Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  The impact of these killings on Indian public opinion was immense; crowds of protestors demanded that the defence minister Krishna Menon, a pro-China influence, should resign. Nehru ordered that the Indian army take over responsibility for the border, authorising outposts north of the McMahon Line, bullishly staking India’s claim without committing the forces necessary to discourage an attack. The Chinese would cleverly spin this ‘forward policy’, with its echoes of Curzon and the British, into a hostile act: previously, they argued, colonial-era borders in Ladakh to the west and Tawang in the east had robbed China of its possessions; now China simply wanted what already belonged to her.

  Throughout the summer of 1962, skirmishes and encounters raised the temperature but until the last moment Indian strategists discounted a full-blown conflict. Even so, on 20 October 1962, with negotiations stalled and using the Cuban missile crisis as cover, the PLA attacked on two fronts, east and west: Indian positions north of the disputed town of Tawang were overrun and the inhabitants evacuated. The Indian army dug in around the pass of Se La. At the other end of the Himalaya, Chinese troops drove out those Indian troops still in the Aksai Chin and swept into eastern Ladakh, surrounding army posts that were insufficiently manned or supported to resist. After four days, China had secured its objectives in what appeared to British observers to be a limited border skirmish. There was no declaration of war and negotiations for a settlement were soon underway as Zhou Enlai wrote to Nehru offering terms.

  President Kennedy was alive to the dangers of China’s invasion, wondering aloud ‘which crisis [the Indian or the Cuban] would be the more significant in the long run’. In the immediate aftermath, however, the existential threat to the United States meant it was left to Kenneth Galbraith, American ambassador in Delhi, and the National Security Council staffer Robert Komer to develop US policy in regard to the Sino-Indian war. When fighting resumed, on Nehru’s birthday, with an Indian attack on Chinese positions at Walong in eastern Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese retaliated with an assault on the Indians at Se La and in Ladakh at Chushul, where huge superiority in numbers resulted in heavy Indian losses. Galbraith was amazed the following day when news of these reversals reached a panicked Delhi, ‘the first time I have ever witnessed the disintegration of public morale’. Nehru appealed to the Americans for a dozen squadrons of jet fighters to drive back what was looking for a moment like a full-scale Chinese invasion, one that threatened ‘not merely the survival of India, but the survival of free and independent governments in the whole of the sub-continent’. Despite Nehru’s panic, China soon called a halt, happy with consolidating its position in the Aksai Chin and thus securing its new road. The Indian defence minister Krishna Menon quit and the Indian military began a period of rapid modernisation. The Americans tried to use the military aid they were now providing to India as leverage, hoping to force India into a resolution of the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. Delhi resented this, but soon afterwards China signed a deal with Pakistan recognising their mutual border, which undermined the Americans’ strategy. This brief conflict, which cost a few thousand lives, many of them through the bitter conditions of the Himalaya, traumatised Sino-Indian relations for decades to come.

  Galbraith, ignorant of the famine then unfolding in China, had been an admirer of Mao’s economic reforms. He also considered the Tibetan resistance movement, Chushi Gangdruk, to be little more than ‘dissident and deeply unhygienic tribesmen’; America’s support for them was for Galbraith ‘a particularly insane enterprise’, a view shared by the CIA’s Indian station chief Harry Rositzke. Discovery of American involvement would enrage Nehru and damage relations with India. It certainly annoyed Mao and Zhou, who assumed Nehru knew the CIA was training Tibetans to fight the Chinese. As it was, the supply of arms was insufficient and far below expectations. (The Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup, the link between Tibetan resistance fighters and the CIA, later wrote: ‘Mao was not the only one to cheat the Tibetans. The CIA did, too.’ This was true, but dodged Gyalo Thondup’s own responsibility.) When China invaded India, Galbraith could come clean about the CIA’s support for Tibetan rebels and fall in line with the strategy of the White House and Langley.

  Even by the start of 1960, two years before China attacked India, Tibetan armed resistance to China’s occupation had been in disarray. In the wake of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, the Chinese had cracked down on it with brutal intensity. Chushi Gangdruk’s base at Lokha had been overwhelmed; fighters, including those trained by the CIA, had been killed or else fled, many to Kalimpong and Darjeeling, swelling the region’s reputation as a crossroads for agitators and spies. Many of these men were put to work building roads in Sikkim. In Darjeeling, the leader of Chushi Gangdruk, Gonbo Tashi, a wealthy trader from the historically important Kham town of Litang, now in western Sichuan, called a meeting of his senior cohorts to discuss setting up a new base. Who it was that chose Mustang, a region in northern Nepal, as its location is disputed. Some historians believe it was the CIA’s idea; they could lean on King Mahendra to turn a blind eye. Given the Americans were more interested in intelligence on China than liberating Tibet, Mustang had the advantage to the CIA of being within striking distance of the road the Chinese had built across southern Tibet, now designated the G219. If that was the case, it proved a shrewd choice; the following year, Chushi Gangdruk fighters captured highly sensitive information after a raid on this road from their Mustang base revealing plans for new troop deployments in Tibet as well as the rift in Sino-Soviet relations. For Tibetan fighters, although Mustang was inconveniently distant from Lhasa, it had advantages for them, too. The local Mustangis, essentially ethnic Tibetans, were supportive. Lhamo Tsering, deputy to the Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup and one of those the CIA had trained abroad, was put in charge of organising a base there. Gonbo Tashi, meanwhile, got on with recruitment and it didn’t take Delhi long to figure out why hundreds of Tibetan road-workers in Sikkim were suddenly quitting their jobs. Yet even before this new Tibetan force arrived, tiny Mustang was the cause of an international incident that would embroil Nepal’s young democracy.

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  The threats facing Nepal’s new prime minister B P Koirala and his elected government were mostly domestic: principally, the king’s faction and communist opponents. Yet China also worried him. Although he abstained from the vote at the United Nations in the autumn of 1959 that censured Beijing for its actions in Tibet, Koirala was instinctively pro-India and saw Nepal’s future as closer to its southern neighbour. India, he said, should support Nepal’s democratic experiment lest it wake up one day and find China in its backyard; Beijing was already leaning on Koirala to allow them to extend Tibet’s road network over the border to Kathmandu. The same Chinese maps worrying Delhi with their implied claim to large chunks of the Himalaya had alarmed the Nepali government as well. Among these were the entire Everest massif and the district of Khumbu, in which the Nepali portion of Everest is located. This affront to national dignity prompted demonstrations in Kathmandu, where many believed the whole peak, not just the south side, was Nepal’s. A mountain no one in the capital had heard of a century earlier was now a piece on Asia’s strategic chessboard.

  By 1960, China understood the political value of Everest very well, thanks in large part to mountaineers from the Soviet Union. Climbing had been an elite pastime in Tsarist Russia and after the Revolution in 1917 mountaineers had needed to work hard to create a proletarian framework strong enough to convince the Soviet authorities. During the 1920s, alpinism became a kind of socialist ideal, a team without individuals prepared to face anything to succeed. After the Second World War, as competitive sport became a cultural front in the Cold War, climbing was made more conventionally competitive, garnering not only the state’s permission but its funds. Despite this conformity, Russian mountaineers weren’t trusted to travel abroad and remained isolated within the mountains of the Soviet Union.

  That began to change in 1953 with the death of Stal
in and the ascent of Everest. At first, the Soviet Union ignored the success of Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but ordinary Russians were interested and journalists had eventually to find an acceptable line on this imperialist success. In 1954, the sports journalist Evgeny Simonov solved the problem by showering praise on the Sherpas: ‘Innocent and honest, enduring and fulfilling their deed to the last! Such are these sons of the mountains.’ Tenzing had shown ‘what new powers are maturing among the people of rising Asia’. Tenzing’s role allowed Simonov to stress a timely political message, of how the Soviet Union was helping Asia throw off the shackles of colonialism. Despite the word ‘Everest’ having been in common usage throughout the 1930s, Russian writers began using the indigenous ‘Chomolungma’, the name preferred by China in its Sinicised form ‘Qomolangma’. Khrushchev had authorised a colossal aid effort to China, building industrial and military capacity, and sport was part of the relationship.

  In 1955, Russian climbers introduced the Chinese to mountaineering on Soviet turf, first in the Caucasus and then at high altitude in the Pamirs of Central Asia. A year later the two countries organised an expedition to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, climbing Muztagh Ata and Kongur Tiube, both over seven and a half thousand metres. The encounter between these two groups is instructive. In theory, they had the same political ideology but it was clear to the Russians that they were at different stages of their journey. ‘When I looked at them more closely,’ one of the Soviet climbers recalled, almost forty years later,

  I understood that our brothers were not only no mountaineers, but no sportsmen at all. The party had directed them to this work front, strength and mountain experience had been replaced by political conviction and literacy by devotion to the party.

  In May 1958, the All-Chinese Committee of Physical Culture and Sport extended an official invitation to Soviet alpinists to join them in an attempt on the north ridge of Everest, the same route taken by George Mallory and all the other British mountaineers before the war. At a meeting in Beijing it was agreed to try in the pre-monsoon season of the following year. The Russians, cautious about what they might find, suggested a reconnaissance that autumn. The Chinese promised to think about it and preparations got underway. With such a prize on offer, both governments threw considerable resources behind the project. Russian engineers began developing oxygen equipment and the People’s Liberation Army started work on an unpaved road so trucks could bring supplies to base camp. In early October Beijing told the Russians that the reconnaissance was on.

  On 23 October, Evgeny Beletsky, who had become famous climbing in the Pamirs before the war, and two colleagues, Lev Filimonov and Anatoly Kovyrkov, arrived in Lhasa, where unrest was building. The Russians reported meeting the deputy chair of China’s Preparatory Committee of the Autonomous Region of Tibet, Zhang Guohua, who told them: ‘The people here do not understand us.’ They were warned of clashes between Chinese and Tibetans and instructed not to tell anyone they met what they were doing there. Even the expedition’s Tibetan porters were hand picked from the communist youth league. The fear something might happen to their Russian guests was palpable. A very secret Everest team – three Russians, ten Chinese climbers, three meteorologists, four topographers, four radio operators and the ten porters – set off for Shigatse with a substantial military escort armed with mortars and grenades. The Chinese told the Russians that the Tibetans particularly feared the mortars since a soul leaving a body torn to pieces would not find peace.

  At Shigatse they switched to pack animals, since the promised road was still under construction. Frustrated at the slow pace and with winter approaching, Beletsky raced ahead of the main column, to reach Rongbuk monastery at the foot of the mountain, where seventy monks were still in residence, on the brink of China’s brutal suppression of monastic life. In just twelve days, Beletsky’s small team was able to explore both approaches to the North Col; having photographed the key sections to the North Col himself, Beletsky began to descend and almost immediately discovered the body of one of the seven Sherpa and Tibetan porters who had died in 1922. Like many of the Russians, Beletsky didn’t think much of using large numbers of porters in the mountains and didn’t like the vast expedition the Chinese were proposing. Even so, as they left Rongbuk optimism was high about the prospects of the full attempt the following spring.

  After a winter training camp, the Russian Everest team gathered in March at a leaving party in Moscow only to see their leader Kirill Kuzmin arrive, head bent, his eyes filled with tears. The Chinese had cancelled. No explanation was given and only later did the rest of the expedition learn of the Lhasa Uprising and the chaos in Tibet. China would extend another invitation to the Soviet climbers for the spring of 1960 but by then relations between Mao and Khrushchev were souring. Compounding the blow, that spring, the Chinese reported they had climbed Everest on their own.

  According to their account, they struggled for hours to overcome the vertical cliff of the Second Step, the climber Qu Yinhua even taking off his boots and socks to try, all to no avail.

  What was to be done? Turn back like the British climbers had done before? No! Certainly not! The whole Chinese people and the Party were watching us. The moment we thought of the big send-off we got at the Base Camp with the beating gongs and drums and loud cheers, the solemn pledge we had taken before we started out, and the national flag and the plaster bust of Chairman Mao which we took along, we felt all powerful again.

  Qu, still barefoot, stood on the shoulders of his companion Liu Lianman, banged in a piton and hauled himself up, pulling his three companions after him. Liu, now exhausted, remained behind while Qu continued on with Wang Fuzhou and a Tibetan called Gonbu leading the way into the gathering dark. It would take another eleven hours to reach the summit, at 4.20 a.m. on 25 May. There were no photographs – it was still dark – and the Maoist rhetoric, praising ‘the unrivalled superiority of the socialist system of our country’ (as opposed to that of the Soviet Union), undermined the plausibility of official accounts; their former Russian climbing partners wouldn’t believe it. The frostbite was real enough, though: Qu lost all his toes and six of his fingers. He received a hero’s welcome in Beijing. Thirty years later, when the former Soviet climber Evgeny Gippenreiter met Gonbu, by then a sport official in the Tibet Autonomous Region, any lingering scepticism was gone.

  In March 1960, as Chinese and Tibetan climbers were beginning their climb on Everest, B P Koirala travelled to Beijing for talks about the border and China’s claim on what the Nepalis regarded as their territory. The Chinese were reasonably sympathetic. Both sides agreed they would not allow troops within twenty kilometres of the border and a boundary agreement was signed that was mutually acceptable. Mao had not shown much concern about where the border ran, except when it came to Everest. Mao wanted the summit to be common ground, ‘a friendship summit’, but Koirala demurred, claiming the whole mountain for Nepal. Mao pointed out that Nepal didn’t even have a name for Everest. In fact, a Nepali name did exist: Sagarmatha, meaning ‘one whose brow touches the sky’. The name had been offered to the world in 1939 by the historian Baburam Acharya, who wrote an article for the Nepali paper Sharada explaining that he had consulted various locals and porters. That story was a fig leaf; Sagarmatha is a deeply Sanskrit term and one coined to annoy the Ranas, which it did, as being anti-British. Koirala struggled to recall the name ‘Sagarmatha’, so pointed out to Mao that the Chinese didn’t have a name either, since ‘Chomolungma’ was Tibetan. Mao said: ‘Tibet is China.’

  In the end, Mao and Koirala agreed to split the mountain down the middle, although Koirala kept this news to himself when he returned to Kathmandu, knowing it would be unpopular. Only when Zhou Enlai returned the visit a few weeks later did the agreement to split Everest become clear. Soon after Zhou’s visit came the news that Chinese climbers had reached the summit, infuriating Koirala: it was clear that even before negotiations were complete China had pressed ahead. In a news briefing, Koirala tried to reve
rse his position and claim the whole mountain for Nepal but it was too late. The new reality – that China could and would do as it pleased – was unanswerable, stoking fears of Chinese hegemony.

  Then, a few weeks later at the end of June, the Indian military radio post in Mustang, part of the network of such stations that Nehru had demanded from Nepal after independence, sent a message from the local raja that a large group of Chinese troops was gathering across the border. China’s ambassador in Delhi told the Nepali military they were on the hunt for Tibetan rebels. The Nepali officer attached to the Indian radio post sent an unarmed patrol, out of uniform, to assess the situation; a soldier was shot dead by Chinese troops and Kathmandu erupted in nationalistic anger.