White Mountain

  With foresight, the British should probably have left Tibet to itself. However, anxious to appear ‘fair’ and ‘above board’ to the Tibetans, yet, at the same time wanting the benefits of trade with that country, they could not leave it alone. The problem is, when you invade a country, it becomes very attractive to other vultures when you depart. Your invasion has proved the country is weak; when you leave, the implied power vacuum will be very quickly filled. We need only to look at Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century to see evidence of this. And in Tibet’s case, every invasion by a foreign power has prefigured a Chinese follow-up invasion. Mongol inroads into Tibet led to a Chinese invasion in 1720, the Nepalese incursions led to one in 1790 and British activity in the form of the Younghusband expedition and its aftermath led to the Chinese invasion of 1910 – which had special orders to capture the Dalai Lama. Luckily for him, he escaped and nine days later was licking his wounds in Darjeeling.

  We tend to think of the Chinese revolution as the communist success in 1949. In reality, the Chinese revolution – like all revolutions – was a bourgeois grab for power, between 1910 and 1913, that was hijacked by those with greater ruthlessness. Mao, like Lenin, would be the ultimate inheritor of the power, once the revolutionary process had disrupted/bankrupted the country. This loss of Chinese military effectiveness with regard to Tibet during the years between the start of the revolution in 1910 and its conclusion in the dictatorship of Mao in 1949 allowed an illusion of independence to grow in Tibet. This was fostered by the benign and dull-witted attentions of the British.

  Fast-forward to 1950 and another Chinese invasion was on the way, encouraged by Britain’s pull-out from India. The British had yet again blundered – in Eastern political terms – by leaving India in a rush. Though morally and commercially completely understandable, in the arena of Great Game politics that Russia and China and Britain had been playing for centuries, the withdrawal from India was bound to send a very powerful message to every country in Asia: despite winning the war, the British were defeated and were going home. What else could they have done? Employed foresight and staged the withdrawal over ten years, ending in 1957 – which had been the original plan, until Mountbatten overruled it? Maybe; it is very easy to fall prey to foresight’s cheap and almost worthless companion, hindsight; however, when it came to Tibet the action of leaving India took on grave connotations and circumstances. Britain was leaving, and Britain had guaranteed Tibetans protection simply by its presence in India. If India did not offer the same assurances, then China would effectively have a green light.

  Which is exactly what Nehru did. Like many intellectuals who have benefited from an education provided by an occupying power – he went to Trinity College, Cambridge – he was riven by inner conflicts all his life. India – the most discriminatory country on earth – if you are an untouchable – is extraordinarily tolerant of difference and inequality. But put an upper-class Indian like Nehru – so intoxicated by Britain’s power that he never learned an Indian language to rival his preferred use of English – through an education that emphasises fairness and intrinsic merit and you are bound to have it backfire. That same person, highly educated – in a Western sense – will demand the freedom and fairness you have been teaching and preaching at him. But Nehru was still an Indian and therefore fairness could not, on nationalistic grounds, be seen to undermine India and its customs. So fairness only really applied to him and the power elite he represented. To ascribe to Nehru an inferiority complex with regard to the British is perhaps going too far; he certainly had a hang-up or two, though, and this resulted in the decision, fatal for Tibet, to support the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations and to release via the Indian ambassador this statement of 15 August 1950:

  The Indian government stated that the Government of India recognises Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. Although the newspaper claims that the Government of India is concerned about Tibet, in fact, the only concern the Government of India has towards Tibet is being afraid of tribal disturbances along the border due to military activities. Therefore [we] hope that Tibetan problems can be resolved through negotiations between China and Tibet.

  Nehru would later rue these words when the implied weakness and failure to stand up to China would result in the Chinese invasion in 1962, but for the time being he was riding high on being anti-British and pro-Chinese.

  As well as declining to support Tibet, Nehru refused to back the US outrage at the North Korean invasion of South Korea. Nehru had delusions of bringing the great powers to the negotiating table – little did he realise that Stalin saw him as a mere tool for advancing his own interests. Mao, too, through the cunning offices of Chou En-lai, further tricked Nehru by implying that the American support of South Korean territorial integrity justified a Chinese invasion of Tibet.

  So far as the Chinese were concerned, the message was clear: India won’t interfere if you invade. So they did. On 5 October 1950, Mao’s 18th Army crossed into Tibet. They had managed to transport 10,000 tons of military provisions and 8,000 men to staging areas on the border. On 6 October the PLA, weighed down with backpacks of up to 40 kilos a man, marched 60 kilometres a day. By 18 October half had died along the road due to altitude-related sickness and exhaustion; 500 horses had also collapsed.

  Despite this setback, Chamdo was conquered and in six days an estimated 5,700 Tibetans were killed.

  The Chinese stated through Deputy Minister Zhang: ‘The problem of Tibet is a domestic problem of China. The liberation of Tibet and consolidating the border are sacred rights of the People’s Republic of China, and no foreign interference shall be tolerated.’

  In this act of ‘liberation’, China had already far surpassed the casualties of the British invasion in 1904, yet this was only the beginning.

  The first town the battle-hardened PLA reached was Gartok. The Christian missionary Geoff Bull noted ‘absolute confusion’ reigned, ‘social order’ broke down and people ran around trying to save what valuables they could. The reputation for looting and destruction preceded the PLA. These were not the mounted infantry of Younghusband, who would not enter the Potala unless invited.

  Bull was taken prisoner and ludicrously accused of being a ‘conspirator against China’. For three years he was serially abused and mistreated in a ‘re-education’ camp. In a form of brainwashing that became well known when employed against US prisoners in the Korean War, Bull was forced to endlessly rewrite his autobiography. Each version would then be criticised, relentlessly undermining any sense of personal history. With Bull it failed dismally; his spirit survived undimmed and unbroken by this insane attempt at mental re-wiring. Released in 1953 at the end of the Korean War, he went on to write the fascinating memoir Iron Gates Yield.

  Another captured Englishman was the young radio operator Robert Ford. Employed by the Tibetans, he ran the sole radio station in Chamdo. He liked to keep busy and was known for having introduced the samba to Lhasa when he worked there. In Chamdo he spent his time replying to amateur radio hams who wanted a ‘QXL’ card to prove they had heard one of the most distant radio stations on the planet. This harmless activity, and the letters from all over the world, sealed his fate as far as the Chinese invaders were concerned. He was sentenced to spend five years in a Chinese prison camp. He survived long periods of mental stress, and later met Heinrich Harrer in London, marked by his experiences but not broken by them.

  Ford had sent the message to Lhasa advising them of the attack and desperately asking for help. The immortal message came back: ‘Right now it is the period of the Kashag’s picnic and they are all participating in this. Your telegrams are being decoded and then they will send you a reply.’

  To this the Tibetan officer shouted, ‘Shit the picnic’ and hung up.

  Ford later wrote, ‘The Tibetans were overwhelmed; the Chinese captured over half the 10,000 Tibetan defenders. With no word from Lhasa and no possibility of stopping the PLA the Governor fled in the middle of the n
ight, leaving the local people to fend for themselves. Panic was breaking out in the town . . . Monks were hurrying towards the monastery, gabbling their prayers . . .’

  It would do little good; it was the beginning of the end of this ancient country and its ancient ways.

  The British were the last to give up on Tibet; in 2008, Foreign Secretary David Milliband claimed it was ‘archaic’ to insist on Chinese suzerainty rather than sovereignty. It was just another deal to make money for Britain; more importantly it meant that China’s invasion had succeeded – Tibet no longer existed as an independent or semi-independent nation. Wikipedia reflects this change – any ‘official’ document – from the United Nations or a government, anything from academia – all refer to China rather than Tibet. China is rewriting history and gradually trying to airbrush Tibet out of the picture. But rewriting history has a habit of backfiring . . .

  12

  Everest: Who Got There First?

  He boasts about eating sweets when he actually ate a potato.

  Nepalese proverb

  Everest – the big one. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949/50, access to the north side, the path of all the early attempts on Everest, was denied. Attention now turned to the southern slopes on the Nepalese side, Nepal having given up barring climbers in an attempt to remain on good terms with the rest of the world now that China was at its border. In the 1950s, Everest was the last big target for explorers; the question was, had it already been climbed?

  Can we discount the imaginative thesis that Irvine and Mallory climbed Everest in 1924 and fell on the way down? Perhaps not. Mallory was a good rock climber; more to the point, he was prepared to take risks. The second step on the north face has one short section now climbed using a 4.5-metre aluminium ladder left there by a Chinese expedition in 1975. There is a crack – a little too wide to fist-jam and not wide enough to fit your body into. This is the only way up if the ladder is not used. Conrad Anker, a member of the 1999 expedition that found Mallory’s body, climbed it and said it wasn’t easy but was certainly do-able by a competent climber from the 1920s. As this was the major technical problem facing Mallory and Irvine, it is just possible they did reach the summit. Mallory had told everyone he would place a photograph of his wife on the summit; though several photographs were found on his body, the one of his wife, as we have already mentioned, was suggestively missing. In the real world it is not enough to get to the top – you have to be able to get down again. As Reinhold Messner says, ‘the greatest climber is the one who is still alive’. So, as they perished in the attempt, we can discount the precocious 1924 claim – unless Irvine’s body should be found beside a camera containing unequivocal shots of the summit.

  For the time being, then, let us consider the real contenders: Hillary and Tenzing.

  Just as it makes little sense to claim prior arrival when you simply got off the same train a fraction quicker than a fellow passenger, there is a sense in which a pair climbing together are an indivisible unit, especially when it comes to claiming a summit. Certainly, this is the usual case in mountaineering, as it is in writing academic papers, authoring books and penning pop songs.

  When the pair are of vastly differing talent, where one climber is effectively hauling the other up the face, if it should happen that the lead climber is not first to set foot on the peak’s very highest point, then he will generally be given the credit for the ascent. Nevertheless, the man who accompanies him will perforce share the honours.

  Tenzing had been climbing as a Sherpa and sirdar for twenty years. He had been ‘discovered’ in Darjeeling by Tilman and Shipton and had graduated eventually to the top slot – a place on the 1953 Everest expedition led by the ‘thrusting’ John Hunt – after Eric Shipton was deemed to lack the necessary oomph to bag the summit. It was seen by many as a miserable return to siege-gun tactics, but for the Brits, having lost most of the empire, and firmly now in the shadow of America, this was the last chance to garner one of the top prizes in exploration. The Swiss expedition of the previous year had come close to succeeding. If the British failed, then someone else would succeed. This was the background to the momentous climb to the top led, in the final stage, by New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary (often described as a beekeeper, which, though true, is misleading – he was a professional climber in his approach, dedication and desire to succeed).

  Tenzing and Hillary both knew there would be immense pressure on them to divulge who got to the top first. They decided to make a pact and tell the world they arrived together, determined that a wedge should not be driven between them. But when they descended and were on the way to Kathmandu, a kind of nationalist hysteria took over and the Nepalese decided Tenzing had been the first. A group of journalists and politicians got Tenzing — who was illiterate at the time, according to his son — to sign a document saying he had arrived first. Hillary, to his credit, did not react to this, but John Hunt announced at a press conference in Kathmandu that Tenzing was not a hero, he was an aide with little mountaineering skill, and that Hillary had led all but a small part of the climb above 8,500 metres. Later, Hunt would retract this. To settle the matter, Hillary and Tenzing met at the Prime Minister’s office and signed a joint statement that they had arrived ‘almost together’.

  As time went by, both Hillary and Tenzing used their fame to achieve a great deal. Tenzing, however, grew weary of the attention. Often people would try to doorstep him when he was in the garden of his Darjeeling home; mistaking him for the gardener, they would ask if Sherpa Tenzing was at home. He’d reply that Tenzing was out, and then carry on weeding, happy to be thought a servant of the man they sought.

  On the night before they reached the summit, Hillary removed his boots and left them outside his sleeping bag. Tenzing kept his on. Hillary’s were frozen stiff the next morning and they were late leaving as Hillary and Tenzing alternated holding the boots over the stove to thaw them out. They were still immovable and stiff when they set out, so Tenzing took the lead. When Hillary had warmed up, he took over. They were able to follow and step in the footprints left by the climbers who had preceded them the day before – Bourdillon and Evans – though the wind had begun to fill the prints with snow.

  Just before the south summit, the slope steepens. Tenzing had found the going difficult, as they were conserving their oxygen. But at this lower summit they retrieved fresh oxygen bottles left behind by Bourdillon and Evans, which meant they could now afford to breathe a richer mixture and push on.

  The route from this point follows a narrow and potentially deadly ridge to the summit. On one side the snow flops and overhangs the 3,000-metre drop of the Kangshung face. Sometimes unnerving holes appear in the snow, allowing a glimpse of this hugely high face. You have to walk a little way from the edge in case this cornice breaks off and takes you with it. But you can’t go too far to the other side as then you might begin an unstoppable slide down into the western cwm, 2,500 metres below.

  The Hillary Step – now surmounted by fixed ropes – was climbed by Hillary and Tenzing by wedging themselves between the rock and the snow of the cornice. After that, they had another half an hour of painfully slow walking – one step followed by a pause to catch their breath – until they reached the top of the mountain.

  Tenzing wrote in his autobiography that Hillary reached the top a few seconds before he did. It made sense, as Hillary had led the way up the last obstacle – the Hillary Step, named after its first climber. (Some elderly Sherpas call it Tenzing’s back, referring to a story that Hillary stood on Tenzing’s back to get a boost – a legitimate but unconventional move.) But you can sense the ego and ambition needed to get to the top in Tenzing’s words to his son on the matter. He did not refer to it as the truth; rather, he called the admission in his autobiography ‘a concession in the hope of finally ridding himself of the interminable questions’.

  13

  The Nanda Devi Caper

  The deer on a slope can be chased even by a calf.


  Nepalese proverb

  The new Great Game of the Himalayas was America v. Communism. At first it was the Soviet variety; Mao was seen as a sideshow. With the invasion of South Korea and Tibet in 1950, attitudes changed. But though the Chinese were a threat through the vast manpower available, they did not have what the Soviets had: nuclear weapons. Paranoid Stalin was not about to empower any nation on his doorstep – whatever their professed alignment with communism. Khrushchev thought differently – he not only sought to station Russian weapons in communist friendly countries, he allowed the Chinese to make their own.

  On 16 October 1964 the evil spreading form of a mushroom cloud was observed from a spy plane in Lop Nur in Xinjiang province bordering Tibet. The explosion – a 22-kiloton device – marked a huge change in the relationship of the West to the East. It meant Tibet was no longer the logical resting place for Chinese expansionist visions; suddenly all the disputed territory they claimed on the other side of the Himalayas – large chunks of Arunachal Pradesh being among them – were all up for grabs.

  The CIA’s Plan A was to put some kind of spying device on a very high mountain in order to accurately observe all the time what the Chinese were up to in the field of nuclear bomb making. A radio scanning device with five sensors would, if placed high enough, be able to directly intercept radio traffic in the Xinjiang region. But it needed to be really high.

  Everest was out of the question – it was accessible from Tibet, and the Chinese had proved competent climbers when they ascended it in 1960 using the north face route that had defeated Mallory and Irvine and all the pre-war climbers.

  K2 was in Pakistan – also problematic, as the CIA wanted to run this operation with India. Also K2 was harder to climb than Everest. Kanchenjunga – the third highest mountain – was the new target, but again parts of it straddled a border with Nepal. Finally, Nanda Devi was chosen; 7,816 metres high, it had American associations, having been first climbed by a party led by Dr Charles Houston, the long-lived (1913-2009) pioneer of much high-altitude medical research. Nanda Devi would also see an American Tragedy in 1976 when top American climber Willi Unsoeld took his daughter – named after the mountain, Nanda Devi Unsoeld – on an attempt on the peak that ended in her death. It was as if this peak, which was isolated and protected by a natural rock amphitheatre, and remains a sacred summit, was taking revenge after the CIA assault on its lonely integrity.