by Ed Douglas
This didn’t go unnoticed. The Anglo-Greek mountaineer and Buddhist Marco Pallis was another exceptional traveller, and his passion for the Himalaya wasn’t confined to its past. He and his companions spent months travelling in Ladakh wearing the chuba, the long sheepskin coat beloved of Tibetan nomads, as a deliberate reversal of the attitude among most British that Western dress maintained a safe distance from the natives. Pallis had climbed near Nako and when he became aware of what Tucci was doing, Pallis wrote to the authorities about it. Tucci rather disingenuously suggested the Indian authorities should have a museum for such antiquities and would keep his collection safe and sound until they did. He wasn’t the only academic to bring Himalayan treasures home with him.
Tucci made two more journeys before the war, this time to central Tibet, the second, in 1939, being the more productive, in which he visited the monastery at Sakya and made a detailed record of everything that would be ruined in the Cultural Revolution. On his first visit, in 1937, he took with him the photographer, anthropologist, writer and mountaineer Fosco Maraini, whose warm character glows like coals from his travel books on the Himalaya and Japan. He liked Tibetans for the way they lived and contemplated writing a book, which he would call Secret Tibet.
The secret will be, not the strange things that it will reveal, but the normal things in it – real people, flesh and blood, love, desire, repentance, pride and cowardice.
The images Maraini brought back from his first Tibet expedition were among the best to emerge from Tibet before the war and stand as an enticing historical record. Maraini had been born in Florence in 1912 to a half-Englishwoman, Cornelia ‘Yoï’ Crosse, joking that his exposure to bad food thanks to her was excellent preparation for expedition life. His father was the sculptor Antonio Maraini, whose career flourished under Mussolini. When he signed the whole family up as fascists, Fosco tore up his party card in front of his father. Tucci, on the other hand, went to Japan as Mussolini’s representative in 1937. Maraini would spend two years in a Japanese concentration camp during the war, along with his wife, the beautiful Sicilian Topazia Alliata, and their three daughters, having refused to support the Republic of Salò, Mussolini’s rump of a fascist state.
After the war, despite Tucci’s support for Mussolini, which cost him his chair at Rome University, he wasted no time in attempting a return to Tibet, in 1946 writing to the government of India’s representative in Lhasa Hugh Richardson to request permission. Tucci could shed allegiances like a snake does its skin. ‘To the vanity, inconsistency and double-dealing of politicians, I have opposed the saints and the heroes, the poets and scientists,’ he wrote. It speaks to Tucci’s charm that he was one of very few Europeans the British welcomed in Tibet. Technically, Britain and Italy were still at war, but Richardson offered circumspect support. The Chinese had recently funded a library in Lhasa, and the British, to keep up, had done likewise. Richardson suggested Tucci send some copies of his latest book to important officials in the city to prepare the ground.
Tucci’s journey took place in 1948, by which time a peace treaty had been signed with Italy and the violence of Partition was over, but the visas for his travelling companions, including Fosco Maraini, were delayed. Tucci went on ahead, taking with him Tenzing Norgay as his factotum. Tucci admired Tenzing’s efficiency and with his fluent Tibetan could discuss anything with the climber, from obscure Tibetan saints to his friend, the new Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Tucci promised Tenzing an introduction. In Lhasa they met the Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who had been detained in 1939 following another German attempt on Nanga Parbat. Having escaped their prisoner-of-war camp at Dehra Dun towards the end of the war, they had crossed into Tibet and to avoid detection reached Lhasa via a bitter winter crossing of the Chang Tang. Harrer, whose first wife Hanna Charlotte was the daughter of geologist Alfred Wegener, was astonished to hear Tucci agreeing with their Tibetan hosts that the world was flat, but Tucci would argue black was white to get what or where he wanted. He visited the three great monasteries of Lhasa – Drepung, Sera and Ganden – and sat with Eric Bailey’s old friend Tsarong Shap-pe, looking through the veteran politician’s personal library. There were long conversations with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, now a teenager taking an active interest in the outside world. Civil war in China and the rise of Mao Zedong were preoccupying Tibet’s cautious and conservative political leadership. It was dawning on them, too slowly and too late, that what the rest of the world knew and thought about Tibet would have implications for the country’s survival as an independent entity. Tucci’s record of Tibet’s treasures came just as they reached the brink of destruction.
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For decades, Western writers – missionaries, explorers and mystics – had said pretty much what they liked about life in Tibet, sometimes without even going there. In the late 1940s, as Mao’s communists fought toward the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949, there was an urgent need to raise public interest in contemporary Tibet, both at home and abroad, to help defend Tibet’s integrity from Mao’s likely ambitions there. Following the lead of his mentor Charles Bell, the Sikkim political officer Basil Gould fostered the notion of an independent Tibet by subsidising the only newspaper yet published in Tibetan, the Melong or Mirror, edited not at Lhasa but in neighbouring Sikkim by a Tibetan-speaking Christian called Gergan ‘Khunu’ Tharchin. (He was nicknamed ‘Khunu’ after the corner of Spiti he was born in. A convert of Moravian missionaries, Tharchin was a teacher in the early part of his career, developing connections that permeated the Himalaya.) Foreign coverage was more difficult, not least because communists in China were trying to get their line across as well. The British resident in Lhasa Hugh Richardson had been posted during the war to Chongqing as liaison officer with Chiang Kai-shek’s national government, where China’s communists also had a liaison officer, Zhou Enlai. Richardson would have been aware of Enlai’s ability to charm foreign correspondents into parroting the party line. One of these was the British journalist Stuart Gelder, a leftist who had been a minor figure in the Bloomsbury group and whose pro-communist sympathies would in 1962 get him access to Tibet, just as the process of collectivisation was at its height. In Chongqing Richardson had recruited an enterprising Canadian-born journalist called Archibald Trojan Steele to Tibet’s cause. Steele had scooped the world with his reporting on the Nanjing Massacre in 1938. Richardson arranged for him to travel to Lhasa to interview the young Dalai Lama in 1944 for the Chicago Daily News, an assignment Archie Steele regarded forever after as the most exciting of his long career. Even so, when Steele asked an official why there were no newspapers in Lhasa, he was told: ‘nothing ever happens in this country’. By the end of the decade, that attitude had given way to near desperate urgency, as Mao’s intentions for Tibet became clearer.
The prospect of China’s inevitable invasion gripped the handful of Europeans living in Tibet. Peter Aufschnaiter wrote to his old friend the Munich climber Paul Bauer that
my fate hangs once more in the balance, after I had begun to settle very strongly for staying here forever, because somehow I prefer life here to anywhere else. A fixed job in Europe or any other part of the world no longer interests me in the least. This half-wild country is just right, and as I wrote to you before, no European willingly leaves it. How terrible that is, you can picture for yourself, because the Tibetans do not know starvation and live better than their neighbours.
Although Aufschnaiter had arrived in Tibet with Heinrich Harrer, they were different sorts of men. He had mastered Tibetan before he left his prison camp at Dehra Dun, something Harrer relied on heavily as they travelled to Lhasa. Later, Harrer wrote his bestseller Seven Years in Tibet and achieved a large measure of fame. Aufschnaiter preferred to live simply and continue his work in the Himalaya. As an agricultural scientist, he was in a good position to do so, working on seed stocks and Tibet’s first irrigation project, although he never underestimated the knowledge and resilience o
f the people he worked for. His skills were unusually diverse: he produced a town plan of Lhasa and worked on the electricity project that General Electric wanted to build. He was also a deeply astute observer of Tibetan culture, calibrating the difference between Lhasa’s Buddhism and the more culturally fluid version that permeated the Himalaya. Giuseppe Tucci for one was impressed by Aufschnaiter’s discoveries of early Buddhist art. His guiding inspiration was the eleventh-century teacher and poet Milarepa, another lover of nature and solitude.
In October 1950, little more than a year after declaring the People’s Republic of China, Mao sent troops into Tibet. Aufschnaiter clung on as long as he could. He spent the next year in southern Tibet, mapping the Kyirong region close to the immense peak of Shisha Pangma and trekking up the East Rongbuk glacier to the slopes of Everest. Eventually, the proximity of the Chinese became too perilous. Communist officials sent word he would be welcome to stay and continue his development work but, sensing what was to come, Aufschnaiter preferred to leave: he wanted the life of a Tibetan estate owner, not an apparatchik with propaganda value. In January 1952, he joined a Kyirong friend and landowner making a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in India, descending the Trisuli valley towards Kathmandu.
At this precise moment one of Nepal’s more famous agitators was going in the opposite direction, fleeing up valley towards Tibet, although so far as we know the two men never actually encountered one another. Kunwar Inderjit ‘K I’ Singh was a doctor and Nepali Congress fighter who made his name (‘Robin Hood of the Himalaya’) doling out grants of land he’d confiscated in the western terai. In February 1951, as Tribhuvan returned from asylum in India at the head of the first post-Rana government, Singh had refused to lay down his arms, and the new cabinet summoned the Indian army to arrest him. It was not a propitious start to Tribhuvan’s reign and some ordinary Nepalis questioned what kind of change had just occurred. This was compounded when Tribhuvan had the task of appointing a replacement for Mohan Shamsher as prime minister later that year in November. He ignored the popular choice, B P Koirala, preferring instead B P’s older half-brother Matrika Prasad ‘M P’ Koirala, a conservative figure whom the Indians trusted more. In early 1952, as Aufschnaiter was preparing to leave Tibet, a radical Nepali Congress militia called the Raksha Dal, fed up with Nepal’s direction of travel, staged a revolt in Kathmandu. Hot-headed activists drove around Kathmandu announcing the dictatorship of the proletariat and sprang K I Singh from jail. Singh was invited to lead this coup attempt but promptly declined and set off instead for the People’s Republic of China, now just across the Tibetan border, destroying the bridge at Shabru so no pursuing Indians could nab him again.
In this world of rapid change, the future suddenly seemed up for grabs. At Trisuli Bazar, Aufschnaiter heard talk among local Newars about re-establishing their former kingdom, turning back the clock to the days of the Malla kings. Minorities in Nepal could already see how Brahmin hill-men, the pahadis, were getting a grip on power. For two centuries, the Shahs and then the Ranas had treated the terai like a colony; it looked like the new government might do the same. When Aufschnaiter got to Kathmandu he stayed for a few days in a grimy lodge in the district of Asan Tol, right in the heart of the city, a place used by Kyirong people passing through. Almost immediately he was interrogated by Indian soldiers, who grilled him for information about Chinese troop deployments. Having brokered the change of government the year before, India was exerting immense influence in Nepal. The British ambassador at the time noted how often Tribhuvan was in India, which was denting his popularity, and reported that the Indian ambassador to Nepal had direct lines to both Tribhuvan and B P Koirala.
India’s great anxiety was security. In late 1950, Nehru made a speech to the Indian Parliament pointing out that ‘we have had from immemorial times a magnificent frontier, that is to say the Himalayas.’ Part of that ‘magnificent frontier’ now lay in theoretically independent states. Nehru’s government had already signed a treaty with Bhutan, effectively continuing colonial India’s control of Bhutan’s foreign policy under the terms of the Treaty of Punakha, signed with the British in 1910. Now he warned that
as much as we appreciate the independence of Nepal, we cannot risk our own security by anything going wrong in Nepal which either permits that barrier to be crossed or otherwise weakens our frontier.
At the heart of Nehru’s concerns was uncertainty about what China would do. As far as India was concerned, the Himalayan frontier had been settled during the colonial era, including the McMahon Line separating north-east India from Tibet, signed off at the Simla Convention in 1914. China had refused to recognise these borders and India was anxious what Mao would do when the People’s Liberation Army reached them. To that end, the Indian army sent small detachments of troops with radios to remote points within Nepal to monitor the border. (The young journalist James – later Jan – Morris, would later use one of these radio posts, located at Namche Bazar in the Everest region, to report that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had reached the summit.) Concern about China may also explain why India was so reluctant to allow Peter Aufschnaiter to remain in Nepal, despite the patronage of his friend Kaiser Shamsher Rana and the fact he was needed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, then setting up shop in Kathmandu. Instead, Aufschnaiter wound up in Delhi, drawing maps of Tibet. Nepal had little choice in any of this and Nepali politicians grew increasingly resentful at Delhi’s taking them for granted.
Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra, later India’s high commissioner in London, began his diplomatic career in Nepal at this time, working on aid projects in the terai. He noted the cynical way M P Koirala’s party workers manipulated Indian aid efforts for political ends, telling local people that the aid was either American, or else part of an Indian plot to alienate the terai from Nepal: ‘simple, credulous folk, who had nothing but goodwill for India, were being misled by a government that Nehru had gone out of his way to help.’ In the summer of 1954, a delegation of Indian politicians on a goodwill mission was met at Kathmandu’s airfield by anti-Indian protestors throwing stones. Nehru was furious and wrote an aggrieved letter to M P Koirala:
We go all out to help the Nepal government, financially and otherwise, and yet our people are subjected to insults there and intrigues against India continue.
Koirala, who had by then split from Nepali Congress to form his own party, blamed the Rana family for the trouble. Indian diplomats weren’t fooled. Nehru had found M P Koirala a big disappointment, someone who asked for advice and then ignored it, while encouraging his party workers to stir up anti-Indian sentiment.
For their part, Nepali politicians were in a quandary. Nepal’s isolation had ended and the modern world was crashing in. The country had been administered as a fiefdom under the Ranas, without any of the institutions a democracy needed. Nepal’s leaders had to fill that gap while maintaining whatever sense of national identity the Rana dynasty had fostered. They were constantly promising things they didn’t know how to deliver and were struggling with each other for ascendancy, with parties fracturing accordingly. Needing technical help for everything from healthcare to schools to policing, they also needed some kind of counterweight against their enormous neighbour to the south, before it overwhelmed them.
Once again, the obvious candidate was America. Harry Truman used American aid as a way to turn the world’s poor away from communism, and the State Department saw strategic interest in the Himalaya. The Delhi embassy’s chargé d’affaires George Merrell had argued as early as 1947 that Tibet might make a handy rocket-launching pad against the Soviets. Tribhuvan had signed an agreement for technical assistance with the US while he was still in exile in Delhi but he died suddenly in 1955, aged only forty-eight, while receiving medical treatment in Switzerland, the family having a history of weak hearts. It was his autocratic son Mahendra who fully realised the potential. Far less sympathetic to democratic experiments, Mahendra saw opportunity in playing the aid budgets of competing powers against
each other. His greatest coup was a no-strings grant from China of $126 million, at a time when Mao was proving the miracle of communism by handing over the people’s wealth. Along with the money coming from America, Nepal literally had more cash than it was able to spend. In 1959, Mahendra would quash Nepal’s first democratically elected government when it tried to institute a taxation system that included Nepal’s elite families: ‘Why,’ the king wondered, ‘should we pay taxes when we can always get more money from the Americans?’
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Throughout these long and tortuous political upheavals, Nepal’s competing factions had all courted foreign support. While getting visas was still difficult, for those with the right credentials – at first diplomats and scientists, then mountaineers and more general tourists – access to its ‘sequestered kingdom’, so long denied, was suddenly possible. At George Merrell’s suggestion, the ornithologist Sidney Dillon Ripley, who later ran the Smithsonian to great effect, got permission for expeditions in the pre-monsoon of 1947 and the post-monsoon of 1948 to start cataloguing Nepal’s birds. Ripley had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the CIA, during the war and while stationed in Asia had cultivated a relationship with the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. The joke about Ripley was that while spies often used science as a cover, he used intelligence work to continue his birdwatching. Even if his mission was innocent, there was no shortage of spies at work in the Himalaya. The Smithsonian, the national museum and archive of the USA, later acknowledged that one of its researchers had done work on the side for the CIA interviewing Tibetan refugees. The Welsh mountaineer Sydney Wignall, planning an expedition to far western Nepal in 1955, recounted decades later how he had been approached by a member of Indian intelligence (‘Call me Singh’) to spy on Chinese troop deployments in the old strategic border town of Taklakot and survived an uncomfortable return journey in winter across the Himalaya after they were caught and imprisoned.