by Ted Riccardi
The Farouk gang soon abandoned Kashmir, for so horrible had their depredations become that the Company deputed a military detachment to Kashmir to apprehend them. Farouk and his gang fled into the mountains, and nothing was heard of them. I waited in Kashmir for news of them, but the gang seemed to have disappeared into thin air. The military detachment remained and seemed to have so frightened the gang that their activities ceased almost entirely.
After almost a year of waiting, I decided to accompany my Kashmiri friends on a trip to Lhasa. By now I spoke some Kashmiri in addition to Persian and could travel unobtrusively. The route was the usual one from Shrinagar and we reached Lhasa without difficulty. I became immediately at home with the Tibetans and their country. I left Lhasa often to travel in the distant corners of the country, spending weeks with yak and sheep herders in Amdo and Kham. When it came time for our caravan to return, I decided to remain. Bidding good-bye to my Kashmiri friends, I stayed behind and continued my solitary travels. Eventually, I made my resting place in Amdo, in a small village where I was welcomed most warmly. I lived with a certain Gyerong and his family. Gyerong was only two years older than I, but he had a wife and three small children. Through the years that passed, Gyerong and I became almost inseparable.
It was after five years of living in this way among the Tibetans that I decided to return to India. By now, my life had become so thoroughly Tibetan that I felt little connection with my past life, but the revenge I had promised myself for my father’s death still haunted me. One day, I told Gyerong of my obsession, and he became the only one who knew my dark desire. He cautioned me and urged me to give up the idea, for it was an unworthy goal. To kill, he said, was against Buddhist doctrine. I tried to remove the desire from my heart, but my obsession would not leave me. I decided to return to Lhasa and there to decide my next move. Before I left, Gyerong gave me a knife with a golden handle as a token of our friendship. He said that the knife had been handed down for many years from friend to friend. The knife, as far as he knew, had never been used in anger or violence, and despite its fierce nature as a weapon, it had often had the effect of calming the anger of its possessor. I took it and thanked him profusely, but I felt no calming effect from its presence.
When I reached Lhasa, I learned that the Farouk gang had reappeared. A caravan of merchants on its way to the city had been attacked. The gang had fled Indian territory with a British detachment in hot pursuit, but they had outpaced the soldiers and made it to safety in Tibetan territory. It was reported that they had made their camp near the ancient city of Guge.
I decided to leave Lhasa at once for Guge, for I felt that fate was leading me to my goal. I joined a caravan going west. The leader of this group was a wealthy Ladakhi merchant, who, unwilling to take any risks, had hired for the journey a heavily armed escort, consisting mainly of retired soldiers from eastern Tibet. We encountered no difficulty at the outset, and five days into our trip we camped near Guge, to the south of the town. The attack came swiftly. Thinking us to be another barely armed caravan, the thieves fired a volley of warning shots and did little to hide their positions. They appeared together in front of our group, demanding that we surrender to them. Farouk himself sat proudly on horseback. Our riflemen, ready for any such contingency, wasted no time in opening fire, and the first shots took their toll. The thieves were taken completely by surprise and tried to flee, but most of them were gunned down. Farouk himself fell from his horse during the first few minutes of the battle. He staggered about, trying to rally his men, but to no avail. I raced towards him, my only weapon the gold knife. I grabbed him and there ensued a fierce struggle between us. Despite his wounds, Farouk was still extremely powerful, and it was only the strength of my obsession that enabled me to overwhelm him. I plunged the knife into his heart, and with a terrible groan, he fell and passed from this existence.
I myself must have blacked out after the struggle, for when I became conscious I found that I lay amid the dead, the only person alive. The caravan had scattered, and I was alone. Farouk’s body was next to me, and his eyes stared at me in the evening darkness, his face a mixture of mockery and pain. What had I done? I had killed a man in revenge, but he still looked at me defiantly. At the time of his death he had no idea who I was, and would have laughed had he known. I tried to console myself with the notion that I had rid the world of a great fiend. But as the night fell, I became filled with strange feelings of emptiness and the utter futility of the obsession that had led to pointless hatred that had drained me for so many of the years of my youth.
I fell into a deep sleep, and when I awoke in the morning, my mind was clearer than it had been since my father had died. Farouk was now only a decaying corpse. I left the knife in his chest for someone else to remove. I decided not to return to the world of my youth ever again, not to India, or Persia, or Europe. I would remain in Tibet for the rest of my life. Clement Moorcroft, whose existence had faded so much during the last ten years, was now no more. I placed my identification papers inside the coat of a badly disfigured thief who was about my height, and, turning east, I walked towards Lhasa, to begin anew my Tibetan existence.
It was a long and lonely walk. Upon my arrival there, I learned casually in the market place of the reported death of a young Englishman named Clement Moorcroft. His body and papers had been found by a group of Lhasa traders led by a merchant named Dharma Ratna, who came from Katmandu. Except for the gold knife, which eventually was returned to me, he turned everything over to Colonel Gillespie, the leader of the British military detachment that had chased the Farouk gang into Tibet. Gillespie had all the dead buried there at the sight of the tragedy. I returned to Amdo and the only people who knew of my former existence.
I had been gone only a month, but terrible changes had taken place. An epidemic of cholera had wiped out most of the village. Gyerong, my friend, was dead. Only his wife and one of his children, the boy Pasang, survived. They were weak and close to starvation. It took me several days to bring them back from the brink, but within a week of my careful ministrations they had regained much of their strength, and were out of danger.
Because of my success with Pasang and his mother, I soon found myself treating others who had survived the epidemic. I told the headman of the district of my intention to stay indefinitely, and he welcomed me, saying that I should become the husband of Pasang’s mother. Pasang’s mother and I readily assented to this, since a great affection had developed between us, and I settled down as a family man and sheep herder in Amdo.
For over thirty years I led this life. Pasang grew up into a strong, handsome, young man who became a soldier in the Tibetan army. His mother and I had several children together, but late in our lives she gave birth to a child who reminded us so much of Gyerong that we named him after my dead friend. We called him Tenzing Gyerong. Tenzing was a special child from the first, remarkable in his intelligence and physical precociousness. He was a great gift as I began to near old age.
During the same year as Tenzing’s birth, we learned that the Grand Lama, the so-called Dalai Lama, had died, and the search for his successor had begun.
As the reader may know already, it is the belief of all Tibetans that the soul of the departed lama reappears in the body of another, usually a young child, who must be found and identified. This child then is designated as the new Grand Lama. In this case, the search was an extensive one, but discouragingly difficult for the monks assigned to the task. Time and time again the monks thought that they had found the Grand Lama’s successor only to be disappointed in the last stages of their search. And so several years passed and the Grand Lama’s successor had yet to be found.
One day, three years after the search had begun, the committee of monks appeared in our village. There were three of them, old and senior monks of the Gelugpa sect. They came because they had heard rumors of the very bright child Tenzing who lived somewhere in Amdo. They came to our house and told us immediately of their mission. Tenzing saw them as he
was playing with his friends, and ran towards them, smiling as if in recognition. He suddenly seemed to all of us older than his four years. We went inside together and the interview began. The monks had come with some of the personal possessions of the previous Grand Lama—his quill pen, a small silver bell, a manuscript of the mangalasutra, and a small silver statue of the Tathagata. Tenzing, as if recognising them, said that they were his. Increasingly encouraged by the results of the interview, the monks continued to ply our little son with all manner of questions. He appeared to give adequate answers to all of them. Finally, they asked to see his feet, to see if the infant shoes of the previous lama would fit. The monks looked at us as they took out the velvet slippers and told us that the previous lama had very narrow feet, unlike a Tibetan’s. The senior monk looked at me and said with a smile, “The Tibetan foot is flat on the ground from end to end, and has three equally projecting toes. It is as square as a brick, but look at these shoes. They would never fit such a foot. The previous Grand Lama had what we call ar-ya pu-ta, or the foot of the Aryan, like the Buddha. Let us see if these slippers fit the feet of your son.” Tenzing showed his feet, and the monk slipped the shoes on his feet. They fit perfectly, and at this moment the monks rose as one and bowed to Tenzing, who had passed all the tests. The boy was asked to leave the room, and there ensued a long conversation with his mother and me over the time and circumstances of the child’s birth. The monks then went outside to talk to other villagers and to survey the landscape to see if it fit with what the last Grand Lama had said would be the place of his rebirth. They returned in an hour to tell us that they believed that Tenzing was the next Grand Lama. So sure were they that they would dispense with the usual formalities and ask us to return to Lhasa with them. The ritual and legal authentification of Tenzing as the new Grand Lama in Lhasa took but a short time, so strong was the evidence, and the installation ceremonies took place shortly thereafter.
And so from a small village in Amdo, where I had lived so much of my life, I was transported to the Potala, and to a powerful position within the Tibetan hierarchy as the Grand Lama’s father. The regent appointed to serve during the child’s minority, an old man named Rinchung, died within two years, and I was chosen to succeed him as regent.
By then I was thoroughly familiar with the inner workings of the Tibetan government, and the conflicting desires of monk and layman, of aristocrat, peasant, and nomad. And it was then, too, that the first threats of foreign penetration began to affect the well-being of my adopted country. The British to the south insisted that their merchants be allowed to import the most abhorrent of foreign goods—liquor, opium, and firearms. I was able to block much of this, but the British became increasingly threatening. I began to see in the new overtures from the Russian and Japanese governments the only effective counterweight to British power. I soon realised, however, that the goals of these governments were equally if not far more dangerous to Tibetan interests and to Tibetan independence, for they themselves were anxious to remove British power from Asia and to divide the spoils, including Tibet, between themselves. Only the Chinese were no longer of concern, for despite the presence of the amban in Lhasa, their own growing internal weakness led me to disregard them, except when I found them useful.
I thus found myself in the difficult position of preserving Tibetan independence by avoiding embroilment in the rivalries of the Great Powers. I made a decision early on to educate my son in such a way that he would be aware of these problems when he came of age. In this way, I would leave Tibet with a leader who could act wisely during the great storms of the next century, storms that would sooner or later engulf even Tibet.
The first great crisis of my regency came in 1891. The Grand Lama was still young, and I was already eighty-one. The Russian agent, Dorjiloff, whom I had mistakenly allowed to enter Tibet, had ingratiated himself with a large number of monks, and Yamamoto, an agent of Imperial Japan, had emerged as a powerful influence among an ambitious group of aristocratic Tibetans. They wished to form an alliance with the Japanese to remove China as a political power and to restore Tibetan hegemony over large areas that had been incorporated into eastern China. Considering the political and military power of Tibet at that time, the latter was a silly fantasy, but it so entranced the ruling nobles in Lhasa that I had difficulty at times in reining them in. I had placed trusted associates in positions of authority within the army, including my adopted son Pasang, whom I had sent to Kham to pacify and regularise the border with the Chinese. But rude, pompous, and unaware of the consequences of their actions, some of the leaders of the Tibetan army on their own attacked a group of British merchants who had crossed the border. They had been encouraged in this I later learned by Dorjiloff and Yamamoto. The army’s action violated the treaty of Yarlung, and it not only raised a British protest but brought about a crisis of authority within the Tibetan government. The army officers had acted without my knowledge or permission. I had them immediately arrested and executed for insubordination. To counter Yamamoto’s influence I had Dorjiloff brought in honour to the Potala, where he was installed as a supreme teacher of philosophy. I did this at great risk, for it meant inordinate Russian influence, but it also meant that my agents could watch him more closely. I decided to ignore the British protest until I had successfully dealt with these two agents. I surmised that, despite the seriousness with which the raid on its merchants would be viewed in the English Parliament, the British government would not invade or attack us until the situation had reached a much more serious stage.
In this my supposition proved to be correct. The British were angry, but they temporised and decided to send a mission in the person of William Manning. With his arrival, the situation became very dangerous. When Dorjiloff and Yamamoto learned that the British had sent a diplomatic mission to Lhasa, they were greatly disappointed, for they had hoped for a military attack. They decided to kill Manning, disfigure his body, and announce that Tibet was now in open defiance of the British Government. This would result almost certainly in a British attack on Tibet. Learning of their plot, I had Manning brought to a secret location, where he was put under heavy guard. The house that he was placed in was owned by Pasang, my foster son, and his wife, the princess Pema. Except for these two no one knew Manning’s whereabouts.
Yamamoto and Dorjiloff were foiled for a time, but soon their agents learned where Manning was. Still, his guard was so strong that he was in little danger until events took a disastrous turn. Not long after the news that Pasang, the husband of the princess Pema, had been killed in battle in Kham, Manning confessed to the princess Pema his love for her and proposed marriage. Somehow this avowal became known publicly, and there was a general outcry. Dorjiloff and Yamamoto both came to me to denounce the presence of a British agent in Lhasa and to make sure that I knew that large crowds had gathered around the Jor-Khang to protest the union of a Tibetan woman with an Englishman. I issued a decree of silence, ordering that neither Manning nor anything concerning him could be uttered. I had no choice but to put Manning in a cell in the Potala, where I made sure that he was well cared for. He was kept there for several months, and the memory of his presence began to fade. In the meantime several letters came from the British Government inquiring about him. I ordered that no reply be made to any British demands. Suddenly, however, there appeared in Lhasa another diplomat, this time a Norwegian explorer and naturalist by the name of Hallvard Sigerson, another with a secret mission. I refused to see him formally, but learned that he had come with the specific purpose of finding Manning. It was also clear that this mission would be the last before the British sent a military expedition. I now had two British diplomats to protect from Dorjiloff and Yamamoto.
I decided to act in a way which was filled with danger and risk but if successful, one that could protect Tibet and my own authority as regent. Under no circumstances would I permit the death of William Manning. Indeed, I realised that he must leave Tibet at the earliest opportunity. To get him out of Tibet a
live, however, I had to convince Dorjiloff and Yamamoto that he was dead. I issued a secret communiqué, but one that purposely reached their ears the moment it was issued, that Manning had been tried and sentenced to die by a Tibetan tribunal and that in accordance with Tibetan law he had been sent to the Garden of Punishment. There he would remain until dead. They were informed that they would be allowed to identify his body if they so chose.
I had Manning immediately transported to the Garden and put in the torturous bamboo cage, one of the great horrors of the Tibetan imagination. I had no intention of having him die, however, and after several days, when I was told by my agents that he was beginning to suffer unbearably, I had him removed in the night and Sackville-Grimes, a notorious criminal of London who had found his way to Lhasa, put in his place. Grimes had been mortally wounded in a fight, was near death, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Manning. In my desire to make sure that Dorjiloff and Yamamoto were convinced of the identity of the dead man, I remembered an old piece of clothing belonging to my father, William Moorcroft, that bore the initials WM on its buttons. I had Sackville-Grimes clothed in this coat. Manning was spirited away to a secret location kept by my good friend, the Newar merchant, Gorashar.
But my plans went awry. I was notified during the night that Sackville-Grimes had died. Rastrakoff, the agent of Dorjiloff, had been sent to verify Manning’s death, but had been overpowered and taken prisoner by Sigerson. Sigerson had returned to the house of the princess Pema, where he already held Yamamoto. Although I had good hope of deceiving Yamamoto and Dorjiloff with the dead Sackville-Grimes, I doubted if Sigerson had been fooled, and I had no idea if he would make his discovery public. I decided to act quickly. Dorjiloff, Yamamoto, and Sigerson must leave Tibet at once. I issued immediate orders for their arrests. Dorjiloff was found in his cell in the Potala and was subdued only with a great struggle. Yamamoto, however, had already been turned over to the Chinese amban for his criminal record in Shanghai, and Sigerson had disappeared from his quarters.