest that day.

For centuries, lack of opportunity had driven Nepalis abroad to look for

work, as soldiers, porters, tea-garden workers and labourers. The rapid growth of Darjeeling was predicated on their labour. Not much has changed in the twenty-first century. Population growth and a stagnant manufacturing sector means there’s a ready supply of people. In the decade before 2018 the Nepali government issued three and a half million permits for its citizens to go abroad to work. That’s around ten per cent of the population. The remittances these workers send home make up a third of Nepal’s economy; half of the population of Nepal relies on them. Foreigners often assume tourism is Nepal’s most important industry but it accounts for only 4.3 per cent of the nation’s economy, well below the world average of 5.2, a minnow compared to migrant labour. Indeed, one of the few areas to see rapid growth within Nepal is the banking sector, thanks to all that cash flowing into the country. But migrant labour has been tainted with corruption, since ordinary Nepalis are often desperate to get the necessary papers. Nor have politicians always stood up for the interests of its citizens abroad, since the nation’s economy is at stake. The deaths of Nepali migrant workers building stadia for football’s world cup in Qatar in 2022 have attracted headlines, but those workers are at risk wherever they go because they are seen as less powerful than migrants from elsewhere. As a Nepali friend told me when I got back to Kathmandu: ‘Forget Everest, there are three body bags a day arriving back at the airport. People should write about that.’ I assumed by ‘people’ he meant me.

Something else struck me about the protests on Everest that spring,

something harder to analyse or define but which sprang from a combination of identity and sovereignty. Put simply, I was left with a question: who owns Everest? In 1960 B P Koirala and Mao Zedong had discussed this issue, Koirala claiming the whole mountain for Nepal, Mao archly pointing out that Nepal didn’t even know what to call it. The people living either side of the mountain, more or less the same in terms of language and culture, weren’t invited to that meeting. Now, more than fifty years later, Sherpas were expressing their anger that while the government in Kathmandu collected millions of dollars in tax revenues, it was Sherpas taking the risks. A government minister was flown in, breathing bottled oxygen to keep him upright, as he nervously reassured protestors their grievances would be answered; the Sherpas looked at him sceptically. They had heard it all before.

A quarter of a century earlier, shortly before the Maoist rebellion began

in 1996, a leading Nepali journalist had told me how encouraged he felt that Nepal had not split along ethnic lines. Yet as they whipped up support for their insurgency, the Maoists had zeroed in precisely on ethnic differences, hoping they could energise the grievances of minorities, the so-called janjati groups, like Tamang and Rai, and those on the plains like the Tharu and Madhesi, people marginalised by the Brahmin–Chhetri majority of the middle hills who continue to dominate the government. Over the course of the civil war, the expectations of these minority groups had been raised and then disappointed as the Maoists failed to deliver on their promises. Their leaders proved no less corrupt than other Nepali politicians. Having been the largest party at elections held in 2008, the first since the declaration of the republic, they sank to third at the next vote in 2013. The concerns of minorities, however, were not going away; the idea of identity, as in so much of the world, had become a potent factor in Nepal’s febrile political discourse. It was a great irony that one of those at Everest base camp in the spring of 2014 taking political advantage of the tragedy was Prakash Dahal, son of the Maoist guerrilla leader and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. Here was the chance for a few populist headlines to remind voters that the Maoists still cared about ethnic rights.

Many Westerners thought it sad that Everest, a symbol of our shared

humanity, a physical challenge to the boundaries of our minds, should have been mired in this way, struggling under a weight of human excrement, both real and metaphorical. Life on the roof of the world had once seemed above all that kind of confusion and mess, a better place where we could find ourselves. The familiar welcoming smiles on the faces of local people had been replaced by angry scowls. There was, however, another perspective on the Sherpa protests that spring: they reminded the world that although empires and distant populations had often treated its peoples with indifference or hostility, the Himalaya is a real place with its own history and cultures. Look where we come from, the Sherpas seemed to be saying from their place in the mountains: see what made us.

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