Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  In providing assistance to Moorcroft, Dev Singh had by chance put his descendants at the heart of one of the great stories of Himalayan exploration, a story that unfolded some fifty years later and hinged on repeated British failures over several decades to gain access to or build relationships with Tibet. In time, the story would add another meaning to the word pandit, more usually spelled in this case ‘pundit’, one of daring subterfuge and limitless endurance, and its origins are to be found seven years after Moorcroft’s journey, with a sudden catastrophic interruption to the flourishing trade Moorcroft had witnessed at the western Tibet settlement of Gartok.

  In 1819, Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire occupied Kashmir and put the valley under the control of loyal Hindu chiefs, Kishore Singh and then his son Gulab, ethnically Dogra Rajputs who had ambitions of their own. Many Kashmiri weavers fled to the plains. Soon after, William Moorcroft embarked on a second, much longer and ultimately fatal journey to explore Central Asia’s trade routes. He spent two years in Ladakh, developing a deep respect both for the people and Tibetan Buddhism. The Ladakhis knew that following the Sikh occupation of Kashmir they were likely next and Tsepal Dondup Namgyal, the chogyal or king of Ladakh, appealed to Moorcroft, as an East India Company man, for help. Moorcroft drew up a trade agreement that allowed Ladakhis to trade shawl wool directly with India, cutting out the Kashmiri middlemen, and open up Central Asia to the British. This deal not only antagonised the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, it also infuriated Moorcroft’s masters in Calcutta, who suspended Moorcroft’s pay. Calcutta saw no advantage in testing the patience of Ranjit Singh, who was, at least in theory, the Company’s ally.

  But Tsepal Dondup, the chogyal of Ladakh, was right to be anxious about the Sikhs. ‘He is said to be rapacious,’ Moorcroft wrote of Tsepal, ‘but his prevailing qualities are extreme timidity and indolence, and he relinquishes the management of affairs entirely to the Khalun,’ essentially the prime minister. The Ladakhi army was undermined by ‘the cowardice of the soldiery, and the inefficiency of their equipment’. They had lots of bows and arrows but ‘one matchlock for ten men, and one sword for six’. So when, in 1834, the brilliant Dogra general Zorawar Singh, born in the district of Kangra, led an army into Ladakh, Tsepal Dondup was deposed.

  Ironically, the consequence of this was to achieve what Moorcroft had proposed. Rather than deal with the aggressive new Dogra regime in Ladakh, traders buying wool at Gartok stopped taking it to the capital Leh, and began instead crossing the mountains further east to sell their wool at Rampur in the Sutlej valley, now under British control following the Treaty of Sagauli. Enraged by the consequent loss of revenue, Gulab Singh sent Zorawar into western Tibet with a few thousand troops to restore his monopoly on the wool trade. In short order Zorawar had marched through Gartok and was at Purang, known in Nepal as Taklakot, close to the Nepali border, scattering a larger but disorganised Tibetan army ahead of him. Dogra troops also occupied hill-states on the other side of the Himalaya north of the Sutlej.

  The complexities of this high-altitude aggression were boggling for the East India Company, which at the time was suffering its humiliation in Afghanistan. The British were also trying to negotiate better access to Chinese markets. Tibet was under China’s suzerainty and so in theory was Nepal. The Dogras were, at least nominally, the Company’s allies. What would happen if any of these parties assumed Gulab Singh’s move had the approval of Calcutta? It was, in the words of the Kathmandu resident Brian Houghton Hodgson, ‘a most untoward event’. The exiled king of Ladakh sent envoys to Kathmandu seeking support from Rajendra, the pusillanimous Gorkhali king whom Jang Bahadur would shortly depose. Rajendra offered China his support should they wish to intervene but the Daoguang emperor turned him down: Rajendra enjoyed little respect at the Qing court. So Rajendra reversed his position and contemplated an alliance with Gulab Singh instead. This prospect was no less alarming to the British, who were now threatened with an alliance that would span much of the Himalaya.

  Luckily for the Company, in December 1841 Tibetan and Chinese troops attacked Zorawar, who, having made a pilgrimage to Kailas, made the fatal mistake of over-wintering in Tibet. His troops were in a miserable state, forced to burn their musket stocks for warmth and succumbing to frostbite and hypothermia. At Toyo, close to Taklakot, Zorawar was utterly defeated and killed; Tibetans were said to have kept scraps of his hair and flesh as talismans. The victorious Qing and Tibetan forces continued on to Ladakh to besiege the citadel of Leh, but Gulab Singh sent reinforcements and after several months of stalemate a treaty was signed at a small village called Chushul that restored the status quo. None of the parties thought it necessary to involve or even inform the British of this arrangement.

  By now Ranjit Singh was dead and his Sikh Empire was fracturing as his offspring struggled for control. The East India Company accordingly built up its military presence to face the Sikhs. When war broke out, once more threatening the balance of power in the Himalaya, Rajendra wrote again to the Qing ambans in Lhasa, warning them that

  the Pilings [British] are now fighting with the Sen-pa [Sikhs], and have already defeated the Sen-pa once; that the said nation [Nepal] is connected with the Sen-pa as a neighbour, and if the Pilings have seized the territory of Sen-pa he [Rajendra] fears their victory will cause [them] to covet Tibetan territory.

  The Chinese ambans sent a memo to Beijing pouring scorn on Rajendra – ‘He is impossible!’ – with the implication that as usual the Gorkhali king had his hand out for a donation. They also reassured Beijing that Tibet’s borders were being watched closely and the British would remain on the outside.

  During this first Sikh war with the British, Gulab Singh steered a clever course that kept him out of the conflict without betraying his former masters, the Sikhs. His reward came in the Treaty of Amritsar, signed in 1846, in which the British recognised Gulab as sovereign ruler of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh under the protection of the East India Company: the root of modern Kashmir’s suffering. In return Gulab would pay the Company a small tribute, not employ any Europeans or Americans in his military and refer boundary issues to Calcutta. On that basis, two boundary commissioners, Alexander Cunningham and Patrick Vans Agnew, were appointed to establish the frontiers between Ladakh and Tibet. Tibet was expected to reciprocate by sending equivalent officers of their own, but no one arrived from Lhasa to work with the British, who were consequently unable to proceed. Vans Agnew was reassigned and not long after murdered at Multan in the Punjab, an incident that prompted renewed conflict between the British and the Sikhs.

  A second commission was established for 1847, again under the command of Alexander Cunningham, a military engineer and later the founding director of the Archaeological Survey of India. With him was Henry Strachey, then a lieutenant in the 13th Bengal Native Infantry. (The year before, Strachey had made his illicit journey to Manasarovar while on sick leave from his posting at Chittagong. Following in the footsteps of Webb and Traill, he had visited the Milam valley and met Moorcroft’s old travelling companion Dev Singh, who recommended that to avoid detection he should cross the Lampiya Dhura pass to the east, which Strachey did, disguised like Moorcroft as a pilgrim.) The third member of the boundary commission was the doctor and naturalist Thomas Thomson, who would join the botanist Joseph Hooker on his later explorations in India. They had ambitious plans to explore Ladakh’s trade routes and for Strachey to travel to Lhasa but he found himself delayed and obstructed at the village of Hanle, on the historic Ladakhi-Tibetan border some three hundred kilometres south-east of Leh. Tibetan officials at Gartok on the other side of the border continued to ignore the British. Gulab Singh’s surveyors came late and grudgingly; those of the Qing never arrived at all. The ambitious plans for Cunningham and his men dwindled almost to nothing.

  Another pressing issue for the British was the restoration of the shawl-wool trade from the western Tibetan market at Gartok to their own commercial hub at Rampur, trade that Zorawar Singh’s invasion had so rudely interrup
ted. A land swap was now done with Gulab Singh that brought the Spiti valley under direct British control: Spiti offered fast access to Gartok and was no more than fifty kilometres from Rampur. Trade agents knew the Tibetans were fed up with the high duties Gulab Singh exacted and sensed there was a deal to be done: but how to reach the Tibetans? Given the experience of Cunningham, it was clear officials in western Tibet would refuse to have anything to do with Europeans. So a local man from Kinnaur called Anant Ram who was working for the boundary commission was tasked with translating and delivering a letter from the governor general to Gartok: another local intermediary working both sides of the mountains. He returned with a long story about how unwelcome the letter was and not to expect an answer until the following year. No one could tell if he was telling the truth; no British officials spoke Tibetan even though many areas of the Himalaya now under British control had significant Tibetan populations.

  While Anant Ram was (or wasn’t) trying to deliver the governor general’s letter at Gartok, a copy was on its way to Hong Kong, to be forwarded to the Chinese. This was the first time the British had tried to influence Lhasa in this way, leverage made possible by their success five years earlier in the first of the Opium Wars with China. The resulting Treaty of Nanking in 1842 had given them greater access to Chinese markets. Yet progress from this direction was also very slow. Throughout the nineteenth century, British colonial officials dealing directly with Beijing judged remote Himalayan border disputes as of peripheral concern. Sir John Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong, sent notes via the trading port of Canton, now Guangzhou, to the Daoguang emperor asking for cooperation in settling the border between Ladakh and western Tibet. Beijing promised to send ‘proper instructions’ to its ambans in Lhasa. These had absolutely no impact. The most influential Chinese official in Lhasa was Qishan, sent to Lhasa in disgrace after mishandling the First Opium War. He had no inclination to ease relations with the hated British. The Tibetan government saw British surveyors as harbingers of invasion. Gulab Singh’s proxies in Leh, knowing the British were after their trade in shawl wool, were no less reluctant to settle the border with Tibet. The British remained shut out.

  Despite this passive-aggressive resistance, British officials on the Himalayan frontier remained hopeful that access to Tibet would eventually be granted. As things turned out, the priorities and politics of the wider British Empire made this almost impossible. It would take British officials in India more than a decade to realise this; but when they did, they turned to the indigenous inhabitants of the Himalaya to cross the border for them, in particular the people of the Johar valley. The descendants of Dev Singh, Moorcoft’s trading partner, would be among them.

  *

  In 1858, the Second Opium War between Anglo-French forces and the Manchu rulers of China came to a theoretical end with the Treaty of Tianjin. This gave the Europeans more trading ports and more rights of passage, a further blow to the fading prestige of the Qing Empire. Before it was signed, hawks around the Xianfeng emperor encouraged him to resist, prompting renewed hostilities. The fighting ended conclusively in 1860 when the cavalry of the Qing’s most trusted Mongol general Sengge Rinchen, a Tibetan name meaning ‘lion treasure’, was utterly destroyed at the Battle of Baliqiao. The British then marched on Beijing to loot and destroy the emperor’s summer palaces. The treaty was signed with yet more concessions forced from the Qing. Included in the Treaty of Tianjin was a new right for foreigners to travel in the interior of China. In theory, this opened the way for British explorers to enter Tibet. Acting on this opportunity, Edmund Smyth, education officer in Kumaon, got support from the Indian government for an official mission to Tibet. Although this expedition never got off the ground, Smyth’s involvement would bring the people of the Johar valley to the attention of the British authorities.

  Born in Lincolnshire, Smyth was educated at the public school Rugby, his time there immortalised by his contemporary Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days. Smyth was the model for the character Crab Jones,

  sauntering along with a straw in his mouth, the queerest, coolest fish in Rugby. If he were tumbled into the moon this minute, he would just pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets or turning a hair.

  He had fought in the same regiment as Henry Strachey during the Second Anglo-Sikh War that followed the murder of Vans Agnew. After that he was in Delhi, from where he was able to indulge his great passion for hunting in the Himalaya. Smyth had no interest in leaving behind an account of his life but from what remains it’s clear almost no other European travelled so widely in Tibet in the nineteenth century. One of his few surviving letters mentions a four-month hunting trip he made to western Tibet in the 1850s with his friend the future explorer John Speke. Another hunting trip to Tibet, made in 1864 after he’d been refused official permission, is recorded in Thomas Webber’s The Forests of Upper India, which makes it clear that Smyth already had deep experience of the northern Himalaya. Webber also claimed to have visited the source of the Brahmaputra, although the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin would later do his best to discredit this. These journeys were trespassing, illicit and potentially damaging, so Smyth and those others who indulged kept them quiet: there was no need to embarrass Calcutta. (Not everyone was so discreet. The Scottish aristocrat Robert Drummond launched a rubber dinghy on Manasarovar, which so outraged Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims that the local governor, according to legend, literally lost his head.)

  In 1854, after twenty years of service, Smyth was due his long leave from India, travelling as far as Aden with his friend Speke, where they met the young Richard Burton, later among the most famous explorers in history. These two went off together to Somaliland and their tryst with the Nile, while Smyth went climbing in the Swiss Alps, where he made a notable first ascent with his brothers Christopher and James, both clergymen. We only know this because the alpinist Edward Whymper wrote Smyth up in a guidebook to Zermatt. ‘The natives used to say that he could climb where birds could not fly, which is the Oriental equivalent for “Monsieur has the agility of a chamois.”’ After that Smyth volunteered for service in the Crimean War, seconded to the Turkish irregular cavalry known as the Bashi-Bazouks, along with Burton and Speke, planning with the latter to traverse the Caucasus, though a lack of passports thwarted them.

  By the time his leave was over, Smyth’s old regiment had been disbanded, having suffered appalling casualties defending Lucknow in the rebellion of 1857. He was appointed ‘inspector of public instruction’ – education officer – in Garhwal and Kumaon, with a remit to establish vernacular schools in the hills. This did two things. First, it took him back to mountains he loved. Second, it put him in close contact with descendants of Dev Singh, who had helped Moorcroft in Tibet, in the Johar valley: Bir Singh and Nain Singh, who was a schoolmaster in Milam, and thus known in the village as ‘pandit’. The renewal of this connection between the Rawats of Johar and British explorers would soon prove instrumental in British exploration of Tibet.

  Smyth’s hopes of an official journey to Tibet were raised in the early 1860s when a Kashmiri merchant working between Lhasa and Nepal told the British resident in Kathmandu that a Qing imperial edict had been posted in the Tibetan capital stating that ‘if any English Gentlemen make their appearance there, they are to be treated with courtesy’. If such an edict ever existed, it made no difference. The British representative in Beijing in the aftermath of the Second Opium War was James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin, son of the man who bought the marbles from the Parthenon. It was Elgin who had signed the Treaty of Tianjin and he wasn’t about to jeopardise Sino-British relations by demanding passports for a speculative adventure in an obscure corner of China’s empire. Smyth’s hopes for a passport were dashed. Without the right papers, Smyth was turned back at the Tibetan border in 1863 with the suggestion he apply to Beijing, where, he knew very well, the British representative was not inclined to support him. It was a diplomatic vicious circle that would repeat itself for the n
ext quarter of a century.

  An officially closed border made little difference to Smyth, who set off on another illicit hunting adventure inside Tibet the following year; but it was immensely frustrating to the Great Trigonometrical Survey, which had arrived at the foot of the Himalaya a few years earlier to discover that both Nepal and Tibet were off limits. The superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, James Walker, liked the fact that tribes on the North-West Frontier were hostile, since it allowed for retaliatory military expeditions and an opportunity to do more surveying. That was much better, he thought, than the ‘passive obstruction of the inhabitants of Chinese Tibet’. Walker had used ‘native’ surveyors with some success, and now the surveyor in charge of Kashmir, Thomas Montgomerie, used the same idea as a way of gaining access to Tibet. In 1862, this skilled political operator, who ‘got his honours and made a name of himself with as little personal hardship as any man in the Indian Survey’, sold a proposal for sending ‘native’ surveyors to areas beyond British reach to the Asiatic Society. Montgomerie could see for himself the ease with which Indians moved across borders that seemed impermeable to Europeans. He proposed using ‘Mahomedans’ to survey Central Asia and sent a Punjabi surveyor called Abdul Hamid to Yarkand to test the theory, since the route was partially known already. As for Tibet, Indians fluent in the language who could pass themselves off as traders or pilgrims would be required. Montgomerie’s only worry was that he wouldn’t find enough reliable local men ‘with sufficient nerve’. Thanks to Edmund Smyth he found them.