Shangri-La in aspic? Not a chance

An epic history of intrigue, strife and empire-building in the Himalaya shatters a few myths. By Mick Brown

THIMALAYA by Ed Douglas 581pp, Bodley Head, £20, ebook £12.99

o start with, it’s Himalaya, singular, not Himalayas. As for the pronunciation, in the 1920s a senior Indian civil servant named Geoffrey Corbett deliberated long and hard on the problem. Tibetans and Hindi-speaking Indians stressed the first “a” as long. In Nepal it was simply “Himal”. Finally, Corbett consulted a friend, Brijlal Nehru, the cousin of India’s first prime minister. Their conclusion was “Hi” as in “him”; “ma” as in father and “la” and “ya” as in the French word “le”. So proceed on that basis.

However you pronounce it, like this book, it’s big. A total area of some 230,000 square miles, including some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. The Tibetan plateau, north of Everest, at an altitude of 16,000ft, receives less than three inches of precipitation a year, while Arunachal Pradesh on the southern slopes of the eastern

Himalaya, averages almost 10ft of rain a year (which is a lot: London gets less than 2ft).

Ed Douglas, a writer and expert mountaineer, has explored most of the Himalaya, and his personal experiences animate this hugely ambitious undertaking, which attempts to encompass history and geography, the rise and fall of empires, military and political struggles, religion, culture and much else besides. Central to the book, as it is to the region, is Tibet.

As Douglas demonstrates, until the 20th century, when China used modern warfare and technology to extend its reach to the northern edge of the Himalaya, it was Tibet’s remoteness, and the hardships of life at altitude, that provided the country’s greatest protection, and sustained its legend as a sort of Shangri-La in aspic. But Tibet was hardly the insular society of modern imagination. The Tibetan elite were aware of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and the Chinese philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism long before Buddhism took hold in the seventh and eighth centuries, even as it dwindled in the place of its origin, India, in the face of an expansionist Islam and a resurgent Hinduism.

Douglas is particularly good on the arrival and development of Buddhism in Tibet, not least the internecine political and spiritual intrigues, and the tortuous complexities of identifiable reincarnation – a singular mixture of magic and realpolitik – that sustained Tibet as a theocracy, with the Dalai Lama at its pinnacle, for 12 centuries until the Chinese invasion in 1950.

The first European encounters with Tibet were, inevitably, enmeshed with missionary intent. In the 17th century, António de Andrade, a Portuguese Jesuit, established a small Christian mission at the palace fortress of Tsaparang in the ancient kingdom of Guge, in what is now western Tibet. The first European to reach Lhasa was Johann Grueber, an Austrian Jesuit, in 1661, whose request to meet the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, was refused when Grueber refused to kneel before an “idolater”. So central was the “Great Fifth” to Tibet’s stability that his death was kept secret for 15 years while the succession was managed – although that is a mere blink of the eye compared with the intrigue around the Bhutanese king Ngawang Namgyal, whose death in 1651 was kept secret for 54 years.

The first Englishman to enter Lhasa was the Chinese scholar Thomas Manning, who in 1811 was granted an audience with the ninth Dalai Lama, Lungtok Gyatso, who had just turned six. Manning was utterly charmed. “He had the simple, unaffected manners of a well-educated princely child,” he wrote, adding: “I could have wept through strangeness of sensation.” Three years later, the boy came down with a cold and died.

Manning’s reaction was an early precursor of Western ideas about a “magical Tibet”, later perpetuated by the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, the author James Hilton, whose 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, described the hidden mountain paradise of Shangri-La, where the head “lama” is not a Buddhist at all but a Christian missionary priest, and the autobiographical writings of Lobsang Rampa, a soi-disant Tibetan monk whose fantastical tales of monastic life became popular in the 1950s, until he was unmasked as Cyril Hoskin, a surgical appliance salesman from Plympton in Devon.

Conversely, Europe was of equal fascination to the Tibetans. Some

Tibetans ironically dreamt of Europe as much as Westerners fantasised about Tibet

scholars even identified it as the location of the mythical Buddhist kingdom of Shambhala. In magical Europe, they believed, there was “no such thing as treating each other badly, accusations, the powerful taking over the weaker or corruption”. When, in 1774, George Bogle, Britain’s first emissary to Tibet, met the sixth Panchen Lama, then Tibet’s de facto ruler, in Shigatse, the Panchen actually asked him to look for clues for Shambhala’s location so that he could visit. As the Tibetan historian Lobsang Yongdan notes: “It is ironic that Western writers created a mysterious land called Shangri-La in Tibet while Tibetan scholars were looking for Shambhala somewhere in Europe.”

Himalaya is not always an effortless read. Its structure and chronology are sometimes confusing; it can be tricky tying together all the disparate threads of warring chieftains and lost valley kingdoms, the ebb and flow of Mongol and Chinese conquest, the competing strategic interests of Imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia, and in more recent times Delhi and Beijing, and the commingling of history and myth.

Douglas wants to tell us everything he’s found out, but this is sometimes at the expense of other things we’d like to know more of. The history of plant hunting and, Douglas’s special interest, the conquest of Everest, warrant books of their own – which, of course, they have had; Douglas acknowledges that his historical research is almost entirely from secondary sources. But as a far-reaching, compendious and elegantly turned examination of a region and its peoples, this book is unlikely to be surpassed. Like an expedition to a mountaintop, Himalaya may be arduous in parts, requiring patience and steadfastness, but the view from the top is magnificent.

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