Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  The Alpine Club were delighted at such powerful support and began putting together an expedition for 1907 in time for their golden jubilee, banking on the Tibetan route since it seemed more practical and better known. The wealthy publisher and Alpine Club member Arnold Mumm offered to underwrite the attempt if he and his Swiss guide could be part of the team. With him would go the Himalayan veterans Tom Longstaff and Charlie ‘Bruiser’ Bruce with two Alpine guides and nine of Bruce’s Gurkhas. Alas, the alpinists had hitched their wagon to a political faction that almost immediately came off the rails. The new secretary of state for India was the dry and bookish John Morley, not a man sympathetic to romantic adventure; even his own prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman once described him as a ‘petulant spinster’. Negotiations with the Russians were continuing and Morley wasn’t prepared to allow a mountaineering expedition to muddy the waters. Sir George Goldie, the Cecil Rhodes of Nigeria, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote a caustic letter to The Times but there was no shifting Morley; a leader in The Times rather took his side.

  Morley also blocked Curzon’s suggestion of trying from Nepal. In 1908, while the Dalai Lama was heading to Beijing, Chandra Shamsher arrived in Britain, where he was given an honorary degree at Oxford, awarded personally by the university’s vice chancellor Lord Curzon, now in the political wilderness. Chandra also got an honorary award from the Royal Geographical Society, but when he met privately with Morley, the secretary of state told him that ‘a very important society, the Geographical Society demanded a pass from me to explore Everest. I refused it. Is it not as you wish me to do?’ Chandra concurred. Nepal’s isolation maintained the good reputation of the British among ordinary Nepalis flocking to join its army. If mountaineers were allowed in, then others would follow. And ‘all Englishmen, Your Lordship, cannot be expected to be gentlemen’. With Chandra’s consent, however, the India Office did allow one concession, a sop to Curzon: in 1907 Nathu Singh from the Survey of India became the first outsider to explore the south side of the Everest region in Nepal, including the Dudh Kosi, the ‘milk river’ that flowed from its glaciers. Mumm, Bruce and Longstaff went not to Everest but the Garhwal and made their creditable first ascent of Trisul.

  In the face of official disapproval, approaches to Everest became a clandestine affair. Alexander Kellas, the Scottish chemist who would perish on the 1921 reconnaissance, had a secret plan to try from the north and in 1913 Captain John Noel of the Machine Gun Corps made a clandestine journey across the border from Sikkim that got a little closer than Rawling had. It was a lecture on this enterprising adventure in March 1919 that Younghusband, soon to take over from Holdich as the new president of the Royal Geographical Society, used as a springboard for the attempts of the 1920s. In October, Curzon was made foreign secretary, just the sort of ally in government to get things moving. Yet it was ironically another invasion of Tibet that would prove to be the key in unlocking the gates of Everest and which would send British policy in Tibet in a new and wholly more constructive direction under the expert guidance of one man: Charles Bell. It would be Bell’s presence in Lhasa that would bring the necessary permission for Younghusband’s adventure to move forward.

  *

  Soon after the British left Lhasa in late 1904, the Qing magistrate Zhao Erfeng had arrived in western Kham where the Qing had been trying to establish Chinese farming colonies among indigenous Tibetans. This had led to riots and the murder of the official responsible for implementing the policy. Zhao had begun a vicious campaign to reassert China’s control, provoking further retaliation. A group of rebellious monks had taken refuge behind the stout walls of the monastery at Chaktreng but Zhao had finally tricked them into opening the doors in the belief reinforcements had arrived. He then executed the survivors. Zhao’s success in pacifying Kham won him promotion and in 1909 he repeated his tactic in the formerly independent kingdom of Derge, ‘the land of mercy’, a significant polity in the Kham region, destroying the historically important Drakyap monastery in the process. The atrocities his troops committed earned him the soubriquet ‘Butcher Zhao’; the destruction of Tibetan culture prefigured the far darker shadow of the Cultural Revolution. In February 1910, only weeks after the Dalai Lama’s return, Zhao arrived in Lhasa with two thousand men. The official reason was to police trade marts established by the British under the terms of a new treaty signed in 1908, but the Tibetans read it as an aggressive statement of intent. The sight of Halley’s Comet burning through the night sky was taken as an ill omen. The Dalai Lama, now in his mid thirties, was forced to flee once again, this time heading for Sikkim, beyond the reach of China.

  The British trade agent at Yatung, on Tibet’s border with Sikkim, was David Macdonald, a civilian veteran of the 1904 Tibet mission who had taken over as interpreter when Frank O’Connor fell ill. Macdonald’s father had been a Scottish tea planter who abandoned his mother, a local Lepcha woman, when David – born Dorje – was small. Macdonald had been warned by telegraph that the Dalai Lama was coming and had orders to help him while remaining ostensibly neutral. Chinese officials in Yatung, waiting for the arrival of Zhao’s troops, demanded that the Dalai Lama be handed over. That night in the midst of a winter snowstorm, he escaped across the Jelep La into Sikkim. From there he went on to Darjeeling where the urbane and sympathetic political agent Charles Bell welcomed him. Bell accompanied his new guest to Calcutta where the viceroy Lord Minto greeted the Dalai Lama with deep respect and listened to his pleas for help. The secretary of state John Morley, back in London, wasn’t the least interested. Echoing Younghusband, he dismissed the Dalai Lama as nothing more than a ‘pestilent animal’ and one who ‘should be left to stew in his own juice’. Morley assessed China’s invasion as simply the natural assertion of its sovereignty. There was no question of British support, not least because it contravened the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Morley told Minto to maintain a position of strict neutrality. Given the surprisingly warm welcome the Dalai Lama had enjoyed so far, this sudden reversal of his hopes was a bitter blow. Bell recalled how the news left the Dalai Lama ‘so surprised and distressed that for a minute or two he lost the power of speech’.

  With a brutal Qing army occupying Lhasa and the British apparently indifferent, the Dalai Lama approached the Russians, but the political winds had changed and he got a polite rebuff. He considered travelling from India to Beijing to make a direct appeal but the situation in China was fast deteriorating and he had little option but to remain under British protection, going on pilgrimage to Kapilavastu, where the Buddha had lived as a child, and Bodhgaya, where he achieved enlightenment, before settling at Kalimpong, just east of Darjeeling.

  One of those who joined the Dalai Lama in exile was the diplomat and military leader Dasang Damdul, who had held up Chinese troops at the Chaksam river crossing as the Dalai Lama fled through Tibet, killing around seventy of them. Then in his mid twenties, the humbly born Dasang Damdul would later marry into the powerful Tsarong family, taking the name and the titles that went with it, particularly that of Shap-pe. He rapidly became the most influential political figure in early twentieth-century Tibet. The Dalai Lama called him ‘Chensel’, meaning visible, because he was always there. More than anyone, Tsarong Shap-pe as he became known, shared the Dalai Lama’s vision of a modernising nation more able to face down foreign threats. He would become Britain’s best friend in Tibet, ‘the one man who is really wide-awake in Lhasa’, according to the Gyantse-based teacher Frank Ludlow. In the autumn of 1911 he was sent to Shigatse to lead a rebellion against the Qing as the centre in Beijing crumbled, opening the way for the Dalai Lama’s return.

  While exiled in Kalimpong, the Dalai Lama developed a real friendship with Charles Bell. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Bell was deeply sympathetic to Tibetan culture. He understood as well as the Chinese that the Dalai Lama was, as the incarnation of Chenrezig, Tibet’s protective deity, the crucial figure in Tibetan politics, no matter what his boss Lord Morley might
think. Born in Calcutta in 1870, Bell was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford before following his father Henry into the Indian Civil Service. As such he was one of the minority of ‘politicals’ drawn from civilian ranks and regarded by military colleagues as a ‘babu’, a pen-pusher, not the sort of daring fellow the frontier demanded. He had previously been in Bihar and Orissa but the galvanising moment of his career was his posting to Darjeeling, where he was wholly captivated by the Tibetan world. Bell not only became fluent in the language, he wrote a book about it: A Manual of Colloquial Tibetan. When under the terms of the treaty signed by Younghusband the Chumbi valley came under British control, Bell was put in charge before taking over as political agent for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet from Claude White, who was more interested in his pension than the political fate of the Himalaya. The Dalai Lama’s exile in 1910 was a moment of serendipity for all concerned. Bell would become the sympathetic architect of a new British policy in Tibet.

  In September 1913, Bell arrived in Simla to advise the Indian foreign secretary Sir Henry McMahon as he oversaw the latest attempt to delineate the boundaries between India and Tibet. Negotiations were tortuous and China ultimately refused to sign, but Tibet did, and the agreement bore the hallmarks of Bell’s ideas. The trade agencies the British had fought for were retained. Bell also persuaded the Tibetan chief negotiator Longchen Shatra, a veteran diplomat with long and sometimes bitter experience of the British, to cede the strategic town of Tawang, previously acknowledged as part of Tibet, to the government of India. Although the Tibetan government got rifles and ammunition as compensation, officials in Lhasa were outraged. The Tibetans continued to administer the town, but the status of Tawang, now in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, has remained a flashpoint ever since, and was one of the causes of the conflict between China and an independent India in 1962. It also reveals that while Bell was pro-Tibetan, ‘Tibetanised’ was his word, he still worked for the Raj. After Simla, he continued to support the Dalai Lama’s attempt to modernise Tibet and its army, although the Great War put constraints on further military support. A more effective army with British backing was a threat to the monastic establishment: a harbinger of the modern world and an alternative powerbase.

  What Bell really wanted was to visit Lhasa, something no British officer had done since Younghusband’s mission. When he retired in 1918 to focus on his Tibetan studies, it seemed he had missed his chance. The Dalai Lama was on a lengthy retreat and the Simla Convention, signed in 1914, seemed to have neutralised British concern in the region. Then the implications of the Russian Revolution became clearer. The Bolsheviks tore up Tsarist treaties, opening the door once again to another British visit. Bell’s replacement as political agent stepped down unexpectedly and Bell, who had remained in the region, was reappointed. Best of all for the Everest expedition, Curzon was made foreign secretary in October 1919 and Bell’s patient and carefully thought-out arguments for a mission to Lhasa were given a sympathetic hearing. Then, while Bell was waiting in the wooded surroundings of Yatung to hear if he had been granted his wish, a representative for the proposed 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition arrived to press the case for the mountaineers.

  Charles Howard-Bury was a wealthy Irish landowner and senior British army officer and consequently had the money and prestige for a successful lobbying campaign. Having served on the Somme and then been captured in the German spring offensive of 1918, Howard-Bury had been free for barely three months when he wrote to Arthur Hinks, secretary of the Everest committee, offering his services – at his own expense. A year later, as Younghusband pushed the issue, he had been approached to take up the challenge of changing minds in India. Things did not start well. When Howard-Bury arrived at Simla in July 1920 to confer with the British Indian authorities, he sensed a great decision was pending and that Everest was a distraction. It was clear also that Charles Bell, preoccupied with his own mission to Lhasa, held the key to Tibet but was unsympathetic. ‘The more I hear of Bell, the less I fear he will help us,’ Howard-Bury reported to Younghusband. ‘They all say he is a most tiresome man to deal with because he is very slow and cautious and does not make any mistakes.’ By the end of July, the India Office in London had formally denied permission, but Younghusband instructed Howard-Bury to visit Bell in Yatung anyway.

  It was the question of weapons that had made the issue so tense. As Howard-Bury understood it, the Tibetans were anxious for the British to sell them more guns for its army. In fact, the issue of weapons was desirable but not critical. Bell understood very well how to get what he wanted from the system, using requests like this as bargaining chips, to be discarded when required. When Howard-Bury joined Bell for lunch,

  he said that he could ask the Tibetan government today and he was quite certain that they would allow the expedition, but that he did not think that it would be advisable at the present time.

  Bell was quite possibly using Howard-Bury to send a message via Younghusband to Curzon, who had publicly supported the Everest project, that if His Majesty’s Government wanted British climbers in Tibet then it should send Bell to Lhasa. In mid October Bell got his permission and on 17 November 1920, a day carefully chosen as auspicious according to Tibetan astrology, he arrived in the holy city, fulfilling an ambition he had worked towards for more than a decade.

  Within a month, the mountaineers had their permission for Everest. The leader of the 1921 reconnaissance would be Howard-Bury rather than the mountaineer Charles Bruce, a more obvious candidate, reward for Howard-Bury’s patient efforts and acknowledgment that there might be a diplomatic angle to the exploration: Bruce was no diplomat. Mallory now entered the scene and the legend of those early Everest expeditions was born. ‘The accomplishment of such a feat,’ Younghusband had told the world in his inaugural address to the Royal Geographical Society,

  will elevate the human spirit. It will give men a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the Earth, that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings.

  In the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history and against a rising modernist tide of alienation and urbanism, his message seemed like an echo from another world.

  *

  Charles Bell remained in Lhasa for a year, long after the footnote of permission to attempt Everest was dealt with and against the expectations of his superiors. In that time he reframed relations between Britain and Tibet, cementing his friendship with the Dalai Lama. Bell would always stress how he inhabited the Tibetan world to advance his agenda, quoting a monastic official as saying:

  When a European is with us Tibetans I feel he is a European and we are Tibetans; but when Lönchen Bell is with us, I feel that we are all Tibetans together.

  That did not mean that Bell went unchallenged. Conservatives associated him with the modernising influence of Tsarong Shap-pe, the head of the army. At the great prayer festival, Monlam Chenmo, during the Tibetan new year in early 1921, Bell saw placards demanding his assassination. Bell’s sly acquisition of Tawang for British India under the terms of the Simla Accord had also annoyed monks from the powerful Drepung monastery who lost an outpost that earned them revenue. As Britain developed a closer relationship with Tibet, it found ways to put money into the monasteries and buy off some of this opposition. The army, and later a new police force, remained targets for discontent. Yet these were the very institutions Bell felt necessary for Tibet to secure its status as a nation independent of China.

  Education was another source of friction. The Indian government, at the request of the Dalai Lama, had experimented with introducing British public school values to Tibet. In 1913, four Tibetan boys, all from powerful families, had been sent to Rugby School and each was trained in practical skills that would prove useful in the process of modernisation at home. One, Khyenrab Kunzang Mondo, studied mine engineering at the pit village of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire, but later as a local governor in western Tibet was notorious for exploiting the local population. Rigzin Dorje Ringa
ng stayed in Britain the longest, studying electrical engineering, and returned home with sufficient equipment to build a small hydroelectric scheme that brought electric light to the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, the Norbulingka. Ten years later and as a consequence of Bell’s visit, a new approach was taken, this time inside Tibet. A teacher called Frank Ludlow from the Indian Education Service arrived at the trade agency in Gyantse to open a small English school.

  Ludlow was a sensitive and capable man, a trained naturalist who studied under the father of the plant hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward at Cambridge. He would spend his life on the frontier, mixing diplomatic service, natural history and exploration. He arrived in Gyantse in August 1923 full of optimism, but it took patient persuasion to attract sufficient pupils to such a foreign innovation; the school finally opened that December with thirteen boys, a number that would eventually double. One introduction that did catch on was football. Ludlow had brought a few balls with him from India but the boys soon wore them out and he had to send for more. He also bought them a football strip in the monastic colours of yellow and maroon, since the long Tibetan coat, or chuba, wasn’t practical for running around. Ludlow himself stuck to refereeing, finding that in the high altitude ‘I couldn’t run more than twenty yards without getting hopelessly out of breath.’

  Ludlow’s school would fall victim to a souring in the relationship between British India and Tibet that would stall the progress Charles Bell had made and interrupt access to Everest for several years. As we shall see, the 1924 expedition would be blamed for this break in relations but its true cause ran far deeper. While the deaths of George Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine caught the public’s attention, 1924 was unusually dramatic in other respects. At the start of the year, the Panchen Lama, so often a rival to the Dalai Lama’s authority, fled the Tashilhunpo monastery at Shigatse for exile in China. Then conflict broke out in Lhasa between the modernising faction, associated with the British, and the Lhasa monastic establishment, increasingly resistant to the growth in military capability that the British wanted in order to make Tibet an effective buffer state. And at the heart of this intricate struggle for control was the new British political officer in Sikkim, a man steeped in intelligence work and political manipulation: Frederick Marshman Bailey.