Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  By early 1686, Hovhannes had built up his own capital and signed an agreement establishing a new company with a partner from Shiraz to embark on a far more adventurous trading mission, to the country he described as Butand, meaning Bhot, or Tibet. He was still working for his masters in Isfahan, but now he had his own stake in the game. If Jesuit missionaries were bringing the word of God to the Buddhist holy land, Hovhannes used the new company’s capital to take things to trade: amber and pearls, bolts of fabric and much more besides, goods worth over eight thousand rupees, equivalent to about ninety-four kilos of silver. He also hired servants to travel with him and bought gunpowder and bullets to protect them all on the road. He left Agra on 12 February 1686 for Shikohabad, in the modern state of Uttar Pradesh, named for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s brother, and there joined a caravan east to Patna, in Bihar on the south bank of the Ganges, with its important Armenian population, where he bought more cloth to trade.

  The choice of route was revealing. Although he had contacts in Patna, Hovhannes also knew that war had badly affected trade in the western Himalaya in the early 1680s. The fifth Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had sent an army to Ladakh in 1679, partly because Ladakh’s Druk Kagyu Buddhists were giving support to their co-religionists in Bhutan, and partly to challenge Druk intolerance of Geluk monks. In response, the Ladakhis asked the Mughals, their new and powerful neighbours in Kashmir, to help them out with some military brawn under the leadership of the Mughal general Fidai Khan. At the most westerly point of the Tibetan plateau and bordering Muslim countries, Ladakh’s Buddhists had faced the greatest challenge from Islam in the high Himalaya: their chogyal, or king, had recently promised to build the first mosque in the Ladakhi capital Leh to placate the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. In response, the Tibetans allied with Dzungar Mongols to drive their common enemies back. A peace treaty was signed in 1684 but Ladakh paid a heavy price. The kingdom lost a huge amount of territory to Kashmiri Muslims, and trade in wool and goat’s hair, around half the Ladakhi economy, became their opponent’s monopoly. Significant numbers of Muslims relocated across the Zoji La, the pass linking Kashmir to Ladakh, to establish themselves at Leh and other major Ladakhi towns, marrying local women and altering Ladakh’s demography for good. They came to dominate this western trade route all the way to Lhasa, where a sizable Kashmiri population also settled. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri met Kashmiri merchants at Leh on his way to Lhasa in 1715. (They claimed he wasn’t a priest at all but a wealthy foreign merchant carrying pearls, gems and other precious merchandise.) By the late nineteenth century, after Ladakh had been absorbed into Jammu and Kashmir, Leh had more than a hundred Kashmiri shops in the main bazaar, where caravans from all over Central Asia and the Himalaya converged.

  In April 1686, Hovhannes journeyed north from Patna to reach the Kathmandu valley, having paid tax at the border to import his goods. For three months he rested in Bhaktapur, where the king Jitamitra Malla was adding to the city’s architectural lustre, expanding and beautifying its palaces and temples – all paid for by currency trading with Tibet and duties from merchants like Hovhannes, who along with the usual bribes, was asked to hand over the English spyglass he carried with him. The Armenian took more than two months to reach Lhasa, travelling up the fast-flowing Bhote Kosi, the ‘Tibet river’, and across the mountains to Kuti, known now as Nyalam, where he kicked his heels until the local chief returned to seal the goods for onward travel. He visited Shigatse, seat of the fifth Panchen Lama, Lobsang Yeshe, who was becoming embroiled in the provincial wars that would plague Tibet in the early eighteenth century. When Hovhannes reached the capital in September, there to welcome him was a small Armenian merchant community largely overlooked by history. The Jesuits Grueber and d’Orville and those missionaries like Desideri that came after are the ones remembered: adventurous servants of God piercing the veil of a hidden world behind the mountains. Hovhannes was more of this world. He short-changed his servants, but not too badly, and wasn’t averse to a little smuggling, avoiding duties on some of the precious stones he carried. As a non-Muslim in the Mughal Empire, he was required to pay a poll tax, called the jizya; this he dodged with a false certificate.

  The Tibetan world Hovhannes encountered in Lhasa must have felt very different to that of the Christian missionaries who followed. He arrived four years after the fifth Dalai Lama’s death, but before that fact had been made public or the Qing Kangxi emperor had been informed. During the almost five years he spent there, Hovhannes learned Tibetan and dealt with all the complexities of operating a business in a foreign country: adjusting to local customs, breathing the thin air, dealing with crooked officials, paying taxes and arguing his case in commercial disputes. Although he stayed put in the city, he used other Armenian and Tibetan merchants to trade for him in Xining, some eighteen hundred kilometres to the north-east, on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, now the largest city in historical Tibet. He did deals with Newars living in Lhasa, and came into contact with merchants from other ethnic groups: more Kashmiris, known in Lhasa as Kachee, soon to build their first mosque in the city, and the Hindu gosain so familiar to George Bogle. With the money he made from selling the goods he brought from India, Hovhannes mostly bought musk, gold and tea. This had been traded for centuries via the so-called Tea Horse Road that linked Sichuan, immediately to the east of Tibet, with the plateau, with Tibetan ponies being sent in return to China. Musk was his most lucrative concern. By the time he left Lhasa in 1692, Hovhannes had bought almost half a metric tonne of the stuff, worth a fortune in the souks of the Middle East. The duties he owed the Tibetan treasury must have totalled tens of thousands of rupees.

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  Achieving such success had required a monumental effort of concentration. Lhasa was not an easy place to do business. Not only were his partners and competitors trying to trick him, the government did its best to extract as much of his profit as possible, using weights and measures that cheated the merchants. Another scam to which Hovhannes fell prey would ultimately become a cause of war between Nepal and Tibet. Three days after he arrived in Lhasa, Hovhannes was required to pay import duties on the goods he’d brought from Patna, just as he had in Nepal. This was done in kind to a particular value of silver and a promissory note given to the Armenian guaranteeing he would be reimbursed a proportion of this heavy tax in silver coins. When they came, the coins were found to be impure: the silver the Tibetan authorities were using was debased. Yet the purchase tax Hovhannes paid on the musk he was buying had to be paid for in pure silver. The Himalayan economy was becoming a clear illustration of Gresham’s law: bad money driving out good.

  It was a system guaranteed to infuriate your trading partners, except that Tibet was on the receiving end of the same scam: the Newari kings who minted Tibet’s coins were also at it. They had started supplying Tibet with its coinage earlier in the seventeenth century during the reign of the fifth Dalai Lama. Tibet would send pure silver to be minted and the Newars would send back coins of the same weight alloyed with a certain amount of copper; the balance of silver was their profit. How closely they stuck to the agreed amount was carefully scrutinised. The Tibetans experimented with minting their own coins in the 1660s and 1680s, just before Hovhannes arrived, but they remained reliant on the Kathmandu valley for their currency for another hundred years. However, when the Gorkha raja Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered the Kathmandu valley in 1767, eighty years after Hovhannes returned there from Lhasa, Nepal’s new ruler wanted the Tibetans to phase out its compromised coins. ‘Keep the mint pure,’ he told his people in his political testament, the Divya Upadesh. He asked the Tibetans to replace their compromised coinage with his dynasty’s new and purer version, something the Tibetans were reluctant to do on the terms Prithvi was offering. Since the Qing Empire was now backing the Tibetans, there was no way militarily that Prithvi felt able to prosecute his aim. As a consequence, trade with Tibet collapsed.

  Then, in 1775, while George Bogle was living at the Panchen Lama’
s seat of Tashilhunpo, news arrived there that ‘the tyrannical and faithless’ Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah was dead. The Panchen Lama immediately wrote to Prithvi’s successor in a bid to restore trading relations with Kathmandu.

  I have heard of the death of your father, Prithi Narayan. As this is the will of God you will not let your heart be cast down. You have now succeeded to the throne, and it is proper that you attend to the happiness of your people, and allow all merchants, as Hindus, Mussulmans, and the four castes, to go and come, and carry on their trade freely, which will tend to your advantage and to your good name. At present they are afraid of you, and no one will enter your country. Whatever has been the ancient custom let it be observed between you and me.

  Those ancient customs would not be observed. On the contrary, trade continued to be a source of friction. The Gorkha regime that now controlled much of the southern Himalaya needed to fund its military, through a restoration of trade or else new conquests. That friction would in the late 1780s erupt into war between Nepal and Tibet, a war that would entangle China and the East India Company, and bring the full might of armies of the Qing Empire to the fringes of the Kathmandu valley.

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  When the mountain explorer H W Tilman visited Rasuwagadhi in 1949, a year before China invaded Tibet, he found a desolate spot: an old fort and a few soldiers on the Nepali side and on the Tibetan just a stone slab inscribed with some Chinese characters. Translated a few years later by a second traveller, Duncan Forbes, this turned out to be a marker post defining the border that had been erected, on 26 November 1792, after the ‘victory over the Gorkhas accomplished by General Fu, the Great General for the Pacification of the West’. It commemorated the Qing victory on behalf of Tibet over the Nepalis, a consequence of these trade wars and achieved in the face of incredible physical challenges as the Qing crossed the towering mountains as ‘though they were moving over a level plain’. The stone didn’t lie: the Qing victory was a swaggering expression of Chinese power, but it came at great cost, absorbing such huge amounts of treasure that the Qing concluded that in future the same ends should be achieved through diplomacy rather than war. The question is: why did they bother in the first place?

  Until the end of the eighteenth century, Himalayan geography limited economic opportunities and put a brake on the size and influence of the region’s political structures. It was trade that connected the Himalaya’s distinct cultural spheres of influence with the outside world. Otherwise, the Himalaya had been a bulwark around which the tides of history flowed; set against the hazards of the mountains, not least the thin air of the Tibetan plateau, the available rewards had not persuaded outsiders to stay for long. By the end of the eighteenth century, this was changing. Foreign colonial powers were extending their influence deep into the mountains.

  Warren Hastings judged the trade routes of the eastern Himalaya to be a way for the East India Company to reach China, sending George Bogle off to explore the idea. In the long run it proved little more than romantic speculation: the Company would solve its trade imbalance with China by other means. New global trading patterns were emerging that would make the old caravans Hovhannes Joughayetsi knew seem a charming anachronism; the mountains would become simply the East India Company’s northern wall against the Qing Empire. While the Himalaya was a region with its own identity, where influences arrived from all directions to create a distinct and remarkable culture, for the emerging global powers, it would be made into a buffer zone, somewhere on the margins, a useful space to absorb the shocks and tension of geopolitics formulated hundreds and even thousands of kilometres away. The diverse peoples of the Himalaya would find themselves, just as Prithvi Narayan Shah predicted, sandwiched between two giant competing interests. Himalayan trade might have been of critical importance to kings in Kathmandu or the abbots of Tibetan monasteries. It would be of only marginal interest to the region’s new masters in Calcutta and Beijing.

  Prithvi Narayan Shah had seen this future and tried to find a balance between fierce self-reliance and a need for trade. In the last years of his reign, his army, though tiny by Indian or European standards, almost tripled in size and was equipped with firearms and artillery. The cost of this expansion couldn’t be met from productive farmland alone; only restoration in trade could ease the immense pressure on Nepal’s exchequer. Prithvi was pragmatic enough to recognise this. ‘Whatever his conduct as a conqueror,’ wrote William Kirkpatrick, the East India Company man who arrived in Kathmandu in 1793 and reported so attentively on its brickwork, ‘or however severe his nature may have been, he was not inattentive to the means of conciliating those on whose support he principally depended.’ Although the Kinloch expedition of 1767 – when the British attempt to intervene against the Gorkhalis had ended in malaria for Kinloch and humiliation for the Company – had soured Prithvi’s relations with the British and persuaded him to expel Kathmandu’s Capuchin missionaries, Prithvi was prepared to patch up relations with Warren Hastings, who tacitly allowed Prithvi free rein to expand his kingdom eastwards, if it brought stability. Hastings wanted Gorkha’s help in ending the predations of sannyasi bandits then plaguing Bengal.

  Likewise, in his final letter to the Panchen Lama, a man with whom Prithvi had bitter differences, the king made an offer to restore trade through the Bhote Kosi and Kyirong valleys. As George Bogle observed, ‘the wealth of Nepal’, meaning its former trade with Tibet, had ‘furnished the Gorkha Rajah with the means by which he rose’. However, Prithvi had ‘neglected to cherish the source’. We have seen already how in his political memoir the Divya Upadesh Prithvi had preached the values of self-reliance and autarky. Kashmiri merchants and Indian gosain had been forced out of Kathmandu, either expelled directly or driven out by tariffs that had risen sharply to meet the Gorkhali regime’s increased costs. Prithvi was now trying to recover his position. His advance east towards Sikkim, located between Nepal and Bhutan, also allowed Gorkha to exert pressure on another major trade route for Tibet, through the Tista valley to the Jelep La, a route of strategic interest to the British as well. Control Sikkim, Prithvi assumed, and the Tibetans would be forced to negotiate.

  After the death of Prithvi Narayan in 1775, his successors in the Shah dynasty became more aggressive, constructing themselves as the dominant military power along the southern flank of the Himalaya. Gorkha swept up statelets and mini-kingdoms that had resisted Prithvi in the west and far west of modern Nepal: the Gandaki river basin and the old Khasa Empire of the Karnali valley. His eldest son and successor Pratap Singh and the sixth Panchen Lama together tried to re-establish the ‘ancient custom’ that had enriched both Kathmandu and central Tibet, as the Panchen Lama requested in his letter. The privileged position of Newari merchants in Lhasa was confirmed and Tibet agreed only to do business with Bengal through Kathmandu. That was also the hope of George Bogle, who told his masters in Calcutta:

  The opening of the road through Nepal, and obtaining the abolition of the duties and exactions which have lately been imposed on trade in that country, appears an object of great importance towards establishing a free communication between Bengal and Tibet. The death of Prithi Naraya, the late Rajah of Nepal, seems to afford a favourable opportunity of effecting this point.

  The deaths of all three men – Pratap Singh, the Panchen Lama and Bogle – within the space of a few years meant it didn’t work out that way. Since conquering Kathmandu, discipline among the Gorkhalis had begun to fracture. With Prithvi’s death, intrigue and feuds began eating into the Gorkha regime’s coherence. When Pratap Singh died aged twenty-six, only two years after his father, a power struggle began between his widow, acting as regent to their son, and Pratap’s younger brother Bahadur Shah, particularly over territorial expansion. When the Panchen Lama died of smallpox at Chengde, and with his reincarnation still a child, Tibet’s political centre of gravity moved firmly towards the Dalai Lama and the system of government imposed by the Qianlong emperor, whereby any policy developed in Lhasa had to meet
the approval of the two Qing ambans stationed there. China was suspicious of foreign involvement in its sphere of influence, and the British, however much they wanted to improve trade with Tibet, were reluctant to antagonise their most important trading partner. Tibet continued to offer support to its tiny neighbour Sikkim, a Buddhist kingdom with an important trade route to Bengal, much to the annoyance of Nepal, which had only agreed to back away from occupying Sikkim in return for a monopoly on trade.

  This fraught situation would have been explosive enough without the interventions of the abrasive Gorkhali regent Bahadur Shah, whose instinct was to act and whose goal was to expand as fast as possible the proto-empire he was building. Apart from the issue of debased coinage, the Gorkhalis chafed that the Tibetans were exploiting them, mixing dust with the salt they exported and imposing heavy import tariffs on Nepali flour. In early 1788, Bahadur infuriated Lhasa by appointing as head of Kathmandu’s Tibetan affairs the Shamarpa, a dissident reincarnate lama (tulku) from the Karma Kagyu school, who had recently fled a dispute in Tibet over the property of his half-brother, the former Panchen Lama. Lacking the wiliness of Prithvi Narayan, the regent threatened to occupy Kuti and Kyirong, that is the two ancient trade routes into Tibet from Kathmandu, until his grievances were resolved. The Tibetans response was to shut the border, suggesting that ‘if the Goorkha wished for war, he was welcome to advance.’ The Gorkhalis appealed to the Chinese emperor but the ambans in Lhasa chose not to tell Beijing what was happening. In short order, thousands of Gorkhali troops were crossing into Tibet through Kyirong and Kuti, their objective the riches of Tashilhunpo monastery, seat of the Panchen Lamas.