by Ed Douglas
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In November 1814, in the early weeks of the war, Major Paris Bradshaw, who had previously been the boundary commissioner negotiating with Kathmandu and was now Major General Bennett Marley’s political agent, was put in charge of concluding a peace treaty with the Gorkhalis. The draft he had made by the end of that month was signed more or less unchanged little more than a year later at Sagauli, on 2 December 1815. Before the war, Gorkha power had been at its zenith, stretching from the Tista river in the east, now in the Indian state of West Bengal, to the Sutlej in the west, in modern Himachal Pradesh. It had truly been a Himalayan empire. After the war, Nepal had lost a third of its territory, including the provinces of Garhwal and Kumaon as well as vast tracts of valuable land in the terai. The new boundaries were the Mahakali river in the west and the Mechi river in the east.
With the Gorkha threat neutralised, Ochterlony and Charles Metcalfe were already turning their attention to the Sikh Empire and the protection of the Company’s flank east of the Sutlej. Yet even with the treaty agreed, Bhimsen Thapa still tried to wriggle off his hook, refusing to have it ratified, and the Company put Ochterlony in charge of a final – arguably unnecessary – campaign to force the issue, in February 1816 taking the fortress at Makwanpur, just a few days’ march from Kathmandu. Necessary or not, during this interlude between the agreement of terms and the capitulation at Makwanpur, Bhimsen looked for help in his struggle against the British, to Ranjit Singh and other potential enemies in common. He also wrote to the Jiaqing emperor, accusing the East India Company of outrageous provocations and aggression, but the ambans in Lhasa refused to forward his letters to Beijing. Or at least, that’s what they told Bhimsen Thapa.
In fact, the Qing had been paying close attention to events in Nepal. British success prompted the Jiaqing emperor into sending an army into Tibet. For several months in the summer of 1816, the Earl of Moira and his staff had to consider the threat of China’s intervention. Now began a three-way game of diplomatic poker. China could ill afford another expensive war in order to reassert its control over Nepal, but wanted to maintain its status with Britain. From the British point of view, having just found out how much treasure fighting in the mountains could absorb, and having suffered several uncomfortable reverses, the last thing needed was an escalation of hostilities. There were plenty in Britain who wondered at the sense of fighting the Gorkhalis in the first place, not least the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the British army, a man who knew a lot about cards and other games of chance. As it was, Bhimsen Thapa, who now held the worst hand, would play best. Knowing Britain was anxious about its relationship with China, he would exploit that apprehension to claw back some of his losses.
Under the terms of Sagauli, the British were entitled to have a diplomat resident at Kathmandu, and on 17 April 1816, the Gorkhali envoy Gajraj Mishra led the new acting resident, Lieutenant John Peter Boileau, through the streets of Kathmandu to the palace. Born in Dublin of Huguenot stock, Boileau had been stabbed in the thigh during fighting in late 1814 but had recovered to split his assailant’s head in two. Now he was enforcing the governor general’s terms for peace. Led up several flights of narrow stairs to the audience chamber, Boileau found the waiting courtiers framed by curtains of white muslin, shielding them from the hot sun. The king, Girvan Yuddha, now eighteen and in his majority, sat under a canopy suspended from four silver standards, but he rose and stepped down from his dais to greet the officer. Real power lay elsewhere in the room; the man Mishra introduced next was Bhimsen Thapa.
In presenting his credentials, Boileau made it clear that while the governor general looked forward to a new relationship with Nepal, the first task of the Gorkhali government was to implement the treaty they had just signed. Bhimsen was courteous, even animated, but impossible to read. No promises were made. Around him were the raja’s bharadar, the nobility, all of them wondering, just like Boileau, what the chief minister’s next move might be, none of them with a coherent plan to get rid of him.
The British, first in the shape of Boileau, then followed in late July by his permanent successor Edward Gardner, were anxious to prevent any confrontation with China. Bhimsen understood this very well, but his relations with the East India Company were only one part of a much more important issue: his own survival. Although he had told China the next British target was Tibet, Bhimsen knew the Qing would quickly conclude the British posed no further threat. Meanwhile, his enemies at court, principally the Pande family, were smarting from the humiliation of a heavy defeat. Acting tough against the British would take the pressure off from both angles, providing a display of strength for the Pandes to consider and a pretext for stoking Chinese anxieties, news of which would chasten the British. So Bhimsen stationed troops to keep watch on the resident and sent Amar Singh Thapa, shortly before the old general’s death, for talks with Qing envoys close to the Tibetan border. Almost immediately, he began feeding information on these overtures to the resident who in turn had a detailed exchange with his masters in Calcutta, who were now contemplating another war with the remnants of the Maratha Empire. In this way, Bhimsen applied pressure on the Company’s most sensitive nerve: China.
Everything now depended on relations with the Qing. If they demanded it, Gardner was to withdraw. Meanwhile the British hurried to reassure China that Nepal retained its independence and the East India Company had no designs on its territory. The Qing did in fact request Gardner be recalled, but the Earl of Moira, now titled the Marquess of Hastings following the war with Gorkha, finessed this by requesting the Chinese install their own resident, to keep an eye on what the restless Gorkhali army was up to. The Chinese demurred, Gardner stayed put and Bhimsen Thapa could justifiably claim that he had managed to keep Nepal largely independent. His hand was strengthened when the young king died, reportedly in an outbreak of smallpox, in November 1816; as noted earlier, the king’s young son was put in the care of Bhimsen’s niece Tripura Sundari, who began her second term as regent.
The Marquess of Hastings soon realised that in making peace with Nepal, the East India Company had effectively become tax collector for the raja in Kathmandu: in the terms of Sagauli, the British had agreed to an indemnity, to be paid to the Gorkhali king as compensation for land on the terai seized during the fighting. The governor general now decided to give back this land: the very land and more besides that the British had gone to war over. The Victorian historian Edward Thornton claimed this decision ‘converted the war into an idle but dismal farce’, but given Nepal’s relationship with China, and Britain’s relationship with China, the governor general had little choice. The Company’s limited room for manoeuvre also explains why the resident at Kathmandu fulfilled a very different and more limited role compared to residents stationed in other important locations on the Indian subcontinent: not so much a diplomat or negotiator, but an early-warning system of Gorkhali militarism.
To accommodate their resident, the king of Nepal had given the British a scrap of land more than three kilometres north of the palace, whose name in Nepali translates as the ‘house of devils’. Plagued by fog in winter and mosquitoes in summer, Edward Gardner followed the governor general’s policy of appeasement towards Nepal to the letter by doing absolutely nothing as politely as possible, a position he maintained for the next thirteen years until Calcutta antagonised him by cutting his salary, at which point he retired. His replacement was the pink-cheeked neophyte Ochterlony had met at Delhi ten years earlier: Brian Houghton Hodgson. His role would be far more active. Through timing, opportunity and inclination, Hodgson would put himself at the centre not only of court politics in Kathmandu, but also what might be termed Himalayan Studies: the region’s ethnography and natural history, and Buddhism, just as Europe discovered it. As we shall see in the next chapter, he also forged relationships that would have a direct bearing on the future of the British Empire.
The impact of détente between Kathmandu and Calcutta on the people of Nepal was the most dismal cons
equence of the war. Gorkha’s powerful army had not gone away and was agitating for revenge. There was no question of reforming how they were paid and no real interest on the part of Bhimsen Thapa in doing so. He was a pragmatist, anxious to keep the court and the army on side. His problem was that the same number of fish were now occupying a smaller pond. Senior officers took their salary as grain from farmers and sold it in India for cash, which was repatriated not to where it was earned but to Kathmandu. In this way, the wealth of the land was centralised on Nepal’s capital and the ordinary people of Nepal suffered decades of little or no investment and no escape from a life of desperate toil. The situation was most keenly felt in those areas of modern Nepal, such as the far west, most recently gathered into the Gorkha Empire and regarded largely as spoils of war. These are still among the poorest parts of Nepal.
Over the next century and a half, the deadening hand of distant interests would hold back the people of the Himalaya. For the most part, assuming they toed a line drawn in Calcutta or Beijing, they were left to their own devices. Abetting this colonial indifference were ruling elites that failed, usually by omission, to develop the material lives of ordinary people. The historian Ludwig Stiller captured Nepal’s stagnant drift in his book The Silent Cry. Prithvi Narayan Shah had believed his new nation walked on two legs, its military and its farmers, and that without a rich peasantry, the country would founder.
Somewhere on the road of conquest, amid the crash of guns and the sweat of battle, these ideals were lost. The military had assumed the right to grow and to live at the expense of the farmers of Nepal, and all too many of the bharadars forgot the meaning of their title (‘those who carry the burden of the nation’) and demanded that the nation serve them.
The picture was different across the border in Kumaon, now under British control. In April 1816, Captain Felix Raper was in its capital Almora, a hundred and sixty kilometres or so west of the new border with Nepal, writing to a friend. Raper had, with permission from the Gorkha governor of Srinagar, explored the source of the Ganges nine years earlier in the company of the Anglo-Indian adventurer Hyder Jung Hearsey. It was a region he knew well. Now he predicted great things for the town, which would become ‘a fashionable resort in the hot weather’. His guess proved correct. Before long the British had built a sanatorium near Almora and the notion of the British hill station was born. Mountain villages barely heard of before the Nepal War became as famous as Calcutta: Mussoorie, close to the fortress of Nalapani where the hot-headed gambler Gillespie perished; the beautiful hamlet of Naini Tal; and Simla, which would become the summer capital of the Raj, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling, hidden in the mountains north of where Amar Singh Thapa had been outfoxed by David Ochterlony. Leaving aside the impact hill stations had on the life of the British up until their departure in 1947, they transformed the economic prospects of the former colonies of Nepal, albeit under British hegemony. Young men from poor villages in Nepal, Kumaon and Garhwal would over time become an integral part of the Indian army, protecting the Raj, a source of wealth and prestige for Britain as it transformed itself, economically and culturally, into the wealthiest nation on earth.
10
Mapping the Himalaya
In late 1774, the affable George Bogle was at Tashilhunpo monastery in Tibet, pressing the East India Company’s trading interests with the Panchen Lama. Suspicion about his intentions and those of governor Warren Hastings, his master in Calcutta, ran deep. An unofficial envoy, a man Bogle called Chauduri, came to visit him, sent from Lhasa by the eighth Dalai Lama’s regent. Bogle didn’t like Chauduri much, commenting on the man’s ‘cringing humility’, which he compared unfavourably with the ‘plain and honest manners of the Tibetans’. Chauduri was not himself Tibetan but from Palpa, on the other side of the mountains, at that time one of the small independent hill-states yet to be absorbed into the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal. While he promised Bogle more than the Company desired, ultimately he delivered nothing; Bogle speculated that Chauduri was either a chancer out to gain advantage for himself or more probably someone sent to gather intelligence whom the regent in Lhasa could deny knowing, which he promptly did.
Whatever Chauduri’s motives, his presence in Tibet is a reminder that far from being a blank on the map, southern Tibet was part of a Himalayan network of cultures linking two of the most populous regions on earth, India and China. The regent had in this instance used a ‘Hindustani’ to deflect British interest; at other times Tibetan officials relied on the presence of the Manchu ambans, ambassadors stationed in Lhasa to maintain the Qing Empire’s influence on its western borders. We’ve already seen the value the Panchen Lama placed on trade and information, and his reliance on the gosain merchant Purangir as an intermediary. Bogle himself attested to the wealth of trade passing through the hands of Kashmiri merchants and Kalmuks from Siberia.
But Tibet’s experience of the world extended far beyond its immediate neighbours. Although Bogle was the first European whom Lobsang Palden Yeshe, the sixth Panchen Lama, had met, the lama had a wide range of European objects in his possession: a French pocket compass and a camera obscura with scenes of London, for example. When the lama pointed out a similarity between the facial features of figures painted on a piece of Chinese porcelain and those of his Scottish guest, Bogle explained that the images of shepherdesses had in fact been copied by Chinese craftsmen from European art. This exchange of knowledge flowed both ways. Bogle was given instruction in Tibetan history and law, as well as more arcane subjects like cosmography. He was also presented with a map, a gift from the Panchen Lama himself; it was an almost casual offer but one resonant with significance. It also challenges western assumptions about what remote Tibet knew of the world beyond the mountains.
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Bogle had crosed the Himalaya armed with the best knowledge then available to the East India Company about Tibet’s geography, politics and culture, drawn from the work of Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, and accompanied by the Nouvel atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise et du Thibet, published in 1737, the work of French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. Neither man had even been to China, let alone Tibet: they drew on the researches of Jesuit missionaries trained as surveyors, who maintained the confidence of the otherwise anti-Christian Qing Kangxi emperor. The Jesuits were able to fix positions of longitude and latitude using astronomical measurements, a significant advance on Chinese techniques. The Kangxi emperor commissioned from them an atlas, a flowering of the French Académie Royale des Sciences in China. Though he restricted its use within his own kingdom to court officials, a copy was sent back to Europe, where it transformed western attitudes to China and the regions around it, including Korea, another kingdom ‘forbidden’ to Europeans.
Surveying for these Jesuit maps began in 1708 and the first of them were published in 1718, after a decade of surveying work. China’s western tributary states were to be included but Tibet, then under the direct control of the Khoshut Khanate, was not part of the original project. The Kangxi emperor soon corrected the omission. In 1709 a Qing diplomatic official called Ho-shou, newly appointed to Lhasa, was given the extra responsibility of surveying Tibet. He took with him to his new posting some Chinese cartographers, according to Du Halde, ‘to make a map of all the territories immediately subject to the Great Lama’. These territories were of political significance to the Kangxi emperor: this was during the period of rival Dalai Lamas, with a pretender under the control of the Khoshut leader Lajang Khan in Lhasa, while the seventh Dalai Lama Kelzang Gyatso, whom the Kangxi emperor, as well as most Tibetans, preferred, was based in Litang. Two years later their work was handed to the Jesuit cartographer Jean-Baptiste Régis in Beijing, but he thought it of poor quality and while it was used for early versions of the Chinese maps, the Jesuits lobbied for a better survey, one that relied on their more exact techniques. In 1717, the emperor finally gave permission for more work to be done.
Two Tibetan lamas educated in geometry and receiving inst
ruction from the Jesuit Pierre Jartoux were despatched to do the job properly. With them travelled an official called Sengju from the Lifanyuan, or ‘Court of Colonial Affairs’, which mostly took care of matters related to Mongolia and Tibet. The survey team took compass bearings, measured distances and established their latitude using gnomons (shadow-casting devices), adding a scientific basis to long-established Chinese traditions in map making. They also collected coordinates of significant mountains and, the sources suggest, measured their altitude: all this a century before the great colonial project, the Survey of India, began its precise cartographic work in the Himalaya and overturned the widespread European belief that the Andes were the highest mountains on earth.
For the Qing Empire, cartographic information was strategically useful. At the end of the seventeenth century, in the north-east corner of the Tibetan plateau, the Kokonor, or ‘blue sea’, region (known afterwards as Qinghai) had come under Beijing’s direct control. The route from the Qinghai city of Xining to Lhasa, some two thousand kilometres to the south, was well known to merchants and pilgrims, including the Armenian community then living in Tibet. Now the Qing armies, the Eight Banners, had a reliable map of the road; Lhasa was calculated to be twelve degrees west of Xining. If the Survey of India was part of a colonial project to strengthen political control by a distant elite, then so was Qing cartography a century before. When the entire project was completed, no country in Europe had better maps than China.