Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  On the Tibetan frontier tensions also remained high, with border clashes between Tibetan and British troops leading to open conflict in March 1888 as two thousand British troops were dispatched to repel a Tibetan military intrusion into Sikkim, the second in as many years. In 1890 Britain moved to annex Sikkim, and by the terms of the Anglo-Chinese Treaty, which fixed the boundaries, and the subsequent trade regulations, negotiated in 1893, it was granted the right to establish a trade mart and install a permanent agent at Yatung, in the Chumbi Valley, a verdant sliver of Tibetan territory that runs between Sikkim and Bhutan and had long been the traditional trade route between India and Tibet. Lhasa was party to neither agreement and actively intervened to impede commerce, imposing custom duties on the Chinese at Phari, at the head of the valley, and physically barricading the valley beyond Yatung to keep out the British.

  Curzon inherited the standoff when he became viceroy in 1899 and was not about to accept such an affront to British prestige. Recognizing the futility of dealing with Peking, he sought to open direct relations with Lhasa. Trade was a concern, but by far the greater worry were rumors of growing Russian influence in the Tibetan capital. On May 24, 1899, Curzon wrote to the secretary of state for India at Whitehall in London and stated unequivocally that Russian agents were present in the inner circles of Tibetan government. He had in mind a shadowy figure, Agvan Dorzhiev, a monk from the Buriat region of Mongolia, formally a Russian citizen and an attendant to His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Known to Tibetans as Tsenshab Ngawang Lobzang, Dorzhiev was, in fact, one of seven revered instructors, or tsenshabs, to His Holiness, and highly regarded as a master of dialectics. The British, however, believed that Dorzhiev was dealing arms and engaged in treaty negotiations on behalf of the czar.

  In the autumn of 1899, Curzon sent two official letters to His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, but neither one was opened or acknowledged. The Tibetans had no interest in affirming British trading rights granted by the Chinese in a treaty to which they had not been privy. Curzon took this diplomatic rebuff as an insult to the Crown and vowed in a third and final note to take whatever measures he deemed necessary to secure British commercial interests in Tibet. This direct threat again provoked only silence, which led to further suspicion. A Japanese monk, Ekai Kawaguchi, reported to the British—inaccurately, as it turned out—that the Tibetans were receiving small arms from Russia, and that over two hundred Buriat Mongolian students, presumed acolytes of Dorzhiev’s, were living at monasteries in Tibet, a perfect cover for Russian espionage.

  On October 22, 1900, a telegram reached the Foreign Office in London from St. Petersburg, reporting that Dorzhiev had carried a letter of greeting to the czar from the Dalai Lama. Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, the Russian foreign minister, denied that the monk had any formal diplomatic appointment. The Russian newspapers nevertheless celebrated his arrival, referred to him as an envoy extraordinaire, and reported the manner in which he had charmed the Russian court. Less than a year later, in June 1901, Dorzhiev was back in Russia as the head of a mission of eight prominent Tibetans and was heralded a second time by the press and lavished with gifts from the czar. It appeared to all, most especially the British, that the Dalai Lama was actively seeking Russian support as a foil to the Raj. Rumors were rife of a secret agreement between Russia, China, and Tibet. There was talk of a Russian railroad to Lhasa, of camel caravans delivering Russian rifles by the score to an arsenal in the Tibetan capital rebuilt and garrisoned by Russian Cossacks. It was even said that Dorzhiev’s influence was such that he could personally muster Tibetan armies and order them into battle.

  How much of this was true was uncertain; but any Russian influence in Lhasa was unacceptable to the British. Curzon took it as his duty to “frustrate this little game while there is still time.” The only solution would be an Anglo-Tibetan accord, signed in Lhasa, guaranteeing if not British domination, then at the very least an ongoing neutrality that would deny Tibet to both English and Russian alike.

  In the spring of 1903, Curzon dispatched a representative to London to seek approval for an advance on Lhasa with a military force of twelve hundred rifles. The home government, unwilling to antagonize the Chinese or openly threaten the Russians, sanctioned only a secret trade mission to treat with the Tibetans at Kampa Dzong, a fort and crossroads located less than a day’s ride from the summit of the Serpo La, the 16,900-foot pass that marks Sikkim’s northernmost frontier with Tibet. To lead the diplomatic foray, a chastened Curzon chose an old friend, Francis Younghusband, whom he felt he could trust both to promote his aggressive forward policies and to overcome the dangers and challenges inherent in such an initiative launched into hostile and unknown country.

  SOLDIER, PHILOSOPHER, mystic visionary, and spy, Younghusband was a man of firm will and gentle nature, yet an adventurer and imperialist to the core. Born in 1863 in the foothills of the Himalaya and later schooled in Britain at Clifton, he attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, returning to India in 1882 as a young officer in the King’s Dragoon Guards. In 1886, after several probing expeditions to the Himalaya and reconnaissance work along the Indus and Afghan frontier, he joined a research party destined for Manchuria, intent on rediscovering the Long White Mountain, a sacred peak that had been described two centuries earlier by an itinerant Jesuit priest. After seven months in the field, Younghusband, then aged twenty-five, found himself alone in Peking, obliged to return to India. He elected to walk, becoming the first European to traverse the Gobi Desert, then passed through Kashgar and Yarkand and plunged into the unknown ranges of the Aghil and Karakoram. Crossing the perilous 18,000-foot Muztagh Pass, seeking a route home to Baltistan and Kashmir, he discovered glaciers the size of small countries, and wild rivers running through mountains unlike anything ever before seen by an Englishman, including the fluted northern flank of K2, the second-highest mountain on earth.

  Little more than a year later, promoted to the rank of captain, Younghusband returned to the Karakoram, ostensibly to investigate attacks on trade caravans by Kanjut raiders from Hunza. His real purpose was to explore the passes and rivers leading beyond the mountains, in both the Karakoram and the Pamirs, and track the presence of Russian agents in these most inaccessible border regions of the Raj. His escort included a small party of the 5th Gurkhas commanded by Charles Bruce, who would, like Younghusband himself, figure large in the Everest saga of 1921–24. Their friendship, forged in the strain of the Great Game, would be the driving force that would draw the British to the mountain.

  In the summer of 1891, Younghusband was taken captive by a Cossack patrol and ordered back to India. The confrontation prompted a major diplomatic incident and seared in Younghusband a deep and lasting impression of the seriousness of the Russian menace, a conviction he shared with Curzon, whom he first met in Chitral two years later while serving as political agent. Curzon was then a young member of Parliament, engaged in his own remarkable explorations in India, writing dispatches for the Times of London even as he scouted the defenses of the Raj for any evidence of weakness.

  By the time Curzon, as viceroy, would tap his friend for service in Tibet in 1903, Younghusband was well on his way to becoming the most famous geographer of his age. The youngest person ever elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, recipient of its coveted Founder’s Medal for his explorations in the Pamirs and Karakoram, author already of three of the twenty-six books he would produce over a long and distinguished career, he was described by the press as a “hero of dazzling adventures in hazardous exploration, a writer of noble English, a daring soldier and a great gentleman.” Not to mention a record holder in the hundred-yard dash, a fact not lost on his many young schoolboy admirers.

  ON JUNE 19, 1903, Francis Younghusband, dressed in breeches and gaiters, brown boots, a khaki coat, and a forage cap, left Darjeeling for the sweltering heat and driving monsoon rains of the Teesta Valley, the first stage in the approach march to Tibet. With him as translator was Captain Frederick O�
��Connor, one of the only Tibetan speakers in the British Army. Escorting the party was a force of five hundred sepoys of the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, all veterans of the ferocious fighting that had marked the Relief of Chitral in 1895. At Gangtok, Claude White, political officer of Sikkim, joined the expedition as Chinese translator. Arrogant, opinionated, and deeply resentful of Younghusband’s authority, White ran Sikkim as a personal fiefdom. In his presence, local people removed their hats and prostrated themselves on the ground, foreheads in the mud. Younghusband was not impressed.

  On July 4 Younghusband sent his main force over the Serpo La and into Tibet, while he remained behind, botanizing in the meadows of the Tangu Plain, reading Tennyson, deliberately delaying his arrival until the force was fully established at Kampa Dzong, so that he might arrive with appropriate diplomatic aplomb. He did so on July 18. Flanked by a mounted and armed escort, his oilskins black with rain, he crossed the pass and rode down the side of the Himalaya and onto the open barren plain of Tibet toward Kampa Dzong. There the British encampment, dotted rows of white tents surrounded by barbed wire and entrenchments, lay on a brilliant windswept flat in the shadow of a massive Tibetan fort that dominated the valley.

  Kampa Dzong would be his base for five frustrating months as he waited in vain for Tibetans to send to the table officials of sufficient rank for meaningful negotiations. “Never have I met so obdurate and obstructive a people,” Younghusband confessed. The Tibetans, in fact, had no interest in dialogue, most especially on their own soil. Nothing could occur, they insisted, until the British force retired to the frontier. Under the circumstances, a protracted diplomatic standoff was inevitable: His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had entered into a three-year spiritual retreat, and with his isolation no major decision of state could be made. It was a clash of cultures for which the British were quite unprepared. After weeks of boredom interspersed with flashes of diversion—gazelle hunts and duck shoots, plant collecting and horse races—Younghusband and his men retreated to Sikkim. For the Tibetans it was a Pyrrhic victory: the humiliating loss of face virtually guaranteed that the British would be back in force, and not under the guise of a diplomatic mission.

  When it came, the excuse for war did not do honor to the British. On November 3, 1903, Lord Curzon, the queen’s viceroy, ruler of 300 million men and women on the subcontinent that was India, sent a cable to London alerting Whitehall to an overt act of hostility. A small group of Tibetan soldiers had attacked Nepalese yaks on the frontier and carried them away. The Younghusband Mission, which began with an attempt to oblige Tibetans to accept trade regulations the British had negotiated exclusively with the Chinese, was transformed into a full-out military invasion because of the poaching of a few animals.

  The British force gathered in early December at Darjeeling and Gangtok, altogether some 5,000 soldiers, Gurkhas and Sikhs for the most part, but also sappers, engineers, artillery and machine gun units of regular British Army, as well as military police, cooks, medical staffs, telegraph and postal specialists, diplomats, and a handful of journalists dispatched from Britain to cover the adventure for the London papers. In support were no fewer than 10,000 porters and 20,000 yaks, which each day would carry some 40,000 pounds of food, ammunition, and equipment over a tenuous supply line eventually reaching from Lhasa to Darjeeling.

  In weather so cold that white rainbows spread across the sky, the army headed not north to the Serpo La and Kampa Dzong, but east to the Jelep La, the 14,390-foot pass that led to the Chumbi Valley and the main trading route from Sikkim to Tibet. This was the direct approach to Gyantse, the immediate goal, and Lhasa, the ultimate quest. Younghusband himself went through the Jelep La on December 13, a Sunday. In terrible winds, with thermometers recording thirty degrees of frost, he surely must have reflected on the audacity of marching an army across the Himalaya in the heart of winter along narrow tracks that had never seen the passage of a European.

  The invasion met no resistance at the frontier, and after three weeks in the Chumbi, Younghusband continued toward Gyantse, crossing the Tang La at the head of the valley and dropping at last onto the vast Tibetan Plateau. He established his advance camp at Tuna, an insignificant place brutally exposed to the fierce winds of winter. The cold was merciless. Old soldiers woke to find their dentures frozen in ice. Breath cracked in the wind. Damp clothing froze and could be broken like a stick.

  Younghusband elected to remain for the winter at Tuna, a site that his military commander, General James MacDonald of the Royal Engineers, considered far too barren and exposed for his army. MacDonald retreated to the Chumbi, leaving the diplomatic party with a skeletal security force on the plateau to endure three months of bitter winds and limited forage, with only frozen yak dung for fuel. Younghusband himself presumably remained warm, for his personal kit alone filled some twenty-nine cases, including two large steel trunks and a container exclusively for hats. As an English gentleman, he naturally had proper dress for every occasion. His clothes at Tuna included, among other things, eighteen pairs of boots and shoes, twenty-eight pairs of socks, thirty-two collars, and sixty-seven shirts, some flannel, others white, twilled, or colored, along with studs and any number of ties. He had a dozen suits with matching waistcoats. His twelve winter overcoats included a Chinese fur, a chesterfield, an old ulster, a posteen long coat, two Jaegers, and a waterproof. For headgear he had a white helmet and a khaki, a brown felt hat, two forage caps, a white Panama, a cocked hat, both a thick and a thin solar topi, and, finally, a shikar, intended only to be used when shooting partridges in the Chumbi Valley. With such baggage to carry, it was no wonder that eighty-eight porters died of exhaustion on the march.

  Unfortunately for Younghusband, opportunities at Tuna to display sartorial preparedness were limited. Three months of fruitless negotiations climaxed with an encounter on March 3, 1904, at which time the Tibetans insisted that Dorzhiev, the imagined nemesis, was nothing more than a simple Buriat monk, and that Russia and Tibet had no diplomatic engagement, let alone an alliance. The British, at this point, were far too committed even to ponder such a possibility. At Kampa Dzong they had learned of a phonograph delivered by Dorzhiev to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. To restore British prestige and prove their superiority in all things technical, they had labored through the night, scraping flat a disk to improvise a device that, to the delight of all, faithfully recorded and played back the voice of a monk. There was to be no quarter in this struggle with Russia. The British had decided that Dorzhiev was an agent. It was the only way to rationalize the extreme measures that Curzon had pressed upon the expedition.

  Cold, indignant, bored, and anxious for resolution, Younghusband decided to march on toward Lhasa, even in the face of certain Tibetan resistance. At the end of March they crossed a flat and barren expanse of stone and at Guru came upon a wall roughly the height of a man, spanning much of the valley. Grassless hills climbed away to the west, and to the east the receding remnants of a lake shimmered with ice. Beyond the stone wall were several thousand Tibetan soldiers, dressed in the colors of the rainbow. Some were perched as infantry, with ancient flintlocks, slings, axes, swords, and spears, arms unlike anything seen in Europe in a thousand years. Others were mounted on Tibetan ponies, whose short stature provoked the scorn of the English. No one initially wanted bloodshed. The British dispersed into the tactical formations that had won an empire: infantry in front, artillery to the rear, and Maxim guns to the flanks, which controlled the high ground. With admirable constraint and at some considerable risk, the infantry advanced, assuming that the obvious evidence of superiority would cause the enemy to capitulate or flee the field. To their astonishment, not a Tibetan wavered. They came so close their breath mingled. All was calm, an empty impasse, until the British demanded that the Tibetans disarm. Language was lost, and the tension shattered as a Sikh enlisted man grabbed the bridle of a Tibetan general’s horse. In outrage, the general drew his pistol and shot the Indian in the face. There was a moment of stunned silence, foll
owed by the crack of a single rifle bullet. And then all hell broke loose.

  The Tibetans barely had time to draw their swords before the Maxim guns opened up. A people whose knowledge of firearms was limited to muzzle-loading muskets encountered for the first time the murderous efficiency of the machine gun. It was another Omdurman, an effortless colonial victory. More than six hundred Tibetans were killed, countless wounded. The British losses were nine wounded: seven sepoys, one officer, and one journalist, Edmund Chandler of the Daily Mail, who suffered seventeen sword cuts and lost his hand. The Tibetans did not surrender. They simply turned away and, as if impervious to the bullets that cut them down, began to lean north toward Lhasa. “It was an awful sight,” wrote a British officer to his mother, “and I hope I shall never again have to shoot down men who are walking away.” Younghusband himself called it a “terrible and ghastly business.” A British correspondent, Henry Savage Landor, well known in England for his own graphic exploits in Tibet, indignantly described Guru as the “butchering of thousands of helpless and defenseless natives in a manner most repulsive to any man who is a man.”