Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  The seventh Panchen Lama was still a boy, but his regent issued appeals for help to the Qing emperor and also to the governor general of the East India Company. From the latter, he also requested secrecy: Beijing would not appreciate Tibet turning to the region’s other great power. The governor general was Lord Cornwallis, who ten years previously had been the commanding officer at Yorktown, where the British surrender set the stage for the loss of its American colonies. Not antagonising the Chinese was foremost in his mind during this crisis, lest something similar occur. At home, the impeachment of his predecessor Warren Hastings was underway, another unwelcome fate for Cornwallis to ponder. Concluding that Beijing would be infuriated at British interference, he told the Panchen Lama he would not offer any assistance. Nor did he agree to keep their correspondence a secret. The Company wanted the ear of the Qing emperor on the matter of its parlous trade imbalance and nothing must interfere with business.

  For their part, the Chinese sent officials to investigate. The Tibetans were happy to fight but the Chinese weren’t confident of military success. They pressed the Tibetans to negotiate, a difficult task with an occupying army threatening destruction. To the east, Gorkhali troops had also occupied Sikkim, taking control of the crucial Jelep La and the Chumbi valley beyond, cutting off a trade route they felt the Tibetans had opened against the spirit of their earlier agreement, breaking Nepal’s monopoly. Thinking they could get better terms from Tibet with Qing mediation, the Gorkhalis negotiated what became known as the Kyirong Treaty, which granted territory, including the frontier town of Kuti, and commercial concessions; it also addressed directly the complex issue of Tibet’s debased coinage. An exchange was agreed, one good coin for two bad, and an annual tribute of fifty thousand rupees a year, a phenomenal sum. The Gorkhalis could be forgiven for thinking they had won.

  This generous settlement might have been a humiliation for the Qing emperor had his representatives been entirely open with him about its terms. They chose instead to be economical with the fine detail, telling Beijing that Nepal, not Tibet, would be paying a form of tribute and that their troops had returned home without the loss of a single Chinese soldier, both of which were only more or less true. When Gorkhali ambassadors visited Beijing in the autumn of 1789, Nepal’s young king was honoured with a feudatory title and his regent, the pugnacious Bahadur Shah, became kung, or duke.

  Then Lhasa began to wriggle on its expensive hook, stirring up trouble in far western Nepal and offering asylum to the deposed ruler of Jumla, one of the mini-kingdoms of far-western Nepal that had resisted the advance of the Gorkhalis. The Dalai Lama then told Kathmandu that further payments would be suspended. There were bad-tempered and fruitless negotiations at Kuti, where the divisive figure of the dissident Shamarpa led the Gorkhali side; soon after, thousands of Gorkhali soldiers were marching back into Tibet under the command of two of Nepal’s most able generals, one of them Damodar Pande, son of Prithvi Narayan’s favourite general Kalu Pande, who had died besieging Kirtipur. The Panchen Lama was whisked away to Lhasa under the protection of his regent and the Tibetans appealed once again to Beijing. When the Gorkhali force arrived at Shigatse, its leaders demanded gold and a hundred thousand rupees, and having been refused, they sacked the monastery of Tashilhunpo.

  News of this latest humiliation revealed the true nature of the situation on the Qing Empire’s western border. The official who had promised the Qianlong emperor that the conflict had been resolved committed suicide even before he could be summoned to the imperial presence. The Qing ordered a punitive expedition under the command of Fuk’anggan, the nephew of the empress, then in his late thirties and with deep experience of quashing rebellions, having pacified Sichuan and put down insurrection in Taiwan. Fuk’anggan led a huge force, including ten thousand troops from the elite Eight Banners, which he marched across the plateau from Qinghai in the depths of winter. The Qianlong emperor also sent an envoy to Kathmandu, demanding the return of the Tashilhunpo treasures and the surrender of the Shamarpa to Tibetan custody. In Lhasa, Newari tradesmen, whose business had suffered since the Gorkhalis took power in Kathmandu, were encouraged by the Qing to travel home to Nepal and stir up resentment there. One of them was detained at the Nepali border and personally interrogated by the regent Bahadur Shah, who learned that Fuk’anggan’s army was bearing down on Nepal.

  Not for the last time, a Nepali ruler now attempted to play their giant neighbour to the north against the one from the south. Bahadur sent a letter to the Chinese explaining his grievances but also warning of British interest in Tibet. He also signed a commercial treaty with the British, hoping this would bring with it their political and even military support, a notion Calcutta didn’t rush to contradict. Fuk’anggan also wrote to the British, however, informing them of Qing plans to invade Nepal, a move Bahadur had thought unlikely, given the terrain. This was a sobering development. That said, should China occupy Kathmandu, the Qing armies would be adjacent to the East India Company’s richest possessions, which might persuade the British to Bahadur’s side. But if Bahadur Shah genuinely thought the British would help him in his hour of need, he would be disappointed. The British were planning a major and costly diplomatic mission to the Qing court, led by Lord Macartney, to raise British grievances over trade. Nothing could jeopardise that.

  Facing the might of Fuk’anggan’s army on the plateau would have been suicide, so the Gorkhali troops withdrew to the border where they could more easily defend the approaches to Kathmandu in the narrow river gorges cutting through the mountains. But the Gorkhali force at Rasuwagadhi was outflanked by a brilliant piece of mountain warfare. Fuk’anggan himself led three regiments to bridge the Lende river, which meets the Kyirong near Rasuwa and forms the modern boundary between Tibet and Nepal. While the Gorkhali forces resisted this move, a second Chinese force crossed the river upstream and circled behind their enemy’s position to attack them from above. The Gorkhalis were routed and only managed to stop the Qing army’s advance thirty-five kilometres from Kathmandu at the Betrawati river, just north of Nuwakot. At this point Bahadur Shah appealed directly to the British for military aid, particularly artillery, but at the same time the Company received a letter from the Dalai Lama, requesting neutrality. Mindful of commerce, Lord Cornwallis offered to mediate, sending the young Scottish envoy Captain William Kirkpatrick to Kathmandu (where we met him in Chapter Five): a diplomatic way of sitting on his hands and hoping Nepal wasn’t destroyed.

  That the Gorkhali crown survived might seem surprising. The Qing’s ambition had been to split Nepal apart and the Chinese certainly battled on, breaking through Gorkhali lines to reach Nuwakot. But the fighting season was almost over and the cost in material and men was steepening. Fuk’anggan’s lines of communication were stretched. How would he resupply in the bitter winter months across the highest mountains on earth? How much was conquering Nepal really worth? Better to agree terms and head for home before the temperature fell. The scale of China’s investment in its Nepali adventure was not immediately appreciated, either by the British or the Gorkhalis, but it was colossal and would not be repeated. Expensive wars and corruption at court were draining the treasury and the Qing would soon face expensive rebellions closer to home. The Qianlong emperor, whose armies had crushed enemies around the whole perimeter of the empire, abdicated in 1796; he warned his successor, the Jiaqing, to be wary of intervening in Gorkha affairs. It was advice the new emperor would follow.

  The treaty the Chinese signed with Bahadur Shah seemed punitive enough: the loot from Tashilhunpo was handed back and tribute demanded; Nepal agreed to renounce any ambitions north of the Himalaya and to send ambassadors every five years under diplomatic conditions illustrating Nepal’s junior status. In return China offered to help if Nepal should be invaded. Otherwise the status quo held. Nepal was free to resume its conquest of the west and negotiate on its own terms with its southern neighbour. Bahadur Shah had judged Calcutta’s hesitation in offering Nepal support as a form of bet
rayal, which is why William Kirkpatrick received such a chilly welcome when he arrived in Kathmandu in 1793. The Chinese were also bitter at the East India Company. Fuk’anggan believed incorrectly that Company sepoys had helped the Gorkhalis. When Lord Macartney’s diplomatic mission to the Qing court eventually failed, he believed it was this imagined intervention that persuaded the Qianlong emperor to dismiss his embassy.

  In the long run, it was arguably the Tibetans who lost most. While they got back the glories of Tashilhunpo, the political price was high. The Qing emperors had been forced to make several critical military interventions throughout the eighteenth century to prop up an often fractious and sectarian Tibetan government and keep dissidents from conspiring with those Mongol groups that remained a threat to China. Tibet hadn’t just been protected: it was swallowed up. Dalai Lamas in the nineteenth century would be both short-lived and heavily controlled: Tibet’s borders were maintained at the pleasure of the Qing dynasty. Only as the Qing fell in the twentieth century did the Dalai Lamas emerge again as great leaders.

  *

  The disaster at Rasuwagadhi and the terms of the treaty between Gorkha and China would lead almost inevitably to conflict with the East India Company. With Tibet so ruthlessly put off limits by the Qing, Nepal’s expansionist ambitions were restricted to areas south of the Himalaya. The immediate loser was the Gorkhali regent Bahadur Shah. Under his rule, Nepal had expanded quickly; between the invasions of Tibet in 1788 and 1791, Gorkhali troops had moved into Kumaon, west of the Mahakali river. Now he had overreached. The king’s courtiers, or bharadar, blamed him for recklessly endangering the regime. The king, Rana Bahadur, reached his majority soon after the Chinese invasion and sought to exert his authority. Bahadur Shah was murdered in 1797. Even so, the factionalism continued, drawing in Nepal’s neighbours as competing interests conspired with one or other for advantage. Rana Bahadur, a capricious and debauched individual who borrowed huge sums from his courtiers, first abdicated in favour of his infant son and then in 1800 went into exile in Benares, under the control of the East India Company. The British were swift to exploit the worsening political situation in Nepal, signing a treaty with the Gorkha state in 1801 at Danapur, close to Patna, promising peace in return for trade relations and the establishment of a British residency in Kathmandu.

  A large faction of the Gorkhali court was bitterly opposed to the presence of a British resident and appealed to the Qing, warning them that the British were using the exiled Rana Bahadur to extend their influence in Nepal and threaten the regime. Instead of intervening, the Chinese advised the Gorkhalis to get their ex-king back. Meanwhile, the governor general Richard Wellesley told the newly appointed British resident of Kathmandu Captain William Knox to ‘direct your attention as to the means of opening a beneficial trade with the countries of Bootan and Tibet either directly with the Company’s Provinces, or through the medium of the merchants of Nepal’. Knox’s mission arrived in the spring of 1802 and for a time was tolerated, but at the end of the year power shifted again. Damodar Pande, the man who had led the attack against the Qing a decade earlier, was made chief minister. As a consequence, relations with Knox became increasingly sour and Wellesley recalled him. The Company had become preoccupied with fighting its second war with the Maratha confederacy in India; it had no wish to antagonise China on its far western marches. Trade with the Qing was much too important. Knox withdrew and in short order the trade agreement with Nepal was torn up. The exiled Gorkhali king Rana Bahadur was told to go home.

  With him came an ambitious and capable minister called Bhimsen Thapa. Many already regarded Bhimsen as the controlling influence behind Rana Bahadur’s actions. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, who had been part of Knox’s mission, described him as a

  very vigorous rash young man, who, owing partly to the moderation of the Company’s negociations [sic] with Rana Bahadur, by him attributed to fear, and partly to the hope of protection from the Chinese, seems to have beheld the British government with contempt.

  Bhimsen promptly had Damodar Pande beheaded and took control of the king. The dynasty that Prithvi Narayan had built so ably a few decades before had become, and would remain for the next one hundred and fifty years, a token to be squabbled over.

  Bhimsen would dominate Nepal’s political scene for the next four decades, a brilliant tactician who learned from his mistakes, his greatest being to misread the British. With the failure of Knox’s mission in 1804, which in some ways was merely a prologue to the Company’s forthcoming war with Nepal, Bhimsen renewed Nepal’s westward expansion, sending his father to occupy the still independent kingdom of Palpa and taking over the important trading town of Rerighat, now Ridi Bazar. That year the Gorkhali army also invaded Garhwal, the kingdom to the west of Kumaon. There was little prospect of trade being normalised with the Gorkhalis tightening their grip on the Himalaya.

  In 1806, Rana Bahadur was murdered at the hands of his half-brother and Kathmandu was plunged into a brief period of extreme bloodletting: the Bhandarkhal massacre. Ninety-three people died, seventeen of them women, all of them in some way obstructive to the interests of Bhimsen Thapa, who emerged intact and in control. Nepal continued its conquests, absorbing territory between the Yamuna and Sutlej rivers.

  To pay Gorkha’s troops for this renewed aggression, Bhimsen nationalised land gifted to religious institutions, a risky move in an increasingly conservative Hindu polity. The reward was the Gorkha government taking an even firmer grip on the region at the expense of its neighbours. The East India Company looked on with growing concern. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, who had been with Knox, observed how the Gorkhali conquests placed a chill over trade:

  besides the military point of view, they are desirous of having few passages as a point of economy in collecting the customs. Accordingly, so far as they can, they have stopt every pass, except that by Butaul [Butwal], which of course, has become a considerable mart, although most inconveniently situated.

  There seemed little prospect of mutually beneficial trade with a neighbour so aggressively acquisitive and so resistant to outside influence. Something would have to change.

  9

  The Hard Road to Sagauli

  In the post-monsoon season of 1819, the newest recruit to the Bengal Civil Service’s Foreign and Political Department arrived at Delhi, en route to the Himalaya. Brian Houghton Hodgson was, in the words of his first biographer, a ‘pretty boy’ whose delicately pink cheeks made him seem younger than his eighteen years. The heat of Calcutta and a fragile constitution had almost ended his career before it had begun, but thanks to influential connections he was on his way to the cooler hills of Kumaon, newly under the control of the British.

  Hodgson dutifully presented himself to the resident at Delhi, General Sir David Ochterlony, now sixty-one years of age, gammon-faced and white haired, the Company’s oldest ‘political’ encountering its youngest. Ochterlony conducted his private life like a nawab, a ‘white Mughal’, promenading each afternoon on the banks of the Yamuna river with his bibis, his common-law local wives, each on their own elephant. Hodgson was unimpressed, noting ‘the costly and pompous style then inseparable from our Indian embassies’. He was a product of Haileybury, a school established to train servants of empire who wouldn’t indulge in that kind of thing. Ochterlony seemed to Hodgson the living representation of the dangers of ‘going native’. Ironically, and in his own quiet way, Hodgson would himself become a late flowering of an orientalism already out of fashion: ‘marrying’ his own Muslim bibi and becoming a scholarly authority on the world he inhabited, a world that Ochterlony himself had conquered: the kingdom of Nepal.

  The excesses and corruption of the East India Company had by the early nineteenth century created a new narrative among critics and political thinkers. In engaging and even identifying with Indian culture, they claimed, European Christian values had been subverted and debauched. Historians and thinkers like James Mill, writing in the Edinburgh Review, argued it was the moral duty
of the East India Company to civilise India, to break down its entrenched superstition, not, as Sir William Jones had done at Fort William College, ‘to employ the lights of a people still semi-barbarous’. There was no question of this being done with the democratic consent of the Indian people: their ‘moral and political situation’ made that impractical. ‘A simple form of arbitrary government tempered by European honour and European intelligence is the only form which is now fit for Hindustan.’

  Ochterlony, born in Massachusetts to a Scottish father, had arrived in India more than forty years earlier, when Warren Hastings was governor general and Britain was consolidating its hard-won position on the subcontinent. Commissioned into the Bengal Native Infantry, he had fought as a subaltern in the Second Anglo-Mysore War, been wounded, losing an eye, and then imprisoned, to be released only at the end of hostilities. In 1803, and by then a major, he had commanded a battalion in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. After the capture of Delhi he was appointed resident at the Mughal court, and when Yashwant Rao Holkar laid siege to its famous Red Fort to liberate the Mughal emperor, Ochterlony was on the battlements directing its successful defence. Later he was sacked as resident in favour of another Scot, Archibald Seton, adding a streak of bitterness to a mercurial temperament. In the flood of action Ochterlony was eager and resourceful; thwarted, he could be sour.

  In 1808, Ochterlony’s career blossomed once again. He was appointed agent for relations with the Sikh states under their capable emperor Ranjit Singh, whose sphere of influence met the British along the Sutlej river. The two men shared a common affliction: Ranjit Singh had lost the sight of one eye during a childhood bout of smallpox. ‘The natives have an idea that a person possessed of one eye only, sees much farther than those who are blessed with two, and is better able to conduct a difficult negociation,’ wrote a correspondent for the Asiatic Journal in 1835, ten years after Ochterlony’s death.