The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  [The Diamond Sutra]

  This is the frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra, one of the most beautiful images I have ever seen. It shows the Buddha, in a garden, teaching his disciple, watched by Buddhist beings and angelic creatures on clouds.

  [The Caves of Dunhuang]

  The cave was part of a network of caves called the ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas’, filled with thousands of other Buddhist texts, sculptures and paintings.

  AFTER I LEFT SCHOOL I lived in India to ‘teach’ in a school in a village in Himachal Pradesh. I loved it. The village was filled with fantastic characters, the countryside around it was lush and green and the children were adorable. At the weekends my friends and I would jump on a bus and head to Dharamsala, home of the exiled Dalai Lama. The town was full of monks dressed in their robes, walking the streets, sitting in cafés talking about Tibet and showing photographs of themselves on their travels. We could walk up to their temple to watch them meditating and chanting. It was heaven for me, even though I wasn’t into meditation then.

  Anyway, meeting Tibetan monks during those months in India is probably the reason I fell for a Tibetan costume and picked it out from the epic swathes of costumes from every era and every continent stored in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  When I saw it, it lived in the Asian costume storage room inside the museum itself where the museum keeps its vast collection of textiles and paintings that are light sensitive and can’t be on permanent display. But by now it has probably been moved to the V&A Museum’s storage rooms in Blythe House. When I visited, the V&A was planning to move the entire Asian and western textile collection to new storage rooms there, called the Clothworkers’ Centre for Textiles and Fashion Study and Conservation, due to open in 2013. There the garments will be stored according to type of clothing, rather than geography so that the researchers, artists and designers who ask to delve into the storehouse can easily find the clothes they’d like to see.

  As they packed the costumes in preparation for the move, the curators told me that they are uncovering new things all the time. They had just found some wall hangings that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

  John Clarke, a curator who looks after Himalayan, Burmese and Thai treasures, offered to show me the Tibetan costume.

  After he had buzzed me through into a study room behind a wooden door just at the end of the café, I found myself in a high-ceilinged room. Two people were working on the costumes up on a mezzanine level and, down below, where John and I stood, there were shoes laid out on racks. He explained that a jewellery designer who likes shoes had just been in to study different styles for a collection she was working on.

  He took the costume out to show me and laid it carefully on a table. It is a Tibetan abbot’s costume made up of several different pieces: a heavy woollen skirt; a jacket with a museum number sewn into it showing it came into the museum in 1930; a pair of red velvet boots with woven soles; a wonderful yellow headdress, the colour of the Dalai Lama’s sect of Buddhism; a monk’s robe, which is wrapped around the body; a vibrant red over-jacket beautifully tailored with red cotton and wool and a ceremonial water bottle. The whole lot is stored, like so many hidden treasures, inside a grey box with its catalogue number on it, and kept on a shelf.

  This costume hasn’t ever been on display, because the museum owns another, better preserved example of a Tibetan abbot’s costume from the same era; however it might one day be included in future shows about Tibetan clothes. The costume I saw is most interesting because of its story, and there isn’t room to tell that story on a small museum card.

  It belonged to the last abbot of Tengye Ling monastery in Lhasa. This was quite an important monastery in Tibet, because it was the one from which the regents of Tibet were chosen.

  The regents ruled Tibet in between Dalai Lamas, while the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was being found to take over from where he had left off in his previous lifetime. The regents were also reincarnated, but they were easier to find, as they tended to turn up in this particular monastery in Lhasa. The abbot of the monastery who owned this costume had been regent until the 13th Dalai Lama was appointed.

  The 13th Dalai Lama’s name was Thubten Gyatso. He was enthroned at the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1879 aged 19, and so became the temporal and spiritual ruler of the Tibetans. The ruling Chinese Qing officials were not happy, however. The previous Dalai Lamas, from the fifth until Thubten Gyatso, had all mysteriously died before they reached the age to take the throne. However, the 13th had survived, and was a strong, healthy and energetic young man. A Chinese official was quoted as saying, ‘Affairs had been managed very badly,’ in the case of Thubten Gyatso. What could they do?

  Their solution, some speculate, was to ask the abbot who owned this costume, Demo Rinpoche, to try to bump him off.

  The abbot sewed evil charms into the soles of a pair of boots very similar to the ones in storage at the museum today and gave them to Terton Sogyal – a close confidant of the Dalai Lama, who was very spiritually accomplished, especially in relation to Shinge, the Lord of Death. The abbot thought this would bring them close enough to the Dalai Lama – the boots would walk in the same rooms as him each day. Then he waited for the hidden charms to work their dark magic.

  Sure enough, the Dalai Lama began feeling terribly ill. He consulted an oracle. The oracle said that there was a plot on his life. A pair of boots was to blame. An investigation was made and Terton Sogyal said that the abbot had given him a new pair of boots as a gift and, funnily enough, every time he wore them he got a nosebleed.

  The boots were torn open and inside one of the soles was a scrap of paper with the Dalai Lama’s name on it and a black magic symbol. These were the deadly charms that were casting a spell on the Dalai Lama.

  The abbot, his brother, his minister, his wife and their associates were arrested, and the National Assembly sentenced them to death. Of course, this was a step too far for the benevolent 13th Dalai Lama, so, instead, he had them punished. Each of them had pieces of bamboo jammed under their fingernails – which makes me wince even to think about it. The chief minister’s wife, who was in on the trick, was made to sit in the street, where all of Lhasa could see her, wearing the cangue, a big bit of wood, across her shoulders. Then she and her husband were sent into exile. The abbot who once wore this costume drowned in a copper vat of water while in prison, which sounds very suspicious to me.

  Tengye Ling monastery was closed, and the monastery’s lineage was no longer recognized. There would be no more reincarnations of regents from the monastery. Later, the monastery supported China in its repression of Tibet. Because of these two disgraces, the monastery was emptied and everything was sold on the street.

  The costume was donated to the Asian collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum by a friend of the 13th Dalai Lama, David McDonald, who lived in Tibet. His job was to look after British Indian trade between Tibet and India. His mother was from Sikkim, then a kingdom in northern India, and his father was Scottish. McDonald was so accepted in Tibet that he had a Tibetan name: Dorje.

  The 13th Dalai Lama had to deal with a British invasion of Tibet in 1903 and 1904, and then a Chinese invasion in 1910. To escape the latter, he went into exile for two years in Darjeeling, in India. McDonald helped him to get safely out of Tibet. It’s possible that McDonald was given the costume by the Dalai Lama as a gift of thanks, or else he bought it from someone who acquired it in the street during the monastery’s closing-in-disgrace sale.

  When the 13th Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa in 1913, he assumed the spiritual and political leadership of Tibet, declared its independence from China, created the Tibetan flag as it is today and introduced secular education, postage stamps and banknotes into the country. Before he died, he predicted:

  Very soon in this land (with a harmonious blend of religion and politics) deceptive acts may occur from without and within. At that time, if we do not dare to protect our territory, our spiritual personalities, including t
he Victorious Father and Son [Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama], may be exterminated without trace, the property and authority of our Lakangs [residences of reincarnated lamas] and monks may be taken away. Moreover, our political system, developed by the Three Great Dharma Kings, will vanish without anything remaining. The property of all people, high and low, will be seized and the people forced to become slaves. All living beings will have to endure endless days of suffering and will be stricken with fear. Such a time will come.

  He predicted the Chinese would invade and take over Tibet, and said he would die early so that his reincarnation, the next Dalai Lama would be old enough to lead the Tibetan people when that time came. His successor is the current Dalai Lama, the 14th, who has lived in exile since 1959, when he left Tibet with 80,000 Tibetan refugees. He has worked all his life for the welfare of Tibetans inside and outside Tibet, somehow managing to chuckle with joy all the way.

  I didn’t see him in Dharamsala when I was there, as he spends so much time travelling and teaching, spreading his messages of hope that the twenty-first century will be a century of peace, tolerance and dialogue. I once saw him speak at the Albert Hall in London. Although I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying as the sound wasn’t great, the atmosphere was one of the most incredible I’ve ever felt inside the Albert Hall. He radiated love.

  [The Tibetan abbot’s costume]

  This sleeveless outer wool and brocade jacket is part of the costume I saw in storage at the V&A that belonged to the last abbot of Tengye Ling monastery in Lhasa. The abbot was involved in a plot to kill the young, 13th Dalai Lama, and so he was sent to prison, and his monastery was dissolved.

  [The 13th Dalai Lama]

  He was enthroned at the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1879 aged 19, and so became the temporal and spiritual ruler of the Tibetans.

  [Flag of Tibet]

  The 13th Dalai Lama predicted the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

  [His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama]

  Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama. He is in the Gelug, or ‘Yellow Hat’, branch of Tibetan Buddhism.

  THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM’S Asian object storage in Blythe House is filled with lots of objects from among the museums Asian treasures which it doesn’t permanently display. Anyone who would like to visit can do so by appointment, and it’s used a fair bit by researchers and designers. The Asian textiles, paintings and sculptures are stored in other locations in Blythe House, and in the museum itself.

  The Asian object store is a large room, but far smaller than some of the warehouses I’ve been to. It is lined with grey metal and glass cabinets, filled with things from India, Burma, Tibet, Bali – in fact, from all over Asia. On the walls there are nineteenth-century copies of the paintings inside the Ajanta caves in India, and inside the cabinets are armour, shields, jewellery from India, furniture from Burma, Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures and most of the Tibetan Collection.

  In among all these things can be found two golden bees the size of rabbits. They’re tubby things, with their wings folded on top of their bodies. They are carved from red wood, lacquered, and gilded all over with crushed-up gold. I saw them in a glass cabinet, on a shelf, but once upon a time they adorned the Bee Throne in the Glass Palace in Mandalay, Burma.

  The Bee Throne was one of eight thrones in the palace complex (a ninth was just outside). Each was decorated with its own auspicious and symbolic animal carvings. There were the Lion Throne, the Duck Throne, the Conchshell Throne, the Elephant Throne, the Deer Throne, the Peacock Throne, the Lily Throne and, of course, the Bee Throne. The most important was the Lion Throne, which had a double door at the back, so the king could climb into it without being seen clambering up. He sat upon it to receive his most important subjects, twice a year, when they swore allegiance to him. The king was protected by a carved sea of magical lions, ancestral figures and worshipping pageboys. The figures enhanced the mystique and prestige of the king, grounding him in a mythical, magical world. The carvings were also a practical way to put off any potential assassins, particularly superstitious ones. A lot of the rulers of Burma met sticky ends, but none while sitting upon his throne.

  The Bee Throne, on which the big bees I saw lived, was placed in the Glass Palace, the most beautiful part of the Mandalay complex, and it was where the king and queen sat to welcome in the New Year. The princesses sat there too, protected by bees, when they had important ceremonies to take part in: maybe they were having their ears pierced that day, or perhaps they were receiving gifts – say, an orchard, an elephant or a servant – bestowed upon them by their parents.

  When the throne was in the Glass Palace there were 36 bees, just like these two in their glass cabinet in London. Now, only the two before me in the V&A storage survive. They are kept company by an extraordinarily beautiful praying pageboy and a slightly bonkers camari, a mythical creature invented by the Burmese. It has cloven hooves, wings, a snub nose, pointy ears, a painted red tongue, tufts on its head, antlers and a goatee beard. Each of the four creatures is golden and red, because the gold has rubbed off in parts over the years to show the red lacquer base beneath. The pageboy has a red chest, red wrists and bits of red showing all over his body.

  A palmleaf manuscript written in 1816 tells how each of the 659 sculptures that decorated the thrones, including these four, was carved simultaneously. An astrologer had decreed the optimum moment for their creation. Each was carved from beautiful trees without blemishes which grew in ‘untainted ground’. Musicians and dancers performed while the carvers worked.

  The thrones themselves were adorned with jewels and gilded with gold leaf. Once all was ready, ceremonies were performed to encourage lucky deities to move in and to keep incumbent spirits happy. Each throne was a focal point during different ceremonies throughout the year. As the king sat upon a throne, he would see the carvings of the animals upon it and be reminded of his different duties, represented by different animals.

  On all four corners of each throne sat a camari, like the one in storage. He was a good symbol for the king to have on each throne because it was said that the camari was so proud of its bushy tail, it would fight to the death to defend even a single hair upon it. The figure on the throne reminded the king to act like the camari, and fight to the death for his kingdom and for justice.

  Another thing all the thrones had in common was a row of eight carved, golden, naked pageboys standing before it. These pageboys (thu nge daw) each faced the king with arms lifted in worship. The whole setting must have been a sight to behold. Sometimes, so the story goes, these boys came to life: this was said to have happened in 1819, for example, when the boys in front of the Conchshell Throne started squabbling, much to the surprise of the courtiers who ‘saw’ it happen.

  What are the bees, the camari and worshipping boy from the Glass Palace doing here? I first read about the exiled Burmese royal family in the beautiful novel The Glass Palace by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. I was captivated by the story of King Thibaw, his wife Queen Supayalat and their daughters, the princesses, and their shocking 30-year exile from Burma, by the British, to Ratnigiri, southern India.

  The king – known as the White Umbrella of State – was undermined, and the mystique of the royal family was destroyed. King Thibaw came from a dynasty of kings known as the ‘Kings Who Rule the Universe’; they were treasured as demi-gods by their subjects. When the royal family left their home, in November 1885, the golden figures were taken as trophies by the British Army, then troops were billeted inside the palace. Later, during the Second World War, Japanese troops used the palace as a supply depot, and the wooden palace was bombed by the Allies and burst into flames.

  Only one of the nine thrones has survived, and that is in a museum in Yangon, Burma. It’s lucky that these little creatures, memories of a reverential, graceful time, were taken out of the palace – probably because they were easy to carry – and made it into a museum, where they could be conserved. The British Museum and the Pitt Rivers in Oxford each
own a medium-sized lion – the smaller ones could well be hiding unrecognized on a family mantelpiece. The two museums also own a pageboy each. The boys are sculpted in the same pose as the child I saw, their arms in prayer in front of their heads, but each one is very slightly different, probably each made by a different artist. No deer, peacocks, conches, lilies, ducks or elephants have turned up yet.

  The bees arrived at the V&A with a note: ‘This gilded beetle [sic] is from the throne of Theebaw, last King of Burmah, & was brought from Mandalay by the late Major General Elphinstone Waters Begbie CB, DSO, in 1899.’ They are kept in storage, as the museum can’t display everything, although these bees are very rare and, ideally, will be on show in the future. There are two others in Oxford but, otherwise, there really is nothing else like them in the world.

  [Two golden bees and a golden camari]

  These three creatures once adorned thrones in the royal palace in Mandalay, Burma: the bees were tubby things, with their wings folded on top of their bodies. The camari is a mythical creature invented by the Burmese.

  [The palace at Mandalay]

  There were eight thrones inside the Glass Palace and a ninth was just outside. Each was decorated with its own auspicious and symbolic animal carvings.

  [The Lion Throne]

  This was the most important of all the animal thrones in the palace. It had a double door at the back, so the king could climb into it without being seen clambering up.