by Ed Douglas
Sangye Gyatso proved a capable young man, acquiring Ngari in western Tibet, formerly the Guge kingdom, from its rulers in Ladakh, but his attempts to steer Tibet into the future came unstuck. Gushi Khan’s grandson Lajang attempted to reassert Mongol control of Tibet and captured the sixth Dalai Lama, using artillery against Drepung monastery in the process. (Sangye Gyatso himself was decapitated, not by Lajang but by one of Lajang’s wives, a Tibetan noblewoman. Gyatso had, the story goes, offered her as a wager over a game of chess and lost.) When the sixth Dalai Lama died in 1706 on his way into exile, Lajang tried to replace him with a monk of a similar age, widely believed to be his own son. He also behaved warmly towards the newly arrived Christian missionaries in Lhasa, including the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri, who believed Lajang might be converted. The missionaries would bear witness to the catastrophe that followed.
The Geluk monasteries of Lhasa turned against Lajang. Someone who treated the lineage of the Dalai Lama so casually and flirted with a foreign religion couldn’t possibly be in charge. They welcomed, initially at least, the interest of a rival band of Mongols, the Dzungar, followers of the Geluk school, who fell on Tibet with astonishing ferocity, reigniting sectarian violence and pitching the country into chaos. Lajang was murdered attempting to escape and many Nyingma monasteries were destroyed. Only with the intervention of a powerful new dynasty in China opposed to the Dzungars was order restored.
While the Great Fifth ruled in Lhasa, the Manchu dynasty, the ‘Great Qing’, had been rising in China, a process completed during the long reign of the Kangxi emperor, each of the dynasty holding their own imperial name. The Qing were not Han Chinese, but part of a tribal confederation from Manchuria in northern China, descended from the Jurchen, closely related to other northern Asian populations, including the Mongols. Lajang Khan had been a proxy of the Kangxi emperor, who had watched in horror as Lajang mismanaged the situation before the Dzungar, his Mongol enemies, set fire to Tibet. He ordered a Qing army to restore order and drive out the Mongols. The Qing then reordered the government, in the process absorbing some portions of historical Tibet into the Qing Empire. (This included parts of Amdo: the rhubarb trade, centred on modern Gansu, was of particular interest to the Qing.)
Unluckily for Tibet’s new government, the Kangxi emperor died in 1722 and Tibet was plunged once again into sectarian war. Opposing sides used alliances with competing Mongol factions and the Qing Empire to snatch advantage. The Qing saw the Panchen Lama as a useful counterweight to the immense power of the Dalai Lama and tried to set him up in his own semi-independent polity: the origin of China’s particular interest in Tashilhunpo. Only in 1751, little more than two decades before the East India Company sent George Bogle to Tibet, was the situation finally settled. The Qing constituted a new government comprising a cabinet, or kashag, of four ministers, with the Dalai Lama as head of state. Two Qing officials, known as ambans, were charged with maintaining Qing imperial interests.
This was the world of the sixth Panchen Lama, Lobsang Palden Yeshe, one of deep divisions only recently healed and a new foreign overlord to consider. The Qing were deeply suspicious of Europe’s rising power and the Geluk remembered the threat missionaries had presented during the rule of Lajang Khan. Tibet was acutely conscious of the dangers of inviting further foreign intervention. Bogle would witness how China kept an arm’s length control of its western frontiers. The Panchen Lama himself understood the importance of intelligence, keeping abreast of any threat to Tibet’s fragile peace. He managed a complex network of traders and informants who kept him apprised not only of Qing court politics but the world on the other side of the mountains, in the holy land of India, where a new, foreign mercantile power had risen. Among them was Purangir, the man who had led Bogle into his presence and most probably the figure offering a scarf to the lama in Tilly Kettle’s painting.
In Europe, it is still the first Europeans who travelled through the Himalaya who are given recognition for their sense of adventure and courage. Yet more often than not they relied heavily on the knowledge and negotiating skills of others, travellers speaking several languages whose agendas were consequently concealed from their immediate employers. Purangir was just such a man. Fluent in Mongolian and Tibetan, among other languages, he spent his life travelling the length and breadth of Asia for masters of different faiths, including several assignments for the East India Company, juggling competing interests, seeing everything but giving little away: part monk, part spy, part trader.
Purangir, then in his mid twenties, was a gosain, a sannyasi or monk ordained into the monastic orders known as the Dasnami, associated with Adi Sankara, the Keralan who had returned Garhwal to Hinduism centuries before. Dasnami means ‘ten names’, or ‘ten schools’: Purangir was a giri, meaning a member of the ‘mountain’ school, and ordained at Joshimath, close to Badrinath, northernmost of the four maths, or monasteries, that Adi Sankar founded. In the sixteenth century, sannyasi had been organised into bands of warrior-monks to defend Hinduism against the Mughals, groups that had in Bogle’s day degenerated into gangs of bandits available for hire: Jaya Prakash Malla, for example, had hired six hundred of them to stave off the Gorkhalis as they closed in on Kathmandu.
These gangs plagued everyone, from Prithvi Narayan Shah to the East India Company, hiding out in the jungles of the terai before making raids. As we shall see, sannyasi almost killed the Bengal surveyor James Rennell in 1766 on the fringes of the Bhutanese Himalaya. Famine had brought fresh raids from these gangs, so much so that Hastings banned them from the Company’s territory. Sannyasi could be men of integrity and learning, like Purangir, but it’s also possible the gosain’s status – and the fierce reputation that accompanied it – protected Bogle on his journey through the same country where Rennell was attacked.
Gosain were required in theory either to be resident in their monastery or else on the road, travelling as mendicant pilgrims. The freedom of movement such holy men enjoyed, slipping easily between different cultures, presented huge opportunities for trade and the acquisition of valuable information. By the eighteenth century, they had come to dominate trade across northern India in valuable commodities like silk and precious stones, using their monastic bases as trading houses and diversifying into money lending and land ownership. They were particularly strong at Benares on the Ganges. Tibetan gold and musk, as well as pilgrimage sites like Kailas, drew gosain across the Himalaya, trading coral and pearls in return. Purangir’s currency was information, gathered as he travelled through the mountains: a walking encyclopaedia and a soul of discretion. His relationship with the Panchen Lama was especially close. There were spiritual synergies between Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu monks like Purangir, a shared knowledge of tantric practice, and the Panchen Lama built a refuge for them at Tashilhunpo. For the lama, India was the holy land but like many Tibetans he feared the heat and disease, especially smallpox, to which north Asians were susceptible. The knowledge Purangir imported was worth the expense.
In the spring of 1774, Purangir, accompanied by the Panchen Lama’s Tibetan servant Pema, delivered a letter from the Panchen Lama to Warren Hastings at Calcutta. It was written in Persian, the diplomatic language of northern India, and accompanied with gifts: Tibetan woollen cloth, gold, both dust and ingots, and musk. The subject of the letter was military action taken by the British to expel Bhutanese fighters from the small Indian state of Cooch Behar in the foothills of the eastern Himalaya. The Bhutanese believed they had the right to appoint Cooch Behar’s ruler: its ousted raja Dharendra Narayan, still a minor, thought otherwise and had sought help from the East India Company to regain his throne. Warren Hastings, sensing an opportunity, had offered to get rid of the Bhutanese, if the raja paid the cost of doing so. He also demanded half the king’s revenues for the Company’s continuing protection. The raja had no choice but to agree; Cooch Behar essentially gave up its sovereignty. To stop the British, the desi, or political leader of Bhutan, a man called Zhidar, sought help from Prithv
i Narayan Shah in Kathmandu and from Assam to the east. Before help could arrive a small British force had been despatched, and while its commander and many of his troops succumbed to malaria in the jungles of the terai, the Bhutanese were driven back. In the wake of this setback, Zhidar had been ousted. (His use of forced labour and diplomatic overtures to the Qing emperor had already offended the ordinary Bhutanese.) He went into exile at Tashilhunpo, seat of the Panchen Lama, who was now offering to mediate in the dispute, so recently and decisively concluded, on behalf of the Bhutanese who, he claimed, in a considerable stretch of the facts, were Tibetan subjects. In this way, the Company tripped over the interests of Tibet, just as they had a few years earlier with the abortive Kinloch expedition to Nepal.
This letter was an unexpected but welcome opportunity for Warren Hastings. As a young man he had been the protégé of Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey had secured the Company’s future in India. Like Bogle, Hastings had started as a clerk, in 1750, a diligent worker who mastered Urdu and Persian in his spare time. His appreciation and understanding of Indian politics and culture had been put to good use in expanding the Company’s influence. (Early in his career he had been appalled at the corruption and greed he had witnessed in his fellow officers. Yet thirteen years after Bogle returned from Tibet, Hastings would be subject to one of the most extraordinary trials in British history, prosecuted by the philosopher Edmund Burke and playwright Richard Sheridan for similar misconduct in what became a public airing of Britain’s conduct in India.) In the mid 1770s, Hastings was in his mid forties, slight, almost ascetic, dome-headed in Tilly Kettle’s portrait of him, magisterially powerful but fizzing too, always curious about his sphere of influence. On the day in late March 1774 that Purangir arrived in his office with the letter from the Panchen Lama, Hastings had his council’s approval for a mission to Tibet. Given British ignorance of the Himalaya (was Bhutan another name for Tibet?) a dependable but open and quick-witted young man was required to lead the mission, someone intellectually dynamic, like Hastings himself, but also an adventurer who could charm his way out of trouble: such was Bogle.
Hastings had a soft spot for young Scots, but there were plenty of other reasons to like George. The historian Kate Teltscher described him as ‘playful, penetrating, self-deprecating and shrewd’, qualities that shine through his account of his Tibetan adventure. This wasn’t published until a century after his journey, when his descendants handed over a box brimming with papers to the honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Clements Markham. Hastings had sent a copy of Bogle’s manuscript to his friend Samuel Johnson, after Johnson sent Hastings A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, but somewhat undersold it as a mere curiosity. Bogle’s rich story lay among Johnson’s papers, apparently ignored. The Highlander spirit touched both accounts, although Bogle proved far more curious and tolerant of mountain culture than Johnson.
Bogle’s father was the wealthy Glasgow merchant George Bogle of Daldowie, one of the Tobacco Lords who made their fortunes during the city’s heyday as an elegant commercial centre with comparatively fast links to the American colonies. His education included six months studying logic at Edinburgh University, aged fourteen, before a long apprenticeship in the family business, now run by his elder brother Robert. The family had powerful connections, such as Henry Dundas, Tory politician, pillar of the Scottish Enlightenment and supporter of British influence in India. Jobs in the East India Company were hazardous, as the rapidly filling cemetery at Calcutta showed: around half of those who arrived in Bengal died there. Yet a position with the Company was a golden opportunity for younger sons to get rich quick. That possibility would soon become an issue for the whole Bogle family. After George had been in Calcutta for two years, the same credit crunch that tipped the East India Company towards disaster also ruined the family firm. Bogle’s brother Robert was plunged into despair and attempted suicide. (A servant grabbed his shirt tails as he threw himself out of an upstairs window.) Having recovered the balance of his mind, he took action to secure their ageing father’s grand house at Daldowie and turned to his younger brother as the best hope of clearing the family’s debts. It was now critical to his family’s fortunes that George’s career was a success.
Bogle won promotions and came to the attention of Warren Hastings, who made him his private secretary. He also fell in with some of the shadier characters then operating in India, living for a time with Lauchlin Macleane, commissary general of the army, a fraudulent speculator whose connections had got him a post in India to clear his mountainous debts. Macleane dazzled those he met with his charm, including Hastings, whose self-absorption left him vulnerable to conmen. Macleane fled India following the Regulating Act of 1773, before his schemes were rumbled. That Bogle navigated such murky terrain with his reputation intact spoke to his affable nature and sharp intelligence. He wrote to his brother Robert that the shameless could prosper in India in ways they wouldn’t dare try in Europe: ‘several People keep the best Company, and are exceedingly well regarded, who are great Rogues, not only from Suspicion, but even by their own Confession.’ Macleane wanted George as his deputy, but Hastings wouldn’t let his young protégé go. The decision saved Bogle from the darker corners of the Company’s corruption and put him on the high road to Bhutan.
His journey to the mountains in 1774 started at the worst time of year, in the heat of the pre-monsoon, but Bogle proved a doughty and observant traveller. With him went a retinue of more than sixty servants, and a fellow Scotsman, Alexander Hamilton, a tall and robust doctor whose physical presence rather overshadowed the spry Bogle. George kept copious notes, partly at the insistence of Hastings, with the possibility of a book in both their minds. John Hawkesworth’s edited version of Captain James Cook’s journals from the voyage of the Endeavour had proved a racy and contentious sensation. Enlightenment philosophers fed on such tales of exploration as illustrations of their theories about human nature. Bogle’s journey offered to fill in a similar blank on the map and might be similarly rewarded. ‘As none of the Company’s Servants, and I might almost say no European, had ever visited the Country which I was about to enter,’ he wrote to his father, ‘I was equally in the Dark as to the Road, the Climate or the People.’ Tibet, however, was not Australia, and when Bogle finally reached the plateau he would discover the wonders of Europe he brought with him were more familiar than he supposed. The Jesuits had already attuned Tibetans to western philosophy.
Having travelled north across the plains, Bogle arrived at the borders of mountainous Bhutan. Plans conceived in Calcutta had not prepared him for the scale of the Himalaya, or of their suddenness. ‘It is impossible to conceive any change of country more abrupt or any contrast more striking.’ Everything that caught his eye was noted: the kinds of crops that grew in the fecund climate of Bhutan, the height of waterfalls, vernacular architecture. ‘The earth produces its fruits with an ease almost spontaneous, and every puddle is full of fish.’ He made his own contribution, planting potatoes to assess their viability on his return. With his eye unclouded by the accounts of other travellers, the image he presents is fresh and almost innocent: ‘At the place where the road crosses the mountain, standards or banners are set up, of white cloth, with sentences written upon them. They denote something religious and are common at the tops of hills.’ Bogle was looking at ‘wind horses’, prayer flags printed with the mantra om mani padme hum, familiar to any tourist who has trekked in the Himalaya.
Bogle took careful note of any infrastructure for possible military advantage, but he didn’t have to be a soldier to realise how difficult fighting would be in these mountains: ‘What a Road for Troops,’ he wrote in his diary. He made a detailed description of the stunning iron suspension bridge at Chukha, in south-west Bhutan, without apparently knowing that it was one of scores of similar structures attributed to the fifteenth century Tibetan Tangtong Gyalpo, known as the Chakzampa, the ‘iron-chain man’, a pioneering civil engineer and blacksmith who bui
lt dozens of suspension bridges across the Himalaya. Tangtong would have been remarkable for his civil engineering alone, but was also a great spiritual adept. He was another nyon-pa, a wild one, known as Lungton Nyonpa, ‘wild man of the empty valley’, a name he used to sign his works, cultivating a mythical status like that of the poet Milarepa. Like Milarepa he encapsulates something paradoxical in the Tibetan Buddhist soul: that the illusion of an individual consciousness could be so persuasively real. The bridges he built were as much illustrations of his psychological expertise as they were practically useful: ferries and bridges are frequent metaphors in Tibetan Buddhist teaching.
The Panchen Lama’s letter had not been an invitation to visit Tibet: Warren Hastings had simply read it that way. So a few days before reaching Tashichho Dzong, residence of the Druk desi, Bhutan’s prime minister, near the modern capital Thimphu, Bogle found himself in a diplomatic impasse. Another letter from the Panchen Lama intercepted him saying it wasn’t possible for the British to visit Tibet: the country was subject to China and he needed the emperor’s permission to let in a foreigner. That would take a year. A second letter, to Purangir, warned that a smallpox epidemic was raging and the Panchen Lama had withdrawn from Tashilhunpo to a more isolated monastery: it wasn’t convenient. Bogle read these excuses as pretexts; he refused to accept the letters or the gifts that accompanied them. Doing so would mean an admission of defeat and a swift return to Calcutta: not the required outcome for a man anxious about his prospects. Sensing that he must put a diplomatic shoulder to the door of Tibet, he despatched Purangir, an enthusiastic supporter of their mission, to visit the Panchen Lama and clear the way.