by Ed Douglas
Taylor described herself as a ‘lone wolf’ who struggled to work well in a group; it was hardly surprising she didn’t fit in with her colleagues in Lanzhou. So instead she used her family’s money to launch her own one-woman mission to Tibet. She moved to Darjeeling, where a young Tibetan called Puntso was brought to her house for treatment on his damaged feet. Born in Lhasa, Puntso would be her connection to Tibet for almost two decades. Having moved to Sikkim in 1890 to study Tibetan at a monastery, she and Puntso, by now a Christian (at least nominally), travelled to Gansu where she shaved her head and adopted Tibetan dress. Trekking for weeks over the high plains of Amdo, she slipped unnoticed past Gyegu, a hub for the tea trade from China, but was then intercepted outside Nagchu, just three days from Lhasa. Forced out of Tibet, Taylor became briefly famous on her return to London and leveraged her fame – ‘God’s little woman’ as one journalist dubbed her – to launch another mission to Tibet. The China Inland Mission weren’t prepared to support a project based in India or a woman leading men in the field, so Taylor once more set up her own, establishing the Tibetan Pioneer Mission in Sikkim and recruiting thirteen missionaries from Britain and Scandinavia, but the project soon foundered on the shoals of her abrasive personality.
Determined to remain in the Tibetan world, Taylor discovered a rather clever loophole. The British had recently signed the Convention of Calcutta with the Qing authorities and in 1893 were allowed to install a trade agent just across the border at Yatung. Using the terms of this treaty, Annie Taylor moved there with Puntso and his wife Sigu and opened a shop, selling Tibetan objects to museums in Scotland to keep her head above water. The locals called her ani, meaning nun; the British customs officer there, Captain McDonnell Parr, thought her a ‘perfect nuisance’. She was still at Yatung in late 1903 when Younghusband reached the village at the start of his campaign in Tibet, intercepting him at the stone arch at the entrance of the village, dressed as a Tibetan: ‘Is this Colonel Younghusband?’ she demanded before interviewing him at length about his religious views. Initially supportive of Younghusband’s campaign, she offered her medical skills at Younghusband’s base in the Chumbi valley but the disruption and violence seems to have upended her mental health, often fragile, and she ended her days in an asylum.
In contrast to Taylor, a missionary who sought medical training, Susie Carson was a doctor who became a missionary. She was born in Ontario to Methodist parents in 1868; her father, a superintendent of schools, encouraged her to go to medical school. She practised as a doctor with her sister Jennie until her mid twenties, and then in 1894 heard a Dutch-born missionary called Petrus Rijnhart lecturing about China where he had recently been working with the China Inland Mission. It’s unclear whether Susie knew his whole story: that he’d worked for the Salvation Army in the Netherlands and then been sent abroad to Canada after allegations of sexual misconduct. His initial application to join the China Inland Mission had been turned down, but he spent three years working for them in Lanzhou before being thrown out. He was back in Canada raising funds to lead a mission to Tibet when he met Susie, who as a girl had dreamt of missionary work. They soon married and within a year were in China at Lusar, the village of the vast Geluk monastery of Kumbum, close to the city of Xining, treating victims of the Dungan Revolt, a largely forgotten Sufi Muslim uprising that was brutally suppressed by Qing and Tibetan troops with the deaths of a hundred thousand men, women and children.
Soon after, the Rijnharts moved to Tankar, also in the Tibetan province of Amdo, and opened a dispensary, hosting the British cavalry officer and explorer Montagu Wellby who had just crossed northern Tibet from Ladakh, been refused access to Lhasa and was now almost penniless. (His book, Through Unknown Tibet, was prefaced with the honest suggestion that it was written ‘that some future traveller may learn, not so much what he ought to do, as what he ought not to do’.) Wellby was not the only explorer who dropped in. While Petrus Rijnhart was guiding him to Beijing, Sven Hedin arrived in Tankar. Susie was able to correct his impression of the caravans passing through Tankar from the monasteries of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas: they were not carrying tribute for Beijing, as Hedin believed, but goods to trade.
Although popular in Tankar, the Rijnharts had always intended to reach Tibet’s capital. ‘We knew that if ever the Gospel were proclaimed in Lhasa,’ Susie wrote, conveniently putting to one side the Catholics who had already been there, ‘someone would have to be the first to undertake the journey, to meet the difficulties, to preach the first sermon and perhaps never return to tell the tale – who knew?’ In June 1897, Susie had given birth to a son, Charles, and so they delayed until the following summer. Their journey started well but after two months and just north of Nagchu everything began to fall apart. Charles died suddenly and was buried in their emptied drugs case, wrapped in ‘white Japanese flannel’. Then Tibetan soldiers blocked their path. At Nagchu, just a hundred and sixty kilometres short of Lhasa, they were told to go no further and put on the caravan route to Kangding, a thousand kilometres to the east. At this point, their reliable guide Rahim headed home to Ladakh. Attacked and robbed by bandits, the rest of their crew fled. Ten days later, Petrus Rijnhart forded a river to seek information from a band of nomads they had seen nearby and was never seen again. Two months later, without husband or child, Susie Carson staggered into Kangding penniless and dressed in rags to be greeted by a missionary called James Moyes who years before had been part of Annie Taylor’s mission. Moyes and Carson later married and had a child, but Susie died only days after the birth. Her account of her travels, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, is well observed but heartbreaking.
Not all the women travelling to Tibet were missionaries. The remarkable Teresa Littledale, like Susie Carson born in Canada, came closer to Lhasa than any western woman before the French spiritualist and explorer Alexandra David-Néel reached the city in 1924. Unlike these others, she had no need or compulsion to write about her adventures; she wasn’t spreading the gospel or filling lecture halls. Born in London, Ontario in 1839, Teresa met her second husband St George Littledale in Japan in 1874, when he was twenty-two, thirteen years her junior. At the time, she was still married to an older man, a Scottish landowner called Willie Scott, whom Teresa’s mother once described as ‘the reverse of handsome’. St George, on the other hand, was young and rather beautiful, the son of a much respected mayor of Liverpool. Like his father, St George was also noted for being affable, self-effacing and hugely determined. On his majority he inherited his father’s wealth and took off to travel the world and indulge his passion for hunting. Having befriended the Scotts in Japan, he travelled with them through Kashmir, by which time he and Teresa were having an affair. With consumate and generous timing, Willie Scott died of typhoid on the voyage home leaving St George and Teresa free to marry.
For the next thirty years they explored the world together, most usually collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum or plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Their greatest journey was crossing Tibet in 1895 when they came closer than any European since Huc to reaching Lhasa. It was, St George wrote in a rare article for the Geographical Journal, ‘the same party as usual’: he and Teresa, now aged fifty-five, and their plucky fox terrier Tanny, but also St George’s muscular nephew Willie Fletcher, who had rowed stroke for the Oxford boat in the early 1890s. (He was gassed at Passchendaele in the summer of 1917 and never recovered, dying of pneumonia two years later.) ‘My scheme,’ St George wrote,
was to strain every nerve to reach Tibet, and, if possible, Lhasa, with plenty of food and animals to carry it. Most of the other expeditions had failed owing to their arriving in a more or less destitute condition, and then, of course, the Tibetans could dictate their own terms. We also relied upon bribery, and went well prepared with the sinews of war for wholesale corruption.
They reached Kashgar in western China in January 1895, where they entertained the ubiquitous Sven Hedin, then in the middle of his first four-year expeditio
n, and were relieved to see the handful of Pathan bodyguards they had requested ‘in case of a scrimmage’ finally arrive after a snowy crossing of the Karakoram. The expedition then headed south to Yarkand and east to Cherchen before crossing the high passes of the Arka Tagh mountains – ‘the most absolute of frontiers’ – in bitter conditions in order to reach the northern fringes of the Chang Tang on the Tibetan plateau. Here things got even worse. Their pack animals died like flies: only eight of 170 would make it through to the other side of the Himalaya. One night the small flock of sheep they brought for food was allowed to wander; wolves tore out the throats of every one. Teresa suffered from dysentery, confessing to her diary that ‘I feel afraid to look at the future of this trip. It is not bright for me.’ To St George she said not a word of complaint. The wind was almost constant and bitterly cold. Her husband, now responsible for shooting their food, found his aim put off by his heavy breathing in the thin air. Only Tanny was happy, nestling in Teresa’s thick coat for warmth.
By mid summer they had crossed the Chang Tang and were in striking distance of the Himalaya. Yet below the Goring La, just eighty kilometres short of Lhasa, they were blocked by a hundred or so Tibetans armed with matchlocks. St George waved their Chinese passport, which luckily the Tibetans couldn’t read, since it prohibited travel through Tibet. He tried threats, promising that if any of them were hurt three thousand Indian sepoys would march on Lhasa, a shadowy prefiguring of the British invasion nine years later. He tried ‘the golden key’ of ‘wholesale corruption’. Nothing worked. The religious official responsible for keeping them out was almost in tears as he told the Littledales he would be executed if he let them through. Teresa, who had just turned fifty-six, demanded St George’s Mannlicher rifle and presented it to the lama, asking him to shoot her rather than send her back across the Chang Tang. It was finally agreed they would be escorted west to Ladakh and return home from there.
Back in London, St George was feted. ‘My greatest traveller,’ Edward VII called him, conveniently forgetting about Teresa. The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their patron’s medal, but again, excluded Teresa. In 1893, two years before Teresa was in Tibet, the Royal Geographical Society had been at war with itself over female membership; Punch magazine had run this satirical doggerel:
A lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts?
The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic:
Let them stay and mind the babies, or hem our ragged shirts.
But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic.
The publisher Edward Arnold offered St George a good advance to write up their adventures but the article had been enough; Littledale didn’t care much who knew what they had done and he slipped quietly beyond the reach of bibliographers. Teresa went on a final expedition to Mongolia and then retired from the expedition life. In January 1928, a few months before she died at the age of eighty-nine, the elderly couple had a small house party for Tibetan friends old and new: Francis Younghusband, who by then had solved the problem of entering Lhasa by kicking down the door, and Sir Charles Bell, the former special ambassador who had lived a year in the city and steered British policy in a more constructive direction. Younghusband also brought two Tibetan friends to meet the Littledales, one of them part of the Lhasa government thirty-three years earlier when St George and Teresa had come so close.
He knew all about us. He said that he thought the risk was too great for any of them to have taken a bribe. It meant forfeiture of land & banishment if discovered. How Willy would have enjoyed it hearing the other side.
The Littledales were exceptional in leaving their story untold. Almost everyone else visiting Tibet in the late nineteenth century published books. The stories they brought back, taken at face value by the public, were often compromised: by a lack of Tibetan, the difficulties of functioning at high altitude in a hostile environment, and often just naked prejudice. Henry Savage Landor’s In Forbidden Tibet was one particularly egregious example: in its excoriation of Tibetans and their way of life, not much more than fantasy. (‘The Lamas are said to have a great craving for human blood, which, they say, gives them strength, genius and vigour.’) Needless to say, the reviewers loved it. ‘Why should people write falsehoods about us,’ wrote the Tibetan emigré Rinchen Lhamo in the 1920s, fed up with the steady flow of twisted perspectives on her country; ‘why should they write at all of things they do not know?’
In the absence of Tibetan voices, and with proper scholarship on the Himalaya still emerging, it was these versions of Tibet that would have primacy in the public imagination, skewing the world’s understanding even now. For some, Tibet was a mystical blank on the map, a place about which you could say almost anything because there was almost no one to contradict you. Tibet became an otherworldly place that promised ancient, esoteric answers to a spiritual dislocation provoked in Europe by rapid industrialisation. As Martin Brauen put it in Dreamworld Tibet:
In the late nineteenth century, in non-missionary literature Tibet was able more and more to signify a mountain towering above the sorrows and problems of the world, an island of seekers.
The woman who did more than anyone else to foster this image of Tibet was Helena Blavatsky, the Russian-born occultist and chief spiritual architect of the Theosophical Society, a synthesis of ‘science, religion and philosophy’ that would revive a lost and ancient system of knowledge. Essentially an occultist, Blavatsky started her esoteric travels in Egyptology and then moved on to Tibet which appeared to be a much less crowded field. Central to her arcane belief system, which had some rather dark notions about evolution, were the Masters of Ancient Wisdom, also known as the Mahatmas. She claimed to have been instructed by two of them, called Mourya and Koot Humi, in the monastery of Tashilhunpo in Tibet, although neither of them was Tibetan. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Blavatsky ever went to Tibet, although she did travel in the Himalaya, causing a minor sensation in Simla. Rudyard Kipling’s father Lockwood described her as among ‘the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors’ he had ever met.
Her genius, if that’s the right word, was blending together disparate ingredients, some fact, many others fiction, into a chimera of spiritual feeling that would comfort isolated and anxious individuals with the promise of redemption, that modern life was not as mundane and meaningless as it seemed. Take for example the concept of ‘vril’, an ‘all-permeating fluid’ which first appears in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s proto-science-fiction novel The Coming Race, published in 1871. At the time Bulwer-Lytton was a hugely popular novelist and a politician, the man who coined the phrase, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. Vril was a kind of power or strength, and it briefly caught on. A Scottish butcher called John Lawson Johnston used the name to market his nutritious beef stock: Bovril. Blavatsky cheerfully scooped up vril and wove it into the complex spiritual fantasy-world she created. ‘The name vril may be a fiction;’ she wrote. ‘[But] the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.’
Unlike Savage Landor’s portrayal of Tibet, full of cannibalistic monks and sexual depravity, Mahatma Koot Hoomi showed Blavatsky a very different Tibetan world:
For centuries we have had in Thibet a moral, pure hearted, simple people, unblest with civilization, hence – untainted by its vices. For ages has been Thibet the last corner of the globe not so entirely corrupted as to preclude the mingling together of the two atmospheres – the physical and the spiritual.
This was the Tibet that would fix itself in the Western imagination and remains influential, as though we were still to assess modern Africa through the prism of the Tarzan legend. When Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to resurrect Sherlock Holmes following his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, it was only natural that he should emerge from mystical Tibet; the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu wrote a pastiche of what the detective got up to in The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.
Blavatsky was not the
only fantasist to weave Tibet into her story. George Gurdjieff, the mystical ‘man of the fourth dimension’ who came to prominence in the early 1920s, also claimed to have lived in Tibet, although there’s no evidence that he did either. Neither did the Hungarian-born con man and former Liberal member of parliament Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, who founded his own Geluk-pa monastery in Shanghai and promised to help the Nazis turn Asia’s Buddhists against the British. Nor had Cyril Hoskin, a plumber from Devon who under the name Lobsang Rampa wrote The Third Eye, a wholly fictitious account of growing up as a monk in Tibet, which became an international bestseller following publication in 1956 despite being quickly unmasked as a fraud. Hoskin simply said that like Blavatsky he had been inhabited with the spirit of Lobsang Rampa. It was these fictional versions of Tibet that filled the vacuum, tilting the world’s understanding at significant cost.
The myth of the ‘forbidden’ city of Lhasa and the fantasies invented around its ‘secrets’ would have dangerous consequences. As the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya wrote:
The Western perception of Tibet and the images that have clustered around Tibet have hampered the Tibetan political cause. The constant mythologisation of Tibet has obscured and confused the real nature of the Tibetan political struggle.
When the Tibetan state finally threw off the last shreds of Qing hegemony, those misconceptions would skew western engagement with an old nation resuming its place on the world stage.
14
The Plant Hunters
At the Chelsea Flower Show in the spring of 1926, delayed for a week by the General Strike, the British public was riveted by a sensational new flower that seemed like the stuff of legend. It came from south-eastern Tibet, country as strange and remote as the moon, and yet here it was in England, apparently prospering as though it were native. In the history of horticulture, few plants achieved such popularity so rapidly as the Tibetan blue poppy. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a poppy at all but a meconopsis, from the Greek meaning ‘like a poppy’ but the distinction was too fine for many to care. For the American gardener and biographer Eleanor Perenyi, they were the ‘color of a summer day, with golden anthers’. The familiar red poppy had been adopted in 1921 by Field Marshal Alexander Haig as a remembrance of the sacrifice of the Great War; the blue poppy was both an echo of that sacrifice and a fresh start. Blue flowers had been a powerful motif in Romanticism, a symbol of love, but also of the infinite and the unreachable. And where else would this ideal originate but mysterious, spiritual Tibet?