by Ed Douglas
Knowing that Smyth had crossed the frontier without papers on several occasions and had needed good local men to do so, Montgomerie wrote to Smyth in Kumaon seeking advice. Smyth recommended his friends at Milam in the Johar valley, the descendants of Dev Singh, who had assisted Moorcroft some fifty years earlier. Not only had Smyth hired men from this valley, the Strachey brothers had also taken Joharis on their adventures. Some twenty years later, Smyth recalled why and how he recommended the Joharis to Montgomerie,
on account of their thorough knowledge of the Tibetan language, and also because they had the entrée into the country. [Montgomerie] asked me to select two, and send them to be trained. I accordingly chose our friend [the teacher, or pandit] Nain Singh, . . . and the second man I chose was his cousin Manee or Mau Singh, who was Putwarie or chief native official of Johar. Manee was far superior to Nain Singh in position, wealth, and intellect, and might have done well, but unfortunately he was too well off in his own country to take to the rough life of exploration.
The two cousins left their valley in February 1863 for the Garhwali town of Dehra Dun where James Walker had developed a programme of instruction for these secret surveyors: the use of a sextant, taking bearings with a compass, walking with a disciplined pace so that two thousand steps would equal a mile. In this way they could manage a good route survey. They used a rosary to count off their paces and strips of paper hidden in a prayer wheel to record their observations. To maintain secrecy, they were given code names. Mani Singh was known as ‘GM’, a reversal of his first and last consonants. Nain Singh was simply called ‘the Pundit’, for his job as a teacher: it was a name that would extend to all those who entered the service of the British as clandestine travellers.
By December their training was done, but their first attempt to cross into Tibet via a pass near their home valley was thwarted. Perhaps the border guards who turned them back knew their behaviour was erratic for Johari traders. Perhaps they were recognised. They returned to Dehra Dun where Montgomerie agreed to let them try via Kathmandu, using the confiscation of Nepali goods by Tibetan officials as an excuse to enter the country as intermediaries. (You sense the killing of two birds with one stone here.) They tried first via the Kyirong valley where they came under suspicion from Chinese border officials. They thought of appealing to the local governor, but Mani Singh realised he knew the man from Gartok – to do so would blow their cover. Despondent, they returned to Kathmandu where Nain Singh decided to try again, this time alone.
While Mani returned home via north-west Nepal, surveying as he went, Nain Singh, pretending to be a Ladakhi trader, managed to cross the border into Tibet. There he met a group of traders from Rampur, in the old kingdom of Bashahr, on their way to Gartok. He joined them for a while and had his first glimpse of the Yarlung Tsangpo, the river which becomes the Brahmaputra. It earned his immediate respect: as he watched, three men drowned when their coracle overturned. Feigning illness, he left the traders and doubled back, reaching Lhasa in January 1866, having covered eight hundred kilometres in thirty-seven days. He spent three months in Lhasa, renting a room and teaching when his money ran out. He also had an audience at Sera monastery with the twelfth Dalai Lama Trinley Gyatso, then just nine years of age. Nain Singh left Lhasa in the spring, slowly making his way west along the main trading route to Gartok before crossing the mountains to arrive back in Dehra Dun on 27 October 1866, his mission complete.
*
Nain Singh’s report included a survey of nearly two thousand kilometres of the trade route to Lhasa, and he defined the course of the Tsangpo to its junction with the Kyi Chu, which flows through the city. The information he provided was a bonanza for the Survey of India, and for the government of India, which released more funds for further journeys. In 1867, Nain and Mani Singh returned to Tibet across the Mana Pass, taking with them Nain’s brother Kalian, crossing the Sutlej at Tholing, once more posing as Bashahri traders, selling coral beads for shawl wool. Their targets were the goldfields of Thok Jalong, still in production despite centuries of exploitation, and the sources of the Indus and Sutlej rivers. Kalian was able to reach the headwaters of the Indus, confirming that it rose north of Kailas. Nain would return for a third mission to Tibet and Central Asia, travelling from Yarkand to Leh via Khotan and Pangong Lake. This time he took with him Kalian Singh and his cousin Kishen Singh, also from the Milam valley and already an experienced pundit.
Kishen’s codename was A-K; he was also, in the estimation of many, the greatest of them all. In 1878 he left Darjeeling on a four-year mission to survey northern Tibet, an attempt to link what was known of Central Asia with the detailed information the ‘pundits’ had already acquired of southern and western Tibet. Kishen would spend a year in Lhasa, waiting for a caravan to Mongolia he could join in order to reach the eastern end of the Kun Lun range. While he waited he gathered detailed information on the city and the governance of Tibet. Kishen’s record proved useful to the British when they finally did enter Tibet with Francis Younghusband’s mission in 1903.
When eventually he travelled north, the caravan Kishen joined was attacked and the Mongolians fled. Kishen was robbed and left almost destitute; his companion then absconded taking what little they had left. Despite it all he kept going, all the way to Dunhuang in northern China where he and his remaining companion Chhumbel were detained for seven months, suspected of being spies. An abbot who was visiting the nearby Cave of a Thousand Buddhas hired the two men as his servants for the journey back home to his monastery, far to the south. This brought Kishen and Chhumbel to the eastern Himalaya and into contact with French missionaries, who relayed a message to Kishen’s superiors in India. They had heard nothing from him in three years.
During Kishen and Chhumbel’s subsequent journey home through eastern Tibet, they encountered an outburst of smallpox at Litang, and took the opportunity to immunise themselves against it using the Tibetan technique of variolation, snorting dried pustules from the bodies of the infected. When the pair finally reached Darjeeling in November 1882 they were almost destitute, their funds gone, their clothes in rags and, in the words of Kishen’s boss James Walker, ‘their bodies emaciated with the hardships and deprivations they had undergone’. Kishen Singh discovered his only son had died in his absence and his house had fallen into dereliction. With a price on his head from the Tibetan authorities, his exploring days were done. Although he received no official recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, he was given a pension and kept a chest full of papers, diaries and books about his adventures, as well as medals from societies around the world. He died in 1921, the year the British arrived at Everest.
Rudyard Kipling would use the myth of the pundits in his 1901 novel Kim, linking them in his readers’ minds inextricably and erroneously with the struggle between Russia and Britain for Central Asia: the ‘Great Game’. If any of the pundits was the model for his character Huree Chunder Mookerje it was another man, Sarat Chandra Das. At twenty-five he became headmaster of the new Bhotia Boarding School in Darjeeling, opened in 1874 to teach young Tibetans and Sikkimese boys and provide a cadre of interpreters and geographers who would be of use in the British Empire’s dealings with Tibet. Das was much more an intelligence officer, though, born in the port city of Chittagong, a Bengali who learned Tibetan as an adult. By contrast most of the pundits were true mountain people, surveying vast tracts of country, relying wholly on their wits and courage to escape a thousand traps and pitfalls, and more often than not completing their missions without a word of complaint. Michael Ward, part of the successful 1953 Everest expedition, wrote: ‘It is difficult to overpraise Kishen Singh’s epic final journey.’ It seems appropriate that two travellers from the mountains should complete the greatest Himalayan journey of all and grimly typical that they should go under a pseudonym and drift into obscurity.
13
‘Forbidden’ City
In late 2014, a cache of documents belonging to the first Englishman to visit the holy city
of Lhasa was found in a cupboard at the antiquarian booksellers Maggs Brothers. Now in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society, the find included four hundred letters, diaries, notebooks and ephemera, as well as the manuscript of his travel narrative, and a tiny sketch of the young ninth Dalai Lama, made in December 1811. The largely forgotten and atypical explorer had a brief touch of fame, resurrecting the nineteenth-century myth of Lhasa as a ‘forbidden’ city, keeping the rapidly changing world at bay.
Thomas Manning was born in the Norfolk village of Broome in 1772, second son of the local rector. A sickly but intelligent child, he was educated at home and in 1790 went up to Cambridge to study mathematics. There he caught the cresting wave of Romanticism, becoming friends with some of the movement’s leading lights, notably Charles Lamb. According to Lamb, Manning had an exceptional mind,
far beyond Coleridge or any other man in power of impressing – when he gets you alone, he can act the wonders of Egypt. Only he is lazy, and does not always put forth all his strength; if he did, I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.
Though others shared Lamb’s view, the charge of indolence doesn’t seem quite right for this restless, emotionally self-aware man. Disaffection seems nearer the mark. He wrote to a friend about the ‘strange power of thought and sentiments that impel me unswervingly to strange things’. He was a rebel too. On the brink of academic glory at Cambridge, he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Church of England and so forfeited his degree, leaving his bewildered father in a puddle of anxiety.
China became his great passion and reaching it his obsession, to the amused bafflement of his friends. (‘Read no more books of voyages,’ Lamb teased him. ‘They are nothing but lies.’) In 1802 he arrived in Paris, taking advantage of the Treaty of Amiens that brought temporary peace between Britain and France, one of many radicals and Romantics eager to explore the new French republic. Paris was also one of the few places in Europe he could study Chinese. When war broke out again, English travellers in France were detained, but with patient lobbying, Napoleon himself signed Manning’s passport and he returned to London, training for six months at Westminster Hospital to equip himself further for his travels. He also won the support of Sir Joseph Banks, then president of the Royal Society, for his plan to explore China disguised in local garb.
In 1806 the East India Company took him up the Pearl river to Canton, then the East India Company’s only port in mainland China, now the modern city of Guangzhou. But the tight restrictions then in place on European freedom of movement thwarted Manning’s ambition. His fellow countrymen ‘with their eyes turned towards their own country, ready to take wing the moment their honey bags are filled’, rarely shared his interest in Chinese culture. He drifted for several years doing translation work and practising medicine, grew a formidable beard and developed a reputation for eccentricity although, as someone who knew him after Tibet wrote: ‘His eccentricities were quite harmless, and concerned only himself personally.’
After a few years trapped in Canton, Manning decided to enter China via a different route, from Lhasa, and travel east from there. Tibet per se was of little interest to him: China was the goal. The governor general of India was then Lord Minto and he promised Canton that Calcutta would help Manning. By this stage, in the early 1810s, the trade imbalance between Canton and Calcutta had eased: opium exports from Bengal to China had turned the Company’s trade deficit into surplus, at the expense of the health and economy of the Chinese people. But thirty years earlier, Minto had helped his friend Edmund Burke impeach Warren Hastings; experiments in Tibet were part of Hastings’ toxic legacy. Manning got nothing but indifferent tolerance. (‘Fools, fools, fools,’ he complained to his journal, ‘to neglect an opportunity they may never have again.’) So at his own expense, he entered Bhutan in September 1811 on a route to the west of that taken by George Bogle, crossing Tangtong Gyalpo’s bridge into the fort at Paro. Here Manning was kept in a smoky guardhouse with no windows and banned from the market, bickering more than usual with his Chinese interpreter Zhao Jinxiu. (‘A spaniel would be better company.’) After they escaped Paro, Manning discovered Zhao Jinxiu had swapped his silver spoons for pewter and pocketed the difference, a new take on debasing currency. Manning sent him back to get them.
At the frontier town of Phari, where the local official was ‘vastly civil’, he had to quit their lodgings to make way for a Chinese detachment of soldiers. ‘The Chinese lord it here like the English in India,’ he noted, but Manning was glad of their presence. One of the ambans in Lhasa was a fiercely anti-British Manchu whom Manning knew from Canton: not the sort of man to greet an Englishman with the hand of friendship. Yet thanks to the troops’ Chinese commander, whom Manning befriended, he got permission to leave Phari in early November and arrived at Lhasa a month later, the first Englishman to do so and, in all likelihood, the last until Younghusband’s bloody expedition of 1904. Only two other Europeans would reach Lhasa throughout the nineteenth century.
On 17 December 1811 Manning had an audience with the young ninth Dalai Lama Lungtok Gyatso, who had just turned six. Manning was utterly charmed.
He had the simple, unaffected manners of a well-educated princely child. His face was, I thought, affectingly beautiful. He was of a gay and cheerful disposition. I was extremely affected by this interview with the lama. I could have wept through strangeness of sensation.
If Manning was aware of the deeply political circumstances of the boy’s selection as Dalai Lama, he gives little hint of it. After the Qing had cleared out the Gorkhali army from Tibet in the early 1790s, the Qianlong emperor had tried to insert the Qing Empire into the arcane process of reincarnation; too often, it seemed to the Qianlong, important tulku, or reincarnate lamas, were emerging from the same influential families. His plan was instinctively bureaucratic: he demanded lists of important lineages and who held them and promulgated the ‘Ordinance for the More Efficient Governing of Tibet’. This featured twenty-nine articles, the first of which was the introduction of the Golden Urn, drawn from the ancient Chinese practice of divination: the Qing ordered the names of likely candidates, written onto slips of ivory, to be put into the urn and for Tibetan lamas and Qing ambans to pick one out. Not for the last time, China was shown to be tone-deaf to the cultural complexities of Tibet. The Panchen Lama had simply ignored this new process when it came to choosing Lungtok Gyatso, and the Qing pretended it was happy about that. The boy would not be Dalai Lama for long, dying at the age of nine having caught a cold during the Monlam festival of 1815. The Golden Urn would and does remain a symbol of Chinese interference: Beijing used it to select its own candidate as Panchen Lama in 1995 after being outwitted by a search party authorised by the Dalai Lama.
Manning’s interpreter had warned his master against trying his limited Mandarin in Lhasa so an interpreter with a thick Sichuan accent translated the young ninth Dalai Lama’s words into Chinese. The munshi then translated them into Latin, their preferred shared language. This complexity must have added to the sense of disconnection Manning describes often feeling in Tibet. The city was ‘dreamy and ghostly’ but not in a good way. Like many European travellers fantasising about distant Lhasa, Manning found the reality a disappointment. Apart from the Potala itself, there was ‘nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt.’ In Lhasa’s defence, he had said much the same on first acquaintance with Paris. By April 1812, Manning had run out of cash and was on his way back to Calcutta the way he had come, refused permission to enter China.
In the end, Manning did visit Beijing: in 1816 as part of a trade mission led by the future governor general of India Lord Amherst, a mission that went awry when Amherst refused to kowtow to the emperor. Such high-level political positioning would increasingly impact on Tibet’s future, which is why British officials in India were forced to use the pundits from Milam to survey the north side of the Himalaya. After Beijing, Manning returned to England, surviving
the wreck of the navy frigate Alceste and meeting Napoleon in exile on St Helena. He lived for another twenty years, latterly in a barely furnished cottage near Dartford half-hidden from the world, by which time his milk-white beard reached his waist. He never did visit China in the way he wanted, to see ‘the actual degree of happiness the people enjoy; their sentiments and opinions’.
The discovery and sale of Manning’s papers to the Royal Asiatic Society in 2014 prompted a rash of newspaper stories about this ‘forgotten’ explorer: the first Englishman to Lhasa. But he hadn’t really been forgotten, not altogether. In 1876, when Tibet’s reputation for exclusivity was reaching its zenith, the honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Clements Markham, published Manning’s journal, along with George Bogle’s account, with a detailed introduction and biographical notes.
Markham might have arranged its publication but he didn’t like Manning’s account very much; in Markham’s opinion, Manning was ‘quick-tempered and imprudent’. In the self-satisfied era of imperial exploration Manning seemed to Markham a dubious sort: he didn’t do geography and wrote far too much about his feelings. Worse, like Samuel van de Putte, who had been in Lhasa almost a century before the Englishman, he travelled for the sake of it, to experience and appreciate people who were different. That was no good: risking your skin should only be done to advance European civilisation. Nor did Manning court publicity: quite the opposite. He left his story untold. But when it did emerge, thanks to Markham, it was no longer the right kind of story. Coleridge would have thrilled to it, but Sir Thomas Holdich, president of the Royal Geographical Society, dismissed him as ‘a bad traveller and a worse observer’ whose journal was ‘a monotonous record of small worries and insignificant details’. Adventure yarns, so crucial in building the myth of empire and racial superiority, required jeopardy and a touch of swagger and absolutely no Romantic introspection.