by Ed Douglas
As he waited for a response, Bogle had time to learn a little about life in Bhutan.
The more I see of the Bhutanese, the more I am pleased with them. The common people are good-humoured, downright [meaning straightforward], and I think, thoroughly trusty. The statesmen have some of the art which belongs to their profession. They are the best-built race of men I ever saw; many of them very handsome, with complexions as fair as the French.
Unlike the Jesuits and Capuchins who had visited Bhutan and Tibet, interest in Buddhism among the British diplomats who visited in the late eighteenth and nineteenth was limited. Like the missionaries, Bogle recognised similarities between Tibetan monks and their Roman Catholic counterparts and the institutions they served. But as a Presbyterian, such religiosity left him indifferent: the long ceremonies he felt obliged to attend bored him rigid. Yet religion, and religious division, lay at the core of the relationship between Tibet and Bhutan.
The Bhutanese elites Bogle now met could trace their lineage back almost two hundred years to aristocratic families in Tibet and the exile of their founding spiritual and political leader Ngawang Namgyal. He had been recognised as the eighteenth reincarnated leader of the Druk lineage at Ralung monastery, just north of the Bhutanese border in Tibet, Druk being a branch of the Kagyu school that started with Marpa Lotsawa in the eleventh century. The ruler of Tibet’s Tsang province, the most powerful political figure at that time in Tibet, favoured another candidate. Fearing arrest, Namgyal escaped into the remote and defensible mountains to the south and set about establishing a new kingdom that would eventually encompass modern Bhutan. In his mid twenties and under continuous existential threat from successive Tsang princes, Namgyal, who became known as Shabdrung, meaning ‘at the feet of’, set about carving out a new semi-theocratic state. In 1621, he founded Chagri monastery high in the Thimphu valley, where he felt sufficiently secure to embark on a three-year retreat. He brought the first known Europeans to visit Bhutan, the Jesuit missionaries Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, to this monastery in 1627. Cacella wrote to his masters:
For two months we accompanied the King through these and other mountains until we reached his house which is situated in the mountain where he went on retreat; he keeps no more than his lamas with him because the place cannot hold more people as in order to build a house one would have to cut many rocks and work very hard to level some space in that very steep mountain; he had chosen that place to protect himself from a King who lives some eight days distance from here, Demba Cemba [Karma Tenkyong], the most important king of Bhotanta [Tibet].
In fact, the main concern of this important king, Karma Tenkyong, lay elsewhere: the Tsang’s struggle with the Geluk-pa and their Mongol supporters. Bhutan was a side issue. But the Tsang-pa still made repeated efforts to crush Namgyal’s new state. To defend themselves, Namgyal’s followers built impressive monastic castles – dzong – to defend their new kingdom from its enemies. The most impressive was at Simtokha, completed in 1629, which dominated a strategic crossroads and the approach to the capital. This was the site of the so-called Battle of the Five Lamas in 1634, when disgruntled local religious leaders combined with Tsang military force to storm the castle. The story goes that the dzong’s gunpowder store exploded unexpectedly, destroying the invaders. In the aftermath, Namgyal was able to establish a new legal code, the Tsa Yig Chenmo, a monastic form of constitution that bound leading landowners to his new Druk state. Bhutan’s tight cultural homogeneity springs from this period: Bhutan’s name for itself is Drukyul, or Druk country, and the state supports the Druk school financially. Some rival schools were banned, including the lineage the bridge-builder Tangtong had founded there. As the new and rising power of the Geluk strengthened its grip on Tibet from the mid seventeenth century, that school too was forbidden. When Ngawang Namgyal died in 1651, the news was kept secret for fifty-four years: the state was too vulnerable to admit the loss of its inspirational leader. Handing on his powers to a similarly capable leader proved impossible. Yet splitting up his different roles ensured two hundred years of factionalism and infighting.
Bogle witnessed an explosive illustration of this as the rivalry between Bhutan’s exiled political leader Zhidar and the new desi, Kunga Rinchen, was fought out in front of him. A conspiracy to reinstate Zhidar was discovered and his supporters fled to the dzong at Simtokha. Stationed a few kilometres south, Bogle watched from his window as the fighting ebbed and flowed. Many of the soldiers were local villagers and although their weaponry was antiquated – cane helmets and shields – it was effective. Their firearms were antiques but the Bhutanese also used six-foot bows with iron-tipped arrows, sometimes coated in poison. Hamilton was kept busy patching up the wounded. Eventually Kunga Rinchen won control, burning rebel villages and cutting off supplies to Simtokha. The rebels fled over the mountains to Tibet.
A day later Bogle and Hamilton set out to follow them for their audience with the Panchen Lama, who despite warnings from Lhasa was sympathetic to Purangir’s arguments. The young Dalai Lama’s regent might technically be in charge, but the Panchen Lama was the most senior monk in Tibet and had a personal connection with the Qianlong emperor. He would listen to the British. It was now mid October and the first snows of winter coated the tops of the foothills, but in less than a month the two Scotsmen were face to face with the Panchen Lama. In Kettle’s painting the Lama is imagined as a compact figure, neat and composed. The reality was more corpulent and jovial. ‘His complexion,’ Bogle wrote,
is fairer than that of most of the Tibetans, and his arms are as white as those of a European; his hair, which is jet black, is cut very short; his beard and whiskers never above a month long; his eyes are small and black. The expression of his countenance is smiling and good-humoured. His father was a Tibetan; his mother a near relation of the Rajahs of Ladak. From her he learned the Hindustani language, of which he has a moderate knowledge, and is fond of speaking it. His disposition is open, candid, and generous. He is extremely merry and entertaining in conversation, and tells a pleasant story with a great deal of humour and action. I endeavoured to find out, in his character, those defects which are inseparable from humanity, but he is so universally beloved that I had no success, and not a man could find in his heart to speak ill of him.
Bogle found himself no less a subject of interest, with crowds coming to look at him ‘as people go to look at the lions in the Tower’. The Panchen Lama offered to have them removed, but Bogle demurred, acknowledging that he was just as interested in them. He was a close observer of human behaviour, watching how the lama gave his blessing to the crowds that gathered at his throne. Aristocrats and gyelong, or senior monks, received his bare hand on their heads. Nuns and regular laymen had a cloth interposed between their heads and his hand. The riff-raff were touched as he passed them with a tassel he held in his hand. Bogle noticed too the Panchen Lama’s generosity. Around a hundred and fifty gosain were lodged with him, some on business, others on ‘pilgrimage’, although Bogle noticed these Hindu pilgrims seemed most interested in their monthly allowance of tea, butter and flour, as well as cash. These ‘Gentoo fakirs’ were, in Bogle’s estimation, ‘a very worthless set of people, devoid of principle’. He speculated on the Panchen Lama’s tolerance. ‘This charity to the pilgrims flows, I imagine,’ Bogle wrote, ‘partly from the generosity of the Lama’s temper, partly from the desire of acquiring information, and satisfying his curiosity about Hindustan, the school of the religion of Tibet.’
Bogle comes across as down-to-earth, amiable and pragmatic; he was culturally open and while he greeted the Panchen Lama in European dress, he soon adopted Tibetan clothing and habits. The metaphysical complexities of the Panchen Lama’s philosophy, however, were not for him. ‘The religion of the Lamas is somehow connected with that of the Hindus, though I will not pretend to say how.’ While acutely observant of religious ritual and social structure, the history of the Panchen Lama’s religious order was of subordinate interest to the matter at han
d: trade. The recent political history of Tibet was of crucial importance to his mission and Bogle would later explain to his masters in Calcutta how it was that China had two political agents, the ambans, stationed in Lhasa: ‘About seventy years ago, the Emperor of China acquired the sovereignty of Tibet, in the way that sovereignties are generally acquired, by interfering in the quarrels between two contending parties.’ It was, Bogle knew, a trick the British had mastered in India.
If the authorities in Lhasa had the Chinese ambans looking over their shoulder, there was a similar distrust in Tibet of the new power to the south. ‘In former times,’ Bogle reported,
when Europeans were settled in Hindustan merely as merchants, there would have been no difficulty in establishing factories and freedom of trade; but the power and elevation to which the English have now risen render them the objects of jealousy to all their neighbours. The opposition which was made to my proceeding into Tibet, as well as the many difficulties I had to encounter in the execution of my commission, arose from this source. The government at Lhasa considered me as sent to explore the country, which the ambition of the English might afterwards prompt them to invade, and their superiority in arms render their attempt successful.
On the other hand, it would have been foolish not to engage with an emerging power in the holy land of India. Furthermore, the new Gorkha regime in Kathmandu had upended centuries of trade and useful relations. Newari art and architecture had adorned the Himalayan Buddhist world for centuries. Good relations with the powerful rival of this unwelcome new neighbour were desirable. The Panchen Lama also showed great interest in establishing a centre for pilgrims in Bengal, re-establishing a connection with Tibet’s spiritual roots centuries after the fall of Bengal’s Pala dynasty.
There was another aspect to Bogle’s journey to Tibet that is easy to overlook in the broader narrative of trade and diplomacy. He liked Tibet and he liked Tibetans. ‘In their private character they are decent and exemplary, and, if I may judge of others by one under whose roof I lived, they are humane, charitable, and intelligent.’ During his mission Bogle had been anxious to get back to Calcutta but once there he found he missed the Panchen Lama. Bogle performed kindnesses for him from afar, having his watches mended and sending him chess sets. He wrote his book, drifting a little, and then settled into a dull posting as a revenue collector. Diplomacy with Tibet rested now on the capable shoulders of Purangir, who in 1776 oversaw the building of a pilgrim and trade house for the Panchen Lama at Howrah near Calcutta, on the shores of the Hooghly river: the Bhot Bhawan, the ‘Tibet mansion’, a refuge for Tibetan pilgrims visiting the sacred sites of the Buddha’s life. Hastings might have failed to open a trade route with Tibet, but the Panchen Lama had got his listening post in India.
Diplomacy would be the Panchen Lama’s undoing. In the decade before Bogle’s visit, the Qianlong emperor had commissioned a temple at the Manchu summer capital of Chengde, in Hebei province north-east of Beijing, to celebrate his sixtieth birthday in 1771. Called the Putuo Zhongcheng, it was modelled on the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace in Lhasa, an architectural expression of Qing solidarity with (and superiority to) its minorities. Summoned a decade later to Chengde for the Qianlong emperor’s seventieth-birthday celebrations, the Panchen Lama faced a dilemma: risk a perilous journey and the dangers of smallpox or pass up a golden diplomatic opportunity. There would be a strong Mongol presence at the party, an opportunity too good to miss. Purangir went with him, meeting the Panchen Lama en route at the Geluk monastery of Kumbum. Purangir later told the British that the Panchen Lama had indeed mentioned the matter of trade between the East India Company and China to the Qing emperor, but the Company only had his word for it. By then the Panchen Lama had succumbed to smallpox, the disease he knew was waiting for him. He faced death, in the Tibetan Buddhist way, sitting propped against a wall, cross-legged, meditating his way towards the ‘light of the void’. Purangir was among the few close followers with him at the end.
Four months later, early in 1781, George Bogle, wholly ignorant of his Tibetan friend’s death, himself drowned, aged thirty-four, while taking his daily bath in a Calcutta water tank. ‘Sunk beneath the water,’ wrote Kate Teltscher, ‘were Bogle’s charm and penetration, his curiosity and ambition, his talent for friendship and diplomatic flair.’ He was buried beneath a massive sarcophagus in Calcutta’s South Park Street Cemetery and then largely forgotten until Clements Markham, who ran the geographical section at the India Office, discovered Bogle’s book in his grandfather’s papers, his grandfather having been a secretary to Warren Hastings. Its publication in 1876 allowed Bogle a little of the fame the Scotsman undoubtedly deserved, albeit posthumously, as did his companion Alexander Hamilton, who died four years before Bogle of fever in the malarial foothills of Cooch Behar.
*
The yaks Hastings wanted Bogle to bring back from Tibet did arrive in Calcutta but not until years later, with the second diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1783, led by Samuel Turner. Only the male survived to make the long journey to Britain, where George Stubbs painted him in a work titled ‘The Yak of Tartary’. The yak was stuffed after death and appeared as an exhibit in the Crystal Palace. Turner’s account of his journey, published in 1798 after he returned to Britain, caused a minor literary sensation. Tibet became what we might now call a meme: Turner’s audience with the young Panchen Lama, the reincarnate of the man Bogle had known, was particularly affecting to a British audience. The Irish poet and lyricist Thomas Moore – ‘Melody’ Moore, friend of Byron – wrote a piece of froth about the boy, ‘The Little Grand Lama’:
In Thibet once there reign’d, we’re told,
A little Lama, one year old –
Rais’d to the throne, that realm to bless,
Just when his little Holiness
Had cut – as near as can be reckon’d –
Some say his first tooth, some his second.
Thus was one of the most enigmatic, complex and culturally rich spiritual and philosophical traditions the world has known bowdlerised for the entertainment of the British public. Some of that twee naïvety suffuses Rudyard Kipling’s Tibetan character in Kim: the Teshoo Lama, the name borrowed from the title of Turner’s account.
There was a coda to Bogle’s journey to Tibet. In 1948 a woman called Nora Heathcote, outraged at seeing George Bogle described in the Sunday Times as being an Englishman, wrote to the paper to correct their mistake and to claim descent from him through a Tibetan lady said to be the sister of the Panchen Lama, a woman named in the family’s papers as Tichan, perhaps a corruption of the Tibetan name Dechen. Clements Markham, in his 1876 edition of Bogle’s book, mentioned two daughters, Martha and Mary, who were put on board a ship to Britain after Bogle’s death so they could be raised by his family. Whether these were daughters of a Tibetan princess or a Bengali common-law wife is uncertain. Bogle certainly had an affair in Tibet, because his travelling companion, the doctor Alexander Hamilton, was prescribing him a mercury ointment on the trek home, commonly used for venereal disease. The British diplomat and Tibet scholar Hugh Richardson had a correspondence with Nora Heathcote, who was born in 1876, and disentangled the complex family history of the Bogle family. There were likely sons as well as daughters, and while he discounted the idea that ‘Tichan’ was the sister of the Panchen Lama, he thought it probable that Bogle had a child with a Tibetan woman, and that some Himalayan blood still ran in Scottish veins.
Although, like so many of his colleagues and friends, Bogle died a young man, and the fame he might have enjoyed went to Samuel Turner, Bogle’s diplomatic efforts in establishing trade links with Tibet were successful, if short-lived. Throughout the 1780s, relations between Bengal and Tibet continued to prosper and trade increased. Purangir returned to Tibet with Turner’s mission and again without British supervision in 1785. He described commerce at Tashilhunpo as flourishing, with Indian merchants making huge profits on the advantageous exchange rate available to them in Tibet. This happy stat
e of affairs might have continued but for the bitter trade war that was about to break out between Nepal and Tibet. Purangir spent more and more time at Bhot Bhawan, the temple at Howrah, where he perished in 1795, confronting robbers who had broken in: the gosain was buried in the garden.
Samuel Turner, leader of the second Tibet mission, shared Bogle’s love of the Himalaya. He took with him a surveyor and artist called Samuel Davis, whose watercolours of Bhutan offer an elegant insight into a world that had barely changed since Cabral’s visit in the early 1600s and wouldn’t much until the arrival of tourism in the 1970s. His own portrayal of the Bhutanese, ‘strangers to extortion, cruelty, and bloodshed’, is similarly positive. Then something changed; the British hardened their minds against the cultures around them. The botanist William Griffith, medical officer on the Bhutan trade mission of 1837, offered a wholly different view of the Bhutanese: ‘they shewed themselves to be ignorant, greedy barbarians, such as should be punished first, and commanded afterwards’. Shortly before the British invaded Bhutan in 1864, Ashley Eden, who had travelled there the year before as special envoy, described the people as ‘an idle race, indifferent to everything except fighting and killing one another’. The enchantment George Bogle had experienced in Tibet, the ‘fairy dream’ as he called it, faded to nothing, replaced with the cold, hard calculation of commerce.
8
Trade Wars
The remote frontier settlement of Rasuwagadhi lies on the border between Nepal and Tibet, at an altitude of 1,800 metres. Immediately beneath it is the Trisuli river, called the Kyirong in Tibet; to its west is the Himalayan giant Langtang Lirung: on a clear autumn morning, it’s this mountain, over sixty kilometres away, that dominates the Kathmandu valley’s northern skyline. Nearby is the Tibetan peak of Shisha Pangma, fourteenth highest mountain in the world. A rail link between such a remote high place and India’s network on the plains at near sea-level may seem fanciful but that is exactly what is currently proposed: a branch line on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s global plan to recreate the Silk Roads. ‘We hope,’ China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi said in 2018, ‘that such cooperation can contribute to the development and prosperity of all three countries. Personally I have a dream, to travel to China from Nepal across the Himalayas in a modern train, enjoying the scenic beauty.’ This growth in traffic will change the Himalaya for ever, perhaps to the disappointment of romantics, and certainly at some environmental cost. But the potential for economic development in an impoverished region makes such schemes almost inevitable.