by Ed Douglas
This truth about the purpose of exploration, or at least that Victorian imperial version of it, reveals another: where these great adventures took place, at least in the public’s mind, was almost secondary. The location would necessarily be exotic and dangerous. What the public really responded to was the hero who conquered it. The story would be full of local colour and observations, but was most importantly a reflection of the qualities the hero brought to the challenges he (and quite soon she) faced, qualities people from his own world aspired to share. Other cultures were simply constructed for the purposes of the author: an exotic backdrop, a population to be civilised or converted, contrasted unfavourably with the new colonial world order being fashioned across the globe. The complexities of Himalayan politics were an irrelevant bore.
For the adventurers themselves, success and the celebrity success offered could be transformative. Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who surveyed more of Tibet than anyone else, recalled the origin of his life’s calling in his 1926 memoir My Life as an Explorer. Growing up, his ‘closest friends were Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne, Livingstone and Stanley, Franklin, Payer and Nordenskiöld’. When in April 1880 Nordenskiöld’s ship the Vega returned from its epic Arctic journey, the fifteen-year-old Hedin was there with his family looking down on Stockholm harbour, lit by ‘countless lamps and torches’ as the ship glided into port.
All my life I shall remember that day. It decided my career. From the quays, streets, windows, and roofs, enthusiastic cheers roared like thunder. And I thought, ‘I, too, would like to return home that way.’
Coming home, for Hedin, was no less important than going out. If the path was chosen, the destination was only set when he studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin under the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the Red Baron and the man who coined the term ‘Silk Roads’. The mysteries of Central Asia, lost cities in the desert, ancient trade routes long forgotten, were only now being pieced together – and the greatest mystery of all was Tibet.
Hedin joined the swelling ranks of explorers, spies, adventurers, missionaries, plant-hunters and mountaineers from industrialising nations in Europe and elsewhere trying to pierce the veil that Tibet had drawn around herself in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early decades, explorers like William Moorcroft and numerous British colonial officials and soldiers had visited remote corners of Tibet such as Kailas. (Hedin, in the interests of his own reputation, would do his best to downplay these explorations.) Then the shutters came down and adventurous British officials probing the southern borders of Tibet found themselves turned away. This was the moment the British began using indigenous pundits for information on the far side of the Himalaya. The myth of ‘secret’ Tibet, and the ‘forbidden’ city of Lhasa was born.
The idea of Tibet as a country determined to keep out the rest of the world was arresting. What was it they wished to preserve or conceal? What were the secrets Tibet held? These questions provoked two responses in the West’s imagination, responses that even now continue to frame the outside world’s perception of Tibet, as an idea as much as an actual place. First, it provoked a cohort of adventurers willing to accept a perceived challenge and try to lever their way in. They couldn’t do that in Nepal, which was no less restrictive, because the British Empire accepted the ruling party’s wish that foreigners be kept out. To attempt to go to Nepal would be to risk sanction. That wasn’t the case with Tibet, and in particular the city of Lhasa, which is why so many more adventurers tried to go there.
Victorian Britain was primed to the notion of forbidden cities by Richard Burton’s bold visit to Mecca in 1853. (The notion of penetrating virginal places speaks for itself.) The impression grew that Lhasa, another holy city, wasn’t just currently closed to Europeans but somehow always had been. This was fanciful. For centuries Lhasa had been a hub on trans-Himalayan trade routes with deep religious connections across Asia. It was and remained culturally diverse. Kashmiris, Newars, Mongols, Chinese and Armenians lived permanently in the city. Nor was the Tibetan elite intellectually incurious. As we’ve seen, the Mongols valued Tibet not just for its spiritual expertise but also for its science, and Jesuit mapmakers relied on Tibetan expertise as well. Yet it was routine for European travellers in the early twentieth century to patronise Tibet’s scientific understanding of the world. Tibetans were a simple, otherworldly people who had missed out on the Renaissance. They thought the world was flat and their medicine, known as the Sowa Rigpa, hadn’t progressed beyond the equivalent of Europe’s medieval humours: lung, meaning breath or the air element; tripa, the bile or fire element; and badken, phelgm or the cold element.
There is another story to set against the cliché of Tibet’s superstition and isolation. During the eighteenth century Jesuit missionaries in Beijing had brought European science to the Qing emperors, who saw its value and sponsored the translation of their works into the languages of state, including Mongolian and Tibetan. Throughout the century, Tibetan lamas at the Qing court rubbed shoulders with Jesuit monks and gradually absorbed the value and accuracy of their astronomical calculations. Until this point Tibetans based their own astronomical understanding, like their medicine, on Sanskrit texts imported from India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly the Kalachakra tantra. Now Tibetan scholars at the Yonghe Gong monastery in Beijing engaged fully with the implications of what the Jesuits were showing them. The Qing court kept tight control of this new learning and how it was used: Tibetan monks had to acquire this knowledge for themselves.
Geluk monks from the Tibetan region of Amdo, a place of diverse cultures and traditions, were, and remain, especially noted for their intellectual openness. The great monasteries there, Labrang and Kumbum, adopted new calendars based on Jesuit astronomy, simply because they were better. And while the Kalachakra did say the earth was flat, by the nineteenth century a monk from Labrang could write that the ‘earth is spherical’; the monastery even had a large spherical globe painted on the wall. The heliocentric solar system hadn’t quite yet percolated through but the notion that Tibetans refused to accept physical laws was simply wrong. This myth sprang, ironically enough, from a newspaper article published in 1938 by Tibet’s leading intellectual of that era, Gendun Chopel, famous for his excoriating mockery of Tibetan backwardness. By then, Tibetan Buddhism really was reluctant to face the modern world. Chopel had been expelled from Labrang as a young reincarnate lama for his progressive ideas but in this case underestimated his own institution’s historic openness.
Tibetan medicine was not always as conservative as it looked either, especially when it came to the disease Tibetans dreaded more than any other: smallpox, known in Tibetan as drum ne, ‘the disease of falling scabs’. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri wrote that, ‘Every ten or twelve years an epidemic of smallpox carries off many people.’ The death from smallpox of the sixth Panchen Lama in Beijing soon after his encounter with George Bogle was a shock but no surprise. The panic smallpox provoked was unlike anything else, partly because Tibetans were unusually susceptible to it and knew they were. The Lazarist priest Évariste Huc, who reached Lhasa with fellow missionary Joseph Gabet in early 1846 (the only two Europeans other than Manning to do so that century), wrote: ‘The Tibetan fear of smallpox was extraordinary. They spoke of it with horror as the greatest scourge that could attack the human race.’ Their visit to the Dalai Lama was cancelled when there was an outbreak of smallpox that arrived with the caravan they had joined for the journey to Lhasa. Tibetan officials weren’t averse to using the threat of smallpox as an excuse for keeping out undesirables. Each year, before allowing trade to resume over the high passes, local Tibetan officials would check first whether there was smallpox on the far side of the mountains. In 1869, as the British Empire’s frustration was starting to build, this caution prompted a mocking article in The Times wondering at the ‘amusing impudence’ with which Tibetan officials ‘gravely inquire and decide every year whether Her Majesty’s Eastern empire is worthy o
f their patronage or lofty recognition’.
Despite the fact that Edward Jenner’s vaccine, developed in the late eighteenth century, had arrived at Canton in 1805, shortly before Thomas Manning, most Tibetans, unlike sarcastic British journalists, still didn’t have access to it decades later, but it wasn’t simply a case of ignoring foreign expertise. Tibetan doctors knew about the Chinese practice, dating back to at least the fifteenth century, of ‘variolation’, a mild infection that gave immunity, which the pundit Kishen Singh had used during his epic journey. But variolation carried significant risks of full-blown infection, so the traditional Tibetan response was most common: to isolate sufferers, usually by leaving them somewhere remote for several days to see whether or not they recovered. Such treatment cut against the grain of Buddhist teaching, but it was the safest strategy on offer.
During his visit in the middle of the nineteenth century, Évariste Huc told the Dalai Lama’s regent about Jenner’s vaccine and saw at once that future missionaries might use it as a Trojan horse, to bring about ‘the fall of lamaism and make possible the establishment of Christianity in that pagan land’. In the twentieth century, both Britain and China would also use the smallpox vaccination to win Tibetan hearts and minds. Yet, even though it was not used in Tibet, the vaccine was not, as many assumed, unknown there: some Tibetan scholars had read about Jenner’s vaccine in an astonishing book: The Treasury of All Precious Instructions, a compendium of diseases and their treatments published in Tibet by a Tibetan in the 1830s, more than a decade before Huc reached Lhasa.
Most of the remedies in the Treasury were Indian and Chinese; it described in detail the process of variolation, essentially inhaling smallpox scabs up the nose. (Right nostril for men, left nostril for women.) A few, however, were from Europe, including a short section on Jenner’s vaccine:
After the cow has been affected by the virus, fluid from the cowpox is taken and then scratched into the arm of the person who has still not been infected . . . This is how the Europeans treat smallpox.
The route this knowledge took to reach Tibet and the author of The Treasury is uncertain. It may have come with gosain traders, like Bogle’s guide Purangir. It may have arrived from southern China or even Siberia, where a vaccination programme was underway in the early 1800s, close to the region of Buryatia, where Tibetan Buddhism was practised. Most probably it arrived from Beijing, where a Russian physician, who had vaccinated a group of Chinese, was friendly with the Tibetan author of the Treasury, a man whose achievements – including another book of far greater scope than the Treasury – belie the assumption that Tibet was intellectually incurious and closed to foreign influences.
The Treasury’s author was Jampel Chokyi Tenzin, fourth in a lineage of reincarnate lamas known as the Tseten Nomonhan, based at the Serkhok monastery in Amdo, far to the north-east of Lhasa. The lineage was politically influential, with seats in Mongolia and Beijing. Following the crushing defeat of the Dzungar Khanate in 1720 and the loss of their Mongolian patrons, the government in Lhasa appointed the second Tseten Nomonhan as ambassador to their new overlords, the imperial Qing court in Beijing. It was a bold decision, because during the war with China the Tseten’s monasteries had been burned and his monks killed. For the first time, China had absorbed parts of Amdo within its own borders. Yet despite fears the lama would simply be a hostage, the Tseten instead became a critical link between Lhasa and Beijing and a tutor within the Qing household. He was offered a permanent monastic residence in the Chinese capital.
The fourth Tseten Nomonhan, Jampel Chokyi, was the son of Amdo nomads, born in 1789. The year before, as Tibet’s ambassador to China, his predecessor had travelled to Beijing with the sixth Panchen Lama, whom Bogle had known, and died there, soon after the Panchen Lama succumbed to smallpox. Jampel Chokyi was recognised as the reincarnation when he was around two years old and installed at Serkhok, where he studied Buddhism and medicine. In 1806, and not yet eighteen, he travelled to Beijing for the first time. Western explorers might congratulate themselves for making such arduous journeys, but they were a fact of life for Geluk monks like the Tseten. He took up residence in the Yellow Temple, remaining there until an invitation arrived for the enthronement in Lhasa of the ninth Dalai Lama, Lungtok Gyatso. There is no record of their meeting, but Thomas Manning was in Lhasa at the same time as the Tseten, another traveller fascinated by the ‘sentiments and opinions’ of different cultures. And if Manning was not aware of the young Tibetan, the lama was certainly aware of the peling, as Tibetans called the British. He had a reputation for conversation and good humour and given his subsequent career, it seems more than likely the Tseten would have paid Manning close attention.
In 1814 Jampel Chokyi returned to his duties in Beijing where he would remain for the next three years, dividing his time between religious ceremonies for the emperor in the Forbidden City and his own temple, where he taught monks from Tibet and Mongolia. (In 1816, Manning was also in Beijing with Lord Amherst.) Then the Tseten was sent back to Lhasa for ceremonies connected to the death of the Jiaqing emperor. That same year he completed the first version of what eventually become an immense compendium, The Detailed Description of the World. This substantial text, much expanded, was published in 1830 in Mongolia at the request of monks there and amounts to an encyclopaedic overview of the regions of the world. In essence, it is a book about how Tibet looked out at the world, rather than how the world looked in.
The Tseten’s sources for this immense undertaking are not fully understood. There were European missionaries in Beijing but the evidence is patchy about who contributed. Jampel Chokyi certainly knew the priest Nikita Yakovievich Bichurin, known as Father Iakinf, who led the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing. Iakinf had seen how a lack of cultural understanding was hampering his mission’s work and set about studying Chinese history, geography and literature. Regarded as Russia’s first sinologist, he also wrote on Tibet and Mongolia, and likely gleaned knowledge from the Tseten. Russian–Chinese diplomacy was conducted in Mongolian rather than Manchu, so as a fluent Mongolian speaker Tseten’s insights were likely useful. This was a time of strengthening ties between the tsar and the Qing emperor and the Tseten had several highly educated Russian missionary friends. He sold them books, some of which were translated into Russian. Another of his sources was the German-speaking doctor and botanist Alexander Georg von Bunge who arrived in the late 1820s and collected plants across Central Asia including Mongolia at the personal request of the great explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt. A third was the sinologist Zachar Federovic Leontevsky, who opened the first museum in Russia dedicated to Chinese culture.
The Tseten had to tread carefully in his pursuit of knowledge and what he revealed. European ideas on astronomy flatly contradicted the Kalachakra. Other translators concealed the fact that this innovative thinking came from Jesuits so that more conservative lamas wouldn’t censor their work. The Tseten didn’t do this; he sought instead reassurance in a letter to the seventh Panchen Lama, who agreed there were problems but encouraged the Tseten to continue his work, particularly on the European calendar, which was clearly superior to the Tibetan. Geography at least was less controversial: the Buddhist cosmology, originating in India, that Tibetan monks studied put a great mountain at the centre of the world and four continents around it, a fairly accurate representation of the region. And thanks to guidebooks written to locate sites mentioned in ancient Buddhist texts, better-educated lamas knew the geography of places like Nepal, western China and northern India quite well. The Tseten’s text worked from within this tradition.
In a modern context, The Detailed Description of the World seems naïve although it has its moments. Britain, the Tseten wrote, was divided into three regions: England, Scotland and Ireland. The ‘shape of their faces looks like that of Indians, but they are as white as snow. . . . The people are rich, but they like to drink, and they are more dissolute than other Europeans.’ Poles on the other hand were ‘beautiful, intelligent,
and honest. They are especially nice to people from outside their country.’ (One of the Tseten’s interlocutors was an ethnic Pole.) He also described the North Pole, taking seriously the possibility that part of the earth could be perpetually in darkness, an idea ridiculed by other Tibetan scholars. Africa was ‘a big continent, and its shape is like a triangle’. Some African animals had Asian equivalents and were familiar: lions, elephants and rhinoceroses. The giraffe, ‘an animal called da po’, was wholly strange:
a horse’s head with a donkey’s tail in different colours such as yellow, brown and green. The animal is very big and its neck is four or three arm spans long.
The continent of Europe was of particular interest, since some Tibetan scholars had identified it as the location for Shambhala, the utopian realm in the west where Buddha had taught crucial initiations to those who lived there. The sixth Panchen Lama, who had written guidebooks himself, had asked George Bogle to look for clues to its location when he went home so the lama could visit. The idea of a mythical land where transformative knowledge lies waiting, so strong within the Tibetan tradition, is reflected in the Tseten’s general comments about Europe. The British were a tangible threat just across the border but in magical Europe there was ‘no such thing as treating each other badly, accusations, the powerful taking over the weaker, or corruption’. Europe was a wonder house, like Kipling’s ajeeb ghar in his Himalayan novel Kim, with
lights that have oil and clothing that generates light . . . mirrors that recognise thieves, hide one from the enemy, and burn the enemy . . . many different stunning things such as celestial and global maps . . . There are also machines that are mechanised by fire, water, air and wood.
As the Tibetan historian Lobsang Yongdan writes: ‘It is ironic that Western writers created a mysterious land called Shangri-La in Tibet while Tibetan scholars were looking for Shambhala somewhere in Europe.’