by Wade Davis
For more than forty years, the intrepid members of the Survey of India, supported by armies of laborers who suffered and died by the score, marched these exquisite instruments across the length of the subcontinent. Their seasons were short and desperate, for only with the monsoon did the haze clear and the dust settle from the air. Tormented with fevers, perched in the ice on the summits of mountains, or in empty deserts where thirty-foot platforms had to be built of stones, they meticulously recorded their observations. Quite literally nothing stood in their way. If necessary to establish a point of triangulation and properly position a theodolite, they razed entire villages, leveled sacred hills, and crushed into fragments the façades of ancient temples.
By the 1830s the Great Arc had reached the foothills of the Himalaya, the highest and youngest mountains on earth, a wall of white peaks a hundred miles deep, stretching in a gentle curve for fifteen hundred miles, from the Brahmaputra to the Indus, a distance, the British would discover, equal to that of London to the Urals of Russia. Here the members of the survey would hesitate before branching east and west, through the foothills and the malarial forests of the Terai, where a new series of baselines would be established, marked by observation posts built of mud bricks, also thirty feet high, from which they would look up and stare into the hidden heights of a mountain range that fired their imaginations. Above the heat and dust of the Indian plain, rising out of the forests of Burma, were more than a thousand mountains that soared beyond 20,000 feet, elevations scarcely comprehensible to the European mind.
The mathematical elegance of the survey’s methods made it possible to calculate the height of these summits from extraordinary distances. In 1846 a party led by John Armstrong took note of a rugged knot of mountains some 140 miles west of Kangchenjunga, then considered the highest point on earth. Compared with the stunningly beautiful massif of Kangchenjunga, which dominates the sky beyond Darjeeling, these distant summits were unassuming, mere fragments of white on a dark horizon. Armstrong designated the highest simply Peak B. During subsequent seasons it remained hidden in cloud, and it was not until November 1849 that another officer of the survey, James Nicolson, was able to make a series of observations from six different stations, the closest being some 108 miles from the mountain, by then known as Peak XV. Only in 1854, at the headquarters of the Survey of India in Dehra Dun and in Calcutta, did work begin on Nicolson’s computations.
Andrew Waugh, surveyor general of India, assigned the task to a brilliant Indian, Chief Computer Radhanath Sikhdar. Given the distance of the sightings and the problem of atmospheric refraction, the challenge was enormous. It took two years for Sikhdar to determine that this unknown summit was, at 29,002 feet, fully a thousand feet higher than any other known mountain on earth. It was a most impressive feat of computation. The actual elevation of the mountain, measured today by satellite technology, is 29,035 feet. But the mountain itself has been rising at a rate of a centimeter a year for the last several centuries. In the 1850s, when Sikhdar did his calculations, the summit of the mountain in all likelihood would have been some five feet lower. Thus, with pencil, paper, and mathematical wizardry, Sikhdar was off by only twenty-eight feet.
The subsequent naming of the mountain provoked controversy. The Survey of India by tradition adopted local names whenever possible. But in a letter dated March 1, 1856, addressed to Sir Roderick Murchison, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, Waugh proposed naming the mountain after his predecessor. Sir George Everest was not pleased. He was a remarkable geographer and largely responsible for the success of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, which he led from 1829. But he was a miserable man, venomous and cantankerous, and he had made few friends in India, in part because of his disregard for ancient religious monuments, which he considered temples of idle and pagan superstitions, mere impediments to his work. His family name was actually pronounced Eave-rest, and it is ironic that his legacy was to have a mountain named in his honor yet mispronounced for all time. Though the discovery of the mountain’s height was published in 1858, it was not until 1865, a year before his death, that the Royal Geographical Society officially adopted the name.
The naming controversy, however, was hardly of great significance to the Raj, which had just endured the fires of the Indian Mutiny. Nor did the mountain itself spark immediate interest. It would be nearly twenty years before a British climber, W. W. Graham, traveled to the Himalaya strictly for sport, and another ten before, in 1893, a subaltern of the 5th Gurkha Rifles, Charles Bruce, and a young explorer and political officer, Francis Younghusband, already famous for his traverse of the Gobi Desert, came together on the polo grounds at Chitral, on the Afghan frontier, and first resolved to scale the mountain. Everest itself was a “singularly shy and retiring mountain,” Younghusband wrote, that “hides itself away behind other mountains.” From the Indian side, the only vantage then available to the British, “its tip appears amongst a mighty array of peaks which being nearer look higher.” For the British rulers of the Raj, it was the land that lay beyond Everest that mattered most, a place of mystery and danger, where the great rivers had been born long before the mountains arose, and the impenetrable canyons were the refuge for all that was sacred to Buddhist and Sikh, Hindu and Jain.
IF MAPS WERE THE METAPHOR by which the Raj came into being, knowledge provided a foundation upon which the entire imperial adventure rested. The botanical explorer and archaeologist, along with the trader, surveyor, and missionary, were the forward scouts of empire. Anthropology was born of the need to understand peoples and cultures that they might be properly administered and controlled. Commercial and military imperatives aside, noted Curzon, “it is equally our duty to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher, and to cherish and conserve.”
In just the decade before Curzon became viceroy, the British acquired new territories equivalent to fifty times the size of Great Britain. The overseas empire, a quarter of the land surface of the world, six times the size of the Roman Empire at its height, was nearly a hundred times larger than the home islands. Victoria, as sovereign, ruled one in four human beings, altogether some 500 million people, and her navy commanded the sea. What the British did not rule, they influenced to the point of domination. The world measured time and longitude from Greenwich. British telegraph wires and cables encircled and entwined the planet. English stamps bore only the queen’s profile, as no other national identification was deemed necessary. “In the Empire,” wrote Curzon, “we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.”
India was the crown jewel, the “peacock bird in the gilded cage,” and for the British it was intolerable that the empire’s most prized possession was surrounded and potentially threatened by mountainous lands of which so little was known. If the British obsession throughout the early part of the nineteenth century had been Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier, increasingly the strategic concern shifted to include the ring of nations and kingdoms that contained the Raj on the north. In the 1850s, Britain secured Ladakh as a dependency of Kashmir. A decade later, the Raj absorbed the southern districts of Sikkim, intervened in a civil war in Bhutan, and fomented intrigue in the palaces of Kathmandu. Looming over all, however, remained Tibet.
“Frontiers are the razor’s edge,” Curzon famously wrote, “on which hang suspended the issue of war or peace and the life of nations.” The frustration for the British was the fact that beyond the visual reach of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, much of the map of central Asia was blank. Boundaries and borders were rumors. No one knew where the Himalaya ended and the Hindu Kush began. The Karakoram and Pamirs had scarcely been penetrated. The hidden ranges of Tibet lay uncharted and unknown. Between 1750 and 1900, only three Westerners had reached the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. At the end of the century, the British still had no diplomatic presence there. Curzon, as viceroy, had no certain way even of opening a channel of communication with Tibetan
authorities, though Lhasa lay but 250 miles from Darjeeling, a major British commercial and agricultural enclave in northern India that exported tea to every hamlet in England.
Tibet, united in the seventh century, conquered by the Mongols in the thirteenth, and then subjugated by native dynasties from 1368, had since 1642 been ruled by the leaders of the Gelugpa Buddhist order, the Dalai Lamas, believed by Tibetans to be the successive incarnations of Chenrezi, the bodhisattva of compassion. The first to dominate and codify the entire nation was the Great Fifth, who gave his spiritual teacher, the abbot of the monastery at Shigatse, the honorific title Panchen Lama, the Great Scholar. From that point onward, these two great complementary spiritual figures were the institutional pillars of the nation.
In 1720 the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty began to take an active interest in Tibetan and Mongolian politics and established an ambassadorial presence in Lhasa, with a titular but impotent figure, the amban, in permanent residence. The British acknowledged and exploited for their own purposes the fiction of Chinese rule, even as the Ch’ing dynasty faded toward its final destruction in the Sun Yat-sen revolution of 1911. In the infamous Chefoo Convention of 1876, Britain formally recognized Manchu authority over Tibet in exchange for China accepting the British right to invade and colonize Burma. Tibet was not party to the agreement.
With the decline of Chinese influence, power in Lhasa was in fact concentrated in the hands of a Tibetan aristocratic elite, dominated in good measure by the high lamas of the great Gelugpa monasteries, Ganden, Sera, and Drepung. The regents who served between Dalai Lamas were appointed by the Tsong-du, the National Assembly, and bore the honorific title Sikyong Rinpoche, Precious Protector of the State. The other anchor of government was the Kashag, the Council of Four, made up of three laymen and a monk, which exercised control over the civil administration of the nation in all matters political, judicial, and financial. Beneath the Kashag was an ecclesiastical council, a body of four monks responsible for all the monasteries in the land. The country itself was divided into five districts, each headed by a commissioner who oversaw two district officers, or dzongpens, one a monk and the other a layperson. The dzongpens were directly responsible for local governance. They maintained order, collected taxes, adjudicated disputes, and pronounced justice, harsh as it might be.
Tibet in the late nineteenth century certainly possessed an aura of mystery and intrigue, but it had yet fully to acquire the mystique that in time would temper all foreign perceptions of the land, secular and metaphysical. Few in diplomatic circles thought of it as a cosmic meritocracy, let alone an isolated earthly paradise straddling the roof of the world. It was simply a nation. The streets of Lhasa, though empty of Europeans, bustled with Tatars, Muscovites, Kashmiris, Han Chinese, and Nepalese, merchants and traders who came from all parts of central Asia. Monasteries drew monks and pilgrims from as far away as the Black Sea. For a thousand years, Tibetan influence had been felt from the capital of China throughout the steppes of Mongolia to the courts of Persia.
Like any complex society, Tibet had great inequalities. The ebb and flow of warfare had swept the land for centuries. Punishments were severe and by contemporary standards out of all proportion to the crimes. But if the country was not a perfect society, its failures, complexities, and contradictions were its own. Fending off invasions, struggling with civil strife, Tibetans engaged like any other people the sordid realities of nationhood. As the officials of the Tibetan government looked south toward India, they saw in the British Raj a new player on their geopolitical stage, a formidable power that consistently allied itself with Nepal, a bitter enemy with whom Tibet had repeatedly gone to war, most recently in 1855. The Tibetan government, deeply suspicious of British motives, was especially incensed by territorial incursions and the persistent and irritating presence of British spies in its midst.
In a dance of espionage famously celebrated by Kipling in the novel Kim, the British had since 1851 trained Indian cadres as surveyors, disguised them as pilgrims, holy men, or peasants, and sent them on foot across the high passes of the Himalaya to find out what lay beyond the wall of mountains that defied their every diplomatic initiative. The goal could be Lhasa and a chance to ferret out information as to the nature of the Tibetan government, the strength of its armies, the bounty of harvests, the possibility of hunger and famine. More typically, these pundits were ordered to explore the borderlands in search of raw geographical information, the height and orientation of mountain chains, the location and accessibility of major passes, the character and extent of the rivers that drained the Tibetan Plateau and flowed into the foothills of India. For survey instruments they had only what could be disguised and carried as the religious icons of a monk. Trained to walk at precisely two thousand paces to the mile, they were given rosaries with one hundred beads rather than the traditional 108, and instructed to drop a single bead into their prayer wheels for every one hundred steps taken. The scroll hidden within the prayer wheel that spun mantras of compassion to the universe was replaced by a blank roll of paper upon which data could be surreptitiously recorded. The pundit Nain Singh, the first surveyor to fix the location of the Tibetan capital, traveled on foot from Sikkim to Lhasa and then all over central Tibet, walking 1,580 miles, or 3,160,000 paces, each counted. To establish the horizon, that he might ascertain longitude and latitude, he used quicksilver, which he carried across the Himalaya in cowrie shells sealed with wax.
The most astonishing caper of all was that of Pundit Kinthup, dispatched into the mountains to solve the single most bewildering enigma of Himalayan geography. It was known that the Tsangpo River, born in western Tibet on the flanks of Kailash, the mountain most sacred to Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain, flowed east for a thousand miles and disappeared into the Himalaya from the north at a place known as Dhemu Chamnak. On the other side of the range, the Brahmaputra, one of the greatest rivers of India, flowed out of the mountains at Sadiya, a mere 120 miles from Dhemu Chamnak. The elevation drop was an astonishing 12,000 feet, and the question lingered as to whether the two rivers were in fact one. If so, what was the nature of the gorge through which such a massive river fell so precipitously? Rumors of mystic waterfalls, higher than any known on earth, captivated British and European imaginations.
In 1880 Kinthup was given the assignment to enter Tibet in disguise and find his way down the Tsangpo to a point where he might cast into the river marked logs, which, if found by spotters assigned to the task on the upper Brahmaputra, would prove that the two rivers were a single artery. It took him seven months just to reach the village of Gyala, perched at 8,000 feet at the head of Tsangpo Gorge, whereupon he was betrayed by a companion and sold into slavery for fifteen months. It would be four years before he was finally able to trace the Tsangpo down to the Marpung monastery on the Dihang and, beyond that, to the country of the Abor, a mere thirty-five miles from the plains of Assam. He prepared five hundred logs, casting into the river fifty a day. But by then his mission had been forgotten, and there was no one waiting to watch for the logs.
When Kinthup finally returned to Darjeeling, in September 1884, those who had sent him into the mountains had either left India or died. No one of significance believed his account. His accomplishment was not acknowledged until 1913, when F. M. Bailey and Henry Morshead validated his claims, even as they nearly perished while exploring the Tsangpo from the south. Bailey will return to this narrative, as will Morshead, who mapped the route to Everest, climbed with Mallory in 1921 and 1922, and was later murdered in the forests of Burma. Thanks to Morshead and Bailey, Kinthup in old age would be celebrated in Simla and decorated personally by the viceroy.
. . .
ESPIONAGE AND INTRIGUE ASIDE, the British in fact had no territorial ambitions in Tibet. What they wanted was for Tibet to remain a neutral buffer, insulating the Raj from the one great rival that truly did pose a threat to the entire British position in South Asia. The Russian Empire, as dominant on land as the English had been at sea, had throughout
the late nineteenth century expanded south and east from the Aral Sea toward the Afghan border at an astonishing rate of fifty-five square miles a day. By the summer of 1902, Russian agents were penetrating the Hindu Kush and Pamir Mountains from the north, even as the English probed from the south. This thrust and parry, a bitter rivalry known to the British as the Great Game and to the Russians as the Tournament of Shadows, had twice since Crimea brought the nations to the brink of war, with hostilities in 1885 becoming so imminent that the British Stationery Office had actually printed documents declaring a state of war to exist between the two empires.
War was narrowly averted by a territorial compromise, the 1885 Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission, which created a buffer zone, ceding to Afghanistan a narrow panhandle of land along the cusp of the Hindu Kush. The crisis, however, prompted a shift in British strategy. In less than a century Russia had expanded over two thousand miles, reaching literally to the gates of the Raj. By all accounts, the czar’s ministers had further designs on Chinese Turkistan and points beyond. The British, no longer content to control the valleys at the base of the mountains, adopted an aggressive forward policy, establishing military outposts, constructing roads, and launching incursions into the uncharted reaches of the North-West Frontier, from the Karakorum and Pamirs in the north to Baluchistan in the south.
If the ultimate foe was Russia, the actual enemy for the British became almost immediately the people of the frontier provinces. To control the passes leading to India meant maintaining remote garrisons in hostile territory where some 200,000 fiercely independent tribal peoples, Afridis, Mahsuds, Pathans, and Wazirs, armed with modern rifles that could kill at a thousand yards, lived by a blood code that demanded that a man avenge any harm or insult to his clan’s honor. In the six years Curzon served as viceroy there were more than six hundred raids and clashes, and more than one British soldier would be found dead, the flesh flayed from his bones. For the Indian Army, stationed at Gilgit and Chitral, the only way to stay alive was to retaliate with equal ferocity, with raiding parties that took as a motto the phrase “Butcher and bolt.” Britain’s goal was to keep the Russians out, whatever the cost.
