A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  From Hardwar the pilgrims travelled through the domains of the Rajah of Srinagar, following the Alaknanda tributary through the deep Himalayan gorges until they were north of the Great Himalaya Range. To get to the ‘pagoda at Badrid’, the famous Vaisnava temple at Badrinath, they had to cross the river again and again on rope-and-pulley bridges. At last they reached the most accessible of the three main Himalayan shrines associated with the Ganga’s sources, sited in a region inhabited by a semi-nomadic hill people called the Bhotias. Beside the temple were some hot-springs, too hot to bathe in at their source but running through a series of rock pools where the pilgrims bathed ‘to cleanse their souls, the hot water being tempered with the cold’.

  Leaving the other pilgrims at this Vaisnava holy of holies, Andrade took his party on up the valley towards Tibet. Their departure was observed, however, and before they could begin the final climb that led out of the Rajah of Srinagar’s territory and over the 17,900-foot Mana pass into Tibet, they were stopped by the Rajah’s officials and ordered to return to Badrinath. Andrade decided to take a chance; leaving Marques to stall the Rajah’s agents, he and the two Christian Indians made a dash for the summit of the pass, taking with them a guide from the nearby Bhotia village of Mana.

  It was too early in the year for the pass to be open. For three days they struggled up through deep snow and blinding snowstorms, suffering increasingly from altitude sickness. Andrade was baffled by this sinister and unreasonable phenomenon that left a man breathless whenever he took a pace forward, but he was unwilling to accept the Bhotias’ explanation that it was caused by poisoned air. ‘According to the natives, many people die on account of the noxious vapours that rise,’ he noted. ‘It is a fact that people in good health are suddenly taken ill and die within a quarter of an hour.’ He could only ascribe the ill-effects that he and his companion were suffering to ‘the intense cold and the want of meat’.

  The last stages of the first recorded climb in the Himalayas were appropriately dramatic. A blizzard hit the travellers as they reached the saddle of the pass, accompanied by a biting wind: ‘Our feet were frozen and swollen so much so that we did not feel it when later they touched a piece of red-hot iron.’ They forced a passage through the snow, even though ‘it was all one dazzling whiteness for our eyes, which had been weakened by snow-blindness and could make out no sign of the road we were to follow’, until at last they stood on the saddle of the Mana pass and could look down into Tibet. ‘The journey was continued to the summit of the mountains,’ Andrade recorded, ‘whence is born the river Ganga from a large pool, and from whence is born another stream that waters the lands of Tibet.’

  Many years later this reference to a large pool was interpreted as proof that Andrade had reached the fabled lake Manasarovar. It seems much more likely that Andrade was describing a large glacial tarn known locally as the Deo Tal (lake of God) sited at the head of the Mana valley just below the pass. Since the lake feeds the headwaters of the Saraswati river, which in turn joins the Alaknanda just above Badrinath, Andrade’s statement is correct; he had indeed reached the source of one of the principal tributaries of the Ganga. Going on a little further he reached the watershed at the head of the Mana pass – and saw another stream running northwards down into Tibet.

  This was as far as Andrade got on his first attempt; seeing ahead of him ‘an awful desert’ without trees or human habitation, he turned back. A month later, when the snows had all but gone and relations with the Rajah of Srinagar were greatly improved, Andrade and Marques crossed the Mana La together and entered Tibet. They descended into a desolate country split into immense ravines and canyons, part of the ancient kingdom of Gugé. For nearly seven centuries its capital, Tsaparang, together with the nearby monastery of Totling, had been the political and religious centre of Western Tibet, exerting an influence that extended to the furthest corners of the plateau. Now it was on the verge of collapse. Andrade and his companion saw it in the last days of its glory; and, unwittingly, they contributed to its final downfall.

  They found no Christians in Gugé, only a deeply religious people who welcomed them with every mark of kindness and respect for their faith and who showed a genuine interest in a religion that in its outward manifestations – its vestments, chants and expressions of worship – so closely resembled theirs. For his part Andrade was less attracted by the demonic aspects of lamaism, the use of human skulls for drinking vessels and drums and thighbones for trumpets. Yet he obviously made a great impression on the king and queen of Gugé. They were so struck by his religious zeal that they agreed to let him return the following summer and set up a mission – and before he left he was given a document bearing the king’s seal that pronounced him to be ‘Our Chief Lama’, with full authority to preach the gospel throughout the kingdom: ‘We shall not allow anyone to molest him in this and we shall issue orders that he be given a site and all the help needed to build a house of prayer.’ It looked as though a great future for the conversion of pagan souls had been opened to the soldiers of Christ.

  In the summer of 1625, Andrade returned to Tsaparang with more of his colleagues, and after spending the winter there witnessed the laying of the foundation-stone of the first Christian church in Tibet – a ceremony performed by the king himself. The letters that he and other Jesuits sent back to India over the next few years are full of optimism about the prospects for the mission. ‘This country promises more than any other I have yet heard of,’ wrote one of Andrade’s colleagues in 1627, ‘for they are a tractable and upright people.’ Their confidence was based on the knowledge that the king’s authority was still paramount throughout Western Tibet and extended as far as Rudok, a hundred and thirty miles away to the north, where Andrade was able to set up a second mission. Although he never quite managed to persuade the king to take the final plunge and the conversion rate among the Tibetans remained depressingly low, Andrade left Tsaparang in 1630 convinced that the mission could only prosper – and totally unaware that a revolution was about to break out. He took over the running of the Jesuits’ main mission in Goa and died four years later – poisoned, it is said, by someone who objected to the enthusiasm with which he promoted the Inquisition.

  Andrade’s fellow-pioneer, Manuel Marques, met an even more melancholy end. Within a few months of Andrade’s departure from Tsaparang, the Jesuit mission had collapsed. The lamas had seen their authority gradually being whittled away by the king’s enthusiasm for another faith and had finally come out in revolt, aided by soldiers from the neighbouring king of Ladakh. After a month’s siege Tsaparang fell, the king was overthrown and the town sacked. The church and the mission buildings were pulled down and the five Jesuits in residence were imprisoned. They were soon released, but in the face of continuing harassment by the lamas they eventually decided to close down the mission and withdraw.

  Six years after Andrade’s death an attempt was made to reopen the mission. With Manuel Marques acting as their guide, a fresh group of Jesuits made their way over the Mana La. But as they entered Tibet they were set upon by Tibetan guards. There was a struggle in which Marques was captured; the others fled back across the border. A year later a despairing letter from Marques reached the Jesuit fathers in Agra. He wrote that he was being tortured by the Tibetans and had given up all hope of rescue. Efforts to secure his release through intermediaries in Ladakh met with no response, and no more was heard of him.

  With the deposition of the king the power of the ancient dynasty of Gugé was broken. Its territories were absorbed briefly by Ladakh and then came under the dominion of Lhasa. Within twenty years Gugé had disappeared from the map of Tibet and its former capital lay in ruins. In 1912 an official of the Indian Civil Service visited Western Tibet as a member of a trade mission. At the request of the Jesuit authorities in Calcutta he made a detour to the long-abandoned capital. He found most of the buildings in ruins, mud brick houses which had long since crumbled into dust. However, there was one surviving relic of the mission: a w
eathered wooden cross lying on top of a large pile of stones.

  In 1667 Father Athanasius Kircher of the Society of Jesus in Würzburg published his China Documents lllustrata, in which he incorporated details of the latest journeys of the Jesuit fathers into a social geography of China and Central Asia. Accompanying this survey is a map of Asia showing the supposed routes travelled by St Thomas the Apostle, Marco Polo, Benedict de Goes and two Jesuits named Grueber and d’Orville, who had crossed from China to India by way of Lhasa in 1661. There too is Andrade’s route to ‘Caparangue’ (Tsaparang) and ‘Radoc’ (Rudok), set close beside two remarkable features: a lake from which four rivers flow southward across the Mogul Empire (Imp. Magoris) and a vast mountain with another lake from which flows the Ganga – but which is identified as the source of the Ganga and Indus (‘Origo Gangis et Indi’). In the text Kircher explains how he came to put two apparently conflicting views on the sources of the great Indian rivers on the same map. The great mountain with the lake was drawn from Andrade’s narrative, supported by the personal testimony of an eighty-six-year-old Indian named Joseph, one of the two Christian servants whom Andrade had taken with him over the Mana La. The lake with the four rivers, shown south of the mountains, had come from Hindu sources. It was the first appearance in the West of the old Puranic legend:

  There is a great lake on the highest mountain of Tibet (which are always covered by snow) from which there take their birth the greatest rivers of India; thus the Indus, the Ganges, the Ravi, and the Athec come out from this basin.

  Even before Kircher’s time, maps had been appearing in Europe showing a great lake in Asia with four, five and even six rivers issuing from it. But this giant among lakes was nearly always sited north of Burma and Siam rather than Tibet and most often associated with the Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy and Mekong. It crept into European cartography in 1550 and there it stayed, growing bolder and larger with the years until Kircher shifted it out of South-East Asia and into the Indo-Tibetan sphere. Although it went by different names – the most enduring of which was ‘Lake Chiamay’ – its link with the holy lake of the Puranas is inescapable. It was lake Manasarovar as seen from a South-East Asia point of view, where the legend was well known but was quite reasonably associated with that more familiar group of rivers whose upper courses run close to each other through the mountains east of the Assam Himalayas.

  Although Andrade’s reputation soon faded into obscurity the memory of his brave venture across the Himalayas was kept alive among the Jesuits. In time it caught the imagination of a new recruit to the order, Ippolito Desideri, a young Italian from Pistoia in Northern Tuscany. While Desideri may have lacked the cold-hearted determination that was said to distinguish the true soldier of Christ, he was not short in other Jesuitical qualities, notably an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a passionate commitment to his cause. His desire to find out what had happened to the Christian population in Gugé in the years since the withdrawal of the Tsaparang mission became something of an obsession. In 1712, when he was twenty-eight years old, he managed to persuade the Pope to back a new mission to Western Tibet. He was ordained as priest in August of that year and within a month had set sail for the Indies.

  It took Desideri a full year to reach Goa and another twelve months before he could get his expedition organized and on the road. Affairs in the Indian subcontinent were no longer so well ordered as they had been in Andrade’s time. The last of the great Mogul emperors was dead and the empire that Akbar and his descendants had administered so ably was now well on the way to disintegration. It was not only Mogul power that was on the decline; the British and French trading companies had now seized the initiative from their Dutch and Portuguese rivals.

  Even so, the Portuguese were not entirely without friends at court. At Agra Desideri found a powerful patron in Donna Juliana, a remarkable Portuguese noblewoman who exercised varying degrees of influence over no less than three successive Mogul emperors. Donna Juliana not only promoted his cause at court but funded Desideri’s expedition out of her own purse. However, even she was unable to prevent the appointment by the local Jesuits of one of their men, a Portuguese named Emanoel Freyre, as its leader. Father Freyre was a missionary in the classic mould, devoted to his faith but with his zeal tempered and perhaps a little blunted by the rigours and disappointments of more than twenty years’ unbroken service in the field. Set in his ways and somewhat short on stamina, Freyre proved to be no match for Desideri’s overriding enthusiasm.

  Both men left vivid accounts of their travels. Desideri’s version runs to four volumes and is a major work of scholarship – the first comprehensive study of Tibetan culture and religion to have been written. Freyre’s narrative, in the form of a report written soon after his return to India in 1717, provides a lightweight counterpoint, gossipy and often revealing in its candid observations about the expedition.

  The Jesuits had decided on a flanking rather than a direct approach to Tibet, going by way of Kashmir. Andrade’s references to Srinagar in his reports may well have misled them, as they certainly misled others. Desideri and Freyre were probably unaware that there were two Srinagars: one the obscure little town in the Garhwal Himalayas that formed the capital of the hill-state of the Rajah of Srinagar, the other the capital city of the far grander kingdom of Kashmir. They made their way towards the latter, setting out rather late in the autumn of 1714 and finding the crossing over the Pir Panjal range that guards Kashmir from the south unexpectedly difficult. It was like climbing staircases ‘piled one on top of another’, wrote Desideri. He began coughing up blood, so instead of pressing on directly into Baltistan and Ladakh – then known as Little Tibet and Second Tibet – the two Jesuits decided to winter in Kashmir. Like many Europeans in years to come, Desideri was greatly taken by the vale of Kashmir and its lakes and water-gardens. Where Freyre saw only ‘stagnant water’ and ‘abundant refuse’, the enchanted Desideri observed ‘a most ornamental garland round the city’.

  In the early summer of the following year the expedition moved westwards into Ladakh – ‘mountainous, sterile and altogether horrible’ – crossing the notoriously treacherous Zoji pass only with the greatest difficulty. By Himalayan standards it was not a high pass but its extensive snowfields made the crossing a slow and exhausting business. Snow-blindness was another unexpected hazard. Freyre describes how he woke one morning after sheltering in a cave to find that Desideri had temporarily gone blind: ‘When we were standing looking at the first rays of the dawn Father Hyppolitus and one of our Christian servants found that they could not distinguish them; and we saw then that their eyes were running with water from the glare of the snow.’ The porters went on strike – the first recorded occurrence of what was to become a familiar and time-honoured feature of all the best Himalayan expeditions. It was resolved in an equally traditional way: Father Freyre slipped the leader some money and ‘soothed them with soft words’. Before going on, however, the porters improvised goggles to cut down the glare of the sun: ‘Each tore a piece from his tunic which he rubbed in the charcoal of the spent fire and stretched it across his eyes like a veil.’

  On 20 June the party finally stumbled into Leh, the capital of Ladakh. As they fly into Leh airport, modern visitors to this long inaccessible corner of India will find Desideri’s description of Leh in 1715 familiar in almost every detail:

  It is situated in a wide plain entirely surrounded by mountains and studded with villages. The city extends up the slope of a mountain to the residence of the Chief Lama and the palace of the King, both large and fine buildings. The whole is crowned with a large fort close to the summit and another fort on the summit. Below and on its flanks the town is surrounded by walls and defended by gates.

  Although the land itself was ‘altogether horrible’, Desideri found the Lamaist inhabitants to be ‘kindly, cheerful and courteous’. They met with the same warmth and friendship that Andrade had found in Gugé a century earlier – so warm in fact that Desideri was grea
tly tempted to abandon his search for Gugé and its Christian community and stay in Ladakh to evangelize. His companion had very different ideas. Freyre now regarded their quest as fruitless, but at the same time he deeply distrusted the rulers of Ladakh. His only concern was to get out of this benighted country and back to India – but not by way of the dreadful pass over which they had come. However, there was no easy way out of Ladakh; Desideri put it over to him that if he was determined to return to India without recrossing the Zoji La, then it would have to be done via Tibet. ‘After praying together to God for guidance,’ wrote Desideri, ‘we consulted together and decided to continue our journey to Third and Principal Tibet, as being the head and centre of that false sect, and also because Father Antonio de Andrade and other missionaries of our Society after him had once been there.’ Freyre may have been the official leader of the expedition but from this point on it was Desideri who was effectively in command.

  In August the travellers set out again, riding on horseback along the ancient trade-route that runs alongside the river Indus and then climbs up and out onto the great Tibetan plateau. After three weeks’ journey they came to the Tibetan monastery of Tashigang, on the border between Ladakh and Tibet. Beyond lay a ‘vast, sterile, and terrible desert’, too cold and too arid to provide more than the meanest of existences; an unexplored wilderness of thin scrub and salt flats broken by mountain ranges, grazed over by yak and antelope and herds of wild asses – and occasionally by dokpa, nomadic ‘dwellers of black tents’, with their herds of domesticated yak, sheep and long-haired goats.