Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  The story Bell recounted was indeed one of duplicity and betrayal. The Younghusband invasion had intended to keep the Russians out of Lhasa and secure Tibetan allegiance to the Raj, if only through commercial interests. The 1904 convention, forced on the Tibetan government in Lhasa by the British, included provisions for a punitive indemnity of £500,000 to be paid in seventy-five annual installments, terms that effectively guaranteed a British presence in Lhasa and indefinite control of the Chumbi Valley, the only conceivable invasion route between the two countries. The Chinese were deliberately excluded from the convention. In a letter to the secretary of state for India on January 8, 1903, Curzon stated the British position unequivocally: “We regard Chinese suzerainty over Tibet as a constitutional fiction.” Tibet, according to the viceroy, was a free and independent country.

  The repudiation of the Younghusband expedition by the Liberal government that came to power in 1905 sent a very different signal to Peking. Committed to abandoning Curzon’s aggressive forward policies, yet anxious still to blunt Russian intrigue, the British elected to placate China, embargoing all arms sales to Tibet and reducing the Younghusband indemnity to £166,000, payable in five installments, a minor sum that China readily paid off, thus reaffirming, in effect, its control and political legitimacy in Lhasa. By the terms of the 1906 Anglo-Chinese Treaty, negotiated bilaterally in Peking without Tibetan involvement, the British government discarded everything the Younghusband invasion had achieved and formally returned Tibet to the Chinese orbit. A year later the Anglo-Russian Convention secured Russian recognition of Chinese suzerainty in Tibet in exchange for British acceptance of Russian domination of Mongolia. The Younghusband invasion had crushed the Tibetan army and left the nation defenseless even as it provoked the wrath of the Chinese and challenged them to exert their influence in a distant land they had long been content to ignore. The subsequent diplomatic betrayal of Tibet not only opened the door to Chinese aggression, it virtually obliged Peking to act.

  The Chinese responded with an invasion force led by a notorious warlord, General Chao Erh-feng, who would become known throughout Tibet as Butcher Chao. A ruthless fighter who vowed to leave not a person or a dog alive, he marched his army through Batang and Derge, subduing all of eastern Tibet, leaving in his wake ravaged monasteries, devastated villages, and rivers stained with blood. Arriving at Bah in 1905, he murdered four monks. When word reached him that a neighboring monastery at Lithang was restive, he summoned two Tibetan officials, and when they confirmed the report, he promptly had them beheaded. When the people of the valley proved unruly, he dispatched his troops and slaughtered 1,210 monks and laymen. In June 1906 his forces surrounded the Gongkar Manling monastery, decapitated the four monks sent out to negotiate, and proceeded to kill and pillage, burning sacred texts, melting down for coinage the gold and copper icons, looting the temples, and reducing the sacred enclosures to ashes and dust. On the third day of the first Tibetan month of the Iron-Dog year, Butcher Chao and his army marched into Lhasa, blasted the Jokhang and Potala Palace with artillery fire, and looted the city, raping women and children and slaughtering any monk who resisted. By the end of February 1910 he had quelled resistance and taken control of the capital, leaving tens of thousands of Tibetans dead.

  The Dalai Lama, having only returned from exile in China in December 1909, fled in advance of the Chinese armies to Phari, where the entire population of the Chumbi Valley rallied to his defense. He reached Yatung the following day, where he was sheltered by David Macdonald, who offered his own bedroom to His Holiness and fed him a proper English dinner of chicken soup and roast mutton, with baked custard apple for dessert. That night while the Dalai Lama rested, Macdonald placed a guard at his door, and when, the following morning, Chinese officials appeared, demanding that the British hand over the revered lama, Macdonald had them seized and searched for weapons. Learning that a larger Chinese force would soon be descending upon Yatung, the Dalai Lama, disguised as a common postal runner, escaped in the night and with his entourage braved the ice and snow of the Jelep La to reach Gnatong, the Sikkimese village nearest the frontier. There the Tibetan party found safety and rest in a telegraph hut, protected throughout the following night by two British soldiers. At daylight they continued to Kalimpong and beyond to Darjeeling, where a house was placed at the Dalai Lama’s disposal by Charles Bell. It was a kindness that would not be forgotten.

  The British under Younghusband had been firm, even brutal, in their 1904 conquest of Lhasa. But compared to the savagery of the Chinese, their transgressions had been trivial. They had paid for food, firewood, and fodder, provided medical care for the Tibetan wounded, protected noncombatants, honored the terms of surrender, respected sacred sites, and done nothing to threaten the religion of the land. When, on March 14, 1910, the Dalai Lama, accompanied by Charles Bell, was welcomed in Calcutta by the viceroy, Lord Minto, and heralded by a seventeen-gun salute, he had reason to look forward to the support of the Raj in his struggle against the Chinese. This was not to be, however. While the viceroy remained sympathetic, his hands were tied by Whitehall. Lord Morley, secretary of state for India and the architect of the Liberal policy, welcomed the Chinese invasion of Tibet as the legitimate assertion of China’s claim to the land. He dismissed the Dalai Lama as a “pestilent animal who should be left to stew in his own juice.” In May 1910 His Holiness was informed that despite the ongoing slaughter in Tibet, the government of India could not intervene.

  What ultimately saved the Tibetans was the October 1911 revolution of Sun Yat-sen, which overthrew the Ch’ing dynasty and destroyed the power of the Manchu Empire. With Chinese forces in Lhasa now stranded, a general uprising led by the monks of the Sera and Ganden monasteries reclaimed the city. Butcher Chao retreated to Sichuan, where he was himself captured and beheaded. In June 1912 the Dalai Lama left India and slowly made his way back to Tibet, marking his time until word reached his entourage that the last Chinese official had vacated the city. At Yatung he stayed five days with David Macdonald. When he left, every object he had touched was deemed a holy relic, and Macdonald had some difficulty preventing the pilfering of door handles and chairs, brooms and washbasins. In January 1913 the Dalai Lama finally made his triumphant return to Lhasa. For twenty years, until his death in 1933, he refused to tolerate a single Chinese representative in his capital.

  Charles Bell, appalled by the litany of British betrayals, decided that if Whitehall would not protect Tibet, he would do everything in his power to ensure that Tibet had the capacity to defend itself. With his encouragement, the Tibetan government created the symbols of an independent state: a national flag, a currency, postal stamps, and even a football team. He heralded the Dalai Lama’s efforts to reorganize the economy and modernize the bureaucracy, with new policies that shifted the burden of taxation, redistributed land, and abolished the most draconian of punishments, the mutilations for criminal deeds. Bell worked tirelessly to increase commercial, diplomatic, and military ties to the Raj. With the active support of the Dalai Lama, he saw to it that the telegraph line from India to Gyantse was extended to Lhasa. A diesel generator carried overland in pieces provided electricity to the homes of the wealthy, many of whom had been educated in Darjeeling and spoke fluent English. The Dalai Lama himself owned a phone and two cars, including an American Dodge with the license plates reading TIBET 1; it also had been carried overland through the Chumbi Valley and reassembled in Lhasa. Perhaps most important of all, Bell had encouraged the Dalai Lama to modernize his military, increasing the size of the army from 5,000 to 15,000 and equipping it with proper arms.

  In September 1913 Bell was ordered to Simla to enter into negotiations on behalf of the British government with China and Tibet. The ostensible purpose of the summit was to delineate the border between the countries, an 850-mile boundary from Bhutan to the Irrawaddy-Salween divide that became known as the McMahon Line. The true thrust of the conference, however, was an attempt by the British to formalize the political and ter
ritorial realignment that had taken place in the wake of the collapse of the Ch’ing dynasty. With China’s hold on Lhasa broken, Britain once again reversed policy and acknowledged Tibet as an independent state. Whitehall continued to recognize the suzerain rights of China over Tibet, but denied China the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the smaller country. For its part, Tibet came to Simla to affirm its independence; meanwhile, the British desired, as always, to secure a protected buffer on the northern frontier of the Raj. China, by contrast, came to recover its former position in Tibet. When this proved impossible, the Chinese delegation refused to ratify the treaty. Tibet and Britain went ahead bilaterally, effectively reducing China to a bystander.

  By the final terms of the Simla Convention, signed on April 27, 1914, the Tibetan authorities ceded to the Raj a small outcrop of territory bordering eastern Bhutan. More significantly, they agreed to divide their country into an inner and an outer Tibet, a decision that haunts Tibetans to this day. For diplomatic reasons there was no mention of arms in the agreement, but within weeks the government of India shipped to Lhasa 5,000 rifles and 500,000 rounds of ammunition, a consignment later augmented by an additional 200,000 cartridges. Three months later, war broke out in Europe.

  With the crisis in Europe, Tibet faded from the British mind, which inevitably provided another opening for China. Violence flared in Kham, and by the beginning of 1918 Tibet and China were engaged in open if sporadic warfare, with the Tibetans moving on Chamdo and occupying all the land west of the Yangtze. The government of India sent Tibet 500,000 rounds of ammunition for self-defense. But preoccupied in France, unwilling to antagonize the Chinese, and keen, if possible, to defuse the crisis, the British denied desperate Tibetan requests for the additional arms, machine guns in particular, that had been promised them, according to Charles Bell. The British did attempt to place a military officer in Lhasa, if only to send a message to the Chinese, but the Tibetan authorities would have nothing of it. By the summer of 1920, as Howard-Bury conferred with Bell, the situation had come to a head. The failure of the British to make good on arms shipments reinforced the suspicions of conservative elements in Lhasa who were already highly critical of the Dalai Lama’s efforts to modernize the country along Western lines. This made it that much more difficult for him to take the steps necessary to protect his people from the Chinese, even as it opened the door to their influence.

  As Howard-Bury informed Younghusband in a letter of September 2:

  Bell told me that politically the state of affairs between us and Tibet is worse now than it has been for 10 years … They are turning now to China again, as they say we only make promises and do not keep them. I fully agree with this point of view. We gave them rifles before and now when they have no ammunition, we make excuses. The Dalai Lama is still our friend, but his council is all going over to the Chinese, even the general in command of the forces supposed to be fighting them is pro-Chinese. Bell has just heard privately from the Dalai Lama all about this and he had wired to the Govt of India for leave to go see the Dalai Lama, before he gives up his job and this I think he will be allowed to do.

  Bell, in fact, had come out of retirement in late 1919 with the specific goal of aiding the Dalai Lama. Throughout the summer and early fall of 1920, even as Howard-Bury continued his scouting journey with a monthlong trek up the Teesta Valley along the route taken by Noel in 1913, where he, too, was rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of Everest, Bell anxiously awaited word from Simla and Lhasa. Though eager to reach the Tibetan capital, he had no intention, as he had told Howard-Bury, of going empty-handed. He was not about to play a role in yet another betrayal of the Tibetans.

  By mid-October Howard-Bury, having conferred with the maharaja of Sikkim, was back in Darjeeling, where he stayed with Lord Ronaldshay, governor of Bengal. His journey was nearing an end, and it was not at all clear what good had come of it. On October 13, he wrote to Younghusband, “I sail from Bombay on Nov 20th in the Kaesar-i-hind, which ought to reach Marseille on December 4. Lord Ronaldshay here will help us in every way and so will the local officials. The Maharajah of Sikkim will do his best and Macdonald the trade agent at Yatung and Gyantse can be most helpful.” He added however: “As long as Bell is there we are badly handicapped, but I am trying to find out who his successor is to be.”

  It was not as if Howard-Bury disliked Bell. On the contrary, the more he knew of him, the more he admired the man. His frustration was with his own mission. Only the Dalai Lama could deliver the path to Everest. Bell held the key to the Dalai Lama and was not about to call in a favor unless the Tibetans were given the arms they so desperately needed. It was a position that Howard-Bury both agreed with and respected. It just did not help him with Everest.

  On October 28, he wrote to Younghusband once again, this time with some startling news: Bell had been allowed to go to Lhasa to confer with the Dalai Lama. The Foreign Office had not yielded on Tibet’s request for arms, as far as Howard-Bury knew, and it was not at all clear how Bell would be received, but it was nevertheless a highly significant diplomatic opening. “So now it all depends on how Bell puts it before the Dalai Lama and we shall have to wait for his answer, which will not be for a couple of months.”

  Bell had waited ten years for the orders that finally came through from Simla on October 15. His would be the first European party ever to be invited to Lhasa by the Tibetan government. He planned the journey with care, arranging transport such that they might enter the holy city on November 17, a day he knew to be highly auspicious on the Tibetan calendar.

  On December 10, 1920, less than a month after his arrival in Lhasa, Bell sent a telegram to the foreign secretary of the government of India. The wire reached Delhi on December 13. Two days later the viceroy conveyed its contents to the India Office in London, and on December 20, Younghusband received a personal note from the political secretary, J. E. Shuckburgh.

  “My dear Sir Francis,” Schuckburgh wrote, “you will be interested to know that we have just received a telegram from the Viceroy in which the following passage occurs: ‘Bell telegraphs that he has explained to Dalai Lama object of desired exploration and necessity of traveling through Tibetan territory and obtained Tibetan Government’s consent.’ We shall no doubt write to you officially about this; but meantime I wish to lose no time in letting you know personally what has happened. The human obstacles—of which you recently spoke—are beginning to drop off!”

  On Christmas Eve 1920, Bell sat down in Lhasa to write a note of explanation directly to Younghusband in which he referred to Howard-Bury’s visit. “At the time I was bound to oppose the exploration of Everest through Tibetan territory,” he told Younghusband. “But by my coming to Lhasa and the personal intercourse with my Tibetan friends that results from this visit, circumstances have changed. It was therefore a great pleasure for me to gain the Dalai Lama’s permission to [unreadable] this exploration, which is to be conducted under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, yours sincerely, C. A. Bell.”

  Precisely what circumstances had changed remains unclear. Bell would stay in Lhasa for nearly a year. It was a perilous period, and at times his life was in danger. His support of the army threatened the power of the monasteries, and during the Monlam Chenmo, the Great Prayer Festival, placards appeared throughout Lhasa calling for his assassination. He was protected by His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who personally urged him to remain in the Tibetan capital throughout the long winter of 1920. His initial orders from the government of India insisted that he make no offer of arms. Yet before he left Lhasa, in October 1921, he had apparently achieved the impossible: a complete reversal of British policy, an agreement whereby Tibet would receive arms, ammunition, military training, and technical assistance. The arsenal arrived in 1922: mountain artillery, Lewis machine guns, 10,000 Lee-Enfield rifles, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, the very basis of a modern fighting force. There can be little doubt that permission for the British to assault Everes
t was but a small piece of a very large and complex diplomatic initiative, imagined and brought into being by Charles Bell, an arms deal upon which rested the very future of a free Tibet.

  CHAPTER 4

  Hinks’s Watch

  NEWS THAT TIBET had sanctioned an Everest expedition broke over London on the morning of January 11, 1921, following an official announcement the evening before by Sir Francis Younghusband at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. The press, orchestrated by John Buchan, did not disappoint. British dailies from Liverpool to Glasgow, Plymouth to Edinburgh headlined the story. Yet even as the papers heralded the imminent adventure, the enormity of the challenge was brought sharply into focus by some of the leading figures of British mountaineering.

  Some weeks before, following a presentation by General Charles Bruce at Aeolian Hall, the highly regarded Himalayan climber Sir Martin Conway had offered a sobering assessment, reminding readers of the Daily Chronicle that for all the excitement, nothing whatsoever was known of the mountain. No European had ever reached its base; the immediate approaches remained uncharted. Little was understood of its structure, the character of its snow and ice, its silhouette and topography, the nature of the rock formations that made up its formidable bulk and narrowed to its imposing ridges. A week later Conway went further in an interview with the Observer. On the upper slopes of Everest no man could be expected to ascend more than 2,000 feet a day, he said. This implied that high camps would have to be established and equipped at 25,000 and 27,000 feet, elevations to which no one had yet climbed, let alone slept overnight. The greatest height achieved to date was a single ascent to just over 24,600 feet by the Duke of Abruzzi in the Karakoram, while the highest camp on record had been established at 23,420 feet by C. F. Meade on Kamet in 1913. What would happen beyond such heights was a total mystery. When, in a notorious nineteenth-century experiment, the French meteorologist Gaston Tissandier had ascended rapidly in a balloon, he’d passed out at 26,500 feet and upon regaining consciousness had found himself deaf and his two companions dead. In the war, pilots had typically donned oxygen masks above 18,000 feet, and reported severe problems above 20,000 feet if the gas was not available. Acclimatization promised to mitigate some of the effects of oxygen deprivation. Still, in climbing beyond 25,000 feet, men would be entering a zone virtually as hostile and mysterious as the surface of the moon. “The man who hopes to climb Mount Everest,” predicted the Daily Mail, citing the well-known Keswick climber George Abraham, “must be able with no training to run at fair speed up the last 300 ft of Mount Blanc.” And, it might have added, in air that had but a third of the oxygen encountered at sea level.