Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Written from a Buddhist perspective, The Detailed Description of the World might seem fanciful to European readers but in the 1830s so were the few accounts of Tibet published by Europeans. Most of those that came later either amused or frustrated educated Tibetans. And the Tseten had a much firmer grip than any European on the geography of the north side of the Himalaya, not least that the Yarlung Tsangpo was the same river as the Brahmaputra, something the British would sweat over for decades to come. Tibetans’ knowledge of their own country was extensive, hardly surprising for a culture that had been printing books for a thousand years and liked to travel. The big monasteries drew students from all over Asia and those in Amdo stood at a crossroads of influences from all points of the compass. While the Tseten held a seal from the Manchu ruler in Beijing, he described Tibet as outside the limits of the Qing Empire: a place with its own identity meeting the world on more or less equal terms.

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  Given all that, what was it that made Tibet so reluctant to allow European visitors? Tension between the emerging British Empire and the Qing is one answer, but it ran deeper than that. There are clues in the reception Thomas Manning got when he reached Lhasa in 1811: although he was curious about Tibetan temples, it took him a while, he wrote, to find someone who could show him around them. His interpreter Zhao Jinxiu had asked him a few times whether he intended to visit these temples, and when Manning finally announced that he would, Zhao was relieved. Manning discovered that Chinese mandarins and Tibetan authorities had also been asking about this.

  The mandarins, he said, were aware that the Catholics refused to pay these respects; consequently, if I went it would wipe off their suspicions of my being a missionary.

  It had been over sixty years since the Capuchin friars had left Lhasa and yet the memory of their threat retained its potency.

  Had Pope Clement XI preferred the Jesuits as missionaries to Tibet over the Capuchins then it’s conceivable Tibetan history would have followed a different course. The Jesuit Ippolito Desideri had spent five years in Lhasa from the early spring of 1716. More than any other missionary to Tibet, he was engaged and intelligent enough to pierce the outer layers of Tibetan Buddhism and grasp its core philosophy, learning Tibetan and writing works of real insight. These were left unpublished in a Vatican archive until their rediscovery in the 1870s, and were only finally published in the 1930s. His obscurity lies in the victory of the Capuchins who had been awarded control of the Catholic Church’s missionary work by the Vatican in 1703. Over the next four decades they sent three missions to Lhasa. The first had ended in expensive failure, having spent a small fortune to baptise two adults. The second arrived in Lhasa a few months after Desideri in 1716, prompting the protracted long-distance argument with Rome that ended with Desideri’s departure. Thereafter the Jesuits would continue to pour scorn on the Capuchin mission’s shortcomings and their overly optimistic reports to Rome. They had a shrewder idea than their competitors how things would go in Tibet.

  The Capuchins in Lhasa would follow a similar arc of experience as Father Andrade and his Jesuits had in the west Tibetan kingdom of Guge a century before. Both groups saw similarities between the Catholic Church and Tibetan Buddhism, equating the Dalai Lama with the pope and drawing comparisons between monastic institutions. They were also struck by the liberty they were given to practise their faith, wearing their robes in public ‘just as in Paris or Rome’. For their part, the Tibetans regarded Christianity as essentially good, showed reverence to Christian symbols and were grateful for the missionaries’ medical skills. The Mongol ruler of Tibet at the time of the Capuchin mission to Lhasa, Lajang Khan, was equally curious about western science; he knew what the Jesuits had brought to the Qing court in Beijing and hoped these missionaries would do the same for Lhasa.

  The missionaries were encouraged by this tolerance and openness. The Qing state was deeply hierarchical and xenophobic; political relationships were about dominance and subservience. Tibet wasn’t like that at all. Tibetan nobles played down their rank to encourage openness, treating the Capuchins as equals. The Christian friars, with their tonsured heads, were even given a nickname: ‘the white-headed lamas’. Mindful of the huge expense of their mission, the Capuchins reassured their masters in Rome that progress was good and influential Tibetans were on the brink of converting. It was a fundamental misjudgment.

  Lhasa aristocrats valued the concept of yarab choesang, being respectful and polite to others, a trope that resonates in modern Tibet just as it did for the eighth-century dharma king Songtsen Gampo, whose sixteen human laws can be characterised as a more affable version of the Ten Commandments. Kindness to neighbours and moderate behaviour are at the heart of this value system. (The fourth Tseten Nomonkhan was a little more cynical. His world encyclopaedia included laconic judgments on Tibetans from different parts of the country: those from Kham were aggressive enemies but loyal friends, too trusting in the view of the Tseten; ‘the people of Tsang’, meanwhile, referring to the region of Shigatse, ‘are honest, polite and cowards. Although smart, they are not deep. . . . They love money, but are generous toward the Dharma’s purpose.’ People in Tsang might judge such wisecracks typical for an Amdo intellectual.) This is why the Capuchins were given residency permits, tax exemptions and allowed to buy property. The prefect of the Capuchin mission Francesco Orazio della Penna, who had joined Desideri in mastering Tibetan at the Sera monastery, was even allowed to conduct masses there. With the invasion of the Dzungars and the death of their patron Lajang in 1717, the missionaries faced a grave setback: Armenian and Russian traders who had given them a sympathetic Christian network fled the city; their hospice was plundered and their funds taken. Yet after the Qing Empire had restored order, the Tibetan elite remained tolerant and welcoming, even when the Capuchins made it clear they wanted to convert Tibetans to Christianity. They were allowed to buy land for a church, and when the local population turned against them, seeing the missionaries as a malign foreign influence disturbing the balance of nature, the Dalai Lama issued a statement saying they must be allowed to continue.

  The mistake the Capuchins made was to confuse generosity of spirit with spiritual surrender. They saw tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Yet the Tibetans were not naïve. They liked the Capuchins for their medical skills, respected their faith and had no wish to convert them. (The powerful regent of the seventh Dalai Lama, Polhane Sonam Topgay, wrote to the Capuchins at the end of their second mission that ‘despite the fact that we do not know [your] religion, we give credence and pay respect to all religions, ours and yours; moreover, in the past we have not slandered it and we do not slander it now.’) They were interested in the knowledge and technology the foreigners might offer and were disappointed when it didn’t materialise. Mostly the Tibetan state was too busy with a continuing storm of political unrest to pay much attention. The Capuchins on the other hand saw the Tibetans as backward heathens; it was their job to bring them to Christ. Unlike the Jesuit Desideri, they saw little value in studying the complexities of Buddhist metaphysics. They took from Tibet only what they needed to undermine what they regarded as its central defining feature: Buddhism.

  During their third mission, beginning in 1741, the Capuchins finally managed to convert some Tibetans to Christianity. It was a sign confirming that God wanted Buddhism destroyed. The Dalai Lama, the missionaries claimed, was not the embodiment of Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion, after all. They demanded a special regulation so their converts could celebrate Christian holidays. The converts refused to perform u lag, a much-resented tax in the form of labour levied by monastic institutions. They also refused to receive blessings from the Dalai Lama. The Tibetans might have been tolerant of other faiths but this was now about more than freedom of religious expression: it was regarded as disloyalty to the Tibetan state. At the insistence of the religious establishment, legal charges were made not against the Capuchins but against the converts. They in turn refused to respect the legitimacy of the c
ourt since its authority rested on false religion. The secular and the religious had become so intertwined in Tibet that to pull at the threads of one was to unravel the other. Five converts, two women and three men, were convicted and publicly flogged.

  The Capuchins were advised in future to confine their preaching to foreigners. They replied that their only purpose in Tibet was to preach the gospel and demanded freedom of conscience. The Dalai Lama’s regent Polhane was incredulous:

  Kashmiri, Newari, Azaras [meaning Indians], Chinese, Turkish, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and other peoples living in Tibet adhere to their own religions and are supported as much as possible and not harmed. But you have spoken evil of the Tibetan religion. If any of us were to go to your country and preach our religion to you in the same manner as you have done with us, would you punish him? Destroying other religions implies nobody may follow his own religion. We have to defend our religion as you are defending yours. You came here of your own accord, we did not call you; as a consequence it is up to you to decide where to go and what to do.

  Orazio della Penna and the rest of the mission withdrew from Lhasa in the spring of 1745. He died at Patan, in the Kathmandu valley, that June and was buried in a grave now lost. Soon after came news from Lhasa that their church had been levelled to the ground. All that survived of the Capuchin mission was the small bell the friars had cast in the Newari city of Bhaktapur, which still hangs in the Jokhang temple. They also left behind a sour taste, a suspicion not only of Christian missionaries but also their political intent.

  When Huc and Gabet, ‘the lamas of the western heavens’, arrived a century later, just as keen as the Capuchins to provoke the fall of Buddhism, Lhasa was in Huc’s words still ‘the rendezvous of all Asiatic peoples . . . with an astonishing variety of features, costumes and languages’. The political map of Asia, on the other hand, had changed dramatically. Tibet had for centuries triangulated itself between the Mongols and China, nurturing patron–priest relationships that allowed its people to maintain their identity and a deep measure of cultural independence. The arrival of British armies and missionaries on Tibet’s southern border was regarded as a new and uncertain threat. According to Huc, a Kashmiri merchant in Lhasa told him how ‘Pelings’, meaning the British,

  are the most cunning of men. They are getting control of all parts of India, but it is always by trickery rather than by open force. Instead of overturning the authorities, they cleverly try to win them over to their side and share the spoils with them. In Kashmir there is a saying: ‘The world is Allah’s, the land is the Pasha’s, but the East India Company rules.’

  The Tibetan elite, from the Dalai Lama down, shared that view and Huc was at pains to reassure anyone who mistook him as British that he was in fact French. ‘The Tibetans have got it into their heads, for some reason, that the British are an aggressive people of whom they had best beware.’ That fear was heightened in 1864 when Calcutta sent troops into Bhutan and took control of Bhutan’s territory on the plains. The Tibetans had every right to be anxious.

  Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet faced an accelerated version of the fate of the Capuchins. The Tibetans were friendly and allowed them to open a chapel; the Qing amban, Qishan, was far less tolerant. Qishan was a Mongol who had enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Qing hierarchy and then been humiliated for his negotiations with the British to settle the First Opium War. A death sentence had been commuted to a posting in Lhasa. The French had arrived from Mongolia via Amdo, spending time at Kumbum, but they planned to leave Tibet for India, in the footsteps of the legendary Chinese Buddhist traveller Xuanzang. Yet that would have left the impression that the marches of the Qing Empire were becoming a free-for-all. Furthermore, should the Qing seem to act in support of Christian missionaries whose intention was to subvert Tibetan Buddhism, then Chinese power in Lhasa would be weakened. Qishan wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice and expelled Huc and Gabet back to China via Sichuan with an escort to see them off the premises. By the time Huc reached Canton, his death had already been reported in the newspapers. He remained there for three years writing an account of his travels. When it was published in Paris in 1850 the book was an instant bestseller. Neither Bogle nor Manning had published anything and Desideri’s writings on Tibet were languishing in Rome. Huc’s account was the first time many Europeans and Americans had read much of significance about the mysterious land north of the Himalaya.

  Huc’s intention had been to produce something brimming with missionary zeal but he couldn’t resist packing it with wonders and narrative drive. It was more a religious adventure story; a simplified version was given to French schoolchildren much as the works of Alexandre Dumas would be. William Hazlitt, son of the essayist and radical, translated Huc’s account into English and it was published in London a year after the French edition. Other European editions soon followed. Suffering a breakdown in health, Huc returned to a hero’s welcome in Paris, where Napoleon III gave him the Légion d’ honneur. But he fell out with his order, which judged his narrative as too sympathetic to the Tibetans and placed it on the Catholic index of prohibited books. His health never recovered from his years in China and he died in 1860, aged just forty-seven.

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  Death saved Huc from watching as his reputation took a battering in the later decades of the century, principally at the hands of the explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, a Russian imperialist whose judgment concerning Asians frequently tipped into racism. (Suggesting Moscow should annex Mongolia and Qinghai, he said: ‘A thousand of our soldiers would be enough to subdue all Asia from Lake Baykal to the Himalayas.’) Przhevalsky denounced Huc as a fraud, partly because he had been thwarted in his own desire to visit Lhasa. Luckily the Frenchman had his champions too, particularly the American diplomat William Woodville Rockhill, who read Huc’s book as a teenager in the 1860s, and in doing so set the course of his life. Rockhill would help rescue Huc’s reputation and become involved in Tibetan affairs himself just as the United States became politically engaged in the region for the first time.

  French missionary interest in Tibet didn’t end after Huc and Gabet’s epic journey. In 1846, the year they reached Lhasa, the Capuchins finally gave up their missionary interest in Tibet, which the Vatican then awarded not to the Lazarists, who were in Mongolia, but to the Paris-based Société des Missions Étrangères. One of their priests in China, Charles Renou, almost immediately visited Kham, despite a prohibition on travel to the Tibetan interior under the terms of China’s trade agreements at that time with France. In 1854 Renou established a small mission in a remote village near the border of Kham and began translating Christian texts into Tibetan and growing food, introducing new plants to the area, including the potato. Yet as in Lhasa, when local Tibetan Buddhist authorities began to understand what Renou and his fellow priests were doing, hostility grew. They had to abandon their first mission and while the Missions Étrangères remained on the fringes of Tibet for a century, they were never able to settle in areas where Lhasa’s influence was strong. After the Treaty of Tianjin was signed in 1860, and freedom of movement for Europeans markedly improved, Renou was still not able to visit Lhasa. In theory the treaty gave them the right to do so, but as with Edmund Smyth, the change in rules didn’t make any difference in Tibet. The Manchu dynasty was struggling to extinguish the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history: Qing officials weren’t going to enforce passports for missionaries to the remote western provinces. The French had the support of their government, and the British asked the Gorkhali strongman Jang Bahadur to send a letter to Lhasa requesting the French passports be honoured, but the Missions Étrangères never got there.

  As the nineteenth century wore on, Christian missionary efforts gathered strength. Protestants began to arrive, including Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, founded in 1865, which sent nineteen missionaries to eastern Tibet before 1900. Among them was Cecil Polhill, an Eton and Cambridge-educated Pentecostal, whose missionary work featured in a book by his sister-
in-law Annie Westland Marston that she titled The Great Closed Land: A Plea for Tibet. A Moravian missionary called Benjamin La Trobe wrote the preface, reflecting the evangelical excitement at opening up Tibet:

  A cordon of missionary posts is being drawn around Tibet. Already it extends westward from Kashmir along the northern frontier of India and Burmah, and reaches up to the north of China. True, it is thin and weak as yet, and there are long gaps in the ranks. Yet, if the missionaries be ‘few and far between,’ each occupies his post in the name and at the bidding of an omnipotent Prince and Saviour, with whom there is no restraint to save by many or by few.

  The arrival of Protestant missionaries created opportunities for adventurous women to bring the word of the Lord to the roof of the world. Isabella Bird was the daughter of a curate who travelled to Ladakh in 1889 and wrote Among the Tibetans. She was also the first woman to lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Like a surprising number of the first Western women to travel to the Himalaya, Bird had suffered from chronic poor health as a child but seemed much healthier riding a pony across the plateau of Tibet. The first Western woman to reach Tibet proper was Hannah or ‘Annie’ Royle Taylor. Born in Cheshire in 1855, she was the daughter of a shipping company director. Like Bird she suffered poor health as a child; aged seven, doctors diagnosed a heart problem that would likely prove fatal before she reached adulthood. She thus escaped formal education and her rebellious instincts went unchecked. Aged thirteen Annie declared herself an evangelical Christian and at sixteen, having heard a missionary lecturing about his work, discovered her life’s calling. Against the wishes of her family, Taylor had medical training in London and then in her late twenties joined Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. Posted to Lanzhou in the modern province of Gansu she found herself on the fringes of the Tibetan world.