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THE MYTH OF SHANGRI-LA:  TIBET, TRAVEL WRITING AND THE WESTERN CREATION OF SACRED LANDSCAPE

Chapter 3:  Inventing The Threshold (1792-1842)

The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds -- and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.
-- (Mircea Eliade [1959, p. 25])

In 1825 a certain Lieutenant George White took advantage of the easier access to the Himalayas that followed the Gurkha Wars of 1815 by going on a short journey to contemplate the views. His travels took him to 'the provinces of Sirmour, Gurwhal and Kumaon', all of which had recently been 'annexed' by Britain following the conclusion of the difficult and costly, but otherwise successful, war in Nepal. This war marked the beginning of Britain's long struggle to contain the rival expansion of the vigorous, militant Gurkha people. At one point, whilst traveling through these new additions to the burgeoning Indian Empire, White was moved to comment: 'The view of the Himalaya from a spot in the vicinity of Saharunpore, is of that dreamy, poetical description, which, though full of beauty, presents little that is definite ...' [1] He then went on to rhapsodize about

... the pyramidal snow-capped heights, which seem to lift themselves into another world, crowning the whole with almost awful majesty. From this site, the mountain ranges have all the indistinctness which belongs to the land of faerie, and which, leaving the imagination to luxuriate in its most fanciful creations, lends enchantment to the scene. The pure dazzling whiteness of the regions of eternal snow, give occasionally so cloud-like an appearance to the towering summits, as to induce the belief that they form a part of the heaven to which they aspire.

Clearly we have entered a different world to that imagined by Bogle and Turner. Here, in White's account, is landscape Romanticism in its first full flowering. Bogle's descriptions of Himalayan landscape, written only fifty years earlier, seem restrained and hesitant alongside White's endless flourishes, his obsession both with views and with a kind of detached, rather gratuitous sense of the sublime. The district of Saharunpore gave White his first glimpse of the mountains, and in addition to inspiring an enthusiastic but dreamy Romanticism, it set him speculating on the value of the region for 'scientific travel': extensive fossil remains have been found in the hills; the cultivation of the tea plant looks favorable. [2]

These comments in White's journal underline the shift that was occurring in the British relationship with the Himalayas during the first half of the nineteenth century. The years between 1792 and 1842 were highly significant politically for this immense mountain region. 1792 had seen the audacious Gurkha invasion decisively defeated by the remote Chinese overlords, whose presence and authority in Tibet and the Himalayas was thereby enhanced and subsequently reached an unprecedented intensity. Relations between Britain and China over this war were severely strained; the Chinese ever suspicious, the British vacillatory. Suddenly the border with Tibet was firmly closed. As Lamb comments: 'a decisive change had taken place in the political alignments of the Himalayas'. [3] The following years saw Britain nervously but steadily consolidating its control of the Indian subcontinent, whilst simultaneously the Himalayas increasingly became imagined as its northern bastion.

The difficult war with the Gurkhas (1814-16) was merely the most dramatic event in a series by which Britain extended its power and influence into the Himalayan region of northern India. Kumaon, Garwhal, the Sutlej valley, Spiti and Lahul were those districts most effectively subsumed by this policy of expansion, containment and stabilization, but Kashmir, Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan and Assam were also similarly drawn deeply into British imperial policy-making. The war brought British territorial influence into direct contact with Tibet for the first time. White's journey in search of sublime views shows just how quickly the military and political appropriation of these regions was followed by an aesthetic one. This early Romantic engagement with the Himalayas was also accompanied by an amateurish scientific curiosity that scanned the landscape for both knowledge and profits.

The Himalayan Tour

As early as 1822, seasoned travelers and explorers were taking the first tourist groups up into 'the snowy range', in the vicinity of what would soon become the hill-station of Simla. [4] Lieutenant White, too, clearly saw himself as charting out a kind of 'Grand Tour' of the Himalayas, as simply transposing the well-established appreciation of picturesque and sublime mountain views, forged in the European Alps, on to the newly acquired Himalayan regions of the British Empire. At the front of his book, for example, he placed a quotation from Captain Skinner's earlier dash through the same landscape:

I have beheld nearly all the celebrated scenery of Europe, which poets and painters have immortalized, and of which all the tourists in the world are enamored; but I have seen it surpassed in these infrequented and almost unknown regions.

There are numerous such references to early European landscape painters in contemporary Himalayan journals. In 1805, for example, one traveler exclaimed:

These two mornings exhibited a spectacle which in sublimity and beauty surpassed all power of description and to which even the pencil of Claude would have been incapable of doing justice. [5]

The passage refers to Claude Lorrain (1600-84), a seminal figure in the history of landscape painting, with his 'nostalgic dreams of lands of enchantment'. [6] In his landscapes Claude concentrated upon capturing an almost mythic and religious sense of ideal Nature: 'the pure and trembling light seemed to dissolve all structure and form'. [7] Along with Salvator Rosa (1615-73), who specialized in wild and dramatic landscapes, Claude played an essential role in shaping eighteenth-century mountain aesthetics. Certainly the names of both Claude and Salvator Rosa had become adjectives for describing landscape in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century travelers on the 'Grand Tour' of Europe. [8]

Such references also draw attention to a problem when reading travel texts. Before the age of photography, the traveler had recourse to four ways of capturing landscapes: by sketching and painting; by descriptive prose passages (later known as word-painting); by comparison with well- known European landscapes, especially the Alps; or by referring to previous landscape portrayals, either in poetry or painting. Any single travel text usually encompassed most of these methods. As Michel Le Bris points out, landscape painters in general tended to lag behind other forms of dramatic painting in the portrayal of the natural sublime. They were, he writes, 'still too subject to the temptation of the picturesque'. [9] The Picturesque-Romantic appreciation of mountain landscapes and of the people who inhabit such places still exerts its dominance today. In the early nineteenth century it seemed to mesmerize the imagination of travelers and cast its floating sense of beauty over most attempts to describe the Himalayas. References either to familiar European landscapes or to famous illustrations were generally conservative. Avant-garde landscape painters such as Caspar Friedrich (1774 -1810) or Joseph Turner (1775-1851) were seldom evoked. Even seminal landscape poets such as Wordsworth were rarely mentioned. Sketching and painting of the Himalayas, too, never freed themselves from the demands of representation and illustration. They never played a leading role in the development of landscape painting as did, for example, the Alps, North Africa or, much later, the American West. Only in passages of descriptive prose did the Himalayas gradually force a radical reevaluation of European landscape aesthetics in the nineteenth century.

The Savage and the Sublime

The geopolitical and Romantic imaginations converged in the Himalayas during this period. White is equally comfortable in both. He is as thoroughly at home in the Romantic imagination as he is out of place in the unknown mountains. Whilst the Himalayas pressed their unfamiliar presence upon him he was on totally familiar ground within his own sentiments. Imperial identity and mountain appreciation were clearly commonplace to him. He knew what he was looking for in the mountains. His evaluation of 'views' was unquestioned and in no need of justification. The Himalayas did not challenge White's imaginative map of landscape aesthetics, they confirmed it. Such a challenge -- and with it a new, deeper, and richer phase of Romantic landscape appreciation -- would have to wait until late into the century. But even though such a challenge lay some decades away with the rise of true mountain-explorers, White still experienced occasional moments of unease, moments when his mountain aesthetics seemed inadequate for his experiences:

From this point we might be said to traverse a land whose savage aspect was seldom redeemed by scenes of gentle beauty, the ranges of hills crossing, and apparently jostling each other in unparalleled confusion, being all rugged, steep and difficult to tread ... [10]

He draws a clear distinction between the picturesque, the sublime, the savage and the dismal, [11] and he was not alone with such categorizations. The British surveyor Herbert, whilst attempting to cross a pass in 1819, commented:

Those who have traveled through such desolate and unfrequented parts will alone understand ... the sight of even the first straggling sheep ... was hailed almost as that of a friend. An animal, even a bird, any living thing in fact, serves to take from such a scene the almost ... death-like character of solitude. ... [12]

Desolation and solitude combine with an overwhelming immensity of landscape confusion to produce a sense of dismal savagery. Lieutenant Alexander Gerard, another British soldier-explorer of the Himalayan passes, wrote in 1818: 'Here the rocks are more rugged than any we had yet seen, they are rent in every direction, piled upon one another in wild disorder ...' [13] Later he comments:

The country ... has a most desolate and dreary aspect, not a single tree or blade of green grass was distinguishable for near 30 miles, the ground being covered with a very prickly plant ... this shrub was almost black, seeming as if burnt, and the leaves were so much parched from the arid wind of Tartary, that they might be ground to powder by rubbing them between the hands.

The landscape was also deceptive in terms of distance. It produced frequent headaches; nausea was common; ravines and precipices abounded:

A single false step might have been attended with fatal consequences, and we had such severe headaches, and were so much exhausted, that we had hardly strength sufficient to make the effort, and it required no inconsiderable one to clear the deep chasms which we could scarcely view without shuddering. I never saw such a horrid looking place, it seemed the wreck of some towering peak burst asunder by severe frost. [14]

'Confused jumble[s] of gigantic masses of rock': [15] endless barren vistas: these lay outside the embrace of the new Romantic aesthetic forged over the turn of the century in the European Alps and in the English Lake District. As late as 1871 the well-known Victorian mountaineer Leslie Stephen argued for the superiority of the Alps over the Caucasus, the Carpathians, the Rockies and the Himalayas. 'All beautiful scenery ...', he writes, should be dashed with melancholy, but the melancholy should not be too real.' [16] For Stephen, mountains could be a little too wild, too bleak and stern, really needing some sign of human habitation or labor to enhance their beauty. The English scholar-eccentric Thomas Manning, on his 1811 journey to Tibet, shared this sentiment:

We continued along the barren valley, seeing no diversity, but the ever-varying shapes of the still more barren mountains, whose color, where it was not actually sand, slate or granite, was a melancholy pale moldy green. [17]

There was, however, a tradition for appreciating certain details of wild landscape, a kind of savage splendor. One of White's fellow-travelers, overlooking a mountain torrent, exclaimed:

Those who have brains and nerves to bear the frightful whirl, which may assail the steadiest head, plant themselves on the bridge that spans the torrent, and from this point survey the wild and awful grandeur of the scene, struck with admiration at its terrific beauty, yet, even while visions of horror float before them, unable to withdraw their gaze. [18]

This safe -- albeit seemingly precarious -- experience masks the outermost limit of early-nineteenth-century landscape aesthetics. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, Rousseau had exclaimed: 'I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me.' [19] As Michel Le Bris points out, here was a fundamental shift in Western imagining: 'a whole age that was coming to an end shunned mountains because they were horrible, while the ... [next] sought out their ravines and waterfalls precisely in order to be carried away by their thrilling horror.' [20]

'Natural sublimity' differed from both the Baroque sublime and the classical sublime: it expressed the ability of nature to unleash the deepest passion, to transcend reasoning, to transport the soul. [21] Terror in the face of some overpowering aspect of nature was integral to this natural sublimity. However, this sense of the sublime had more to do with the subjective experience of the observer than with the particularities of the geographical place. The precise forms of the place were incidental, only a platform for the intensification of individual experiences. It was these experiences that were being acclaimed in early Romanticism, rather than natural wilderness landscape. In these early Himalayan accounts we have not yet reached that decisive point when the imaginal balance shifts: that point where the immensity of nature, rather than exalting or filling the human soul, dwarfs and crushes it.

If we step back just a little from gazing with exquisite horror at the wild splendor of nature, the early-nineteenth-century aesthetic is once again on firm ground, with a kind of noble sublimity:

On the right, the snowy ranges shoot up their hoary peaks to a tremendous height ... shewing an endless variety of forms ... Imagination, however vivid, can scarcely figure to the mind a prospect so grand and thrilling ... [22]

Distance brings order to the irregular chaos; a variety of forms redeems barren sameness. [23] The early accounts of Himalayan travel are full of 'grand prospects', 'solemn majestic' views, picturesque scenes and, of course, 'glorious landscape':

There is no possibility of conveying to the mind of the reader the gratification which we have experienced in some new burst of scenery, when, emerging from the sombre labyrinths of a thick forest, we come suddenly upon one of those glorious landscapes which fill the whole soul with ecstasy! [24]

These early travelers were not only engaging with an unfamiliar and overwhelming outer landscape, they were also struggling to chart a corresponding set of inner experiences. Wherever possible, individual experience and landscape scenes were constantly being brought into alignment, and when the effect was undesirable the result was summarily abandoned. Nevertheless, as we have seen in these few examples, the Himalayas inevitably drew European travelers to the boundary of their known aesthetic paradigm, constantly demanding new modes of appreciation. Unlike those who journeyed in Europe, Himalayan travelers could not judiciously avoid dismal, chaotic and disturbing places: these were inevitable. Slowly a second generation of landscape Romanticism was emerging, one that combined sweeping experiences with close attention to particularities and details. A new way of looking, observing, experiencing -- of engaging with the landscape -- was slowly gathering strength: one that was disgusted with the rampantly indulgent subjectivity of earlier mountain appreciation. [25] But the extremes of barren, dismal and endless wildernesses would have to wait even longer, until eventually redeemed by a subtle appreciation of light and space that appeared only towards the very end of the nineteenth century. [26]

In 1841-2, early British confidence in the 'naturalness', of their imperial presence in Asia received a series of major setbacks. Wars in Afghanistan and China, with a crushing defeat in the former, were only the most visible of manifestations. The Sikh nation under its vigorous leader Gulab Singh, rivaled the Gurkhas in both military ability and expansionist desires. Both powers threatened to reconcile their differences and unite, a possibility that sent shudders through British Himalayan aspirations. The Sikhs had already successfully invaded Ladakh in 1834, thus coming into direct contact with China; then, in 1841, they invaded western Tibet. With an army recently annihilated in neighboring Afghanistan, British moves towards Himalayan hegemony had reached a critical stage.

One Tibet or Many

Lieutenant White's journal stands exactly midway through this highly formative period in the British relationship with the Himalayas and Tibet, but the self-assurance of his text is deceptive. In some ways White's confidence points forward to the mid-century, mid-Victorian synthesis, to the popular excursions from the hill-stations of Simla and Darjeeling. On the other hand, in its naivety it harks back to a simpler time when the Himalayas seemed to lie outside complex political intrigue: to a time before their full integration into Western history, into the new global, geopolitical map. White's journal is not typical, but in fact the period produced no typical Himalayan travel accounts. We have not yet reached the stage in Himalayan exploration when the selection of texts for interpretation becomes a problem. Travel texts during these years are both extremely limited in number and highly idiosyncratic. Nevertheless they do fall into certain patterns and each helped, in some essential way, to lay the foundations for the Western creation of a Tibet that was imaginatively rich, complex and substantial.

Although there were comparatively few of them, the travelers among the Himalayas during the first half of the nineteenth century formed a highly diverse group. Manning, the only Englishman actually to reach Lhasa during the whole of the century, was an eccentric devotee of Chinese culture who had little interest in Tibet and was instead totally preoccupied with reaching the 'forbidden' city of Peking from India. [27] The French Lazarist priests Huc and Gabet, the only other Europeans to reach the capital of Tibet, were also unorthodox. Journeying from northern China and through Mongolia, they were the final representatives of a line of intrepid Catholic missionaries to Lhasa extending back into the seventeenth century. [28]

But what constituted an orthodox Himalayan traveler? Moorcroft was one of the most famous, yet he was spurned by the British administration in India. A mixture of adventurer, meticulous observer and trader, with his warnings about the Russians he was also one of the first British travelers with a global, imperialist perspective on the politics of the region. [29] The wandering Transylvanian hermit-scholar Csoma de Koros had his British, scholarly counterpart in Brian Hodgson. [30] Compared with the enigmatic brilliance of the Hungarian, who died in poverty in 1842, Hodgson steadily exerted his powerful presence as a Himalayan scholar, administrator and innovator throughout most of the century.

Each individual represented a new kind of Himalayan traveler: the British officers Lieutenant Webb, Captains Raper and Hearsey; the Austrian botanist Baron Carl von Hugel: the renegade Scotsman Dr. John Henderson and the Harrow-educated English sportsman Godfrey Vigne; the three Gerard brothers from Aberdeen; the French botanist, dilettante and socialite Victor Jacquemont; the enigmatic, cosmopolitan adventurer Colonel Alexander Gardiner, half Scottish, quarter English and quarter Spanish; the religious eccentric Joseph Wolff, son of a Bohemian rabbi. [31] Caught up in the beginnings of the 'Great Game', the imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia, they combined adventure and trading with a mixture of surveying, mapping and spying. Among the other travelers, James Fraser and George White were like adventurous tourists. On the other hand, Francis Hamilton and Captain Pemberton were engaged on straightforward diplomatic missions to the independent Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan. [32] Henry and Shipp were soldiers, whereas Herbert was a surveyor. [33]

Whilst they were highly individualistic, these early travelers nevertheless shared a common sense of kinship of which Moorcroft and Gardiner were the acknowledged founding fathers. [34] In 1835 von Hugel and Henderson met in Kashmir; earlier Jacquemont and von Hugel had crossed paths in Poona; Moorcroft and Trebeck had, by chance, encountered the solitary Csoma de Koros whilst traversing Ladakh in 1820; [36] the Hungarian subsequently died in the company of Hodgson in Darjeeling. These encounters and the familiarity with each other's work helped to lay the foundations for a coherent tradition of Himalayan travel writing. [37]

During this period Tibet was closed off, sealed in. It was becoming a hermetic vessel for Western projections. The frontier, the boundary, of this potentially sacred place began to be invented. At the same time a new and crucial element was introduced into Himalayan travel: concern about the validity both of the travelers and of their texts. Evaluations began to be made about the relative value of different travelers and their reports.

Any fantasy about a particular place always rests upon ideas about the particular route followed and the traveling style adopted, but above all on the type of people who travel and the kind of observations they make. Almost ritual notions came to exist as to the status and validity of any journey to Tibet. Indeed, as we shall see, women, non-Europeans, lower classes, amateurs, eccentrics and young people all, at some stage, had their journeys discounted. By selecting and encouraging one style of travel and reporting, whilst discouraging others, the British exerted the power of their fantasies over 'the Himalayas' and 'Tibet', creating a very specific type of place. At the same time they legitimized an equally specific way of looking at the landscapes of the world, an aesthetic of geopolitical Romanticism.

In the creation of a place, a critical point is always reached with a struggle over the selection and evaluation of texts. Assessment is made about their relative usefulness in the creation of a particular, desired landscape. Struggle over texts is always a struggle between contending landscape fantasies. In the case of the Himalayas and Tibet, this issue was never to be completely resolved; there would always be many Tibets. But imperialism and nineteenth-century scientificity demanded systematic, cultural, commercial, political and geographical surveys, and these quickly gained the ascendancy. Britain needed and created a coherent, rational and well-mapped Tibet as the century progressed. The geopolitical rivalry with Russia provided the impetus for the hegemony of this kind of travel text, whilst the establishment of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 furnished this landscape perception with a powerful and efficient headquarters. The only exception to these systematic, scientific, political and commercial perspectives that was looked upon with some favor was the aesthetic, but even this would not receive dedicated attention until much later.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Tibet and the Himalayas were 'known' territory, not in terms of geographical and cultural details but by virtue of their absorption into the established rhetoric of travel and exploration. Blank spot or not, early in the century Tibet had been located, at least within the grid and coordinates of Britain's global map. When that most ungeographically aware traveler Thomas Manning wrote, whilst in Tibet in 1811: 'the latitude and longitude of Lhasa ... are pretty well ascertained', he was implying a symbolic, as well as a geographical, location. [38]

Whilst its full impact would not be felt until the second half of the nineteenth century the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), after its founding in 1830, soon began to shape the contours of British exploration. India and the Himalayas received considerable attention as a region where 'British interests were most intensely concentrated'. [39] Between 1830 and the end of the century, explorers of the Western Himalayas received twelve of the Society's Gold Medals; a number unmatched anywhere else in the world, [40] but the RGS's intense interest in the Himalayas was still only a part of its more global geographical concern. It has been said that 'to know the world and to map it were clear responsibilities of the RGS'. [41] The Society's preference for 'scientific' and useful travel was also made fairly clear as early as 1835, when its journal contained an article that was bitingly critical of what it called the 'travelers' tales' type of geography. [42]

Moorcroft: A Traveler without a Place

Towards the middle of the century, the British, anxious about the security of their Indian possessions, were desperately attempting to collect and collate extant information about Tibet and the Himalayas. The authorities began to search the earlier accounts for 'useful' facts. In most cases they were to be sorely disappointed; Manning's diaries were full of 'gossip and complaints'; [43] Huc and Gabet clearly used poetic licence quite freely to improve their story; [44] Gardiner reached for geography only when he thought he was lost and in need of directions. [45] None of these travelers was desperately concerned about geographical accuracy. Moorcroft's massive journals, whilst packed with cultural details, were not of the kind British imperialism felt it needed. In 1873 Wilson, their patient editor, lamented: 'To say the truth, Mr. Moorcroft's writings were so voluminous, so unmethodical, and so discursive, that the chance of meeting with any person willing to ... [collect and edit] them was remote'. [46]

Wilson, a member of the Royal Asiatic Society (founded in 1823), also exclaimed:

The whole of the intervening country between India and China is a blank; and of that which separates India from Russia, the knowledge which we possess is but in a very slight degree the result of modem European research, and is for the most part either unauthentic or obsolete.

Under the pressure of imperial demands, travel journals began to be arranged chronologically; older accounts were considered unreliable, outdated, relegated to the realms of the 'amusing' and the 'curious'. Earlier in the century the British had been conspicuously indifferent towards seminal accounts such as Moorcroft's (1819-25) or Manning's (1811), yet in 1837 Wilson was seriously complaining that the journeys of the Catholic missionaries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gathered 'very little useful information'. [48]

Towards the middle of the century, Tibet and the Himalayas became increasingly drawn into the grid of Western history and its attendant global geography. As Baudet comments in his perceptive study of European ideas about non-Europeans, eighteenth-century social and human universalism was replaced in the nineteenth century by the myth of the nation. Fundamental to this change was the notion of national history: 'History ... was first and foremost the history, the growth of their own nation ... there was no place here for the non-European world unless it served the interests of the national idea.' [49] A decisive shift was taking place in British identity throughout the first half of the century. Travel in the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia played a small but critical role in this transformation.

By 1837, along with the founding of the RGS, the concept of 'modern travel' was already becoming established. Moorcroft's journals did not easily fit into this mold and, as we have seen, took a long time to be published. They were not entertaining, nor were they full of the sublime uplifting quality that had come to be expected from descriptions of wild mountain landscapes. Again the weary Wilson groans: 'Much that recommends travels in the present day -- liveliness of general description, moving incidents by flood or field, and good-humored garrulous self-sufficiency -- are not to be looked for.' [50] It was to individuals such as Lieutenant Alexander Burns of the Bombay army that fame would be extended in this period. His Travels into Bokhara (1833) combined extensive, carefully checked observations with an inspired narrative and assessments that were 'portentous but modest and discreet'. [51] It impressed the general public as well as political and scientific circles. Burns was introduced to the king at court in London, elected a member of both the prestigious Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society, and awarded the latter's Gold Medal. He was acclaimed in Europe and his book, in three volumes, sold 900 copies on the day of publication. Clearly the contrasting fate of these two explorers, Moorcroft and Burns, and of their journals, reveals much about the British expectations of travel in the first half of the nineteenth century.

As Keay points out, when Moorcroft was in the field 'there was no Royal Geographical Society to acknowledge ... [his journey]; even the concept of the explorer was not current.' [52] It was argued, too, that Moorcroft was not scientifically trained in geography, 'neither was he an oriental scholar or an antiquarian'. [53] Between Moorcroft's mysterious disappearance in 1825 and Burn's journey to Bokhara in 1832 much had changed. Burns was an exemplary figure of the new era: a scholar, a diplomat and adventurer with a good sense of what the time and place wanted. As the mid-century approached, there was a demand for accounts that contained precise and scientifically accurate observations on politics, geography and culture -- facts that would be useful, for British imperial aspirations. At the same time such accounts should, ideally, reinforce the unquestioned exuberance and self-confidence of the new British global presence and identity.

Thomas Manning in Tibet [LC-1]

It is somewhat ironic that even by the idiosyncratic standards of early Himalayan travelers, the only Englishman to reach Lhasa during the whole of the nineteenth century was an eccentric among eccentrics. Thomas Manning seems to defy any categorization as a traveler. Indeed, so at variance was he with the demands of nineteenth-century British geopolitics that his journal becomes a valuable social document almost by default; it is the exception that proves the rule. By virtue of its position outside the 'common-sense' ideas about travel, it serves as a critical vantage point from which to observe the logic behind the nineteenth-century British creation of 'Tibet'. Manning was like the fool to the subsequently established 'court' of the Royal Geographical Society. His journal always seemed to be greeted with a sense of frustration, as if it represented an opportunity wasted. As Markham, who edited it for the first time in 1871, wrote: 'good or bad it stands alone'. [54] He suggested that Manning had the ability to 'have written a good account of his remarkable journey but never did'. Markham grudgingly conceded that Manning's journal does contain some insights into the social habits of the local people, but overall it was clearly unsatisfactory: 'His narrative is to a great extent filled with accounts of personal troubles and difficulties.' [55]

Whilst Markham was writing in 1871 and is most representative of that time, his sentiments, as we have seen, are not alien from those expressed earlier, around the middle of the century. It would be difficult to find two individuals so diametrically at odds in their understanding of what constituted useful information about Tibet. Factual details -- whether about geography, politics, religion, trade or landscape -- all succumb to Manning's delightful eccentricity. No wonder Markham, the exemplary Victorian systematizer on Tibet, continually felt thwarted by Manning's odd text.

One night, having finally reached Lhasa, Manning lay ill with rheumatism. He felt an obligation to go on to the roof of his 'miserable' little house so as to take bearings from the stars, but quickly persuaded himself against any exposure to the night air: 'there was nothing I could do for geography that would compensate the risk I must run.' [56] Manning was no hero, nor a martyr for science; he was ill, and went into an extended discussion about his illness. Despite repeatedly calling for help, he had been left alone all night in his bed. Finally his Chinese traveling companion came into his room and told him to be quiet. Manning wanted to beat their servant for his neglect, but his Chinese companion objected. Manning faithfully recorded their argument:

You can't strike anyone here in Lhasa.
Can't? Oh, we will see.
You can't.
But I will beat him.
You can't. [57]

One can imagine Markham's frustration with page after page of these apparently domestic trivia. Manning's endless disputes and complaints, whilst obviously vital to Manning himself, hardly seemed the stuff of Tibetan exploration to Markham. Indeed, so obscurely tangential is Manning's mind that he actually footnotes this argument: 'In Latin', (Manning and his Chinese companion always spoke to each other in Latin) 'he used the words "non Potes". He ought to have said, "non licet". My response was, "at verberabo". [58]

Meanwhile Markham desperately scanned these endless anecdotes for a hard, geographical fact. He attempted to deal with Manning's whimsy by employing his own 'rigorous' style of footnotes. So in contrast to Manning's pedantic footnote about Latin grammar, Markham, seemingly desperate to put some backbone into the narrative, inserts one of his own:

The pundit of 1866 reached Lhasa on January 12, and remained until April 21. He says that city is two and a half miles in circumference, in a plain, surrounded by mountains. It is in 29° 39' 17" N and 11,700 feet above the sea according to the Pundit. [59]

This particular 'scientific' footnote is prompted by the bizarre opening of Manning's chapter on Lhasa. Here is the first eyewitness account of this fabled city by an Englishman -- and indeed, the only one for well over a hundred years. How does Manning open the chapter? With exclamations about the architecture, or the colorful people? Comments about the dirt or perhaps a date, or just a tidbit of geographical detail? No. He writes: 'Our first care was to provide ourselves with proper hats.' [60] Are proper hats really that important in Lhasa, or are we confronting another strange twist in Manning's mind? Whatever the answer, he provides us with details about what was considered to be a 'proper' hat among the Chinese community in Lhasa in the winter of 1811. Clearly these were not the kind of details that Markham considered useful.

Manning was like a Laurence Sterne, an Irish raconteur, let loose in Tibet. [61] In fact, not only did the geographers and scientists have grounds for complaint with his journal, so too did the lovers of mountain scenery. When he climbed to the top of a prominent hill, instead of describing the view he wrote: 'When I got to the top, my servant had palpitation, sweated profusely, eruption broke out, and the next day he said his skin peeled away. I told him it would do him good and prevent fever. Next day I bargained for people to carry us in our chairs.' [62] We are left none the wiser about the scenery.

Even the highly conspicuous religion of Tibet becomes almost invisible behind Manning's delightful preoccupation with his own experiences. He delayed visiting a temple until he could find someone to explain it. He was under pressure to make such a journey, for he was disguised as a lama from Bengal. People began to wonder why this strange foreign lama, who had been in Lhasa for several months, had not yet visited a temple. After much characteristic vacillation he finally arrived at one, but immediately became involved in a loud argument with his servant who exclaimed Manning, 'was ignorant as a beast'. [63] Frustrated by his servant's lack of religious knowledge, Manning became angry and made a scene in front of numerous Tibetan devotees. In the end we learn absolutely nothing about the religion except for a totally vague footnote: he cannot recall the name of a Tibetan deity and, leaving a blank space in the body of hid narrative, writes: 'This is the name of their great saint or religious lawgiver. I never could rightly make out his story.' [64] Of the religion we are still ignorant, but of Manning's complex relationship to it we have a rich store of anecdotes.

It would be easy to isolate Manning and consider his travel diary as an oddity, an aberration; but in reality his text belongs firmly within a tradition of Himalayan travelers and travel writing which presents the 'inside story' of Tibet. This tradition is concerned less with big views, or with scientific and geographical exactitude, than with the journey itself as an experience, a series of daily events. As we have already seen, such a development can already be found in the intimate corners of Bogle's account, but with Manning it reached an unequivocal intensity. A twentieth-century representative of this tradition, Fosco Maraini, called his book Secret Tibet. [65] In this he was referring not to occult rituals but to the small, everydayness of Tibetan life which so frequently eluded Western travelers and hence remained secret.

This tradition also includes that officer-comedian in Britain's eventual invasion of Tibet in 1904, Powell Millington. With a measured irony, given the desperate attempts to reach the capital of Tibet, he called his account To Lhassa at Last. [66] No military record of Powell Millington exists, and his true identity has never been discovered. Robert Byron's account, First Russia: Then Tibet, is similarly full of humor and extensive sidetracks. [67] Peter Matthiesson's The Snow Leopard (1980) is another of these almost inside- out accounts. [68] Here geographical details merely provide the springboard for introspection, or are reduced to a suitable location for the intriguing details of everyday life. However, under the early hegemony of the Royal Geographical Society and pressing imperial demands, this other way of imagining Tibet was to be ridiculed and trivialized: its authors were constantly criticized for being unscientific, even selfish and narcissistic. [69] Yet these few texts were an important antidote to the overwhelming number that were preoccupied with the 'Great Game', with the grandiose creation of global geopolitical fantasies, with Tibet as a heroic or occult proving- ground.

Manning clearly offered no mapping of Tibet, but did he offer anything other than the mapping of his own idiosyncracies? Even Markham suggested that 'for those who know how to find it, there is much wheat to be gathered from amongst Mr. Manning's chaff.' [70] As well as Markham's wheat, what does Manning's chaff offer?

As we have noted, Manning presents an inside view of Tibet, a perspective from the early-nineteenth-century Chinese community in Lhasa. His account takes its place with other ethnographic portraits such as Bogle's intimate glimpse of late-eighteenth-century Tibetan court life, or the Japanese monk Kawaguchi's detailed experience of Tibetan monasticism at the end of the nineteenth century. [71] Like these other travelers, Manning felt at home in his small corner of Tibetan society, sympathetic to the mundane details that made up its everyday life. He had an acute ear for the gossip, slander and other tales that abounded in such an isolated, semi-exiled community as the Chinese in Lhasa. We hear, for example, a story about the animosity between a 'Tartar dog' and a 'crack-brained mandarin': another about the execution of 'a good mandarin', told from both the Chinese point of view and the Tibetan; about the Chinese spies and informers that kept close watch on the community in Lhasa: 'my bile used to rise when the hounds looked into my room', exclaimed Manning. [72] He operated as a doctor, both to the Chinese and to the Tibetans. At one stage he even treated the Dalai Lama's own physician. The Tibetan doctor refused to take Manning's medicine: 'He was childish, they said; he did not like the taste or the smell.' [73] A short while later, to Manning's genuine sorrow, he died.

Manning's account also contains numerous short essays -- on clothing, food, beards, translations, horses. [74] At first glance these too may seem to be as trivial as his poignant glimpses into the small Chinese subculture in Lhasa, but many of his observations are acute and pertinent. We must not be misled by his gentle humor and his outrageous irritations: for example, two pages devoted to the problems with his horse and saddle were quite relevant in an age before motor vehicles. [75] His reflections about clothing were not just whimsy but sensitive and astute. He praised the local costume and ridiculed European stubbornness in continuing to wear inappropriate clothing. [76] He also reflected, whilst wearing the local Chinese gown, how such a dress -- similar in many respects to that worn by a Western woman -- restricted movement, engendered caution and took away boldness. It would be some years before women explorers arrived at similar conclusions.

Manning's view is from the back streets of Lhasa and is not overly concerned with the scientific, political or geographical needs of British imperialism, nor with its landscape aesthetics. Recovered and reviewed late in the nineteenth century when such attitudes were assumed to be self-justifying, when heroism and self-sacrifice for the good of the nation -- or at least for science -- were expected, Manning's account was treated as a weird curiosity. Yet he upheld the tradition of the 'little' traveler, one who does not presume to be the mouthpiece and representative of an entire nation. In Lhasa he was desperately poor, often ill, generally afraid and virtually friendless. In his diary he constantly gives rein to his anxieties, yet his story has a poignant dignity. Forced to sell nearly all his meagre possessions, he reassures himself: I managed so as to keep up a certain respectability; and though I was not invited anywhere to dinner ... wherever I went I was treated as a gentleman.' [77]

Inventing the Frontier

In 1818, some seven years after Manning's journey to Lhasa, Lieutenant Alexander Gerard of the Bengal Native Infantry set out to explore the Himalayan passes in the vicinity of the Sutlej river, hoping eventually to enter Tibet itself. His narrative begins:

From Soobathoo, in latitude 30° 58' and longitude 77° 2' situated about twenty miles from the plains, and 4,260 feet above the level of the sea, I marched to Mumleeg nine miles, three and a half miles from Soobathoo, crossed the Gumbur, an inconsiderable stream, but it had swollen so much from late rain, that its passage was effected with great difficulty. [78]

Gerard, with his crisp precision and concern for geographical exactitude was clearly a different traveler to Manning. At the end of his narrative he assures the reader: 'Throughout the ... tour, the road was surveyed with some care, and a number of points were fixed trigonometrically ...' [79] Gerard belonged to a tradition of scientific exploration that, whilst not new, was to assume increasing importance as the century progressed. His journey to discover, explore and map the Himalayan passes was a model of its kind, and in following its progress we can gain access to some basic landscape fantasies of that period. Like the equally seminal account of the journey to Lake Manasarovar in Tibet by Moorcroft and Hearsey in 1812, Gerard's is highly eclectic in its concerns. He presents a continual series of vignettes: about the villages, crops, temples, dogs, plants, religion, people, administration and languages. Both scope and detail are breathtaking. In quick succession we move from the pleasure of grapes --

In the summer season, from the reverberation of the solar rays, the heat in the bed of the Sutlej, and other large streams is oppressive, and quite sufficient to bring to maturity grapes of a delicious flavor. [80]

-- to the study of languages:

The Koonawur language, of which we made a collection of nearly 1,000 words, differs much from the Hindee, most of the substantives ending in -ing and ung, and the verbs in -mig and nig. [81]

Unlike the scientific specialists who were to dominate the second half of the century, these earlier travelers were eclectic amateurs. Their capacity for observing, noting and collecting was relentless. At one state in his journey, Moorcroft had reached utter exhaustion: 'though I climbed as slowly as possible, I was obliged to stop every five or six paces to take breath'. Nevertheless he still had energy to discover 'two kinds of rhubarb -- one I took for the Rheum palmatum, the other was much smaller'. [82] He went into extensive details about these plants. Then, the next day, he again embarked upon 'a toilsome ascent of five hours'. After a brief but appreciative comment on the view, Moorcroft immediately set about collecting plant specimens from 'a dark green carpet formed by a short narrow leaved grass of a springy nature, and enameled with small blue polyanthuses in tufts, with anemones and ranunculuses ...' [83]

The most striking thing about this exercise is its totally random character. Moorcroft simply gathered 'all the varieties within ... reach'. Here was a veritable plenitude -- wherever one happened to glance, discoveries could not help but be made. Indeed, in the face of this over-abundance, how does one go about 'scientific' exploration? What actually is important; what should one look for and collect? In the early nineteenth century such questions were still wide open, despite the underlying pressure generated by the growing needs of British imperialism.

Both Moorcroft's and Gerard's journeys were ostensibly undertaken to satisfy very specific questions. Moorcroft's was concerned with trade, particularly the lucrative wool from the shawl goat. Geography, let alone botany, was clearly secondary. Even finding the exact location of the fabled and sacred Lake Manasarovar assumed importance only later. Gerard, too, was primarily concerned with mapping precisely some of the major Himalayan passes:

This pass [The Brooang] is situated in latitude 31° 23; and longitude 78° 12:, it separates Choara from Koonawur, another of the grand divisions of Busahir, which lies on both banks of the Sutlej, extending from latitude 31° 30: to 32°, and from longitude 77° 53' to 78° 46' It is a secluded, rugged and barren country ... It is terminated on the north and NW by a lofty chain of mountains covered with perpetual snow, upwards of 20,000 feet high ... [84]

As the Himalayas became increasingly imagined as a protective frontier, the British avidly set about locating and evaluating all the major and minor passes through them. The early-nineteenth-century enthusiasm about possible trade routes was replaced by the late-nineteenth-century concern about potential invasion routes. Confidence in the expansion of trans-Himalayan communication was replaced by a paranoiac need to be in complete control of the passes. Gerard's journey was merely the forerunner of many that would be made throughout the century with the purpose of locating and evaluating any possible weak points in the mountain frontier-wall.

We get only glimpses of the 'romance' of travel in these early accounts. Gerard, for example, writes:

We should have afforded an amusing spectacle, seated upon blankets near a fire in the open air, surrounded by our servants, dissecting the partridges with the kookree, or short sword worn by the Goorkhalees, and smoking plain tobacco out of a pipe little better that what is used by the lowest classes. [85]

Not only does such a comment remind us of the aristocratic and bourgeois domination of Himalayan travel throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, it also presents us with an early example of an exploration anecdote. Exploration, as it would be understood and celebrated in the second half of the century, had scarcely been formulated in 1818, and there is still a certain pleasing naivety about Gerard's self-conscious reflections on his novel experiences. Such anecdotes would become increasingly familiar as the century progressed, finally ending their days in the twentieth century as tourist cliches.

Eventually Gerard found his path blocked by Chinese officials. Such an experience would become commonplace to Westerners throughout the century, as Tibet became a hermetically sealed-in landscape. In the history of Tibet as a sacred place, such moments of attempted entry assume crucial proportions. [86] The era of the unopposed, let alone welcomed, entrance experienced by Bogle and Turner would be a long time returning. For over a hundred years Western travelers resorted to disguise, bluff and other such subterfuge, in an attempt to enter Tibet. Moorcroft and Hearsey for example, also found the way denied them, but with a mixture of disguise (as Hindu pilgrims), stubbornness, diplomacy and, above all, the liberal use of Western medical skills, they overcame the opposition to their journey. [87] As we have seen, Manning also resorted to disguise and to the supreme bargaining power of Western medicine. Gerard used neither and was forced to turn back.

But it would be a mistake to imagine the mountain passes blocked by desperate and ferocious anti-European warriors. Whilst this image had some substance further West, on the borders with Afghanistan and Dardistan, it was almost the opposite in the Buddhist Himalayas. Gerard writes: 'The Tartars pleased us much, they have none of that ferocity of character so commonly ascribed to them.' [88] Even the incidents which finally led him to abandon his goal of entering Tibet were full of humor and good feeling. The Chinese official admitted that he did not have the means physically to prevent Gerard and his party from continuing, but in such an eventuality he, as the official in charge, would probably lose his head. All he could do was withhold provisions. This firm, but non-violent, closure of the Tibetan passes added its own qualities to the mysterious and unknown land that lay beyond.

One result of this closure was that Gerard was forced to turn back into the Himalayan frontier and to direct all his astute observational powers on to this mountain region. The Himalayas became increasingly seen as a region in their own right. Through the travels of Gerard, Moorcroft, Hearsey and others, they were shown as imaginatively alive and inhabited, as culturally and geographically rich.

The Liminal Zone

Heidegger has written that 'a boundary is not that at which something stops but ... is that from which something begins.' [89] Boundaries have two edges, and in between they have depth. Between the edge at which things stop and the edge at which things begin is a place of transition, of suspension: a liminal zone. [90] In such a space one is neither here nor there: one has left but not yet arrived. In the ensuing years the Himalayas gradually became imagined as such a boundary-place. At first such a fantasy was somewhat subdued, revealing itself only in isolated references or as a kind of fragmented background echo, but late in the nineteenth century, when imperial politics demanded a coherent boundary, the Himalayas would emerge, as if from nowhere, as a fully evolved 'frontier'. In 1774 such an image of the 'frontier of Empire' was almost meaningless, but a century later it had become fully established and integral to British identity.

In understanding the creation and maintenance of a sacred landscape, the genesis of the boundary deserves the closest possible attention. Its unique qualities are enhanced by the tension between its two edges; the known and the unknown. These complement, contradict and refract each other, causing some features of the boundary to be enhanced and others diminished. Fantasies about it are affected by the land on either side -- in this case the familiar, conquered, administered and controlled territory of British India, as compared with the evasive and aloof Tibet.

The most immediately striking quality about the Himalayan region is, of course, the immensity of its mountains. As we have seen, the first estimates of their height provoked disbelief. Only gradually, by around 1821, was it accepted that they were the highest in the world, higher even than the Andes. [91] Yet the Himalayas were more than just mountain peaks. The valleys and their inhabitants, the rich flora and fauna, the complex cultural and political networks, all played their part in the creation of the Himalayan 'frontier'. Scientific curiosity, political expediency, aesthetic delight, adventure and individual self-improvement, colonization and commerce, mystic aspiration and self-fulfilment have all fed, in one way or another, upon the contents of this region, and helped to shape its imaginative contours.

Three imaginative movements were apparent in the emerging fantasy of an Himalayan frontier: a concern with crossing it; a concern with establishing it as a known, controlled, well-defined boundary; and a fascination with it as a place in its own right.

Crossing the Threshold: Going Out

Before being imagined as the northern bastion of imperial India, the Himalayas merely lay at the crossroads of British aspirations for Central Asian trade and Far Eastern communications -- a place of crossings, of routes, both real and imagined. Most of the earlier travelers were more concerned with discovering ways through and across the mountains than with exploring them for their own sake.

In addition to a general curiosity about what lands lay on the other side, early-nineteenth-century British interest in the pathways across the 'snowy range' was especially motivated by an intense desire to find a channel of communication with Peking. As one diplomatic mission after another failed to be admitted at the front door of China, Tibet came to be imagined as a possible back door. [92] Using the route through Tibet to reach Peking had been vaguely considered as early as 1792, but twenty years later such a thought had more urgency about it. Compared with the firm and somewhat haughty closure of China, Tibet's exclusion of Westerners seemed easier to overcome. As we have seen, Manning nearly succeeded in taking the high road to Peking, through the back door of Lhasa.

Tibet and the Himalayas lay in the penumbra of the fascination evoked by the Celestial Empire in the West. The British gaze passed through Tibet on its way to Peking, firmly imprinting its trace across the landscape. In the first half of the nineteenth century the British were constantly reticent about their involvement in Himalayan politics, for fear of alienating China. British policy-making always had only one eye on the Himalayas whilst keeping the other on Peking. [93]

During this period, the British image of the Himalayas began to be differentiated into discrete regions. Attention shifted from one end of the mountain range to the other, depending on the imagined suitability of each region as a point of access to Lhasa, and hence ultimately to Peking. The early use of Bhutan was denied after 1792. Nepal then seemed to offer the best possibility, despite the violent unrest in that country. As the hopes held for Nepal slowly dimmed, attention became directed on Sikkim. [94]

This regionalization of the threshold marks a critical phase in its overall creation. The particular route taken, and the region traversed when crossing over the boundary, profoundly modify the final image of the sacred land. With a traditional temenos, whether holy city, sacred grove or temple precinct, it was always a matter of importance by which gate one entered or left: east, west, north or south. [95] In Tibet, such a formal orientation around the cardinal points was not so important as geographical and cultural directions. Images of Tibet were profoundly modified depending on whether the traveler approached from India in the south, with its abrupt change in landscape, culture and climate; or from China in the east, where the changes were more gradual. Alternatively, travelers entering from Ladakh would already have experienced an abrupt transition much further west when journeying from Kashmir, and would notice no change when entering Tibet. Similarly, explorers venturing from the north, from Russian territory, would have a completely different set of expectations and experiences. In addition to these objective geographical and cultural factors, there were also overriding elements of fantasy. Routes connect: they bring dissimilar places into alignment. To enter Tibet from the fabled Silk-Route to the north was quite different to approaching it from the south, from India, from the 'jewel in the crown'. But early in the last century, such well-defined regional differentiations did not exist. They were merely beginning to announce their presence.

In 1815 Sikkim's ruler was 'persuaded' to act as a link between Calcutta and Lhasa. The British viewed the relationship between Sikkim and Tibet primarily in terms of their shared religion. As the British government became more aware of the extended influence of Tibetan religion throughout the Himalayan region, its interest changed from one of detached fascination to one of intense concern. An understanding of this strange religion, so embedded in Tibetan cultural life, in aristocratic allegiances and intrigues of state power, steadily came to be viewed as essential to any successful political or economic involvement in the Himalayas. Gradually the lines of rival imperial policy shifted away from Peking and began to intersect at Lhasa. By the middle of the century Britain was attempting to communicate with Lhasa less in order to reach Peking than to improve its own Himalayan trade and to stabilize Himalayan politics.

But Sikkim, at once so rugged and so lush, was not to be fully exploited as a route to Lhasa until late in the century. In the meantime British interest shifted once again -- this time to the far western Himalayas, especially the barren, high-altitude deserts of Ladakh. This western region provided access to the lucrative shawl-wool trade which, as we have seen, was the explicit object of Moorcroft's journey to Lake Manasarovar. In addition, following the conclusion of the Gurkha War, Britain had a common frontier with Tibet in this region. Given its remoteness from Peking, and from Lhasa, the British also hoped that their involvement in the western Himalayas would not be subject to rigorous scrutiny from China. But perhaps the most important reason for their close attention to the Western Himalayas was the establishment of a hill-station at Simla. By 1827 the benefits Simla offered to European health had already been attested to by such personage as the Governor-General and his family. Suddenly, a vital centre of British imperial administration and cultural life became established in the foothills of the western Himalayas. At the same time, the acquisition of Kumaon and Garwhal brought the British into intimate contact with the complex and ancient ties that bound these regions with Tibet, Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim and Bhutan.

Crossing the Threshold: Coming In

Increased British interest in the western end of the Himalayas was also the result of a quiet but critical shift in Britain's imperial political concerns. Early in the century Moorcroft had warned that the Himalayas around Kashmir were as much Russia's back door to India as they were Britain's back door to China. [96] With the conclusion of the wars against Napoleon, British anxiety about possible threats to their Indian possessions shifted towards the Russians, who were single-mindedly and vigorously expanding eastwards. It was the beginning of the 'Great Game', that nineteenth-century cloak-and-dagger precursor to the twentieth-century Cold War which was to affect every aspect of Himalayan imagining.

Both Moorcroft and Gerard were caught up in the earliest days of the 'Great Game', and mapping the passes of the western Himalayas was viewed as an increasingly urgent task. [97] The Russian victory over Persia in 1828 drew British attention to the unknown regions that formed the northern and northwestern frontier of their Indian possessions. As Russia moved its Asian frontier eastwards through the course of the nineteenth century, British fantasies about the Himalayas shifted accordingly. By the middle of the century, only the western end of this mountain chain was unduly affected by these insecure fantasies, but the second half of the century saw such fears extended to the central region and to Tibet itself, the eastern region of the Himalayas, on the other hand, always remained comparatively unaffected by the 'Great Game'.

Here is the beginning of a fundamental tension that would extend, with varying intensity, from one end of the Himalayas to the other. Were the numerous passes the gateways to China, to the fabled gold mines, to a lucrative trade with the vast, untapped markets of Central Asia, or were they the almost undefendable back doors into the always vulnerable British Indian Empire, its Achilles heel? Such contradiction and paradox was basic to the imaginative creation of the Himalayan frontier. As Britain became increasingly established in India and as the 'Raj' became a critical landmark of British identity, the fantasy of the Himalayan passes as the gateways to 'the Beyond' would be replaced almost entirely by a fortress mentality.

Such a nervous ambivalence is hinted at in the 1818 report by the surveyor Herbert. Whilst exploring one of these passes, he mused:

Neither this one or any of the others had been yet examined by Europeans; indeed, previous to the commencement of the present survey, the existence of such passes had not even been suspected, ...the Himmaleh having been always supposed to form an impenetrable barrier between Hindoostan and Chinese Tartary. [98]

Similarly, when Francis Buchanan Hamilton compiled his classic account of Nepal in 1819 for the East India Company, he wrote:

The ridge of snowy alps ... has few interruptions, and, in most places, is said to be totally insuperable. Several rivers that arise in Thibet pass through among its peaks, but amidst such tremendous precipices, and by such narrow gaps, that these openings are in general totally impracticable. [99]

As the century progressed closer attention to these mountains revealed a veritable honeycomb of passes. It must be remembered that mountaineering was in its infancy, and that apart from traversing well-worn trade and pilgrim routes, the inhabitants of the Himalayas were not mountaineers. The closer the British engaged with the mountains, the more passes appeared. What was considered impractical to the early-nineteenth-century traveler often came to be viewed as almost a highway by later, more experienced mountaineers. The very nebulousness of the Russian threat also encouraged a variety of fears. A pass that was too difficult for an army could still be of use to a small and determined band of saboteurs.

The Imaginative Gradient

Attention must be given to the two edges of the liminal zone that protects and defines a sacred space: the edge that leads from the known, and the edge that leads into the unknown. These two extremes create a steep imaginative gradient between them, a tension of opposites which intensifies the contradictions, ambivalences and paradoxes of the landscape that separates them. This coincidenta oppositorum, or meeting of opposites, expresses the mystery of passage, of passing over and of returning. The Himalayas increasingly became a place where a radical and abrupt change in consciousness was both expected and desired.

Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century a struggle ensued between European Romanticism, its enthusiasm reinforced by imperial confidence, and the Himalayas themselves, which continually refused to be constrained within such fantasies. The immense verticality of the mountains, with their steep contrast between perpetually silent, snow-clad peaks and dark, densely vegetated valleys, echoed the intense horizontal mystery of the frontier. Moving from one side of the boundary to the other was increasingly likened to entering a new world, a world outside time and space. So too, the ascent of these soaring mountains, whether physically or merely in the eye of the imagination, was likened to a passage between the realm of impermanence and that of immortality. Standing back on the plains and just gazing at the Indian edge of this threshold was sufficient to turn the mind to an intimation of higher things. As Robert Colebrook, the Surveyor-General, wrote in 1807: 'The weather was clear, and the whole range of snowy mountains was visible, and presented a scene which for grandeur can scarcely be rivaled.' [100] The Tibetans came to be viewed as the gentle guardians of the threshold, past whom only the most deserving could venture -- but this is to look ahead. As yet, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the 'frontier' lacked imaginative coherence. Even as late as 1849 that tireless explorer-scholar Brian Hodgson bemoaned that the Himalayas were 'quite without a plan'. [101]

We have seen that as the century progressed, British interests increasingly demanded a rational and systematic mapping of the Himalayas. The name of Hodgson was associated with two notable early attempts at achieving such a goal, but it belonged to two very different men and two very different enterprises. Between 1815 and 1818 John Hodgson began the first systematic survey along the length of the Himalayas, until illness obliged him to hand over the task to others. This mammoth undertaking, completed in 1822, produced an important map: The Mountain Provinces between the Rivers Sutlej and Ganges, and bounded on the North by Chinese Tartary and Ladak. [102] The Himalayas were now effectively connected to the grid which the Great Trigonometric Survey had thrown across India, and hence were now 'rationally' and tangibly joined to Britain and to its scientific and imperial aspirations.

The other mapping of the Himalayas associated with the name Hodgson was one which embraced the study of geology, languages, customs, religions, fauna, flora and politics. This project was begun by Brian Hodgson in the first half of the century and continued by him almost until its conclusion. Brian Hodgson's work was of seminal importance, not just for the Himalayas but also in the formulation of the new sciences -- from ethnography to linguistics. [10]3

But once again we have moved ahead just a little too quickly; the early nineteenth century was not yet obsessed with exhaustive and systematic scientific surveys. The collection of geological and ethnographic details, of landscape views and botanical specimens, was made only from what lay within immediate reach. Rather like Moorcroft hastily gathering plant specimens whilst lying exhausted on the ground, it was all a matter of chance encounters. Items tumbled over one another in a gloriously random profusion. Wherever one looked, whenever one stopped to gather, fresh discoveries were to be found. In most cases, only the route and chronology of the journey gave any semblance of order to the collection.

The attitude of many British early in the century was perhaps expressed best by Lord Moira, the Governor-General, on an official tour up-country in 1814: 'The sight was truly grand. The snow, illuminated by the beams, looked exquisitely brilliant ... Yet at this moment I am speculating on the trade which may be carried on beyond it ...' [104] Views and trade, trade and views -- these were the dominant sentiments of the age, both dovetailing delightfully in the Himalayan landscape.

The Dalai Lama, Lhasa, and the Creation of Tibet

And what of Tibet, the unknown land that lay on the other side of the newly emerging frontier? In fact, for most of the early nineteenth century the British were not unduly concerned with Tibet, except in so far as it was caught up in Anglo-Chinese communications. Of course, Tibet was still the place of rumors -- the sacred Lake Manasarovar mentioned by Pliny and Marco Polo, the source of the Ganges and of the Brahmaputra, the place of gold and silver mines. It was also viewed optimistically in terms of possible trading links with India. But by 1816 the Tibetan policy initiated by Warren Hastings had all but been abandoned. Nevertheless, scholarly research was still being supported, if not enthusiastically, as in Csoma de Koros's Tibetan dictionary and Brian Hodgson's collection of religious manuscripts.

In many ways, the British attitude towards the Dalai Lama mirrored all the ambiguities in their wider relationship to the whole of Tibet. While the Dalai Lama would have to wait until much later in the nineteenth century before assuming a central role in Britain's Tibetan drama, innumerable lines of influence were already beginning to converge on his Potala palace at Lhasa. The Dalai Lama was waiting in the wings, his script being prepared, until on cue he would step fully evolved into centre-stage. His physical elusiveness throughout the century was a crucial aspect of the evolving myth, forming a sharp contrast with the absolute centrality of his position within Tibetan culture and politics.

Only one British traveler actually met the Dalai Lama in well over a hundred years. Thomas Manning, like Bogle and Turner before him with the Tashi or Panchen Lama, underwent a profound experience upon his rare encounter.

The Lama's beautiful and interesting face and manner engrossed almost all my attention. He was at that time about seven years old: had the simple and unaffected manners of well-educated, princely child. His face was, I thought, poetically and affectingly beautiful. [105]

Manning left the interview deeply moved: 'I could have wept through strangeness of sensation.' Later he wrote, 'I strove to draw the Lama.' One of his characteristically eccentric yet most intimate footnotes reads:

1st Dec., 17th of tenth Moon. This day I saluted the Grand Lama! Beautiful youth. Face poetically affecting; could have wept. Very happy to have seen him and his blessed smile. Hope often to see him again. [106]

Manning, that exemplar of late Classical Europe, had made contact with an image of divine perfection. His adoring salutation to the Dalai Lama belongs, along with Bogle's to the Panchen Lama, to a past era of reason, order and spiritual ecstasy. Western adoration of the Dalai Lama then went into quiescence and reappeared only eighty years later, in the theosophical imagination. [107] In both Manning's diary and the writings of the founder of theosophy, Madam Blavatsky, the Grand Lama transcends any political, social and religious connections but never loses his unique Tibetan-ness. But Manning's image of the Lama comes as if from nowhere, whereas Blavatsky's, as we shall see, had been gathering the fragments of its form throughout the nineteenth century. Just as Manning's image of the Tibetan Lama's divinity simultaneously ended one era and initiated another, so too would Blavatsky's. Her Lama arose from the carefully gathered images that had been brought back from Tibet over nearly a hundred years. Images that had found increasingly fertile ground in the Western imagination.

After Manning's late, unpublished but ecstatic salutation, the Dalai Lama became a distant, elusive and enigmatic figure of power and authority in the journals of Western travelers. But for all his physical absence, he gradually came to exert a formidable imaginative presence. Travelers were constantly to encounter examples of his power and of Tibetan hegemony in their journeys through the Himalayas, yet the Dalai Lama like Tibet itself, was almost formless and shapeless. Tibetan hegemony, too, was seldom exerted by armed force. More often it was by unseen connections, through kinship, cultural ties and religious obligations. For example, more typical of the encounter with the Dalai Lama during this period than Manning's were those reported by Moorcroft and Hearsey during their journey to Lake Manasarovar. Whilst complaining about the past troublesome behavior of the 'independent Tartars of Ladak', Moorcroft observed that their deference to the Dalai Lama had resulted in a moderation of their behavior.

The sacredness of this personage, who is the head of the religion of the Tartars, caused them to desist from their incursions, and probably, would have the same influence in the event of any alteration in the current of trade. [108]

Later, in an exchange of gifts with an old lama, Moorcroft received 'some slips of gauze', which the Dalai Lama had sent to the old priest. In addition, he was given 'some red comfits made of flour, water, and some red coloring matter: they were insipid, but having been made by the holy hands of the head of the church of this country, were said to possess extraordinary virtues'. [109] In contrast to Manning's direct and intimate encounter with an individual who stood outside any particular social form, Moorcroft's Dalai Lama was an aloof and elusive presence exerting his power through the channels of religious ritual, trade, law and order.

Naturally, the Dalai Lama was also integral to British attempts to understand Tibetan religion. This in itself was complicated by European confusions about Buddhism and the exact relationship of Tibetan religion to it. Early in the century, the term 'Buddhism' was not even in common usage. Francis Buchanan Hamilton writes only of 'the followers of Buddh' or 'the sect of Bouddh': 'The Lamas are the priests of the sect of Bouddh, in Thibet and the adjacent territories ...' [110] He drew a distinction between a Guatama who lived in the sixth century B.C. and a Sakya who lived in the first century AD, and continued by pointing out that the Tibetans 'consider the Buddhs as emanations from a supreme deity, view many of their Lamas as incarnations of a Buddh, and accordingly worship them as living Gods, although they do not consider them equal to Sakya, who is the Lama of Lassa'. [111] Until the sudden availability of Sanskrit texts after 1830, made possible by Brian Hodgson's labors, the full nature of Buddhism, let alone the Tibetan variant, would remain obscure. Nevertheless, it was already becoming clear that Tibetan religion was not an isolated anomaly but part of a spiritual belief embraced by a considerable proportion of the world's population. In many ways it was this sheer scale of Buddhism that drew the attention of many Western observers. It also seemed that the Dalai Lama was a significant figure not only in Tibet but wherever the 'followers of Buddh' were to be found.

The relationship between Tibetan religion and Buddhism was to be a controversial issue throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, but as we shall see, by mid-century systematic studies of both had been attempted. However, it was easier for the West to produce a rational and coherent 'Buddhism' from textual sources than from the seemingly chaotic and cultural-bound practices of Tibetan religion. Tibetan Buddhism, unlike other forms, was never to be imagined independent of its land of origin. Travelers, rather than scholars, continued to dominate the shaping of Tibetan Buddhism in the Western imagination throughout the century. Their direct encounters with the religion's practitioners produced complex and contradictory impressions: attitudes towards monasticism were generally mixed and somewhat reserved; recluses and hermits were treated carefully and with some respect; the ordinary Tibetans, despite being the object of scorn for their superstitions and gullibility, evoked consistent respect for their all-pervading sincerity and faith. [112] At this stage, only a passing interest was shown in Tibetan metaphysics and ritual. The tireless labors of Csoma de Koros, for example, were as much inspired by linguistics and Hungarian nationalism as by religious curiosity.

Whenever the Tibetan religion was compared with Islam, no matter what was thought of its internal contradictions, it was always viewed most favorably. Moorcroft, for example, wrote that whilst Islam has encouraged temperance, 'it has introduced much more dissoluteness, dishonesty and disregard for truth, than prevails in those places where Lamaism still predominates'. [113] Yet, he continued, Lamaism itself is 'a strange mixture of metaphysics, mysticism, morality, fortune-telling, juggling and idolatory. The doctrine of the metampsychosis is curiously blended with tenets and precepts very similar to those of Christianity and with the worship of grotesque divinities.' [114] Here were all the contradictions that Tibetan religion aroused in the contemporary Western mind.

As the myriad images of Tibet and its religion slowly began to present themselves to the Western imagination -- although not yet to assemble themselves into any coherent shape -- they always seemed paradoxical, enticing yet distasteful. Moorcroft's comment that the monks at a monastery he visited 'seem a happy, good humored set of people, dirty, greasy and in good ease', was typical. [115] Yet this strange religious culture seemed to cast its net across the entire Himalayas -- was a unifying influence in the region that could not be ignored. It is understandable that intense efforts were later to be made to unravel it, to understand and evaluate it systematically.

No less prominent than the Dalai Lama, and just as elusive in the emerging fantasy of Tibet, was the city of Lhasa. Again, not until much later in the century would Lhasa appear as a fully evolved and coherent object of Western longing. Yet, as with the Dalai Lama, fragmentary images were slowly being deposited throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, images upon which the fabled city of the Western imagination would eventually arise. At this stage, however, Lhasa was viewed merely as either an important but provincial outpost of the Chinese Empire, or as a centre of influence among the small Himalayan hill states. [116] Only when British policy shifted and the Himalayas came to be regarded as important in their own right did Lhasa become imaginally emancipated from its subservience to Peking. Once again, despite his eccentricity, Manning's attitude towards Lhasa echoed that of many of his fellow-travelers. His impression in 1811 was of a dirty and desolate place of exile for out-of-favor Chinese bureaucrats. Whilst Lhasa was an important place for Tibetans and other people of the mountains and Central Asia, it was hardly a great centre of civilization. Manning's entry into the city is worth recording in detail, so sharp is its contrast with the golden fantasies of the future Victorian era.

When he arrived, he was reminded of Rome. Such an association would continually recur in the fantasies of later travelers, but would be based then upon its wide-ranging influence rather than any physical resemblance, for indeed no other nineteenth-century Briton would actually see the city. Ostensibly, Manning's association had nothing to do with the regional influence of Lhasa; it was also only marginally related to the city's architectural appearance. True to his whimsical imagination, Manning was impressed solely by the proximity of marshland to both capitals. But perhaps he was less naive than he appears, and his association of Lhasa with Rome was stimulated by the many earlier comparisons of Tibetan religion with Catholicism. Moorcroft echoes such sentiments: 'of the Paraphernalia of the temple, the resemblance with those of the Romish church was very striking.' [117] Any comparison with Roman Catholicism generally had a double edge, given the suspicion directed at that religion by most nineteenth-century British travelers. Manning, for example, comments: 'We are apt to think the Muhammadan religion eminently intolerable; but if it be fairly examined, it will be found much less so than the Roman Catholic, both in practice and in principle'. [118]

Manning was certainly impressed by the Potala palace. He commented that it produced a 'striking and grand effect' and continued: 'The road here, as it winds past the palace, is royally broad; it is level and free from stones ...' [119] But his admiration stopped there and his subsequent impressions reinforced the growing belief that the Tibetan landscape was disturbingly paradoxical. 'If the palace had exceeded my expectations', he wrote,

the town as far fell short of them. There is nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The habitations are begrimed with smut and dirt. The avenues are full of dogs, some growling and gnawing bits of hide which lie around in profusion, and emit a charnel-house smell; others limping and looking livid; others ulcerated; others starved and dying, and pecked at by the ravens; some dead and preyed upon. In short everything seems mean and gloomy, and excites the idea of something unreal. Even the mirth and laughter of the inhabitants I thought dreamy and ghostly. [120]

One can only wonder how such a place would ever excite the desperate longings of generations of Europeans later in the century, especially when Manning's eyewitness description was readily available.

In these travel accounts, different levels of fantasy and association constantly slide across one another: the Dalai Lama and his Potala place, whilst obviously belonging to Lhasa and to Tibetan religion, were also somehow different; the monasticism, the religion, the people, their culture, even the landscape did not yet add up to a coherent whole. The Dalai Lama was respected, yet the monasticism was suspected; the Tibetans were liked, but their dirt and their customs -- such as polyandry -- evoked distaste; the austerity of the landscape was considered inspirational, but its barrenness was abhorred. Such contradictions and seemingly irrevocable dissociations were not easily resolved, and not until the very end of the nineteenth century would the West evolve a fantasy-place of sufficient complexity to embrace them all.

As British people's confidence in their imperial presence in the Himalayas increased and became a 'natural' part of their global identity, their curiosity became augmented by arrogance; the Classical era's sense of a common human brotherhood was replaced by a belief in racial and cultural differences. Manning, for example, enthusiastically embraced Asian habits in clothing and was even willing to give due respect to Asian religious formalities: 'Any form and ceremony that is required I shall go through and nothing further.' [121] However, despite his ecstatic encounter with the Dalai Lama, he never desired to embrace Tibetan religion. Such aspirations among Westerners would have to wait until the very end of the century. Manning mused:

All religions as they are established have a mixture in them of good and evil, and upon the whole they all perhaps tend to civilize and ameliorate mankind: as such I respect them. As for the common idea that the founders of all religions except our own were imposters, I consider it as a vulgar error. [122]

Manning's panhumanism belonged to a passing age: it was soon replaced by a Weltanschauung characterized by developing human sciences such as ethnography and sociology, with all their connotations of knowledge and power, assessment and evaluative schemas. [123]

If Manning ('When I entered the temples in Bengal, if there were natives about, I always made a salam') is the last representative of a bygone age, then Lieutenant White stands as a forerunner of the future. At the beginning of this chapter we saw how his 1825 journey into the newly 'acquired' territories of 'Sirmour, Gurwhal and Kumaon' marked the beginnings of an aesthetic appropriation of the Himalayas by the West. These mountains now firmly belonged to Britain in a way that lay outside the earlier imaginations of Bogle, Turner, Manning and even Moorcroft. White was visiting territory that had become merely an exciting, unknown extension of Britain. The inhabitants, with their cultures, were now to be administered, controlled and, perhaps, picturesquely admired. How different this world was from Manning's! White strongly advised Westerners to avoid visiting places where their values might be compromised. For example, he wrote that removing one's shoes at a Hindu temple 'is an acknowledgement of the sanctity of the place, which no Christian ought to give'. [124] On the other hand, he suggested, a European should not show 'the haughty superciliousness, arrogance and contemptuous conduct, too characteristic of Anglo-Indians'. He regretted that 'the influx of European travelers' was bringing to the hills these attitudes that were 'so prevalent in the plains'. White was attempting to sort out rules of conduct befitting a race which considered that it possessed superior knowledge, virtue, wisdom, science, etc. By the middle of the century such an elitist attitude would be fully engaged not only with the people and their cultures, but also with the mountains themselves.

Places and Styles of Travel

The first half of the nineteenth century was a formative period both for the creation of Tibet and the Himalayas as places, and also for the establishment of travel writing as a genre. Construction was begun not only on the Himalayan frontier but also on the core-image of Himalayan exploration, on its personae and its dramas. Such an image was never simple and at least seven main themes have been identified in this chapter: Manning exemplified the concern for details, for the intimate, inside stories of the journey, of the traveler and of the place itself; White's concern was with aesthetics; Moorcroft was primarily a commercial adventurer; Gerard prefigured the systematic, scientific explorers soon to be promoted by the Royal Geographical Society; Hamilton's journeys belonged to a tradition of diplomatic, fact-finding missions; Henry and Shipp offered experiences that would be typical of many soldiers who fought in Britain's nineteenth-century Himalayan campaigns; Herbert approached the mountains as a dedicated surveyor.

Notably absent were the expedition leaders and the mountaineers. The former would soon arrive on the scene, whereas the mountains would have to wait much longer for the latter. Finally, with the exception of the Frenchmen Huc and Gabet, the Himalayas and Tibet had not yet witnessed a nineteenth-century missionary, or mystic, assault from the West, and certainly not from Britain. All these styles of engaging with the landscape would add their images to the emerging place of Tibet, struggling to impose their own coherence on its contours. The mid-century would see all these struggles subsumed under the hegemony of systematic, comprehensive and scientific surveys.

A frontier imagination was being born, as critical to the Himalayas as it was to the American West. It would color every aspect of the mountains, from aesthetics to ethnography. But this was not a colonizing frontier, mobile and expanding, like the American West, but one whose main purpose, stability and containment, was quite the opposite.

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Librarian's Comment:

[LC-1]

Thomas Manning:
Eccentric or Extraordinary?
by Pilgrimsbooks.com

Thomas Manning was the first Englishman to visit the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Yet before this achievement many regarded him as a hopeless eccentric with as much hope of reaching Lhasa as of travelling to the moon.

Manning was a brilliant academic and a friend of the essayist Charles Lamb and the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He was a classical scholar versed in Latin and Greek and taught mathematics and algebra at the university level. While studying at Cambridge University he began to brood over the mysterious empire of China and studied the language and arts of that country. He resolved at all costs to enter China, at that time a country firmly closed to foreigners.

He studied Chinese in Paris, then the European centre of Oriental studies. When war broke out between France and England in 1803, such was the esteem in which Manning was held among French orientalists and mathematicians that he was the only Englishman to be allowed to leave France -- with a passport personally signed by Napoleon.

With a letter of recommendation from the great scientific patron, Sir Joseph Banks, in 1806 Manning sailed for Asia, where he resided first in the East India Company trading outpost on the outskirts of Canton and later in Calcutta. In Canton he immersed himself in Chinese culture, wrestling with "veiled mysteries of the Chinese language" and even adopting Chinese dress to the dismay of other expatriates. He also wore a full and flowing beard.

Frustrated in his objective of entering China from Canton, he proceeded to Calcutta in 1810 where he appealed for assistance from Lord Minto, the Governor General of India. Unfortunately, he was ignored by the government and was given no recognition of any kind. The result was that Manning decided to undertake on his own and in disguise a journey to Tibet and hopefully from there to Peking. Amazingly he succeeded in reaching Lhasa, where he resided for several months and where he had interviews with the Dalai Lama. Though he did not succeed in the rest of his plans, what he actually did achieve places him in the first rank of English travellers.

Manning left a diary of his journey which was discovered and published 26 years after his death.

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