Garwhal proverb
Up over the Himalayas was Heinrich Harrer’s plan. Fresh from failing to ascend the dangerous mountain of Nanga Parbat in 1939 – which we’ve already encountered – Harrer almost made it back to Germany before war was declared . . . but not quite. He and his fellow climbers were locked up very politely by the British. They even admired him when he made a break for it, but nevertheless made strenuous efforts to get him back. He was interned in 1939. His final break, after several false starts, was in 1944. The war had almost ended. Harrer must have known the game was almost finished, but he would have his adventure yet.
There is something so outlandish, unnecessary and extraordinary about the whole Harrer episode – escaping over the mountains, where he befriends the young Dalai Lama, eventually becoming his teacher and confidant. We must recall that only the British had access to Tibet in the pre-war period, which meant the most outstanding climbers in Europe – mainly Germans, at that time – could not try their hand on the world’s highest peak. They were forced to try something as difficult, if not more difficult, but not as high. This meant Nanga Parbat. And since Mummery, the greatest of the early climbing pioneers, had died on this peak, Nanga Parbat, if climbed, would be a kind of commiseration prize for not being allowed to climb Everest.
It wasn’t easy. The sheer numbers of Germans who had perished trying to climb Nanga Parbat had its legacy in the sensible caution of Heinrich Harrer’s failed attempt in 1939. Locked up as enemy aliens, he and his friends had plenty of time to cogitate and plan an escape. Escaping would be ‘their war’ – though this is never mentioned in Harrer’s memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, with its conscious biblical overtones – getting to Tibet would be his victory over the British Empire. Symbolically, the war was to be won by his huge sacrifice and the achievement of crossing the world’s highest mountain range and penetrating the most mysterious country on earth, the source of all spiritual mysteries for many.
But it would not be easy.
In the final escape from India, Harrer decides to travel alone. He is a slippery narrator. He writes as if he is a simple climber with no ambition, save to climb peaks and perhaps earn his money by teaching the children of the wealthy. He abhors the twentieth-century disease of everybody being in a rush. The Tibetans don’t do this rush thing. They arrive late at the office (in Lhasa, this is) and depart early. In the 1930s when Mahjong is introduced, it becomes an epidemic. Almost all work is neglected. Servants lose their life savings in a few hours. The government decide it is bad for the country so they ban it – by buying up all the sets in existence. Once the games have been fairly bought up they are destroyed and then an edict is issued condemning any secret transgressors to terrible punishment. And Harrer observes some terribly harsh punishment: a petty thief who stole a golden butter lamp from a temple had his hands publicly amputated, then he was sewn up into a wet yak skin and hurled off a vertiginous cliff.
Every now and again he lets out a strong opinion – strong enough for us to realise he probably has many more, just better hidden. He comes across a nun and a monk who have been condemned to a hundred lashes; the pair had been in a secret relationship which resulted in a child neither of them wanted, so the young mother killed the baby. Harrer can’t understand the local reaction, which is, as the couple are being whipped, to beg the authorities to be lenient. He wants this woman harshly punished as a murderer, yet he fails to see that in traditional cultures children are so vulnerable to an early death that attachment to them is suspended until they pass their earliest years. He wants to see the entire hundred lashes administered.
Harrer met up with his pals when they reached Tibet. The next challenge was to get to Lhasa – this is never really explained, except HH has a vague plan that in the capital he can make a living tutoring the sons of the wealthy. The further away they were from the capital, the harder it seemed; none of the officials they met would give them a permit. So they wandered along the border with Nepal, surreptitiously getting closer all the time. Harrer and the last remaining pal – also a climber – made their way across the snowy wastes; the non-climbers, finding the going too tough, had all returned to India or Nepal. They decided to approach Lhasa from the north, an unexpected thing, and something no one in their right mind would attempt – so said all the nomads they came across and lodged with. Sometimes the nomads invited them into their tents, sometimes they seemed scared of their red beards and gaunt, bedraggled appearance, mistaking them for Kazakhs who had entered Tibet, or Indian traders. But the main fear of the nomads were Khampas: roving bands of armed brigands who parasitically lived off the unarmed nomads in their felt tents. One nomad told Harrer he paid 500 sheep to buy a modern Mannlicher rifle – it was worth it, he claimed, to keep the Khampas at bay.
Being foolhardy and brave, Harrer and his pal decided to ignore all advice and head across Khampas country. Before long they discovered that they were being followed by men on horseback. Dodging their pursuers, they came upon a nomad encampment and decided it would be a good place to hide. They were welcomed in at the tent door with such friendly politeness, their suspicions were immediately aroused. A normal nomad, fearful of the Khampas, would give them a hard time until it was proven they were harmless. To be taken at face value, welcomed in, could mean only one thing. The two travellers exchanged horrified glances; both men knew they had fallen right into a Khampas household.
Outside it was 40 degrees below freezing. They had no choice but to stay the night and risk being robbed and killed if they slept a wink. One Khampa wanted to use Harrer’s bag as a pillow, no doubt suspecting they’d hidden a pistol inside and wanting to get it away from the two Germans. Having managed to get the bag back, Harrer handled it in such a way as to emphasise its potential as a pistol pack. There was one woman Khampa who prayed all night: ‘It occurred to me that she was praying in advance for forgiveness for the crime her husband intended to commit against us.’
At first light, Harrer exchanged a pocket mirror for some yak’s brains, which were cooked for breakfast. They managed to get out of the tent and start walking, but Harrer’s Tibetan dog did not follow them. They saw then that three men were following them. Harrer asked where the dog was and the men suggested one go back for it. Their plan was transparent – they meant to separate Harrer and his friend, then rob or kill them both. Harrer was determined not to leave without his dog, so they both turned back, speaking in such a harsh way that the men knew they were prepared to fight. Because there were two of them, the Khampas held back; like all professional robbers, they preferred violence that wasn’t going to rebound on them (though Harrer mentions that their only weapons were the tent poles they carried).
Back at the tent, the praying woman appeared with the dog. Was she spoiling the plan? Or, more likely, pretending nothing was up – until it was. Turning abruptly away with the dog Harrer and his friend retraced their steps at a very hurried pace, not stopping until they were back with the last nomads who warned them against what they had so foolishly done. There was absolutely no question of going on – not over the Khampas territory, at least.
The nomads suggested another route and by this time it was apparent that, the nearer they got to Lhasa, the less suspicious people were about them. Using an old permit meant for another part of Tibet, they finally made their way through an unguarded gate into the Forbidden City itself.
The war had already ended, but for Harrer this was just the beginning of a new adventure.
Eventually, Harrer becomes the tutor of the fourteenth Dalai Lama – who at the time was only fourteen years old. Fascinated by the outside world, he’d had translated from English into Tibetan a recent seven-volume history of the Second World War. Mechanically inclined and very adept, despite not being able to read the English instructions, the Dalai Lama had taken apart and reassembled the film projector he enjoyed using. (It seems appropriate that Hollywood should have embraced so wholeheartedly in later years the cause of the Dalai Lama. The fourteenth Dalai
Lama was fascinated by film and shot some early movies himself – along with Heinrich Harrer.)
HH threw himself wholeheartedly into teaching the Dalai Lama everything he could. A discussion of the atom bomb led to talk about elements and metals – for which there is no separate word in Tibetan. The Dalai Lama recognised all manner of different aeroplanes from his books about the war. Anything mechanical, he found fascinating, though the bulk of his training had been in philosophy and history. He gave Harrer his own lessons in the latter, for which HH seemed most grateful. In a moment of modest pride, the Dalai Lama shyly showed Harrer an exercise book where he had been attempting to copy Roman letters. Harrer agreed to teach him English.
On the flat roof of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama had his telescope. He admitted to sometimes spying on Harrer as he worked in the garden of a Tibetan noble. The Dalai Lama’s brother confided to Harrer that the Dalai Lama had been lonely as a young man growing up in the Potala. Indeed, it was a kind of prison – he was unable to mingle with ordinary Tibetans or attend the parties of the fun-loving aristocrats. Harrer writes that when the glint of the Dalai Lama’s telescope was seen by people at a party, they would flee indoors. It was considered rude to be having such fun when the poor boy-king could not!
Harrer introduced several innovations, including ice skating, in Lhasa
When at leisure, the Dalai Lama wore a red jacket he had designed himself. He was very proud of it. Copying designs he had seen in books, he had incorporated pockets – which are not to be found in any traditional Tibetan garb. Harrer writes: ‘Now like every other boy of his age he was able to carry about with him a knife, a screwdriver, sweets etc.’ He also kept his coloured pencils and fountain pens in his pockets. He loved clocks and timepieces and had bought, with his own money, an Omega calendar clock. Before he attained his majority, the only money he had was that which was left at the foot of his throne. One day the treasure vaults of the Potala would be open to him and he would become one of the world’s richest men.
Attracted to magic, the Dalai Lama explained to Harrer that he was making a study of all the methods by which he could be in one place while his body would be in another. This is a common magical technique – you find similar spells and references in most magical traditions. Almost certainly it refers to telepathy: the ability to know who is making that telephone call, or, by projecting the right vibe, make someone call you. Harrer was rather sceptical and declared that he would convert to Buddhism if the Dalai Lama could be in two places at once. And yet, in later life, we see him as such an inveterate traveller, and so spoken about, that it seems by Western technology he has achieved the ability to be in many places at once.
So, Harrer, having escaped the British, managed to do something that no Briton had ever managed in his wildest dreams, which was to become the personal tutor of the next ruler of Tibet.
It is the most extraordinary fable and yet it is true.
7
Public Schoolboys in Tibet
The wall that has given way will surely fall further; the wall that is being built will surely be finished one day.
Garwhal proverb
Heinrich Harrer mentions in passing the famous four Tibetans who were sent to Rugby public school in 1913 by the thirteenth Dalai Lama in order to help Tibet modernise. Rugby was where Tom Brown’s School Days was set. The great Thomas Arnold, reforming headmaster and father of Matthew Arnold the poet, taught there. It was in many senses the archetypal public school of the time – designed to inculcate the ‘public school spirit’ which manned the empire and filled the trenches of the First World War.
But just what effect did Rugby have on the Tibetans? The colonial civil servant Teddy Wakefield provides a tantalising glimpse in his diary of a visit to Tibet. Wakefield was a good public school man himself, having attended Haileybury, which had been established for the sons of the less well-off middle classes – soldiers and colonial administrators – who would then go out and rule the British Empire. Wakefield was a scholar and an athlete – he got a first in classics at Cambridge and learned to climb with Geoffrey Winthrop Young – a friend of Oscar Eckenstein, of Crowley expedition fame.
In 1929, aged just twenty-six, Wakefield, who served in the élite Indian Civil Service, was charged with inspecting the British Trade Agency in Gartok. One of the purposes of the Younghusband invasion was to secure somewhat better trade with Tibet. Wakefield would see how well that was developing.
He set off from the usual hill station departure point, Simla, with a cook, bearer, four riflemen and a havildar – all Gurkhas. His agency staff – a Dr Ram and more servants and soldiers – had preceded him by two weeks. At Sarahan they met up and the young Wakefield was received by the Rajah of Bashahr. He then proceeded north to the uniquely named town of Pooh. While the agency staff went on to Gartok, Wakefield decided to do some exploring. This is the wonderful thing you discover about those times – the relative freedom of young men with rather vague administrative jobs, trusted to do their own thing and interpret their orders.
Having struggled through trackless mountain wastes, where one Gurkha died of altitude sickness, Wakefield came down to the Indus valley. He arrived at the Jongpen Palace in Rudok and was astonished when a messenger rode out of the palace with a note written in perfect copperplate English: ‘I am glad to hear you’ve arrived. Please let me know what time I may come to see you, yours sincerely, K. K. Mondo’.
Mondo was an ordained monk and the local dzongpan or ruler, but he was also one of the Rugby School four. After Rugby, Mondo attended Camborne School of Mines. When he returned to his homeland, he began prospecting for gold some way north of Lhasa. But the lamas feared he would upset the balance of life – earth spirits do not approve of excavations – so they bade him stop. Mining, like metalworking, has always been a spiritually troublesome subject. And anyone who has been around old mine workings may sense the violence expended in penetrating the earth remains as a sort of dead atmosphere, a place of disturbed sleep and nightmares.
So Mondo was out of a job. He hoped to become the equivalent of an English parson with a country living, undisturbed and free to follow his interests, but instead of retiring to a monastery he was forced to become a monk-policeman in Lhasa. He rubbed people up the wrong way. Five years at Rugby had done its work: he brought a powerful motorbike back with him and – quite a feat – manhandled it over the high passes into Lhasa. Mondo liked to roar around the Holy City on his bike, causing one highly placed lama to be pitched from his mule. For this and other obscure infractions of lama law, he was disgraced and exiled to the far west of Tibet.
Wakefield found Mondo’s English a little rusty from disuse – it had been twelve years since he’d spoken the language – but ‘it was perfect English when it did arrive’. The two reminisced about quadrangles, school life, perfectly mown lawns and playing fields – all absent in the dry, almost desertlike conditions in western Tibet.
Oddly enough, Mondo was regarded as the most oppressive of a series of tyrannical rulers. Wakefield wrote, ‘No method by which money can be extracted from impoverished subjects has not been put into practice.’ In only one way was he lenient. After being whacked at Rugby for failing to do his prep – perhaps a Flashman-style beating – he’d had his fill: corporal punishment, though common elsewhere in Tibet, was banned in his province.
En route to Gartok, the interpreter Raghu Das went down with snow blindness and ‘had to be held by several men from attempting to knock his brains out against the rocks’. A cocaine solution revived and soothed him. Having saved the man, the party’s doctor, Dr Kanshi Ram, who was riding ahead, managed to narrowly avoid a dacoit or bandit whose hunting mastiffs had brought down a kyang. The bandit let off a shot at the doctor, who returned fire with his revolver. This so shocked the dacoit that he gave himself up. The party delivered the miscreant to the rightful authorities, who lost no time in dealing out a rather severe 200 lashes. This was not for firing on a stranger – it was for killing th
e wild ass. A recent edict from Lhasa banned the killing of wild animals and smoking tobacco – both were thought injurious to the health of the Dalai Lama.
At Gartok they went to the races. The monkish viceroys or Garpons had no English-schooled sense of fairness. The big prize donated by the Lhasa government brought out foul play. Their horses were allowed to start before the others. The owners of the best horses were browbeaten into leasing their rides to the Garpons. And if that failed, their grooms and boy jockeys were given full support in waylaying and beating the opposition. Wakefield was amused rather than outraged.
A true Victorian in spirit, Wakefield was not sick once in his five-month tour. He put it down to walking not riding the 1,300 miles. He wrote that he ‘suffered less than the rest of the party from colds and headaches and those bodily ailments inevitable in a country where fruit and vegetables are unobtainable’.
Frederick Spencer Chapman’s views focus on the quirky. You can tell that he doesn’t take any of the Rugby Four very seriously; he was very much a man of his time, the heyday of British influence in India shortly before the Second World War, more parochial and perhaps more arrogant than the ever-questing Victorians. Chapman would become famous as the man who stayed behind Japanese lines in Malaya after the fall of Singapore. Living on his wits for four years, he wrote the classic of guerrilla literature: The Jungle Is Neutral. But before this he was a mountaineer and arctic explorer. He was also a schoolmaster, and naturally when he got to Lhasa in 1937 he was interested in meeting the product of the type of school he had both attended and later taught at.
Ancient gate into Lhasa
He tells us four Tibetans were sent to Rugby and four returned. Their names were Mondo, Kyipup, Ghonkar and Ringang.
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