Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Already, China has built a high-speed rail link to Shigatse, the seat of the Panchen Lama, some three hundred kilometres from Rasuwagadhi, whisking Chinese tourists to the monastery of Tashilhunpo, these days a nexus in China’s influence on Tibetan Buddhism. A new road and dry port facility has already been built in the narrow Kyirong valley at the border. Damaged by the 2015 earthquake that struck Nepal, it was repaired and reopened two years later. More recently, China and Nepal have agreed that the railway to Shigatse will be extended to Kathmandu through the Kyirong, among the most beautiful and sacred valleys of Tibet.

  Exploiting the tension caused in Delhi by its closer ties with China, Nepal has also signed a deal with India to connect Kathmandu with the subcontinent’s extensive rail network. Nepal already has access to India’s railways. Less than thirty kilometres up the line from Sagauli Junction is the border crossing between the frontier towns of Raxaul, on the Indian side, and Birgunj, now the second-largest city on Nepal’s terai. At the start of the twentieth century, Birgunj was little more than a handful of villages but its location, directly between Kathmandu and British India, made it the obvious place to build a customs post. The town’s significance grew in 1927 when the British completed a narrow-gauge railway into Nepal, improving connectivity between an ally who had sacrificed its sons during the Great War and markets south of the border. Although much of that line is now defunct, the section at the border has recently been upgraded to the modern Indian network’s broad gauge, linking Indian Raxaul to Nepali Birgunj’s new container storage facility. Many obstacles lie in the path of both these schemes. But even if they don’t come to fruition, there is already a strong economic and political argument to re-energise the ancient trade route that once linked India to the Tibetan plateau. Whether China will permit this ancient road’s other role of cultural artery, drawing the lifeblood of Indian creativity onto the Tibetan plateau, is another matter.

  Across the Himalayan belt, since before recorded history, pilgrims, artisans and above all traders travelled the high country north to the Silk Roads of Central Asia and south to the plains of India, using those Himalayan valleys and gorges that were amenable to pack animals, their belongings and goods carried by yaks at altitude and mules, or else on the backs of human porters. Much of the conflict and political tension in the Himalaya coalesced around these lucrative pinch points, the narrow ‘money rivers’ of this wild, remote country. The British historian John Pemble has described such trade in the eastern Himalaya as ‘a feeble trickle’ and ‘a peddling business in luxury goods, carried on mainly at the behest of the wealthy and curious’. In the context of nineteenth-century global trade, this is arguably true; the East India Company was initially curious about grabbing a share of this trade but concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble, finally preferring instead to use the mountains as a protective barrier. Yet the wealth this ‘peddling’ generated underpinned the spectacular artistic legacy of Himalayan centres like the Kathmandu and Yarlung Tsangpo valleys. Trade also funded an immense cultural transfer, the importation of Buddhism to the Tibetan plateau and along with it Indian and Chinese art and technology. In the western Himalaya, there was also huge trade in what was called shawl wool or cashmere, since Kashmir is where Europeans first encountered it, more commonly now pashmina, Persian for ‘woolen’. The best source for this was the Chang Tang of Ngari Khorsum, the high country north of the old Guge kingdom where nomads with terrifying mastiffs drove goats and sheep to wool marts with close access to Himalayan trading routes, particularly at Gartok, west of Kailas. The Indus and Sutlej rivers offered ready access to Ladakh and Kashmir in the west and Indian hill-states to the south, where the people of Lahaul in particular dominated the trade, taking shares in the immense flocks on the high plateau.

  Alongside this international exchange is a quieter story: most Himalayan trade routes and the products that were carried along them were local and of negligible value to the wider economy: grains, foodstuffs and salt, breeding animals, medicinal herbs. It might not have looked valuable to the wider world, but this trade also formed the bedrock of a vibrant and complex cultural exchange that characterises the Himalaya no less than grand temples or exquisite statues. If you measure success in turnover, then you could perhaps judge this Himalayan trade as trivial: in terms of the societies it fostered, it was vital.

  The fault line in this web of ethnicity and trade was always between ethnic Tibetan populations, genetically adapted to life at high altitude, and those from the south; to paraphrase the Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Tucci, the ‘rice–lama line’, between rice-growers from the south and Tibetan Buddhists from the north. Growing food at altitude is difficult and limited to particular crops, and so the risks inherent to trade become more worthwhile. For most of Himalayan history, traders could make a small fortune in the space of a few harvests. Trade also encouraged a more cosmopolitan outlook; hospitality in a tough environment like the Himalaya is not desirable, it’s essential. The anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described ‘a system of hospitality ideally suited to the needs of long-distance traders not only in need of shelter in an inclement climate but dependent for their business on relationships of personal trust established and strengthened by occasions for conviviality’. It was on the trade routes of the eastern Himalaya that the Sherpa reputation for hospitality was born.

  In the modern era, China’s occupation of Tibet in the 1950s casually brushed away most of this delicate web from its high, dusty corner, a loss the wider world hardly noticed. Many of the customary local trade routes, which had existed long before nation states, were abruptly closed. The borderlands of the Himalaya turned from a space into a line: something fluid and magical turned to stone. On top of that, the human ‘boundary’, the ‘rice–lama line’ between those adapted to altitude and those not, was offset from the political boundary, which ran along the crest of the mountains. As a consequence, large populations of ethnic Tibetans, such as the Sherpa, people who had since time immemorial relied on freedom of movement, were trapped on the wrong side of a new and seemingly arbitrary line, more or less cut off from their root. The consequences were predictably distressing, and not just materially: Tibetans, with their strong nomadic tradition, like to travel. Even in remote Tibetan villages, it was once commonplace to find individuals who had crossed the length and narrow breadth of the Himalaya. Now they travel to India to study or for an audience with the Dalai Lama, and often at great personal cost in terms of harassment and worse from China’s security forces.

  Inside Nepal, the results were equally dramatic but also intriguing, sometimes prompting a realignment of identity to suit the new prevailing conditions. In the early 1970s, little more than a decade after the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet prompted the hardening of the border, Fürer-Haimendorf met ethnic Tibetans living in the old Nepali frontier village of Mugu, far to the west of Kathmandu, part of what had once been the medieval Khasa kingdom centred in the Sinja valley. This group had been trading from here across the border into ‘official’ Tibet for centuries; their distant ancestors helped build the Buddhist monastery in the Limi valley to the west. Now they were presenting themselves as Chhetri, a Hindu caste, turning their Tibetan faces away from the high plateau towards the more Hindu-oriented middle hills where they were now confined. (On the flip side, the Tibetan diaspora, which China’s occupation created, led to a spiritual resurgence in Buddhism south of the Himalaya wherever exiled Tibetans found sanctuary, a resurgence that sparked interest from foreign tourists, spreading that resurgence even further.)

  While much Himalayan trade was for centuries local and small-scale, some was of immense value and sometimes extraordinarily distant. It was this trade that underpinned the artistic brilliance of Kathmandu and attracted the attention of the East India Company. We have already seen how gold financed the expansion of the Tibetan Empire and the acquisition and translation of Buddhist texts. (‘Like a spring of precious gold bursting out upon the ground,’ wrote the eleve
nth-century tantric master Nirupa, ‘all the learned Indians come to Tibet.’) Trade in rhubarb, prized in Chinese medicine, flourished on the Silk Roads in the first millennium; Marco Polo saw it growing in its native habitat, on the north-east fringes of the Tibetan plateau. As we have seen, more unusual items, like yak tails, used as flywhisks in Indian temples, were recorded in ancient Rome. But the most important luxury product was musk: glandular secretions from deer used in the manufacture of perfume and traditional medicine. This is still one of the most expensive animal products anywhere in the world, to the detriment of modern musk deer. In antiquity its value was astronomical.

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  As early as the ninth century, Arab doctors were writing in praise of Tibetan musk, on sale in the souks of Mecca. The smell of it was so strong that when ships arrived at the old port of Basra, in modern-day Iraq, customs officials knew if musk was on board. It had been exported to the Middle East since at least the third century, long before the rise of Islam, but its role in Islamic culture undoubtedly boosted trade. When Arab and Persian poets wanted to evoke the fragrance of their beloved, they turned to musk. In Shiraz during the tenth century the Persian author al-Tha‘alibi described a debate at court in which one contestant, the globetrotter Abu Dulaf, made his selection for the finest products and services available to mankind through the munificence of Allah: silks from China; Kyrgyz squirrel fur; Greek eunuchs; slave girls from Bukhara; concubines from Samarkand: ‘may he let me eat the apples of Syria, the fresh dates of Iraq, the bananas of the Yemen, the nuts of India . . . And may He let me breathe the musk of Tibet.’

  Tibetan musk, and that of Kashmir, was prized over its Chinese competition, in part because of the Himalayan aromatic herbs, including spikenard, which the musk deer browsed. Tibet was also closer to the Middle East, and Tibetan merchants had the habit of leaving the musk pod unadulterated. Chinese producers would open them to add other materials, and traders weren’t averse to passing off the inferior Chinese version as Tibetan, a process made easier because Tibetan traders didn’t travel far beyond their plateau: musk was sold on to traders operating along the fringes of the Himalaya. The Sogdians were the great trading group of the Silk Road, and letters in their language from the fourth century, recovered from the Dunhuang Caves, mention musk acquired from the Tibetan borderlands of modern Gansu. There are documentary traces of its journey through Central Asia to the Arab port of Daybul on the Indus delta in modern Pakistan, from where it was distributed throughout the Arab world.

  Jewish merchants also had a significant role in the musk trade. The Sephardi traveller Benjamin of Tudela travelled throughout the Middle East in the second half of the twelfth century and wrote a book about his experiences, a century before Marco Polo. He too writes of Tibetan musk, the first European reference. Translated later from Hebrew into Latin for the European market, The Travels of Benjamin became another tributary feeding the stream of travel compendia that permeated Western scholarship.

  There are fewer literary clues about the musk trade at the start of its journey, in the Himalaya, although deer have a spiritually symbolic presence. There is a story from a Tibetan hagiography about the mahasiddha Padampa Sangye, a contemporary of Milarepa from the eleventh century, born in southern India but closely associated with the Tingri region of Tibet, close to Everest. It tells how he built his monastery around a stone thrown by the Buddha to indicate where his teachings would flourish north of the mountains. Padampa Sangye found the stone at Tingri with musk deer circling around it, and then dissolving into it. The potent medical properties of musk are associated with Padampa’s teaching.

  Another reference, this one in the Blue Annals, written in the fifteenth century, captures an illuminating example of how trade and tantric teaching collided to transform Tibet in the eleventh century. Kor Nirupa, quoted above, was born in 1062, an inauspicious year, as the fifth son, an inauspicious number, and sent off to Lhasa to be a monk. (His sister threw a handful of dirt after him as he left, a sign of ostracism.) In Lhasa he met two students of Atisa, the great Indian scholar, who had died a few years before. One of them was a Newar, Anutapagupta, who taught him Sanskrit for a year and then sent him off to collect a book from the widow of a translator. Nirupa, still only nine years old, ended up working at a gold mine, where his belongings were stolen. So he cast a magic spell, a move very much from pre-Buddhist Tibet, and discovered enough gold to meet his obligation to the Newar. Not long after, his father died and he went home to pay his respects, where he dug up a chunk of turquoise his sister had hidden. This he sold for a weight of gold, ‘one roll of gold embroidered silk and musk worth one golden zho’, around five grams. With this he set off for Kathmandu with his two friends, to be initiated into the mysteries of tantric Buddhism.

  Arab sources give us clues about the species of deer involved – the favoured animal, they reported, was small and lived in forests, presumably at lower altitudes – and how it was collected. The ninth-century geographer Ahmad al-Ya‘qubi, in the Kitab al-Buldan, the Book of Lands, born at the time of Tibet’s tsenpo emperors, centuries before Benjamin of Tudela, wrote that

  it was well known that the origin of musk was in Tibet and elsewhere. The local traders there build something like a little tower, which has the height of a forearm. The animal in whose navel the musk is produced comes and scratches its navel on this tower so that the navel falls off [meaning the musk gland]. The traders go there at a certain time of year, which is known to them and gather the navels freely. When they bring it to Tibet, they have to pay tax on it.

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  We know just how important the duties paid on musk were thanks to the extraordinary records of an Armenian merchant called Hovhannes Joughayetsi, who spent five years living in Lhasa from 1686. This was only twenty-five years after the Jesuits Johann Grueber and Albert d’Orville, commonly regarded as the first Europeans to reach the Tibetan capital. Their interest was theological: their mission to save souls. Hovhannes went to make money. Both wrote about their experiences, but Hovhannes’s account was simply that: his accounts. There are precious few references to the colour or drama of the road he travelled, no burning zeal to save souls. When Hovhannes mentions God, it’s to ask his protection from bandits, not to speculate on the metaphysics of tantric Buddhism. When he arrives in Lhasa, he is required to pay duty on the goods he has imported, totalling eleven and a half kilos of silver, a handy revenue stream for the government. A rupee at this time was worth around eleven grams of silver; Hovhannes was paying his servant forty rupees a year, less than half a kilo. For every litre of musk he bought, he had to pay the Tibetan treasury thirty-eight grams of silver.

  What an Armenian was doing in Lhasa in the 1680s is another matter. In the early seventeenth century, the region that is modern-day Armenia was split between Persia and its bitter rival the Ottoman Empire. In 1604, Persia’s Safavid leader Shah Abbas invaded western Armenia and then withdrew, burning towns and villages as he went, bringing home with him a huge population of Armenians. The peasantry was put to work growing silk; the merchant classes, well known for their commercial acumen, were set up in Nor Jougha, a suburb of the Shah’s extraordinary new capital at Isfahan in central Persia, tasked with building trade networks across Asia and the Middle East. Armenian merchants were known as khoja, a respected class of Christians in the eyes of Islam, part of the religiously tolerant world Shah Abbas encouraged. In 1683, two such merchants hired Hovhannes to trade for them in India. They would get three-quarters of the profit, Hovhannes the rest. Their range of operations was impressive, extending all the way from Western Europe to the Levant and into East Asia. When he left Nor Jougha for India, Hovhannes carried with him hundreds of yards of red and green English broadcloth to sell.

  For reasons unknown, the accounts ledger Hovhannes kept while living in Lhasa surfaced in Lisbon. It’s possible he died there after returning to Europe. It lays out the Armenian’s profit and loss in painstaking detail, necessarily so since his well-being relied on its accur
acy. Hovhannes had studied all aspects of trade in Isfahan, from foreign weights and measures, to taxation law and accountancy, so he knew that if he didn’t provide an exact reckoning of how he’d spent his masters’ money as soon as he got home he could be jailed and whipped every day for a year. His understandable attention to detail offers a dry but hugely revealing insight into the complex world of Himalayan trade, the sophisticated financial instruments it relied on, how important it was to the local economy and just how international the Himalaya has been for much of its history.

  In the late seventeenth century, trade in much of the subcontinent was still regulated by the Mughals, and although Agra was no longer their capital, it remained a crucial hub with a thriving Armenian population that worshipped at their Orthodox church. Hovhannes based himself here for more than two years, travelling around India, buying goods and then selling them on. In 1684 for example, he bought two tons of indigo at Khurja, weighed, pleasingly, in charms, and travelled to the Gujarati port of Surat in Western India to ship a portion back to Isfahan and Basra in modern Iraq. Like all merchants, he relied on the sophisticated Mughal banking system that allowed large sums to be remitted across the trading network that he and his colleagues inhabited, a system that had impressed and inspired earlier European financiers.