by Wade Davis
In the wake of the debacle at Guru, the Tibetans retreated north and the British pushed on, fighting a series of skirmishes that climaxed in a two-month siege at Gyantse, where they endured tens of casualties while inflicting on the Tibetans some five thousand. With such a ratio of suffering, it is not surprising that the British generals had come by 1914 to view war as something glorious. Their military strategy, successful in countless colonial encounters, was distilled in two short lines of Victorian verse, poet Hilaire Belloc’s famous ditty: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun and they have not.” By the time Younghusband saw the glittering roof of the Potala Palace and passed with his soldiers through the West Gate of the holy city, more than twenty-six hundred Tibetans had been killed, against British losses in all ranks of just forty dead.
Still, Lhasa had been achieved. Perceval Landon, a correspondent for the Times, recalled the moment in hushed tones: “Here at last it was, the never-reached goal of so many weary wanderers, the home of all the occult mysticism that still remains on Earth. The light waves of mirage dissolving impalpably just shook the far outlines of the golden roofs and dimly seen white terraces. I do not think any one of us said much.”
Such reverie was short-lived. Within a few days Landon came upon the part of the city where dwelt the Ragyabas, the breakers of the dead, those destined to devote their lives to carving up the remains of the deceased, to feed the vultures and to remind the living, through the drama of the event, that all things material in the end must decay. The British who witnessed a sky burial had no idea what they were seeing, but of the lives of the Ragyabas, Landon had no doubts. “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to imagine a more repulsive occupation, a more brutalized type of humanity, and, above all, a more abominable and foul sort of hovel than those, which are characteristic of these men. Filthy in appearance, half naked, half clothed in obscene rags, these nasty folk live in houses which a respectable pig would refuse to occupy.”
Lhasa would prove a disappointment. Heeding the counsel of the Nechung Oracle, His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had broken his retreat and fled toward exile in Mongolia four days before the British reached the city. He would not return for five years. In his absence, Younghusband struggled to find an appropriate authority with whom to negotiate. The Chinese were powerless. A British attempt to replace the Dalai Lama with the Panchen Lama went nowhere. With the help of the Tongsa Penlop, later maharaja of Bhutan, Younghusband eventually dictated terms to the four members of the Kashag, or Cabinet. The convention, forced upon them and signed on September 7, 1904, gave the British control of the Chumbi Valley for seventy-five years, allowed free access to Lhasa for a British trade representative, and forbade the Tibetans from having any dealings with any foreign power without British consent. The third and final clause was, in the circumstances, an afterthought. Younghusband found no evidence of Russian influence in Lhasa, no arsenal or railroad, no diplomatic or military mission. Dorzhiev, whom he met, appeared indeed to be a simple monk. The very thought of Russia threatening India through Tibet, as Edmund Chandler reminded his readers of the Daily Mail, was rendered absurd by the impossible geography they had struggled through to get their modest force to Lhasa.
The holy city itself, stripped of the radiance of the Potala and the Jokhang Temple, appeared to the invaders as decrepit, medieval in aspect. In the streets hungry dogs lay abandoned as children in rags smoked wild rhubarb and tobacco. In the shops were bundles of scented soaps that had been on the shelves for decades. The people bathed once a year. They had prayer wheels but no wheeled transport. They called guns “fire arrows.” They took it as a given that the world was flat. They allowed women to marry more than one man, and men to embrace in matrimony any number of women. Refusing to kill an insect or harm a blade of grass, they enforced the most ruthless of sanctions, the gouging of eyes, the severance of limbs for petty theft. In religious services, they played music with trumpets carved from human thighbones, and drank offerings from chalices made of human skulls. Religious devotees lived in the darkness of caves and sealed chambers for their entire lives. It was all too much for English sensibilities. Even the notion of reincarnation, a sliver of the complexity of the Buddhist science of the mind, was seen by them as abject tyranny, a sleight of hand intended and devised to hold the spirit in ransom for eternity.
Within a fortnight of the signing of the treaty, the British, fearing the onset of winter, abandoned Lhasa and retreated across the Tsangpo River and over the harsh, sweeping uplands that led to the Tang La and the slow descent into the Chumbi Valley. Two weeks in the Tibetan capital had been enough to dispel for some, most especially Perceval Landon of the Times, any romantic illusions. The Tibetans, he wrote, were a “stunted and dirty little people,” their religion nothing but a “disastrous parasitic disease,” while their government was a theocratic regime, oppressive, inefficient, bizarre, tyrannical, and corrupt. This sense of good riddance, distilled in journalistic dispatches fired over the telegraph wires that the British had laid in the wake of their advance on Lhasa, defined English perceptions of a Tibet that remained a political adversary. Only in subsequent years, when the diplomatic ground shifted, did it serve British interests to cultivate an image of Tibet as the place of innocence and mystic fantasy it has since occupied in the Western imagination.
For Younghusband the political and military success in Lhasa was short-lived. The expedition had been widely praised in the British press. Congratulatory telegrams arrived from King Edward VII, and from Curzon and Lord Ampthill, who had taken over as acting viceroy in the months the army had been in the field. Younghusband could with confidence look forward to a hero’s welcome in London, complete with an audience at Buckingham Palace. But praise was far from universal. Indian and European papers condemned the negotiations as a farce, the treaty as a “useless scroll of paper,” the invasion itself as a murderous imperial adventure, anachronistic, vainglorious, and self-serving on the part of its leader. There were reports of the plundering of monasteries, of caravans of loot strung out over the tracks leading back to the Raj. For Younghusband the cruelest blow came from Whitehall, which disavowed key elements of the treaty even before the mission departed from Lhasa. A telegram arrived just days before he left, ordering him to reopen the negotiations and modify the terms, reducing the size of the indemnity charged to the Tibetans and eliminating the demand that a British trade agent be stationed in Lhasa. Younghusband simply ignored the request as impractical, given the advance of the season.
MANY OF THOSE who had accompanied the expedition left Lhasa disenchanted. There was a sense that something very special had been violated—not a country but the idea of a place, a forbidden land, one of the last blank spots on the map. On the eve of their entry into the city for the first time, Chandler had sent a dispatch to his paper saying that after Lhasa, “there are no more forbidden cities, no real mysteries, no unknown land of dreams.” The Younghusband expedition, wrote Curzon to the famed Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, has “destroyed the virginity of the bride to whom you aspired.” In London John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, reflected, “It was impossible to avoid a certain regret for the drawing back of the curtain which had meant so much to the imagination of mankind. With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of the older romance.”
Younghusband, by contrast, despite setbacks and disappointments, left Lhasa on September 23 positively elated, his spirit liberated from the tensions and pressures of the campaign. A day before his departure, a high lama, Ti Rinpoche, gave him an image of the Buddha as a gesture of peace. He would carry the icon with him for the rest of his life, and his daughter would place it reverently on his coffin when finally, having witnessed two world wars, he would pass away in 1942. His headstone would be a relief of Lhasa with a simple inscription: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Clearly something powerful had touched the man during his weeks in Lhasa. He would leave the city transformed, a mystic warrior drawn thereafter to the
spiritual life. As founder of the World Congress of Faiths, he would devote all his energy to shattering barriers between the great religious traditions of the world. His heart and mind would remain remarkably open. At a time when the English in India spoke openly of their disdain for the “wogs,” and visionary men such as Mahatma Gandhi provoked only scorn, Younghusband was asked by a group of officers seated around a campfire to name the historical figure he most admired. Younghusband selected Ramakrishna, a Hindu religious leader much derided and mocked by the British as a wild fakir. After Lhasa, his eyes were focused on another realm, another reality.
As the mission departed the sacred city, Younghusband slipped away from his retinue at the first opportunity to take a walk alone in the mountains. The sky was radiant blue, and on the ridges, he recalled, the light was violet. He looked back at the distant outline of Lhasa and felt the intention of the lama’s parting words of peace, coming over him as a wave of compassion. “And with all the warmth still on me,” he later wrote, “and bathed in the insinuating influences of the dreamy autumn evening, I was insensibly suffused with an almost intoxicating sense of elation and good will. The exhilaration of the moment grew and grew till it thrilled through me with overpowering intensity. Never again could I think evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man.
“Such experiences are all too rare,” he continued, “and they but too soon become blurred in the actualities of daily intercourse and practical existence. Yet it is these few fleeting moments, which are reality. In these only we see real life. The rest is ephemeral, the unsubstantial. And that single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the rest of my lifetime.”
Younghusband had entered the holy city a man in pursuit of enemies, both real and imagined, only to emerge with his mind intent on the sky, the stars, and the mountains that soared on all sides. The unveiling of Lhasa had provoked in him a new set of mysteries, both of the heart and of the spirit. His convictions robust, his idealism not swayed, he swept the horizon for a new possibility upon which to anchor his dreams. The place of innocence once occupied by Lhasa both in his and the British imagination, sullied and emptied by the reality of conquest, would not remain vacant for long.
As Younghusband made his way back to India, his soldiers describing narrow tracks through the snow, his officers tripping lightly through his mess in the cold evenings, he charted the last adventures of the mission. Free of political obligations, looking south toward a side of the Himalaya utterly unknown to the British, he conceived two great thrusts of exploration. One would be a move on the upper gorge of the Tsangpo, where the Pundit Kinthrup had suffered, to see if a way might not be found through the mountains, along the river to Assam. This would be led by Claude White and supported by Captain Charles Ryder as survey officer. The second expedition would be under the command of Captain Cecil Rawling, an intrepid explorer who only weeks before the beginning of the Younghusband Mission had returned from a clandestine journey of a thousand miles in which he had crossed into western Tibet from Kashmir and Ladakh to survey some thirty-five thousand square miles of unknown country. His duty now, as conceived by Younghusband, would be even more ambitious. Rawling’s orders were to head west on horse, tracking the Tsangpo, as the upper Brahmaputra is called, to its source, wherever it might be, and then find a way through the Himalaya from the north to return to India, all before the onset of winter. In the end the government of India vetoed the exploration of the Tsangpo Gorge, fearing that White and Ryder and their men might be slaughtered by the “truculent, independent tribes between the border of Tibet and Assam.” The result was the reinforcement of Rawling’s expedition to the headwaters by two remarkable men, Lieutenant F. M. Bailey, a soldier who as a spy would make history, and Captain Ryder, who in later years as surveyor general of India would do much to facilitate the Everest expeditions of 1921–24.
What especially excited Younghusband was the trajectory he had proposed for the journey to the headwaters, an uncharted route of nearly a thousand miles that would take the party, though at a distance, along the northern flank of a destination far more difficult of access than Lhasa, a place purer in nature, more dangerous in character and disposition, which had been in his sights as an explorer for nearly twenty years. Younghusband had first seen Mount Everest from Darjeeling, and from there it appears a modest mountain, a white fang on the horizon, dwarfed by the magnificence of Kangchenjunga. At Chitral in 1893, he and Charles Bruce had spoken of attempting Everest from the south with an approach through Nepal. But until Younghusband’s first diplomatic foray to Kampa Dzong, in 1903, a year before the invasion, no Englishman had ventured beyond the Himalayan divide into Tibet. With the possible exception of the Pundit Hari Ram, who in 1871 completed a secret traverse from Shigatse to Nyelam and may well have glimpsed Everest from the Tingri Plain, no agent of the British had ever seen the mountain from the north.
Younghusband had been among the first to do so when, on the morning of July 19, 1903, he woke to an early frost and a perfect sky in the shadow of the fortress at Kampa Dzong. His tent was pitched on a bare stretch of earth in the midst of stiff patches of grass and wormwood. There had been rain the previous day, and upon his arrival the entire camp had been enshrouded in mist. But now the air was clear. Looking out into the spectral light he saw, far to the southwest, “the first streaks of dawn gilding the snowy summits of Mount Everest, poised high in heaven as the spotless pinnacle of the world.” In that instant, he later recalled, the mountain became fused with his destiny, its summit a symbol of all that was vital in the heart and spirit of man.
The irascible Claude White, also at Kampa Dzong that day, photographed the mountain with his large-format camera. The image is preserved in the Curzon Collection in the India Office in London. In the foreground are rolling hills, in shadow, without discernible evidence of vegetation. Above the hills is a ring of clouds marking the horizon. Beyond the horizon, reaching to heights incomprehensible to the ordinary man, are the summits of Makalu, Chomo Lonzo, and Everest, a ridge of white scoring the skyline.
THE RAWLING EXPEDITION left Gyantse on October 10, 1904, and headed northwest, away from the height of the Himalaya, to reach the Tsangpo River at Shigatse, Tibet’s second city and the site of the great monastery of Tashi Lhumpo, the religious seat of the Panchen Lama and the home, at the time, of some forty-five hundred monks. After an official audience with the high lama, and a few days spent provisioning the men with fur coats and hats and thick woolen blankets, as well as securing new transport, the expedition, altogether thirty-five men and forty-four ponies, along with a hundred hired horses and the requisite drivers, left Shigatse on October 16.
In four days they reached Lhatse, a fort and monastery perched on a rocky outcrop dominating a wide plain and guarding the approaches to the heart of central Tibet from the west. There the expedition divided. Bailey and another officer, Captain Wood of the Royal Engineers, taking all the heavy baggage and most of the transport animals, followed the traditional trade route, which ran overland, parallel to the river but well north of it for some 160 miles. Rawling and Ryder, lightly equipped, elected to continue west along the right bank of the Tsangpo, a perilous track perched at times 200 feet above the water on rock ledges too narrow to permit the movement of a loaded pony. For three days they traversed the bluffs, a dangerous passage relieved only by the discovery of verdant valleys, isolated between the long stretches of rock and ice. At the monastery of Rujé, balanced on the edge of a steep precipice rising sheer from the riverbank, the way was finally blocked by cliffs impossible to turn, and their party headed south into richer country, a low-lying district of grassy meadows and fens, abundant in herds of yaks and sheep, and dominated by the ruins of towers and fortresses shattered by the invading Gurkha army during the war with Nepal a half century before.
On the morning of October 27, having spent the night some 2,000 feet above the river, exposed to relentless and bitterly cold winds, Rawling and Ryder broke camp early and made their way through dee
p snow to the summit of the Kura La, a 17,900-foot pass that overlooked the Tingri Plain to the north and marked the divide between the drainage of the Tsangpo and that of the sacred Ganges. They paused at the divide and on a whim decided to climb higher, up the steep slope of a conical hill that offered the promise of an unimpeded view to the south from its summit. The morning was cold, crisp, and clear, and from the top of the rise, at a distance of perhaps sixty miles, could be seen fully exposed the wildest heart of the Himalayan range. Dominating the skyline, instantly putting to rest the notion that it might anywhere have a rival, was the northern face of Everest, never before seen by a European from this vantage, a sheer precipice so daunting that even at such a distance it caused Rawling to shudder in anticipation.
“Towering up thousands of feet, a glittering pinnacle of snow,” he wrote, rose Everest, “a giant amongst pigmies [sic], and remarkable not only on account of its height, but for its perfect form. No other peaks lie near or threaten its supremacy. From its foot a rolling mass of hills stretch away in all directions, to the north dropping to the Dingri [Tingri] Plain, 15,000 feet below. To the east and west, but nowhere in its immediate vicinity, rise other great mountains of rock and snow, each beautiful in itself, but in no other way comparing with the famous peak in solemn grandeur. It is difficult to give an idea of its stupendous height, its dazzling whiteness and overpowering size, for there is nothing in the world to compare it with.”
The wind was too bitter for Rawling and Ryder to remain long at the height of the Kura La and they soon descended, ultimately reaching a narrow gorge, a mere slit in the rocks that ran for miles before finally opening onto the Tingri Plain, which they did not reach until after dusk. The following day Rawling’s cook fell ill and the expedition was obliged to lay over for twenty-four hours. Captain Ryder took advantage of the opportunity to head south, across the vast and open expanses of grass stretching all the way to the flanks of the mountains that formed the wall of the Himalaya. That afternoon, he saw Everest again, and in the rarefied air the mountain seemed nearer than it actually was. He probably came within fifty miles, close enough to glass the ridges leading to the summit and report back to Rawling that the mountain might be climbed, should it prove possible to penetrate and force a line up its lower slopes, hidden as they were from his view. From that moment Rawling vowed to return and find a way to the mountain’s inner sanctum, where an assault on the summit might be staged.