Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  His second wife recalled how in the Curzon household, foot servants were chosen for the elegance of their wrists while holding a plate. Even as a young man his friends predicted he would be foreign secretary; before he entered politics he had a passion for exploratory travel, despite a chronically injured back, that would echo in his enthusiasm for the Everest adventure. The fact that in 1919 he realised his friends’ prediction by actually becoming foreign secretary also helped the prospects of an Everest expedition.

  There is a photograph taken in 1901 that captures Curzon, his brilliance and his vanity, and the world he moved through. He stands in neatly creased plus fours, pith helmet in his right hand, among a group of British staff officers and officials, Nepali colonels and turbaned bearers proudly looking down at the corpse of the gigantic tiger he has just shot. Hunting, or shikar, was the imperial equivalent of a businessman’s round of golf, beloved of British aristocrats and Indian potentates alike. It was a chance to do business, and Curzon had an agenda.

  The viceroy wasn’t altogether welcome in Nepal. Bir Shamsher Rana, nephew of Jang Bahadur and still maharaja following the assassination of his uncle Ranodip in 1885, had been unwell when Curzon requested an invitation to visit Nepal and was initially reluctant to accede. Then, after the invitation had been made but before Curzon arrived in March 1901, Bir Shamsher died, to be replaced by his younger brother Dev. Among the satra bhai, the seventeen brothers, Dev had been closest to the marginalised sons of Jang Bahadur and was consequently distrusted. Worse, he had reforming instincts. Dev wanted universal primary education for Nepali children and wider engagement in politics. So Curzon’s visit, a fortnight after Bir Shamsher’s death, was inconvenient. Dev’s younger brother Chandra, head of the army, volunteered to take Curzon hunting but from what happened next it seems unlikely they talked only of tigers. Three months later, in June 1901, Chandra deposed Dev in a coup and with lightning speed Calcutta recognised his government, congratulating him on how it had been achieved without the usual bloodletting. Queen Victoria might have promised the British would not acquire more territory in the subcontinent but that didn’t exclude regime change.

  What Curzon got from Chandra in return was support for his Tibet policy. Nepal, under the terms of its 1856 treaty with Tibet, was technically obliged to come to Lhasa’s aid if attacked by a foreign power. Curzon needed to anchor Nepal firmly to his side before moving forward. He was determined to end the drift on the border with Tibet where agreements signed in good faith were being ignored and his letters to the Dalai Lama were returned unopened. More importantly, Curzon was determined to stop what he perceived as a Russian threat to absorb Tibet into its empire as China’s power waned. It was true that Russia had benefitted from the collapse of the Qing Empire by taking territory in Manchuria. And the British had known for a century that Russian influence could be felt in the Himalaya: George Bogle and William Moorcroft had both seen it. What Curzon feared was altogether different. He believed that the other great figure in this drama, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, was falling under the political control of St Petersburg. Yet while there was some mutual interest between Russia and Tibet, it wasn’t remotely sufficient to justify military intervention. As with the weapons of mass destruction not found in Iraq in 2003, serious politicians were convinced a Russian threat existed, but it was more or less fiction.

  For most of the nineteenth century, the Dalai Lamas were little more than political pawns, boys whom the progressively more conservative religious establishment could control and who died shortly before or after they reached their majority, not always of natural causes. Trinley Gyatso, the twelfth Dalai Lama, had been enthroned in 1873 at the age of sixteen but died of a ‘mysterious illness’ two years later. This sequence of underage national leaders meant the Panchen Lama at Tashilhunpo and senior monks in the great lamaseries at Lhasa kept a tight if not always harmonious grip on the political helm under the watchful eyes of China’s ambans. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, was different. First, the Panchen Lama at this time was a child too. Second, as Chinese influence waned, Thubten Gyatso had been presented as the only candidate for Dalai Lama to the Qing, signalling Lhasa’s growing confidence to act independently of the Golden Urn. As a boy he survived an outbreak of smallpox, leaving him with a mildly pitted complexion, and he grew up in an atmosphere of spiritual seclusion, insulated from the growing tension with British India. While most Dalai Lamas assumed political control by the age of eighteen, Thubten Gyatso requested he continue his studies for two more years. Even then he remained anxious that he was too inexperienced to face the growing crisis developing across the mountains and was persuaded to take up the reins of power only after consulting the Nechung Oracle. He also faced threats from within, surviving an assassination attempt by his former regent.

  What worried Curzon was the Dalai Lama’s long-standing friendship with a Buryat Mongol monk called Agvan Dorzhiev. More than twenty years his senior, Dorzhiev was a teacher and debating partner of the young Thubten Gyatso. He told him about his homeland and the growing influence of Russia. With China signing treaties with the British that the Tibetans neither wanted nor approved, and increasingly incapable of securing Tibet’s borders, the Dalai Lama used Dorzhiev as a contact with the imperial capital of St Petersburg, explicitly requesting the support of Russia as a diplomatic counterweight to the increasing British pressure. As much as this shocked the British, it was an obvious move. As the Russian Empire established itself in Siberia, the tsars treated those of their subjects that practised Tibetan Buddhism relatively well, whereas the British appeared hostile to Buddhism and supportive of Christian missionaries. The notion of Russia sending an army to Tibet was fanciful, but Curzon used Dorzhiev’s mission as the foundation on which to stack every half-baked rumour of Russian influence that emerged from the bazaars of Simla and Darjeeling. He was aided in this by his friend the maharaja of Nepal, Chandra Shamsher, who relayed to Calcutta any anti-Russian gossip that arrived from Kathmandu’s representative in Lhasa: passing on news of Russian arms shipments arriving in the Tibetan capital spurred the British to supply the Nepali army. Chandra promised Curzon when they met at the Delhi coronation durbar in 1903 – the ‘Curzonation’ – that Nepal would disregard any obligations to Tibet but only in return for compensation.

  The point man for Curzon’s policy in Tibet was his loyal friend Francis Younghusband. They had met when Younghusband returned on leave to Britain in 1892 and again in Chitral, in modern-day Pakistan, two years later. Having been something of one himself, Curzon took a shine to explorers, and frontiers obsessed him. Younghusband could see Curzon’s faults but knew he was on the fast track to greatness and admired his assurance and drive. He would have no better friend, at least professionally. When Curzon arrived in India as viceroy, Younghusband’s glittering early promise had rather stalled. He was a colonial administrator in Rajasthan dealing with a horrifying famine and had witnessed desperate Indians eating roots and leaves, or else ‘seizing burnt remains from the funeral pyres and gnawing at them’. Curzon invited him to Simla for a rest and gave him a more prestigious posting, reassuring Younghusband he was still regarded ‘as an old friend and fellow-traveller’. When Curzon decided to force Tibet’s hand he had already singled out Younghusband as the perfect man for the job.

  In July 1903 Younghusband crossed the Tibetan border at the head of a diplomatic mission to make clear to the Tibetans that Curzon was determined to resolve the situation. With him went the political officer Claude White, ‘a little god’ in Sikkim, according to Younghusband, but ‘worse than useless in dealing with high officials of an independent nation’. Younghusband himself got almost nowhere. The Tibetans maintained their stony indifference to British demands. Camped uselessly outside the fort at Khamba Dzong, Younghusband in desperation passed on rumours to Calcutta from Annie Taylor, the missionary at Yatung, that twenty thousand Russians were marching on Lhasa. ‘We have merely to burst the bloated bubble of monkish power,’ he wrote to
Curzon, ‘and we shall have the people with us, and be able to oust that Russian influence which has already done us so much damage.’ As a misreading of the situation in Tibet it was hard to beat.

  In late December, as winter settled its bitter grip on the high Tibetan plateau, Younghusband set out once more for Tibet, this time at the front of a column of a thousand troops, mostly Gurkhas and Sikhs, with a vast baggage train featuring thousands of yaks, mules, bullocks and ponies most of which would perish in the harsh conditions of a Tibetan campaign. The military force was commanded by Major General James Macdonald, a seasoned if rather dull engineer with long experience of Africa. More recently he had been building roads in Sikkim and was the senior officer on the spot when Curzon ordered military intervention. Macdonald fretted about supply lines and constantly urged caution. In frustration, Younghusband turned to the younger officers around him, especially Captain Frank O’Connor, born in County Longford, who had arrived in Darjeeling as a young artillery officer and fallen in love with the high, unexplored country to the north. O’Connor was the first and at the time only British officer in the whole of the Indian army capable of holding a conversation in Tibetan and had been appointed to Younghusband’s mission as interpreter. O’Connor’s presence in British Himalayan diplomacy would be understated but seemingly ubiquitous for the next twenty years. Another was Frederick Marshman Bailey, discoverer of the blue poppy. Known as Eric and then in his early twenties, Bailey was born in Lahore, the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Indian army and a friend of O’Connor who followed his example in learning Tibetan. He caught Younghusband’s eye as just the sort of man the empire needed on the frontier.

  The Tibetan winter was no less brutal for the British than it had been for Zorowar Singh’s Dogra army sixty years earlier. At the British encampment at Tuna, marooned five kilometres high on the wind-blasted plateau, troops huddled round yak-dung fires; a dozen Sikh Pioneers died of pneumonia. Lieutenant Arthur Hadow of the Norfolk Regiment, who commanded the column’s pair of Maxim guns, used rum and kerosene to keep their cooling system from freezing up in temperatures that sank to minus 30 °C. (It was the Maxim guns that revealed the bullying nature of the British mission in Tibet.)

  Near the hot springs of Chumi Shengo on the last day of March 1904, as the British column resumed its march towards the important town of Gyantse, their path was blocked by two thousand Tibetan troops, many of them dob-dob, monks who kept order in the sometimes turbulent monasteries. There was a brief meeting between the Tibetan general Lhading and British commanders; then British troops outflanked their opponents to make surrender inevitable. Not a shot had been fired. As Sikh Pioneers began disarming the Tibetans, British officers had time to photograph their exotic-looking enemies with their matchlocks and swords. Then a moment’s misunderstanding and the shooting began. A Sikh was hit in the jaw and the Maxim guns opened up. Macdonald reported to Curzon the following morning that his men had used fourteen hundred machine-gun rounds and over fourteen thousand rounds of rifle ammunition, as well as fifty shrapnel shells from the column’s artillery. A dozen on the British side had been injured, mostly from swords and slingshots, while Campbell counted the Tibetan dead at 628. Many had been shot in the back, walking away. The Daily Mail journalist who witnessed this slaughter asked, ‘Why, in the name of all their Bodhisats and Munis [sic], did they not run?’ As for modern Russian weapons: almost nothing, just a handful of old breech-loaders and later some hunting rifles likely traded decades before.

  Younghusband himself was appalled by what he told his father was ‘pure butchery’. The blame, however, he shifted elsewhere, to the Tibetan general Lhading for his ‘crass stupidity and childishness’ and the Tibetan troops themselves for their ‘inability, even when our troops absolutely surrounded them, to take in the seriousness of the situation’. He blamed the Dalai Lama too, who was, ultimately, ‘at the bottom of all the trouble and deserves to be well kicked’. Such excuses were Younghusband’s myth creation at its most grotesque. He had no comprehension of the struggles within the outmoded Tibetan political system: the rising tide of nationalism and unwillingness to compromise that beset its leaders. All he wanted was to ‘smash those selfish filthy lecherous Lamas’. Such naked prejudice was rooted in a particular strand of English evangelical anti-Catholicism, which saw in Lhasa echoes of Rome. Younghusband’s argument, shared by Curzon, had been that Tibetans were a religiously oppressed people gasping for liberty, but this was simply a fiction, and one used to justify the use of modern weaponry against troops who genuinely believed that magic amulets would ward off bullets. Even after the slaughter of Chumi Shengo, the naïve courage and sacrifice of the Tibetans continued, impressing the urgently needed British reinforcements who witnessed it. That didn’t stop them looting and shopping their way to Lhasa, sending back four hundred mule-loads’ worth of artworks and souvenirs, some of these still in British museums and private collections. What was supposed to have been a demonstration of British authority had become a rather squalid smash and grab.

  As Younghusband neared Lhasa in triumph, ‘the greatest success of my life’, Curzon was in London, defending the mission against an increasingly hostile British cabinet. A day before the city fell, the Dalai Lama, the physical and spiritual embodiment of Tibetan identity, fled with Dorzhiev to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, at that time called Urga. The choice had political significance: in avoiding China, he made an expression of independence; there was also a Russian consulate he could consult. (The presence of the Dalai Lama alienated Mongolia’s spiritual leader, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, himself a Tibetan, being the son of a steward in the Dalai Lama’s retinue, and Mongolia’s most senior Geluk monk. He was an equivocal figure, described by the doughty British traveller Beatrix Bulstrode in 1919 as ‘a man of middle age, already decrepit, in appearance bloated, dissipated, uninspiring’. The Polish traveller Ferdynand Ossendowski thought him ‘clever, penetrating and energetic’. The monk’s blindness in old age has been ascribed to both syphilis and alcoholism.) In September 1904, Younghusband signed a treaty at Lhasa in the absence of the Dalai Lama. It would be abandoned at the end of the following year by Britain’s newly formed Liberal government amid distaste at imperial meddling. (This was less to do with human rights and more that foreign meddling was expensive.) By that time, Curzon had resigned as viceroy. The missionary Annie Taylor, although snidely dismissed by British officers, put the outcome rather neatly:

  far from being strengthened, the prestige of Britain has been weakened all along the border between Tibet and India, the only gain in this respect being on the part of China.

  Russia and Britain effectively ended their rivalry in Tibet with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, agreeing to deal with Tibet only through China. The Dalai Lama now had little choice but to deal with Beijing. He moved back to Amdo for a while and then decided to travel to Beijing, despite fears that he might be detained there. On the way, he paused at the Wutaishan monastery, where he sent invitations to foreign diplomats to visit, including the British. It was part of a deliberate effort to change Tibet’s course of determined isolation to one of engagement. He told the American diplomat William Woodville Rockhill about his struggles against the Chinese and how Tibet had ‘no friends abroad’. Rockhill told the Dalai Lama he was wrong, that Tibet had around the world many well-wishers who wanted to see Tibetans prosper. Rockhill wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, then serving his second term as president, that the meeting was ‘the most unique experience of my life’. The Dalai Lama was a man ‘of quick understanding and of force of character’.

  A day later, the Dalai Lama met the future president of Finland and Russian imperial army officer Gustaf Mannerheim while the Lama’s attendants ensured that the Chinese agent watching the Finn was kept out of the room. Mannerheim, ostensibly travelling but in reality a spy, was keeping notes in Swedish of his travels through Central Asia for his masters in St Petersburg. The Dalai Lama asked if Mannerheim had a message for him fr
om the tsar, which he didn’t, but gave him his pistol for protection – a Browning, not a Russian weapon – and showed him how to load it. He also noted the lively intelligence Tibet’s exiled leader showed in foreign affairs, writing that he

  does not look like a man resigned to play the part the Chinese Government wishes him to, but rather like one who is only waiting for an opportunity of confusing his adversary.

  When the Dalai Lama finally arrived in Beijing in September 1908, he refused to kowtow to the Guangxu emperor and the dowager empress Cixi, who nevertheless made it clear he must return to Lhasa and obey the ambans there.

  Both the emperor and Cixi were dead within days, the Guangxu emperor poisoned at the age of thirty-seven. The Dalai Lama was forced to remain for the obligatory period of mourning but his presence in Beijing made him available to European diplomats for the first time. By chance Frank O’Connor was there, accompanying the young prince of Sikkim on a world tour. He thus became the first British government representative to meet the leader of Tibet, as well as his Buryat adviser Agvan Dorzhiev. The meeting was cordial, even friendly; it helped that the British had by then almost completely withdrawn from Tibet. The Dalai Lama, aided behind the scenes by the American Rockhill, also managed to see Japan’s ambassador, despite Chinese objections. Fascination in Japan for Tibet had been sparked with the publication of Three Years in Tibet, the experiences of the traveller Ekai Kawaguchi who had met the thirteenth Dalai Lama in Lhasa while posing as a Chinese monk. When the Dalai Lama finally returned to Lhasa, Japanese military advisers arrived to help modernise the Tibetan army. It was too little, far too late.

  *

  Not long before Curzon quit as viceroy he had set the ball rolling for an expedition to Everest with his letter to Douglas Freshfield. During the Younghusband mission, two army captains Cecil Rawling and Charles Ryder, later surveyor general of India, had got clear views of Everest from around a hundred kilometres away, which had put the issue firmly in Curzon’s mind. There are two approaches to Everest, from the north through Tibet and from the south through Nepal. Curiously, in his letter Curzon explicitly suggested approaching the maharaja of Nepal Chandra Shamsher to request access to the southern route and made no mention of Tibet. He may have felt that despite Britain’s military intervention, access from that direction would be unlikely and they were better off asking his friend Chandra.