Himalaya
Page 25
The Tibetan survey team reached as far west as Kailas but the catastrophic Dzungar Mongol invasion of Tibet in 1717 prompted them to withdraw swiftly and quietly to China, most probably via Sichuan, since the survey provided updated information on the road between Lhasa and the Sichuan town of Kangding, known as Tachienlu in those days or Dartsedu in Tibetan. Their information was passed to their instructor, Pierre Jartoux, and while the maps produced were not as reliable as those to districts under direct Qing control, they were a big improvement.
As far as the British were concerned, however, a serious omission was the map’s vagueness on the source of the Ganges; the surveying lamas had been forced to rely on oral information from fellow monks about where the river rose. Despite this lacuna, the exchange of knowledge between China and the West was productive. According to the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil, one of the surveying lamas kept a journal of their travels. This was most likely a man called Zangbu Rabjamba, the latter name being an academic title that indicates he must have studied at one of the three main monasteries of central Tibet. We know that the same monk who kept the journal, soon after returning to Beijing, also translated a Chinese work on European astronomy, knowledge brought to the Qing by the Jesuits, into Tibetan. The contribution of Tibetans to the scientific understanding of their own country, the so-called ‘Lama Survey’, has faded from view, just as most of the Indian and Anglo-Indian surveyors working in the Himalaya a century later would also be left in obscurity.
The maps Bogle carried by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, based on those of their Jesuit predecessors, were as far as he was aware the most up-to-date of Tibet available, so he must have been surprised when the Panchen Lama casually offered him a better one. It was, Bogle wrote, ‘a splendid Object’, and acquiring it would no doubt earn him praise from his superiors in Calcutta. Yet he hesitated.
I considered that the Company could have no Interest in this Country but that of Commerce; and that to know a number of outlandish Names, or to correct the Geography of Thibet, although a matter of great Curiosity, and extremely interesting to Geographers and Map-sellers, was of no use to my Constituents, or indeed to mankind in general, and that to this I might be sacrificing Objects of far greater Importance, by encreasing that Jealousy which had hitherto so cruelly thwarted me in all my Negotiations.
And so Bogle, despite the Panchen Lama’s insistence, turned the offer down. When he saw his host’s disappointment, he hastened to explain that he was much more interested in the culture of Tibet than its geography, which pleased the Panchen Lama so much that Bogle offered him an account of Europe, to satisfy the Panchen Lama’s curiosity.
As the weeks passed, Bogle’s affection for Tibet only deepened; he grew close to the Panchen Lama’s family and began a love affair. The subject of the map was dropped, but there remains a tantalising question. There is no way of knowing what the map was that Bogle was shown, let alone who made it, but nothing available in Europe surpassed the Qing survey until the second half of the nineteenth century. If the Panchen Lama’s map was indeed more comprehensive than the one Bogle had used, who had drawn it?
One of the contenders is the Italian Ippolito Desideri, among the first missionaries to reach Lhasa, arriving there in 1716, and the first to study properly the Tibetan language and religion. He was allowed a chapel in Sera monastery, where he studied Buddhism, and was still there in late 1717 when the Dzungar Mongols invaded and overthrew the Khoshut leader Lajang Khan. This was despite the arrival of Capuchin missionaries the autumn before, who insisted that the Vatican had made Tibet and Nepal the Capuchins’ to convert and that the Jesuit Desideri should leave. After years of fruitless argument with Rome, Desideri did eventually return to India but there’s no version of the map Bogle might have been shown in Desideri’s papers.
Another possible source of the Panchen Lama’s map is a man called Samuel van de Putte, whom Desideri encountered on his journey to Pondicherry in southern India, having been appointed to lead the Jesuit mission there. Stopping off at Patna, on the south bank of the Ganges, Desideri and van de Putte had what must have been a remarkable encounter: van de Putte, although born in the Netherlands, was fluent in Italian and had many stories to tell, being several years into an epic journey that would last most of his lifetime, one of the greatest journeys made in Asia by a European, and yet almost unknown.
*
Samuel van de Putte came from a family on the rise, his father Carel being a vice-admiral in the navy of Zeeland, a Dutch province predominantly below sea level, from the port of Vlissingen whose prosperity, then fading, had been built during the Netherlands’ golden age of privateering. The epaulettes on his shoulders, won fighting the English in the Four Days’ naval battle of 1666, gave Carel rights to buitengoederen, booty that secured his financial future. Aged fifty, he married Johanna Biscop, from a solid middle-class family. They had five children in quick succession but within ten years both were dead. The young Samuel, born in 1690, moved with his sisters and brothers to live with their uncle, and the family house was sold. He graduated from the famous law school at Leiden and by 1715 was an alderman in his hometown. Inheriting a legacy from his parents, he found sufficient funds to buy back his childhood home. A sober life of prosperous Dutch rectitude awaited him. Perhaps that prospect goaded him to have an adventure; with Egmond van Nijenburg, a wealthy friend from university, Samuel embarked on the early eighteenth-century version of the grand tour.
The friends travelled through France and Venice and settled in Padua, where Samuel studied medicine, the subject that really inspired him, and learned Italian. In the university library he found a copy of Giro del mondo, the extraordinary travelogue of the Italian lawyer Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, then still living in Naples. Thought by some at the time to be a fraud, it told an astonishing story of independent travel that circled the globe, done for its own sake, in a spirit of simple curiosity. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Jesuit missionaries Careri met in India had thought him a spy sent by the pope. Why else would anyone travel? The reason lay in the thwarting of Gemelli Careri’s career because of his family’s lack of nobility, something that may have resonated with Samuel. While his companion Egmond’s father had been made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, assuring Egmond’s success, for Samuel, by contrast, a life of legal drudgery lay ahead. Perhaps that didn’t seem as appealing after reading Gemelli Careri.
After Constantinople and a tour through the Holy Land, Egmond and Samuel reached Aleppo. Here they parted company. Egmond turned for home, slipping back into the privileged life he had left. Samuel joined a merchant’s caravan and set out across the desert, along the Silk Road to Isfahan. He would be travelling with caravans almost constantly for the next three years, his journey pieced together from fragments, occasional obscure references in the official archives of merchants and missionaries. His father had bought shares in the Dutch East India Company (VOC), then the largest company in the world, and his younger brother Constantijn worked for them in Amsterdam; this gave Samuel a global assistance network. But when he passed through the company’s station at Gamron (Bandar Abbas) in the Persian Gulf his request for assistance was refused: a wild, half-starved eccentric two years in the desert dressed like an Arab seemed a poor bet. His appearance at Gamron was reported to Batavia, the centre of VOC operations in Asia, and passed on to the Netherlands, where his brother intervened. An instruction was issued in October 1724 to stations throughout Asia to be prepared to help him. Before then, Samuel van de Putte had reached the VOC station at Cochin in southern India, a year after leaving Gamron, exhausted and riddled with illness.
The following summer he was in Patna, two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Kathmandu, having travelled overland to Pondicherry before sailing up the coast to Bengal, still under Mughal control. His motivation for travelling to the Himalaya is unclear. Gemelli Careri didn’t go there, so perhaps he was looking to try something more original. Perhaps he had acquired a taste
for wilder landscapes. In light of the choices he made later, Samuel van de Putte’s life seems like a voyage of psychological exploration, a faint echo of the tantric mahasiddha who travelled the Himalaya centuries before. It seems unlikely that it was coincidence he met Desideri, who had with him the manuscript about Tibet he had been working on since he returned five years before, the manuscript that would be proscribed and archived on his return. Van de Putte read Desideri’s work and made twenty pages of notes. He also followed Desideri’s advice about travelling through Nepal to reach Tibet, the first Dutchman to do so, and the last for more than two hundred years.
Van de Putte would spend the next five years in Lhasa, staying for at least some of the time with the Capuchin missionaries still living there. He took a strong interest in Tibetan Buddhism, making friends with lamas. In 1731 he joined a group of them journeying to Beijing via Qinghai, before returning to Lhasa in 1736. This time he travelled through Sichuan and entered Tibet at Kham in the south-east, the first European to visit this part of Tibet. After another short stay, he returned to India through Ladakh. We know the route he took on these travels only because he explained it in a letter to the head of the Capuchin mission at Lhasa, Francesco Orazio della Penna. It’s not that he didn’t keep copious records. He had a perfect command of Tibetan and the knowledge he gathered was preserved in notes, diaries and maps. But when he died in 1745, aged fifty-five, at the Dutch East India Company headquarters of Batavia, he left instructions that everything he had amassed during his travels should be burned. An entire lifetime’s travelling and knowledge went up in smoke: or at least, almost all of it.
It seems a baffling, acutely painful decision, but the man who carried out his wishes said that van de Putte had reached the conclusion his material wasn’t sufficiently accurate to be worth publishing. A few papers escaped and these were returned to his family in the Netherlands: some notes, fragments of letters and sketch maps, one of which the geographer Clements Markham included in his compendium of early European exploration of Tibet, published in 1876, a sketch-map that subsequently disappeared. The French compass the Panchen Lama showed George Bogle a century before was most probably a relic of the survey carried out in 1708. It’s possible the map he showed him was the work of Samuel van de Putte. Bogle called his predecessor the ‘Marco Polo of the Lowlands’, but though well meant, it’s too glib a comparison. Marco Polo travelled for profit and wrote for profit too. Samuel van de Putte did neither, but his motivation and the true scope of the material he gathered will forever remain obscure.
*
Whoever produced the map the Panchen Lama showed George Bogle, it clearly resonated with the Tibetan, not as some foreign curio but as a meaningful document. He was a travel writer himself, at least in the sense that he was writing a kind of cosmological guidebook: The Explanation of Shambhala and Narrative of the Holy Land, the holy land in question being India, the source of Buddhism. Bogle himself would end up as an informant for this book, which was completed in 1775, the year he left Tibet, filling in details about the current rulers of the holy land, who had so recently replaced the Mughals. After centuries of retreat and dislocation, the Panchen Lama must have seen the changing political scene in India as a possible source of optimism for Buddhism in its place of birth.
The treatise was, amongst other things, an attempt to locate tantric centres of practice, known as pitha in Sanskrit. In the Tibetan imagination, India had become something of a lost world, where sacred places that had witnessed the Buddha’s life were waiting to be rediscovered, as though they remained current, despite the centuries that had passed since Buddhism and its institutions had been razed and swept away. Like other writers in the seventeenth century, the Panchen Lama located Kushinagar, the place were Buddha achieved enlightenment, in the Assam village of Hajo, on the banks not of the Ganges but the Brahmaputra, far from the sites in Bihar and Nepal that we now associate with Buddhism, as though Jerusalem had moved to Cairo. How this happened is an obscure but important story for our understanding of how the lama viewed maps.
A resurgent Hindu Shaivite temple at Hajo began to attract Buddhist pilgrims in the early seventeenth century, Shaivism being strongly flavoured with tantrism. Assam was accessible to southern Tibet, since the powerful Geluk state then ruling in Lhasa extended its control to the old Monyul kingdom, part of the modern Indian Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders Assam to the north. As more and more pilgrims visited Hajo, mania built. A famous terton, or revealer of secrets, Pagsam Yeshe, visited in the 1680s. When he reached Hajo, thanks to a prophecy of the Guru Rinpoche, he discovered sacred treasures, including part of the bodh tree where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. He brought a branch of it back to Tibet. A few visitors were sceptical, with one ascribing Hajo’s fame to ‘the crafty Indian inhabitants there who live by means of deception’. But mostly the narrative was accepted; here was a vibrant, living religious world located in the mother country that reconnected Tibet to its spiritual origins.
When the Panchen Lama included Hajo in his treatise, its status as the focus of the holy land was a matter of fact and would remain so deep into the nineteenth century. He was simply following the example of similar works from other respected Buddhist scholars before him. One of them was Sangye Gyatso, the powerful regent who had kept the death of the fifth Dalai Lama in 1682 a secret from his own people and the Chinese emperor. He had a clear motivation to acknowledge the pilgrimage site of Hajo, since the new Dalai Lama was from that part of the world; in doing the same, the Panchen Lama was in good historical company. What he wanted to know now, he told George Bogle, was the location of Shambhala, the fabulous kingdom of purity outlined in the Kalachakra teachings and the Hindu Puranas. Perhaps Bogle would seek out that information from informed pandits when he returned to Bengal?
When we think about maps, we think about useful accurate information that will take us where we want to go. We sometimes consider them as cultural artefacts, but rarely, in the West, do we see them as spiritually enriching. Yet the story of Hajo tells us a lot about what mattered to Tibetans as they navigated their way through the complex terrain of the Himalaya. Physical landscapes were simply starting points for spiritual exploration, an idea shared by Buddhists across Asia. The first Japanese map to depict the whole world was published at Kyoto in 1710, the work of Buddhist priest Rokashi Hotan. Its central focus is Asia with India, being the holy land, at its centre. Hotan drew on the travels of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang’s travels in the Himalaya and includes motifs typical of Buddhist cosmography. Included on the map is the mythological Lake Anavatapta where the Buddha was conceived, essentially Lake Manasarovar, along with the four great rivers, the Karnali, Indus, Brahmaputra and Sutlej, flowing from their respective heads: of a fox, elephant, lion, and horse.
The British geographer John Brian Harley wrote in 1989, in his paper ‘Deconstructing the Map’, how western cartography can dull our responses to the very different sorts of geographical information available to someone like the Panchen Lama. The kind of maps we are accustomed to, depicting in two dimensions a simplified, graphic version of the world from a great height,
tend to ‘desocialise’ the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the [Western-style] map . . . lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape. Decisions about the exercise of power are removed from the realm of immediate face-to-face contacts.
Thus, when the Survey of India arrived in the late eighteenth century, there was already a great deal of knowledge available to it about Himalayan geography, principally from traders and pilgrims, and a map made using European methods from the early seventeenth century. And yet in the popular European imagination of the time, the geography of the Himalaya was often characterised as blank, somewhere to be filled in by courageous soldiers and explorers writing their own narratives. The reality was more like a palimpsest, somewhere that was scraped clean before a new script could b
e written. ‘We are about to walk off the map,’ George Mallory would claim in 1921, on his way to Everest. But it wasn’t true.
*
Following the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and Robert Clive’s success in prising Bengal from the Mughal emperor, the British were anxious to get a clearer picture of the country they now governed. The artery of the Ganges was of greatest interest: was there a channel navigable for shipping north of Calcutta? To answer that question, the governor Henry Vansittart, despite grappling with a corrupt East India Company and its souring relationship with the nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim, had just enough time before resigning to commission an enterprising young marine surveyor called James Rennell, the first truly great geographer the British produced.
A Devon man, born in December 1742, Rennell was four when his father, an artillery officer, died fighting France in the Low Countries. His mother had to sell the family home and Rennell was from the age of ten raised by the vicar of Chudleigh, where the boy was already drawing maps for fun. After a few years of grammar school, Rennell, barely thirteen, was commissioned midshipman on the Royal Navy frigate Brilliant and saw active service against the French during the Seven Years’ War. He came out to India in 1760 and was seconded to the East India Company, working for the Scot Alexander Dalrymple as a marine surveyor, drawing charts and harbour plans. With the war over, and without connections, Rennell saw little future in the navy and switched permanently to the Company, where Vansittart found him. Aged just twenty-one, Rennell was put in charge of the survey of Bengal, a cornerstone of the future Survey of India. Knowing the Company’s public reputation, he remained grateful for its investment in science, writing a quarter of a century later: