The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

  Here you can penetrate anywhere, only not with the Gospels under your arm, but with money in your pocket, a carbine in one hand and a whip in the other. Europeans must use these to come here and bear away in the name of civilization all these dregs of the human race. A thousand of our soldiers would be enough to subdue all Asia from Lake Baykal to the Himalayas … Here the exploits of Cortez can still be repeated.

  These were the terms of Przhevalsky’s reports to the General Staff, reports which contributed much to the bullying ruthlessness of some Russian ministers’ attitude to Peking in the years to follow.

  Using Choibseng as a base, Przhevalsky roamed the mountains. Choibseng had a species of red birch previously unknown; the forests that covered the mountains up to the 10,000-foot line were rich in moisture-loving shrubs and songbirds. Beyond the tree-line the predators soared; king of them all was the snow vulture with its ten-foot wing span. In a few weeks Przhevalsky and Pyltsov collected 324 species of flowering plant and 124 species of birds. It was too early for seeds to have ripened. Przhevalsky took back only dead specimens: dried and pressed leaves, stems and flowers. The birds, shot or poisoned, were preserved merely as ‘gloves’ of skin and plumage, with the skull and sometimes the skeleton to help the taxidermist reconstruct them. There were fewer species of mammals and, thanks to the low temperatures, almost no insects for Pyltsov’s own collection. The rain forced Przhevalsky to buy bellows from a Tangut to light the camp fire; the carbine would misfire and even the Viennese matches he had bought in Ting-yüan-ying would not strike. Przhevalsky spent a whole day climbing the highest peak, Sodisoruksum, only to find that he could not light a fire to boil water and calculate its height. But the exhaustion and the solitude pleased him; he returned the next day and found the peak to be 13,600 feet.

  Though he shunned the native population, Przhevalsky made laborious enquiries about the Tanguts and even compiled a small vocabulary of their Tibetan dialect. Enquiries were slow thanks to ‘the mental limitations of Dondok Irinchinov, the stupidity of the Mongol and the suspicions of the Tangut’; nevertheless, Przhevalsky brought back the first general study of the Tangut people. They generally refused to recognize Chinese sovereignty, considering themselves self-governing subjects of the Dalai Lama. Most were nomadic yak-herds and Yellow Hat Sect Buddhists, living on the produce of the yak and gathering potentilla (p. anserina) roots and medicinal rhubarb (r. palmatum). They loved the west mountains of Kansu and the marshes of Tsaidam and abhorred the arid plains of the Mongols, with whom they were often in conflict. They lived simply; often naked under their yak-skin gowns, with right arm and shoulder bared to all weathers. Their lamas shared their life in their black yak-hair tents. When they could not afford tea, they drank a brew of allium heads, together with the Mongol’s dzamba (roast barley meal) and curds. Many of the nomadic Tibetans–the Ngolok and Yograi with whom Przhevalsky was later to skirmish—were half-savage bandits, preying on caravans; but the Tanguts of Kansu were relatively gentle people.

  In mid-August there was a minor earthquake, and the rain began to turn to snow. Przhevalsky decided to move on. He returned to Chörtentang to collect his camels. They were all infected with coughs and scabs from the wet, but Przhevalsky had no alternative pack animals. He led them across the narrow bridge over the Ta-t’ung Ho, labourers dragging the baggage across separately, and over the dangerous rocks and mud to Choibseng. The lamas at Choibseng were expecting a Tungan attack and the entire population had crowded into the lamasery grounds. There was no room for the camels, so Przhevalsky organized his own defensive ‘square’ outside the walls using the camels and baggage for cover. For six days everyone waited, but the Tungans had melted away. By now Przhevalsky was regarded as both clairvoyant and bulletproof; a party of Mongols who had brought sheep to sell in Choibseng and who were anxious to get back to their pastures in the upper Ta-t’ung were only too pleased to guide Przhevalsky there on his way to Kuku Nor.

  This was not the direct route to Kuku Nor, but the shortest route went straight through the towns that the Chinese army was clearing. Ten thousand Tungans, it was reported, had been thrown over a precipice after the capture of Hsi-ning. The Chinese army was now preparing to move on to attack Suchou (or Chiu-ch’üan), north-west of Kuku Nor, and crush the Tungans completely. Przhevalsky, like the Tanguts, was anxious not to get embroiled. The Mongols wanted to travel by night; Przhevalsky had to pretend to augur before the Mongols agreed to use daylight, which would enable him to map the route. Then, after a few days in which Przhevalsky moved all his surplus equipment and collections to the comparative safety of Chörtentang, the expedition moved on.

  Not far out of Choibseng the party was charged by Chinese cavalry; they wheeled away at the last moment when they saw that Przhevalsky was about to open fire. They then had to cross two of the Tungan routes to the town of Ta-t’ung; near the second path 100 mounted Tungans blocked their exit from a gorge. The Mongol and Tangut travellers wanted to desert; Przhevalsky threatened to shoot them if they turned back. Faced with a heavily-armed and apparently fearless party, the Tungans dispersed at 1,000 yards. The next night had to be spent on an exposed mountain pass without a fire. But soon Przhevalsky was safely in the Mongol lands of Mur-zasak, where the local chieftain had a private truce with the rebels. Here his letter of introduction from Choibseng gave him guides to the next Tangut camp, where he was received with gifts of a sheep, butter, and more guides to take him past the sacred peak of Konker, down the gentle slopes to the shores of Kuku Nor. On 12/24 September 1872, at over 10,000 feet Przhevalsky pitched camp.

  ‘The dream of my life was realized,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘What had recently been only a dream was now an accomplished fact … all the misfortunes undergone were forgotten and my companion and I stood in complete delight on the shore of the great lake, admiring its wondrous, dark-blue waves.’

  Kuku Nor was a romantic setting. Its shallow, salty waters were whipped up by the storm winds into waves which contrasted with the stillness of the snow-capped mountains that surrounded it on three sides; the autumn weather was generally still and clear. Przhevalsky found a new species of carp, Schizopygopsis przewalskii. He hunted over the river, Bukhain Gol, that flowed into the north-west part of the lake; the first Tibetan species were appearing: the kiang, the Tibetan race of the wild ass (onager or kulan), grazed warily on the sparse vegetation.

  Only now did Przhevalsky realize that his path to Tibet was open. He had visited a Mongol encampment to exchange eleven of his sickly camels. Here he found, to his astonishment, that the Tibetan ambassador from Lhasa to Peking was staying. The ambassador, Kambe Nantu, had left Lhasa in 1862 and was now on his way back, waiting only for the Tungan rebellion to die down. He came to Przhevalsky’s tent and promised him that the Dalai Lama would be glad to see the Russians. Never again was Przhevalsky to be invited to Lhasa; at no other time in his life, with the Chinese embroiled in rebellions and the Tibetans at their least xenophobic, was such an opportunity to recur. Przhevalsky accepted Kambe Nantu’s proposition. But he knew he dared not go farther than half the 1,000 miles to Lhasa; he had less than 100 liang, the price of a couple of camels, in his pocket, and the Tibetan winter was coming. To go to Lhasa would invite disaster and jeopardize all that the expedition had achieved.

  Kambe Nantu’s visit raised Przhevalsky’s prestige throughout Kuku Nor. (Kuku Nor was a Mongol feudal princedom including most of the modern province of Chinghai.) Two guides were found for him: one was a lama from the monastery of Kumbum, near Hsi-ning, where the Tibetan Yellow Sect of Tsong Khapa had originated and where the sacred lilac with hieroglyphic markings on its leaves still grew. From this lama Przhevalsky learnt enough of Tibetan herbal medicine for even his scepticism to be quelled. With his guides he moved westwards from Kuku Nor and crossed the mountains on his way to the Mongols’ ‘capital’, Dulan Kit.

  Dulan Kit was safe from Tangut raids and here the Chinghai Wang, or ruler of Kuku Nor, had moved his headquarters. But before Przheval
sky reached Dulan Kit, near the salt lake of Dalai Dabasu he met the future Wang and his regent mother, who welcomed the expedition to their dominions. At Dulan the Wang’s uncle gave Przhevalsky a ger, eleven-foot wide and nine-foot high, without which they might never have survived their months in Tibet; the Wang’s uncle, an abbot, even stopped the inhabitants of Dulan Kit from pestering the great khubilgan (saint) as Przhevalsky was now called. Two hundred people knelt as the expedition entered Dulan Kit: Przhevalsky felt obliged to bless the sick and predict the future. He was asked to locate missing cattle, to cure a princess of barrenness, and to stop the Khara Tangut from robbing the Mongols. He was credited with a hundred invisible warriors whom he could conjure up to his aid.

  Protected by this aura, Przhevalsky moved on south-east over a pass that led to the vast salty marsh, the depression of Tsaidam. He descended the Baltagyn Gol into an expanse of saline clay, that, according to the Mongols whom Przhevalsky was one day to prove wrong, stretched unbroken to the almost legendary Lob Nor. Tsaidam was terrible terrain. The salty ground ruined his camels’ hooves; Faust and Karza could barely walk on their bleeding paws. There were few animals and no plants. Only the kharmyk shrub (Nitraria schoberi) gave anything to man or beast. The camels ate its desiccated branches while the wolves, foxes and birds came down from the mountains to feed on its salty-sweet berries. The Tsaidam Mongols, who fled to the mountains to escape the summer insects, returned in autumn to gather kharmyk berries and pickle them for winter. They were poor people, for cattle did not thrive in Tsaidam and the Tungan rebellion had cut them off from China, forcing them against their custom to till the soil and grow a few cereals.

  Przhevalsky found nothing in Tsaidam except a new race of pheasant, which he was to name Phasanus vlangalii in gratitude to the ambassador in Peking, but he heard reports of the animals he was to discover in later expeditions. In the west of Tsaidam wild camels were hunted: caravan camels had been known to desert to the wild herds. There were rumours of a wild horse around Lob Nor, too canny to hunt.

  It was now mid-November and the thermometer would not climb above zero for many months. But the sky was clear and no snow had fallen when Przhevalsky reached the kherem (clay fort) of Dzun-dzasak on the other side of eastern Tsaidam. Here he left some supplies and the bulk of his equipment before climbing up 6,000 feet on to the plateau of northern Tibet. The Dzun-dzasak chieftain was glad to be helpful. To him Przhevalsky’s sacks of barley meal were a talisman that protected his people; when the expedition came back, he gave Przhevalsky two sheep as thanks. As lightly laden as he dared be, early in December Przhevalsky left Dzun-dzasak with an old Mongol, Chutungdzamba, who had been to Lhasa nine times, as guide. He hoped at least to reach the valley of the Mur Usu, the headwaters of the Yangtse Kiang.

  They climbed into the rarefied air of the Burkhan Budda, the eastern extremity of the great Kun Lun system that blocks off northern Tibet from the lowlands of Lob Nor and the plains of Tsaidam. Snowbound, absolutely bare of life, swept by howling gales, the Burkhan Budda was a foretaste of a Tibetan winter. Przhevalsky shed more equipment, burying ammunition to await his return. As they crossed the pass and came down a few hundred feet to the Nomokhun Gol, a camel dropped dead of oxygen starvation. Dizziness, nausea and headaches afflicted everyone. The abbé Huc, like the Chinese, attributed the symptoms to ‘carbon gases’ emitted by the unfriendly rocks. Przhevalsky realized that on a plateau which never dropped far below 14,000 feet, the rarefied air was going to make movement difficult and even sleep uncomfortable. The plateau, in fact, was known to the Mongols as guresu gadzyr, the country of wild animals. Despite its desolation it was well-watered in summer and kulans and yaks searched for patches of grass, while wolves and foxes pursued the herbivores in search of carrion.

  Between Tsaidam and the Tang La range 500 miles to the south there was no human settlement or even encampment. Clumps of grass grew around natural springs; elsewhere this was a region of rock, saline clay and sand which the incessant north-westerly gales whipped up into terrible dust storms. Every day the cold became worse; Przhevalsky and his men suffered from nausea and weakness. Their hands trembled, and taking bearings was all but impossible. At night the lack of oxygen gave them nightmares, from which they awoke struggling with asthma. There was not enough oxygen to make camel dung burn; when they did manage to light a fire, because of the altitude the water boiled at such a low temperature (85°C) that tea would not brew or meat cook. Pilgrim caravans never travelled here except during autumn, a brief interlude that separated the incessant summer rains and the sub-zero winter. During these two months, when the rivers became fordable and the gales died down, caravans tried to cover the 1,000 miles from Donker (Tangar), near Hsining, to Lhasa. If they moved on yaks instead of camels the journey took four months, but at least they had the advantage of surer-footed and hardier beasts. In winter, on camels, Przhevalsky had the worst of it. Even had he aimed for Lhasa, the camels would have had to be exchanged for yaks twelve days north of the city, for want of grazing and suitable tracks. The journey was considered hazardous even for the experienced. The last Tibetan caravan from Lhasa to Peking had left in February 1870 and had lost all but three of its 1,000 camels, while fifty of the 300 travellers had perished in the deep snow.

  Leaving the Nomokhun Gol, Przhevalsky climbed the gentle slopes of the Shuga range. Now he was in Tibet, the first Russian to penetrate so far into Central Asia. Though sick and cold, he felt extraordinarily happy: the country of wild beasts was a game-hunter’s dream. Herds of yak and kulan, wild sheep and bharals, orongo gazelles and ada antelopes roamed the plateau, unused to, and hardly afraid of, man. The orongo stags were herding the hinds: in their rut they paid little attention to the hunter. Przhevalsky shocked Chutungdzamba by eating their meat, for the orongo was sacred and its horns were used to mark the graves of lamas. The wild yak, however, gave Przhevalsky his greatest excitement. He would crawl on all fours from his ger, holding the tripod of his gun above his head to deceive the myopic yak into mistaking him for another animal. At 100 yards Przhevalsky would take aim, loading his carbine with bullets he carried in his cap. Often the yak would then charge, and, although it invariably turned away at the last moment, it was difficult to kill and dangerous to wound. Often Przhevalsky emptied all his bullets into a yak only to find the animal still alive. He would return to the ger to fetch Pyltsov, a Cossack and more ammunition. It sometimes took a whole salvo to put the animal out of its misery. In two months Przhevalsky slaughtered thirty-two yak (only three were cows, which had the sense to mass together for protection) and if only there had been fuel and oxygen enough to cook the meat properly, the expedition might have eaten well. Altogether the expedition butchered fourteen tons of meat, most of which they abandoned to the wolves. They would break up ice with an axe and heat it with the frozen meat in an iron cauldron over a smoky fire of dung. The humid air had rusted the cauldron; they patched its holes with barley dough or raw skin and in the end, soldered them with spent copper cartridges.

  Life became increasingly tougher. The ger from Dulan Kit took an hour to erect, with its wooden lattice frame and felt cladding. Even so, with all the men crowded in and a fire smouldering on an iron grate in the middle, the temperature stayed well below freezing. In vain did Przhevalsky line the walls with yak and antelope skins or packing cases. Their warm clothing was in tatters, their boots had collapsed and they had to stitch patches of raw yak hide onto the remains of the uppers. The horses were too exhausted to carry a man; Przhevalsky and Pyltsov dismounted, carrying twenty pounds each on their backs. There were days when the gales lifted so much salt and dust that the expedition was holed up in its ger. The ten hours of darkness were only another form of nightmare in which the sleepers fought for breath. A diet of meat simmered in half-boiled water or of ‘Siberian soup’—barley flour fried in yak butter and stirred into ‘brick’ tea (the compressed tea of Central Asia)—did nothing to strengthen them physically or morally.

  The Tibetan wolves w
ho followed the expedition over the plateau were a more comic nuisance. Every night a few of these whitish-yellow beasts raided the camp. They would devour whole gazelle carcases the instant a hunter turned his back and went to fetch a camel to carry the game back home. One wolf dragged off a rifle and some cartridges. Przhevalsky eventually found the rifle discharged and the cartridges eaten out. The wolves dug up the supplies which Przhevalsky buried against his return journey: a whole pack of butter wrapped in linen was stolen from the Shuga valley. The wolves were too cunning to ambush and Przhevalsky had no snares with which to trap them.

  Each day was worse. Przhevalsky recorded the Russian New Year (13 January 1873) in his diary: ‘Never in my life have I had to spend the New Year in such an absolute desert as we now find ourselves in … We have absolutely no supplies left, except the accursed dzamba and a small quantity of flour. The privation is terrible but must be borne in the name of the expedition’s great goal.’

  Outside, the wind never relented; their eyes were full of tears, and even hunting became impossible: dust clogged up the Berdan; cartridges would not come out of the breech. Pyltsov was so badly frozen on one excursion that he lay immobile for a week. In December and January there was a dust storm every other day, blotting out the sun, blinding the eyes, making the air unbreathable and leaving the atmosphere tinged grey and yellow for the next day. But finally, on the 10/22 January 1873, the expedition reached the mouth of the Napchitai Ulan River and found itself on the Mur Usu or upper Yangtse Kiang. Twenty-seven more days might have brought them to Lhasa, but three of Przhevalsky’s camels were dead, others were dying and he had just five liang—about eight ounces of silver, the price of a sheep—to pay his way. Chutungdzamba went on up the frozen Mur Usu; Przhevalsky, wisely and sadly, gave up his dream of reaching Lhasa and turned back to retrace his steps to Tsaidam, Kuku Nor and Kansu.