The Hotel on the Roof of the World (15 page)

The English devised a cunning plan to send in the only alternative: loyal British subjects. Indian pundits were recruited from the southern slopes of the Himalayas and trained in surreptitious map-making techniques. Nineteenth-century James Bond gadgets were designed in a fashion that Q would have been proud of. Sextants were concealed in the false bottoms of pilgrims' carrying cases and mercury was hidden in the caps of walking sticks. Even the roll of printed prayers inside prayer wheels was substituted with note paper, which would be used to make jottings of illicit observations.

Codenames were given to each of the pundits for maximum security and training in serious began. The spies learnt to walk in evenly measured paces and to keep record of their steps on fake rosaries using 100 beads instead of the holy number of 108 beads. One bead was counted for every 100 paces and thus the beads of an entire rosary would represent 10,000 paces. By counting every step of the way into and around Tibet the pundit ‘AK' mapped out his track of nearly 3,000 miles by recording over five million paces.

Of all the incredible feats performed by these brave and selfless men, the most astonishing story must belong to Kintup, codename ‘KP'. If he had dreamt that the spy world was to be a 007 whirlwind of women, romance and excitement in luxury hotels with open expense accounts, he would have been disappointed. He set off for the Tibetan frontier in August 1880, disguised as the servant of a Mongolian lama, with the mission to solve the riddle of the Brahmaputra. It was a puzzle that vexed every Englishman in India and caused many a sleepless night for members of the Royal Geographic Society. The great Tsangpo River raced along the northern side of the Himalayas and the even greater Brahmaputra raced in the opposite direction along the southern edge of the Himalayas and out into the Bay of Bengal. But were the two related? Did the Tsangpo turn the corner at the end of the Himalayas and become the Brahmaputra? If it did, where and how? That damned blank area on the map was simply intolerable – the region had to be explored.

The answer to the riddle was expected to come from the spy team of Kintup and the Mongolian lama who would launch 50 marked logs into the Tsangpo River in Tibet every day for ten days. The Brahmaputra on the southern side of the Himalayas would then be checked by British officers to see if the marked logs floated down. Elementary.

Kintup and the lama entered Tibet without any hitches, but the plan went disastrously wrong when Kintup discovered that the lama had given up the idea of map-making, taken all the money for the expedition, disappeared towards Mongolia and sold him as a slave to a ruthless petty official in the remote town of Tongkyuk Dzong. This left Kintup in an awkward position, to say the least. After seven months of forced labour he escaped, only to be captured again by the official's men. The traditional punishment for runaway slaves was amputation or at least a permanent crippling by severing tendons in the legs. However, Kintup was fortunate to be bought from his captors by a kind Tibetan abbot, who treated him well and allowed him temporary release from slavery to make pilgrimages. Over the course of three years Kintup used his pilgrimages to continue with his British secret service orders to solve the Brahmaputra riddle. He cut logs, marked them with the special tags and visited Lhasa to ask a Sikhimese trader to take a message back to the British in India saying on which date he expected to launch the logs. The following year the kind abbot released Kintup for good behaviour from his slavery and he could finally launch his logs into the river. Savage tribes blocked the direct route back to Sikhim and so he returned on foot via Lhasa, arriving home some four years after setting out.

His homecoming was not the glorious welcome he deserved. His mother had died, his note had never arrived, no one had looked for his logs and none of them had ever been recovered, the riddle of the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra had already been solved in his absence and to top it all, no one believed his tale.

It took a further twenty years after Kintup had returned until Westerners would walk in the streets of Lhasa. Many had tried to reach the Holy City but all had been turned back by the xenophobic Tibetans, the Chinese, the bandits or by the forces of nature which surround the Tibetan plateau. These forces were to prove no obstacle to the British who, determined to protect the Empire in India and to keep the Russians at a safe distance, eventually invaded under the pretext of wishing to sign a treaty on trade. Their entry was not entirely peaceful but anxious not to be seen as an invading force the intrusion was sportingly called an ‘expedition'.

Tragically there was heavy fighting on the way, leaving many Tibetans dead and dying. The wounded Tibetans prepared to face death as the British troops swept out over the battlefield after each fight. Treatment of prisoners in Tibet varied from region to region, but it invariably led to a nasty end. Khampas preferred decapitation, while the most feared captors were the Glak-lo Nagpo (the ‘black savages') of the lower Tsangpo area, who were said to eat their prisoners of war. The reaction by the British was somewhat different and totally incomprehensible to the Tibetans. Immediately after every skirmish the invaders rushed around the battlefield picking up all the wounded on stretchers and spent the rest of the day with them in the hospital tent trying to sew them up again and restore them to good health. It made no sense at all. What was the point of shooting someone in the morning and then patching him together in the afternoon?

Colonel Younghusband, who led the expedition, marched his men through Pargo Kaling, the western gate of Lhasa on 3 August 1904. The gateway formed a magnificent entry to the city, framed in the centre of a rock curtain joining the two hills of Lhasa; Mepori crowned with the Potala and Chagpori with the Medical College. Over the stone gateway stood a large
chorten
– a geometric cone containing sacred relics.

The gateway and the
chorten
have long since disappeared – blown apart by the Chinese in their programme of road modernisation. Strings of prayer flags now mark the spot where the gate once stood and an elderly Tibetan with beer-bottle bifocals sits cross-legged on the pavement carving the Tibetan characters for ‘Om Mani Padme Hom' on slabs of stone. This phrase, roughly translated as ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus' is the most popular prayer of Tibetan Buddhism. Om Mani Padme Hom is said to ‘open heaven and close hell' and is chanted ad nauseam as every utterance gains a further merit point towards the big day when all the brownie points are added up and the decision made as to whether the next rebirth will be up or down.

Younghusband was fascinated by the faith of the people and while waiting for the trade treaty to be signed, he and his officers studied the religion, culture, fauna and flora of the capital, as well of course taking time for the mandatory map-making. The unexplored area on the map was becoming smaller but there were still some tantalising blank spots requiring investigation. In particular, the lower reaches of the Tsangpo where it was rumoured that waterfalls greater than Niagara existed in the homeland of the fearsome ‘black savages'. Colonel Waddell, the Chief Medical Officer of the expedition, learnt more enthralling information on the ‘black savages' from the wounded Tibetans whom he had brought back to health. Apparently, as well as eating their prisoners of war, ‘the Glak-lo Nagpo at their marriage festivals kill and eat the mother of the bride if no other person is forthcoming.'

The 650 British soldiers and 4,000 Indian infantry and camp followers pitched their tents on the dry plain north of the city towards Sera monastery. Younghusband and the expedition headquarters were stationed nearer the Potala at Lhalu house, a residence of one of the wealthiest families in Tibet – which coincidentally had also produced two reincarnations of the Dalai Lama.

Lhalu House, with its vast gardens, fine stonework buildings and large courtyard, was known as one of the five beauties of Lhasa. Parties were held on an island in the large pond in the grounds and it was said that the best
chang
in Lhasa was brewed from the estate's barley and the pure water which flowed through a crystal-clear stream beneath the house.

Tibetan dances were held in the courtyard of Lhalu house and the British put on durbars and gymkhanas to woo the Tibetans into friendship and hurry them up with signing the trade treaty. They seemed to enjoy the festivities, although there were some areas where the different cultures could not understand one another. Betting was popular at the gymkhanas but Younghusband reported that the Tibetans found it hard to see why only the first person over the finishing line should receive a medal yet everyone had completed the race.

It took Younghusband a month and a half to persuade the Tibetans to sign his trade treaty before he could check-out of Lhalu and take the British and Indian troops back over the Himalayas, leaving Tibet to its own devices once again. Chinese empires came and went and after the fall of the Manchus in 1913, the Tibetans could at last consider themselves independent. They allowed the British to make several explorations, including one by Colonel Bailey who traced the course of the Tsangpo towards the land of the black savages. He took with him the only notes of the area, those made by Kintup nearly thirty years previously, and found them to be astonishingly accurate. On his return to India, Bailey searched for Kintup who had been dropped from the secret service after his epic journey. He discovered that Kintup was living in obscurity as a tailor in Darjeeling and immediately campaigned that Kintup be awarded a government pension. Instead he was granted a 1,000 rupee reward. It turned out to be far more than he would ever have received as a pension, as he died only a month after receiving the money.

Life in Tibet continued without the strain of the Manchu governors, known as Ambans, and the Chinese oppressors were quickly replaced with Tibetan ones. Unfortunately, the power struggles, corruption and incompetence of the Tibetan government in these years of de facto independence did nothing to prepare Tibet for the inevitable move into the twentieth century. The ‘good old Tibet' searched for by romantic Westerners was little different from medieval Europe, with absolute power in the hands of a few who were guided solely by their own personal interests. Government jobs were bought and sold, human rights were non-existent and mass exploitation was the order of the day. Political opponents could be stabbed, decapitated, have their eyes gouged out, sent parcel bombs or poisoned. Traditionalists will be pleased to know that some of these old habits still exist in present-day Tibet. It is said that decapitation remains a favourite of the Khampas, while poisoning is regarded by the more cosmopolitan city folk as a relatively safe way of ridding oneself of an unwanted spouse or adversary.

Ganden, Sera and Drepung, the three great monasteries of Lhasa, housing a combined total of over 20,000 monks, gripped the nation in the Middle Ages. Any changes proposed by farsighted nobles were immediately stopped by the leaders of the monasteries, who permitted nothing to come between them, their way of life and young monks.

This may seem a rather bleak picture yet it is generally accepted that the Tibetans were surprisingly happy with their lot. It was not all sodomy and decapitations and life continued auspiciously with a spin of the prayer wheel, a cheerful chorus of ‘Om Mani Padme Hom', a ready smile and much laughter. A tough but pious life would lead to gaining more merit and therefore a good chance of a successful reincarnation next time round so individual hardships were simple to bear.

Some even went in the fast lane to nirvana by volunteering for unimaginable deprivations. ‘Brickie' hermits believed they were taking the ultimate shortcut to enlightenment by voluntarily being bricked up in small caves. There are stages on the way for the faint of heart or for those wishing to give it a trial run before committing themselves for the big one. First a six-month sentence, or a three-year-three-month-and-three-day sentence, but the only direct way to nirvana, without passing go or having to suffer the tiresome circle of rebirths, is the full self-imposed life sentence, where they would stay not just for a few hours or a few days but for life. Their only contact with the outside world was the daily knock on a small wooden shutter just large enough to pass a small bowl of food prepared by the hermit-keeper. But solitary confinement until death was not enough for the brickie hermits to reach nirvana, they also had to keep to their vows of silence and not to look out from behind the wooden shutter, however tempting it must have been to have just a quick peek at the view from the cave, as total darkness was also a prerequisite for the nirvana road.

If the brickies had been permitted radios in their cells, they would have learnt of the storm clouds gathering to the east and the imminent danger which threatened not just their extreme lifestyle, but the very existence of all life on the Tibetan plateau. The Buddhists were in for a shock.

The small group of foreigners living in Lhasa had been listening anxiously to the events taking place in mainland China. The expat community included the British under Sir Hugh Richardson, who maintained a British Trade Mission in Lhasa for nine years. Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, the Austrian and German who had completed a Herculean escape from a British internment camp in India to reach Tibet and set up residence for seven years, were also present. All were about to leave.

The Communists had been victorious in the fight against Qiang Kai Chek in mainland China and on 1 October 1949, Mao Tse Tung announced the foundation of the People's Republic of China: a land without oppression or serfdom, a land where no one was induced to brick themselves up. His next target for liberation was fairly obvious, and in 1950 he sent his triumphant PLA troops to free their Tibetan comrades from oppression – the ‘peaceful liberation' began in earnest.

Lhalu Shape, who had been stationed in Chamdo in Eastern Tibet, returned to Lhasa and was replaced by the young Ape Ngapoh Renchen. The Tibetans had been used to fighting: against themselves, the black savages, the Nepalese, the British and the Chinese warlords; but never before had they faced such totally unfair battle tactics as used by the Communists. It was a dirty war. Prisoners were asked to speak up about the injustices they had suffered, were lectured on equality and the benefits of the proletariat distributing and sharing in the profits of the land. To top it all, the prisoners of war were set free after the lectures, with a silver coin each to take back home. It all sounded quite good, and on 23 May 1951, a 17-Point Agreement was signed by Ngapoh to the effect that Tibet would be part of the motherland and that the Chinese would allow the religion, government and Dalai Lama of Tibet to carry on as before.