A Mountain in Tibet Read online

  Charles Allen is the author of a number of bestselling books about India and the colonial experience elsewhere, including Soldier Sahibs, God’s Terrorists, A Mountain in Tibet and Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. However, in recent years his researches have taken him ever deeper into the early history of the sub-continent; in particular, India’s neglected history as the fountainhead of Buddhism. A traveller, historian and master storyteller, he is one of the great chroniclers of India.

  Also by Charles Allen

  Plain Tales from the Raj

  Tales from the Dark Continent

  Tales from the South China Seas

  Raj Scrapbook

  The Savage Wars of Peace

  Thunder and Lightning

  Lives of the Indian Princes

  A Soldier of the Company

  A Glimpse of the Burning Plain

  Kipling’s Kingdom

  The Search for Shangri-La

  The Buddha and the Sahibs

  Soldier Sahibs

  Duel in the Snows

  God’s Terrorists

  Kipling Sahib

  The Buddha and Dr Führer

  Ashoka

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978 1 4055 2497 1

  Copyright © 1982 by Charles Allen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Also by Charles Allen

  Copyright

  Preface

  Prologue: Death of a Bold and Most Ambitious

  Explorer

  1

  The Fountainhead of Asia

  2

  ‘Here Christians are said to live’: the Jesuit Explorers of Tibet

  3

  ‘A Mighty Maze without a Plan’: Hyder Jung Hearsey and the Sources of the Ganga

  4

  ‘A Tour to Eastern Tatary’: the British Discovery of Lake Manasarovar

  5

  Up the ‘Burrumpooter’: the Openion of the Upper Assam Valley

  6

  ‘The Queerest, Coolest Fish at Rugby’: Edmund Smyth and the Pundits

  7

  The ‘Missing Link’: the Exploration of the Tsangpo Gorge

  8

  The Monk and the Gentleman-Traveller: Ekai Kawaguchi and Henry Savage Landor

  9

  Sven Hedin: Hero and Martyr

  10

  Sven Hedin: Conqueror and Nazi

  Glossary

  Notes and Sources

  Index

  PREFACE

  When I was four my father, Geoffrey St G. T. Allen, was appointed Assistant Political Officer on the Balipara Frontier Tract in Assam. For several years we lived in the APO’S bungalow at Sadiya, on the banks of the Brahmaputra river and under the shadow of the Eastern Himalayas. Every morning there were visitors – exotic even to a child’s eye – who gathered in the compound, squatting on their hunkers and smoking as they waited for the sahib to appear on the verandah. They were tribesmen from the hills, mostly Abor and Mishmi warriors, sturdy, wild-looking men in rudimentary loin cloths, with swords strapped across their shoulders. In the summer months their numbers were swelled by Tibetans, sweating, awkward giants with pigtails and flashing teeth who wore their thick, yak-hair coats rolled down to the waist to reveal pale, butter-coated skin. They had crossed the Himalayan barrier, bringing turquoise, amber and musk to trade in the plains.

  Later I came to England and from my grandmother heard stories about her father, Colonel St G. C. Gore, Surveyor-General of India from 1899 to 1904, who in his time had spent months and even years on lonely surveys in the Himalayas. He had known Everest, Godwin-Austen and General Walker as well as Sven Hedin and the Pundit explorers, Nain Singh and Kishen Singh Rawat.

  Later still I met Professor (and Colonel) Kenneth Mason, then almost ninety and probably the last of the players of the Great Game. He told me how once in his youth he had outsmarted a Russian adversary in the high Pamirs; the two men had swapped toasts all night and in the morning, while the Russian lay in a stupor in his tent, Mason had exchanged his own useless ponies for the other man’s yaks and made off with them. Besides being a distinguished explorer and geographer, Kenneth Mason was also a keen historian. It was from him that I first heard the outline of the story that is told here – the astonishing geographical properties of South-Western Tibet that are celebrated in Hindu and Buddhist sacred literature; the Indian surveyor-spies called the Pundits who explored it in disguise; and the controversy surrounding Sven Hedin’s claims that was all the talk when Mason first came out to join the Survey of India in 1909.

  I owe his memory a debt of gratitude for setting me on this particular journey – as I do my family and many others who helped me to complete this book. Among them I would like to thank especially Mrs Charmian Longstaff, who most kindly searched through her late husband’s papers for me and found a crucial letter; Lord Perth, who helped me to find out more about his kinsman, Robert Drummond, and supplied the family photograph of the Drummond brothers taken in 1858; Sir Martin Lindsay, Bt, for allowing me to quote extensively from his father’s letter written during the Abor Campaign of 1911–12; John Hearsey, who led me through the branches of his family tree and most kindly allowed me to borrow – and quote from – the manuscript Journal of his much maligned ancestor, Hyder Jung Hearsey; Lord Kilmorey and other members of the Needham family for their help in tracing the antecedents of Jack Needham; G. E. D. Walker (another distinguished Political Officer from the Assam Frontier) for his help and advice on the Assam chapters; Professor Adolf Gansser for his most valuable observations on the geology of the Kailas-Manasarovar region; Mrs Ken Saker for allowing me to see the film and photographs of that same area taken by her late husband in 1942; Michael Mason for his guidance on tantric philosophy; Hanna Yates for her German translations, Matthew Reisz for his Latin, Françoise Reisz and Alice Rockwell for their typing.

  I am also greatly indebted to the Director and Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society for permission to quote from a number of unpublished letters in the Society’s archives and from the Geographical Journal. I am particularly grateful to the Society’s Archivist, Mrs Christine Kelly, for her help and advice and to the Librarian, G. S. Dugdale, and staff. I am similarly indebted to the Director of the Sven Hedin Foundation, Stockholm, for allowing me to quote from unpublished letters in the Foundation’s archives and to publish a number of Sven Hedin’s drawings and photographs, and to Peter Thunberg for his kindness. My thanks, too, to the following institutions: the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, the India Office Library and Records, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Army Museum, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the US Geological Survey and the Curator and staff of the Leeds Museum (who tracked down for me the stuffed Tibetan yak presented to the museum by Edmund Smyth in 1863).

  Now to India and to the persons and institutions who assisted my research in the Garhwal Himalaya: in particular, I would like to thank Colonel J. A. F. Dalai (formerly Surveyor-General) and Mrs Nergis Dalal; the Surveyor-General, Survey of India; the Director, National Archive of India; Indra Singh Rawat (a descendant of Kishen Singh), Colonel Ranjit Singh Rawat (Nain Singh’s grandson) and other members of that distinguished family; Kira Singh Fonia for his knowledgeable assistance on the culture of Garhwal and the Bhotias and his nephew Yashu Pal fo
r guiding me through several Bhotia villages, and Richard Cooke, who came with me to the traditional source of the Ganga. My thanks, too, to Sally Thompson, the Telegraph Magazine, the Indian Tourist Board, Mountain Travel India and the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam for making my travels possible – and to Air India, that most courteous and dependable of airlines.

  A final expression of thanks to my editor, Faith Evans, whose patience and encouragement enabled me to complete this book.

  PROLOGUE

  Death of a Bold and Most

  Ambitious Explorer

  On 26 November 1952 Sven Anders Hedin died in Stockholm. Once honoured as the man who had done more, single-handed, than any other to colour the blank spaces of the map of the world, the eighty-seven-year-old Swedish explorer ended his days friendless and neglected. Among the newspapers that noted his death was The Times. It recalled how Dr Hedin had supported Kaiser Wilhelm II in the First World War and Adolf Hitler in the Second (despite being, as the writer put it, ‘one-sixteenth non-Aryan’). As to his achievements, it recalled that Hedin was apt to dismiss the geographical fruits of all discoveries other than his own.

  But these criticisms were mild by comparison with the obituary notice that was published three months later in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. For his contributions to geography and exploration the Society had awarded Hedin its Founder’s Medal in 1898 and its Victoria Medal in 1903. Half a century later it took a rather different view. The writer of the notice was a Member of Council of the RGS, Sir Clement Skrine, one time HM Consul General at Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan (now Sinkiang). ‘Dr Sven Hedin was a bold and most ambitious explorer,’ wrote Skrine:

  Once he had made up his mind to attain a particular object, no consideration of other people’s feelings, convenience or even safety was ever allowed to deflect him. In his own words, the adventure and the ‘conquest’ of an unknown country, and the struggle against the impossible, all had a fascination which drew him with an irresistible force. But to him exploration in the field was only half the battle; its results had to be recorded for all time to the glory of Sweden and Dr Sven Hedin. By temperament Hedin was a Nazi, to whom exploration was a Kampf, a struggle not only against the forces of nature but also on paper, against rival explorers. It is not surprising that he espoused in turn the causes of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler.

  In the 128 years of the history of the Royal Geographical Society no more bitter appraisal of an individual had ever appeared in the pages of its Journal.

  It was not simply Hedin’s manners or his politics that Skrine attacked. What British geography could not forgive, even after nearly half a century, were his claims; in particular, the discoveries so triumphantly revealed by the returned explorer at the Queen’s Hall on the evening of 8 February 1909 – and so rapturously acclaimed by his audience. They marked an end to a century of exploration and dispute – or so Hedin declared – for he had brought back from the wastelands of Tibet an answer to ‘the most important and magnificent geographical problem still left to solve on earth’. He offered nothing less than the final solution to a geographical mystery that had captured and held men’s imaginations ever since the first Aryans penetrated the great Himalayan mountain barrier some three thousand years ago.

  This mystery was centred on the belief shared by a large slice of humanity that somewhere between China and India there stood a sacred mountain, an Asian Olympus of cosmic proportions. This mountain was said to be the navel of the earth and the axis of the universe, and from its summit flowed a mighty river that fell into a lake and then divided to form four of the great rivers of Asia. It was the holiest of all mountains, revered by many millions of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains as the home of their gods. In metaphysical form it was called Meru or Tisé; in its earthly manifestation it was Kailas, the crystal, or Kang Rinpoche, jewel of snows, an isolated snow-peak on the Tibetan plateau.

  Not a whisper of this belief, so ancient and powerful in Asia, reached the West before the seventeenth century. Even in our own day the legend of the holy mountain and its attendant waters is hardly known outside Asia, partly as a result of the dominance of the Western cultural viewpoint which until recent years tended to disparage all things oriental, partly because of the sheer size and inaccessibility of the area in question. Kailas, its lakes and all the sources of the major rivers of South Asia lie behind the greatest natural barriers on earth; by the Himalayan ranges to the south and west and the deserts of Takla Makan and the Gobi to the north and east. Even its outermost ring of defences appeared, in the view of a nineteenth-century surveyor, as ‘a mighty maze without a plan’.

  Forced to choose between highly improbable oriental beliefs and the solid cartographical reasoning of Ptolemy, European cartographers preferred to stay with Ptolemy until well into the eighteenth century. As late as 1800 Sir James Rennell, who has been described as the father of modern Indian geography and is generally acclaimed as the first man to put the Himalayas on the map, was still toeing the classical line when it came to setting down the supposed source of the river Sutlej on his charts.

  Not until British power had actually begun to lap up against the walls of the Himalayan barrier in the first decade of the nineteenth century was there any serious attempt made to examine the mysteries that were said to lie beyond. In 1808 two British officers and an Anglo-Indian soldier of fortune entered the Nepalese-held mountain country of Garhwal to explore the head-waters of India’s most sacred river, the Ganga. A century later, when Sven Hedin returned from the last of his great journeys through Central Asia in 1908, the process of discovery was all but complete. The last of the great white patches on the map of Tibet had been filled in – and the legend of Mount Kailas and the sources of the great rivers of Asia was shown to have its basis in solid geographical fact.

  This century of Tibetan exploration coincided with Britain’s rise as an imperial power, and it was largely through the window of British India that the world looked into Tibet. The Victorian appetite for expansion in the name of trade had given rise to that tough and enterprising breed, the Victorian traveller, to whom Tibet’s historic inaccessibility proved an obvious and tantalizing lure. After Timbuctoo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tibet’s holy city of Lhasa became one of the most sought after of far-off places, the Blue Riband of the exploring world. No less enticing were the sources of the four greatest rivers of India – the Indus, Sutlej, Ganga and Brahmaputra – whose upper courses all lay hidden behind the ramparts of the Himalayas.

  Few of these trans-Himalayan travellers, doughty and courageous though they were, made a name for themselves. Apart from Sven Hedin there were no giants of Central Asian exploration to rival the Victorian and Edwardian public heroes of African and polar exploration. The unravelling of the mysteries of Western Tibet, intertwined as they were with the religious beliefs of several cultures, remained elusive to the popular imagination by comparison with, for example, the Nile and its sources in the mid-nineteenth century. Politics also played its part. The East India Company, and its successor, the British Raj, were jealous powers, opposing any attempts, even by such distinguished institutions as the Royal Geographical Society, to open up the Asian interior. Since Tibet offered no prospects for commercial advantage there was nothing to be gained by its annexation – while the Gov ernment of India had every reason to discourage interest, national or individual, in Tibet. That arid, inhospitable, tableland served its purpose as – in Lord Curzon’s favourite phrase – a buffer state, and only when its neutrality was threatened, as Curzon believed it to be by Russia in 1903, did the Raj actively promote intervention.

  The prospective Asian explorer had thus to contend not only with the Himalayas but with two hostile governments as well. If he was a foreigner there was every chance that he would not be allowed off the ship at Bombay; if he was a government servant he risked his career. It required nerve and a strong measure of rebelliousness to overcome such obstacles – and rebels, as a rule, did not
prosper long under the British Raj. Only Sven Hedin learnt to play the system to his advantage, and he paid the price for his temerity.

  After the jolt provided by Curzon’s unwarranted invasion of Tibet the rival powers in Central Asia – Britain and Russia – agreed that Tibet was out of bounds. The way was cleared for China to strengthen a hold that had never been more than tenuous, and to intensify Tibet’s seclusion from the outside world. In recent years an uneasy peace on both sides of the Himalayan border has done little to diminish Tibet’s extraordinary isolation. Even with the arrival of satellite photography it remains to this day the least known, least explored country on earth, rich in mysteries, still beckoning us with its secrets and still denying us the answer – a vacuum at the centre of the world.

  1

  The Fountainhead of Asia

  As the dew is dried up by the morning sun so are the sins of men dried up by the sight of the Himalaya, where Shiva lived and where the Ganga falls from the foot of Vishnu like the slender thread of a lotus flower.

  There are no mountains like the Himalaya, for in them are Kailas and Manasarovar.

  From the Skanda Purana

  Twenty million years ago Tibet lay at the bottom of the sea. The manner in which it was shaped into its present commanding position in Central Asia has been described as an epic in the long history of the formation of the earth’s crust. Caught between two approaching land masses, the sea bed buckled into a series of long parallel folds. The tops of these folds were levelled down by rain-bearing winds blowing up from the Indian Ocean, while the intervening depressions were filled with alluvial silt, creating the Chang Tang, the vast northern plateau of Tibet that stands at an average elevation of sixteen thousand feet above sea level. As the squeeze continued so the remaining sea waters drained southward into one enormous river system, the Indo-Gangetic river, which acted as a gutter to this newly-raised roof of the world and allowed it to evolve into a relatively fertile land of alpine forests and grasslands.