"Everest Through The Lens" - Exhibition Review

 

Climbing Mount Everest. Under the auspices of the Mt. Everest Committee: the cinematograph record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922. EE/6/5/60 (RGS-IBG Collection)

Exhibition Review: Everest through the lens (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, UK: 5 October 2022-20 January 2023) - this review was originally written for the Other Everests Research Network.

Everest through the lens was an exhibition marking the centenary of the first two British attempts to climb the world’s highest mountain in 1922 and 1924. It examined the expeditions as seen through the lens of official expedition cinematographer, Captain John Noel. Focussing on the two films he made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), the exhibition set out ‘to unpick the uncomfortable and complex social, racial and geopolitical dynamics that shaped the expeditions – from their beginning to enduring legacy.’ Utilising a range of photographic and documentary sources, as well as a handful of well-chosen objects – such as a kinomatograph camera, similar to the one Noel used at high altitude, and Noel’s own Remington portable typewriter – exhibition visitors were guided through the various stages of the two expeditions, from their meticulous preparation, through their actual execution, to their final presentation in both print and film media.

 

As a documentary filmmaker, Noel’s lens was far from an objective one. The narrative of both films gives a distinctly colonialist view of the ‘heroic’ exploits of the British climbers, whilst the far larger entourage of local porters and other indigenous labourers who were key to enabling the endeavour are lost somewhere in the flickering side-lines, obscured by the simultaneous glare of the white snows and the reflected imperial glory bestowed upon the films’ British protagonists. Viewing the expeditions in the context of their times, this was a period when empires and nations vied to best one another in epic feats of exploration in harsh and extreme environments. Notably the British had lost out in the races to be the first to reach the North and South Poles, hence the summit of the world’s highest mountain – or the ‘Third Pole’ as it was then dubbed – represented a last chance at attaining pre-eminence. Together, the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club formed the Mount Everest Committee, which tasked itself with recruiting a team of elite mountaineers and geographers. Naturally these men were all British born and bred, privately educated and recruited through a network of mutual contacts. Letters and medical appraisals show that social considerations of class and military background counted as much as aptitude and experience in mountaineering. We are told that George Finch, as an Australian, was a lone exception to this rule, but that consequently he ‘was looked down on by some team members.’

 

A far more overtly condescending view was expressed with regard to the indigenous communities whom the expeditions encountered as they made their way through Tibet. An intertitle card from one of Noel’s films gives a clear example, stating that: ‘The men and women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are hacked to pieces, without a wash the whole of their lives.’ The British expedition members were genuinely fascinated by the cultures they encountered in the Himalaya. Noel filmed scenes described in another intertitle as: ‘the weird and fantastic devil dances at the sacred monastery of the Rongbuk.’ A Tibetan cymbal brought back by the expedition leader, Brigadier-General Charles Bruce in 1922, included in the exhibition, shows how the British climbers were particularly struck by Tibetan music which must have seemed very different to their unaccustomed ears. Climber and surgeon, Howard Somervell transcribed Tibetan folk songs into Western musical notation, and Noel later had bands perform this music as an evocative accompaniment to the screenings of his silent films.

 

Trailer for Noel's "The Epic of Everest" (BFI)

              

Social hierarchies shaped the expeditions. Base Camp was effectively a small village, run by the British along familiar colonial lines, with clear demarcations according to social, racial and class considerations. The selection process for local porters may have been less careful to note down details, but everyone recruited – ‘from bootmakers to botanists’ – had a role with set expectations and was renumerated accordingly. Ranked highest in this hierarchy were the high-altitude porters, who were very skilled and often more adept mountaineers than the British, who nicknamed them ‘tigers.’ It is notable in many of the photographs of the expedition that there is a marked discrepancy in the size and weight of the loads which these men were charged with carrying compared to the British members of the team. Without their efforts, lugging huge quantities of supplies, equipment and oxygen tanks to the various camps ascending the mountain, the British climbers would have struggled in their attempts to reach the summit. These efforts were not without genuine risk, as a disaster in 1922 made only too apparent. Seven porters – six Sherpa, Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema, and one Bhotiya, Norbu – lost their lives in an avalanche. George Mallory, seen as the hero of Noel’s films, felt himself responsible. Writing to a friend, he stated that the men who died were ‘ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I am to blame.’ However, the loss of these men’s lives was dealt with in a bureaucratic manner, with their families in Tibet, Nepal and Darjeeling being financially ‘compensated.’

 

In Noel’s film, the disaster was edited out of the final cut for fear of a negative backlash from viewers. A poignant memorial of this fact is embodied in a small bronze figure of the goddess Tara, which was on display in the exhibition. This was given to the British climbers on their return from Everest by Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Head Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, to commemorate the lives of the seven men who died. This action was filmed by Noel, but in the final version of his film Noel edited and placed these scenes at the start, representing the exchange as though it were a gift given to bless the expedition when it was first setting out.

 

Similarly, Noel appears to have had no qualms about appropriating an image of a deity depicted in a mural at the monastery in order to accentuate the sense of drama. A deity which the British stylised as ‘a mountain goddess angrily destroying the bodies of white climbers.’ As it is well-known, the 1924 expedition resulted in the loss of the lives of climbers, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared from view while making a bid to reach the summit and never returned.

 

The names of Mallory and Irvine, like those of Robert Falcon Scott and his men in Antarctica, were of course duly added to the roster of ‘heroic defeats’ which now characterise the annals of British Imperial exploration. A vision of heroism and self-sacrifice which Noel’s films did much to crystallise. As the final sections of the exhibition showed, this was not without controversy however.

 

Noel very actively sensationalised Tibetan culture as a marketing ploy for his films. He was personally invested in them, having funded much of the 1924 expedition himself in order to retain the rights to his footage. He hired and brought to London a troupe of seven Tibetan dancers to perform at screenings. These ‘dancing lamas’ were in fact Tibetan novice monks rather than lamas. The publicity stunt deeply offended the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, such that they banned all Westerners from entering Tibet to climb Everest for the next ten years. Despite the fact the British mountaineering community knew that the controversy of the ‘dancing lamas’ was the real cause of the ban, the Everest expeditions were meticulously stage-managed operations, consequently they drew ranks and found a convenient scapegoat in John Hazard, who undertook an unauthorised survey expedition in Tibet also in 1924, pinning the blame on his activities instead.

 

For a small exhibition, Everest through the lens, explored a number of less well-known faces of the two earliest attempts by British mountaineers to ‘conquer’ the world’s highest peak very effectively. It elucidated a number of often overlooked themes, incorporating a rich array of written and visual documentation; particularly Noel’s film, The Epic of Everest, which was screened on a continuous loop as part of the exhibition. Shining a light on the lives of those whose names are well-known to history, such as Mallory and Noel, but more importantly it also highlighted the indigenous team members who have stood, obscured in the background for far too long. Recovering some of those names which otherwise might have been lost to history in the panel and label texts, as well as listing them in the leaflet accompanying the exhibition. In doing so, Everest through the lens showed that there is still much to be learned about cultures of imperial exploration. By taking a closer look, information which has lain hidden in the archival shadows cast by the official record which the two British expeditions carefully created as their own legacy can begin to emerge. Much like the unnamed Sherpa who can be seen steadying the camera tripod, if one looks very carefully, at the well-known photograph of John Noel, seated on a kit box, shooting the first of his films at high altitude in 1922.

Captain Noel kinematographing the ascent of Mt. Everest from the Chang La [one of his Sherpa porters can be seen steadying the tripod] MEE22/0602 (RGS-IBG Collections)

~

'Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds' Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter Hansen & Jonathan Westaway (MUP, 2024)

For more information on my involvement with the 'Other Everests' Research Network, and my chapter in the forthcoming edited volume of essays which the network will publish in 2024, see here.

Also on 'Waymarks'

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

Betrayal in the High Himalaya

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

Circumnavigating the Cornubian Batholith

 

The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey by Tim Hannigan (Head of Zeus, 2023)

Tim Hannigan's Route

This is a book which I’ve long been looking forward to reading, and, now that I have turned its last page and closed its covers, it’s a book which didn’t disappoint. In fact, it is a book which I’m tempted to begin re-reading immediately. While he was writing it, I watched Tim Hannigan posting updates on his progress as he penned The Granite Kingdom on Twitter. Tantalisingly scanning the list of chapter titles which he posted several months before it was published, I could tell that this book would touch upon an array of topics which have both intrigued and challenged me over the years: Bordering; Merlin’s Magic Land; Piskey-Led; Coasting; See Your Own Country First; Rebel Country; Looking for the Light. As the book-blurb on the inside of its dust jacket describes: “Few areas of Britain are as holidayed in, as rhapsodised over or as mythologised as Cornwall … it is a region densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how do they all intersect with the real Cornwall – its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity?”

 

 

As anyone who is familiar with Tim Hannigan’s The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys In Search Of A Genre (Hurst, 2021) will know, Hannigan is an academic who writes about travel writing with admirably accessible flair. Travelling in companionable prose with him is always a joy, and in this book particularly so, because here we are on his home turf. But writing a travelogue about one’s own homeland, as Hannigan acknowledges, is perhaps a more challenging task than writing as an outsider. Most travel writing has a kind of ‘through the looking glass’ quality to it. The whole point of the travel writer’s self-appointed task is to act as the outsider looking-in, providing an interpretation of ‘the other’ for readers who (it is tacitly assumed) are similarly placed at one remove from both the place and people described. But writing as an insider looking both within whilst also attempting to present an outward-looking personal interpretation for insiders and non-insiders alike could very easily become a tautological trap set in a hall of mirrors, yet Hannigan manages to remain aware of this inherent difficulty at all times. Hence, he acknowledges his own scruples, and his at times instinctively defensive reflex in seeking to assert his non-Englishness in certain situations, rather than trying to hide it or gloss over such matters. Particularly when he encounters other people during his travels through the county/duchy with whom his interactions prompt reflections upon Cornish nationalism and questions of native identity. ‘Cornwall is not England,’ is an often-encountered assertion here, and as such this gives the book its central underlying theme. What does it mean to be (or to claim to be) Cornish? – Where exactly does Cornwall begin and England end? – How closely can Cornish nationalism align to the allied spirit of fraternal ‘Celtic’ nativism which is found in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and even Brittany as a region with its own language which has died out and is now being revived, along with all the attendant trappings of the recently invented St Piran flag, Cornish tartan, and other emblems designed to highlight its sense of distance from generations of Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultural appropriation?

 

Gala Day, by Stanhope Forbes

It's an intriguing proposition when Hannigan reflects that, despite being born and raised in West Penwith, his ancestry has roots outside of Cornwall. As he states, “this shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter, but if I’m writing about Cornwall and Cornishness, I have to mention it.” – However, it does matter in the sense that Cornwall has long been a place out of kilter with the rest of the UK. Today, shamefully, it is one of the poorest regions not only in the country but also in western Europe too. As Simon Reeve has poignantly illustrated in a recent BBC television series focussing on the country’s farthest southwestern region, people living in Cornwall face huge adversity most obviously in employment and the housing market. Recent decades have seen a boom in property sales to wealthy outsiders who have bought holiday homes which have essentially hollowed out local communities, turning picturesque villages into affluently neglected ghost towns out of season. It’s little wonder that outsiders are resented by some locals. On the one hand, tourism is the industry which has supplanted the dwindling or extinct traditional industries of fishing and tin mining, which most people Romantically associate with Cornwall. In this respect, Cornwall has confounded itself in the fact that the very thing which now sustains Cornwall is also the thing which is slowly killing it. One can’t help wondering how such a detrimental trend might be reversed?

 

My family might well have been seen as part of this problem (hence one avenue of my interest in this book). My parents along with my aunt and uncle began holidaying each year in Cornwall long before I was born. My grandfather even cycled to Land’s End with his friends back in the early 1930s. But it was a small advert in Dalton’s Weekly in the early 1960s which began this collective pattern of family pilgrimage. For many years, before the recent boom in the annual invasion of “the bucket and spade brigade” (as one local Tory MP famously disparaged it in the late 1980s), throughout my childhood, we hired two sail lofts on the west pier of Newlyn harbour from the same local family, whom we came to know well through two generations. I even have very clear memories of watching Tim Hannigan’s dad’s distinctive fishing boat, the Heather Armorel, coming and going beneath our window. We were later given the opportunity to buy the sail lofts (as well as other cottages we subsequently stayed in), but my family always resisted doing so. We always thought that there was something very wrong in the idea of a property standing empty for the majority of the year simply so that we might own our own patch of paradise for those two spare weeks of the year when we could get down there.

 

The Heather Armorel entering Newlyn harbour

Consequently, we were always very aware of both the harmful effects and the negative perception of incomers. But on the other hand, it was a duality which we realised had to be reconciled in as positive and as equitable a manner as was possible. I spent so much time there each summer that Cornwall is as much a part of my identity as my native Middlesex. And there are parallels of self-perception here too in the erasure of an old Anglo-Saxon County which still actively seeks to assert its identity several decades after its County Council was dissolved and it was subsumed into the homogenising boroughs of northwest London. Questions of identity do matter, and perhaps ironically, we later came to learn that we do in fact have Cornish ancestry – with forbears hailing from the Cornish village of Menheniot – so perhaps we aren’t the invasive interlopers we always feared we were. Every summer, I used to play in and around Newlyn harbour with the local kids, we even visited out of season at Christmas too, and several generations of my family have their ashes scattered on a particular cliff along that rugged coastline of West Penwith which forms Hannigan’s personal ‘Granite Kingdom.’ The salt sea air, the scent of gorse, and the sun-baked lichen of those granite-cleft coastal paths, along with the less clement weather of squalls and drizzling thick fog, are as much a part of me as all the other places which have come to feel like home throughout the course of my life. Cornwall remains a place for me to return to whenever I need to recharge my physical and emotional batteries, a testament to how we ground ourselves and all that makes us who we are in an acute sense of place. As such, there is a lot which I can relate to in this book.

 

The West Cornwall Experience (c.1980s)

There is much to like and much to be learnt from the pages of The Granite Kingdom. Hannigan expertly weaves into his long walk a lot of careful research and insightful analysis, reflecting upon both familiar and perhaps less well-known tales of local folklore, from King Arthur to Jan Tregagle; the standard tourist-titillating tales of smugglers, wreckers, and pirates; as well as the observations made by Hannigan’s literary predecessors, in works by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, D.H. Lawrence, and Daphne du Maurier. He also looks at the so-called ‘artist colonies’ which flourished in Newlyn and Lamorna, and which continue to characterise St Ives (for better or worse) to this day, as well as the ‘Rick Stein phenomenon’ that appears to define a lingering air of unrealised expectancy in Padstow – something which Hannigan as a former chef in the kitchens of Cornwall’s tourist high season can comment upon with firsthand knowledge and experience. He also reminisces and riffs upon the ‘anthropological’ intrigue which he felt the tourist brochures and TV adverts of the 1980s conjured in his mind as a child whose grandparents ran a guesthouse in Penzance – with its elastically-stretched parallels between the Cornish and Italian Rivieras! – representing the curious exoticisation of what was for him especially just the everyday reality of life lived in his home county. And all of this is deftly told with both eloquent erudition and good humour.

 

Essentially, what The Granite Kingdom demonstrates is how all locales are shaped both by insiders and outsiders alike. There’s no stopping the waves of change which sweep in and out of the eras like tides which shape and define the landscapes we perceive to be our own homelands, especially in the British Isles. In walking a meanderingly meditative (and many a pasty fuelled) route through Cornwall, from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home of Morvah, Hannigan guides us through his own unique view of, and engagement with the history, folklore, and geology, as well as the physical and cultural topography of a Cornwall which as a writer he aims to reconcile within himself as much as for the reader who accompanies him on what is a very personal journey. One reviewer has very astutely and accurately described this multi-facetted, gem-like book as “an inland journey, both introspective and expansive.” – It’s often said that the point of travelling is best realised in homecoming; hence, if this book represents a new direction in an erstwhile familiar genre of travel writing, I think the kind of homeward route which Hannigan sets out to explore in The Granite Kingdom should be a welcome one for others to take and emulate. 

On The Cliff, by Eleanor Hughes

Study of a Fisherwoman, by Stanhope Forbes

I would like to thank Tim Hannigan and Jade Gwilliam at Head of Zeus Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of The Granite Kingdom.

~

Also on 'Waymarks'

From Coast to Carn Euny

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

What is Place?

Between the Tides, by Walter Langley

The Shoal Fisher, Newlyn Harbour, c.1880s

Wanderers & Way Makers: Walking with Women Writers

 

“... but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited by men.” –  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).

A few years ago, I was walking along a wind-blasted stretch of the coastal path in Cornwall with my mother, who made an observation: “Have you noticed how all the solitary walkers who have passed us today have been women walking on their own?” – It was true. Of the handful of walkers whom we had met coming in the other direction, greeting each other amiably as we passed by, trudging purposefully along that rugged clifftop path, miles from anywhere visibly populated by people, the majority had been lone women, or very occasionally men and women who were clearly couples, walking together. It was, in many respects, a curiously heartening fact to notice.

As Kerri Andrews points out in her recent book, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (Reaktion Books, 2020): “The history of walking has always been women’s history, though you would not know it from what has been published on the subject. Since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Reveries of a Solitary Walker appeared in 1782, walking has been acknowledged as central to the writing of many famous male authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincy, John Keats, John Clare and others.” Even modern-day writers tend to foreground the writing of other men: “Leslie Stephen, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Kant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Werner Herzog, Robert Macfarlane. When these men write about their walking, they look back to earlier male walker-writers; even the most recent accounts of walking, such as Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), refer mainly to other male walker-writers (with just one exception in Macfarlane’s case: his championing of Nan Shepherd’s prose poetry about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain). So utterly has writing about walking been dominated by men that Rebecca Solnit has described it, with some bitterness, as a kind of club, ‘not one of the real walking clubs, but a kind of implicit club of shared background’, where the members ‘are always male.’”

 

Consequently, the publication this month of Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews (Reaktion, 2023), is long overdue. As Andrews writes in the Introduction: “This is the first anthology of women’s writing about walking. It seems remarkable to be writing that in mid-2022, when anthologies of walking pepper bookshelves in hundreds of bookshops, but it is nonetheless true.” Such omissions are not due to a lack of material, as this anthology amply attests, given that it contains 74 pieces of writing by 57 different authors. “Much of it has lain in plain sight,” Andrews observes, citing the centrality of walking to the denouement of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example. In this anthology, which Andrews has arranged chronologically, there is a mix of both prose and poem ranging through the years from 1746 to the present day. Many of the authors it features are well-known names, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, and, of course, Nan Shepherd. But other names are less well-known or even unexpected (Dorothy L. Sayers?), and this is the quirk of a good anthology in my opinion. It can spark joy through welcome familiarity as much as through its equally welcome opposite, by introducing one to new and hitherto unheard-of writers and their works. Inspiring us, perhaps, to return to old literary friends as much as prompting us to seek out the acquaintance of authors who are new to us and the promise of the world seen anew through their books.

 

Dorothy Wordsworth

But, that said – while anthologies can and definitely do delight in such ways, they can also disappoint as well. When excerpts appear to end just as they are getting going, or when a writer’s poems or passages of prose are presented without any background to lend context or exegesis to better inform the reader, it is not always possible to appreciate or properly understand their significance without the anthologist acting as a guide. In this sense, then I would have liked it if Andrews had given the anthology a longer and more in-depth Introductory essay, or some brief commentary or biographical information at the start of each excerpt. However, happily all is not lost in this respect, because I would very much recommend reading Way Makers as a sequel to, or rather as a twin-tome / companion-compendium to be read in tandem with Wanderers. Reading the two books, one after the other, really helped me to understand more about the writers whom the anthology features, several of whom I knew little or nothing about beforehand. For me, at least, these tended to be the more contemporary writers, some of whom Andrews describes and analyses in Wanderers. Each of the chapters in that book ends with a personal reflection which adds a fresh and interesting perspective on her project to foreground women writers who are also walkers, something similar, I think, would have worked well in Way Makers. 

Wild (2014)

Indeed, without reading Wanderers beforehand, I think I would not have understood or properly appreciated some of the writers whom this anthology presents, for example: – Cheryl Strayed, whose story people might be more familiar with from the recent movie adaptation of her book (published in 2012), starring Reece Witherspoon, Wild (2014). Not having read Strayed’s memoir or seen the movie myself, I found Andrews’ chapter on Strayed’s epic 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail to be fascinating; consequently, I felt kind of sad to find that Strayed is only allotted two and a half pages in Way Makers, while other writers are given both lengthier and multiple entries. Given that Strayed is one of the more contemporary writers included in the anthology, perhaps there were copyright restrictions which came into play here? – But then again, it is certainly far too much to expect of any anthology for it to be exhaustively comprehensive. After all, as already acknowledged, anthologies are best read and appreciated as a judicious selection of material which has been assembled with the aim and intention of prompting us to seek out and expand our own literary compass. As Andrews herself says: “This anthology is a start. May it not be the end.”

Nan Shepherd

Setting my very minor personal quibbles aside, however, this anthology very definitely succeeds in demonstrating how walking is as much for women as it is for men both a creative and a physical exercise. Walking is often an intensely personal act, one which can inspire both feelings of freedom and liberation, as well as danger and fear – particularly for women, in different ways than it does for men. Consequently, there is unfortunately a necessary significance which needs to be highlighted by the simple fact that all the authors in this anthology are women. In writing, and equally in reading about walking we can all share something of the solitary self, and the elements – both literal and metaphorical – which make us simultaneously individual and communal souls. What Kerri Andrews’ shows us throughout the pages of both Wanderers and Way Makers is that there is a rich literary heritage which continues to evolve through generations of women writers who love to walk; an essence which resides within all of us who like to set out on foot purely for the pleasure of walking, whether in open country or in crowded city streets; an essence which these writers have distilled through diaries, letters, poetry, travel guidebooks, and novels. Walking and writing are often allied in the sense that they are both about new ways of seeing:

“This day, to put off the moment of seeing it face to face, I chose to climb first the easy Canisp, which blocks the view; then, grasping the summit cairn firmly, I turned to look at Suilven across the gash of Glen Dorcha. A monster indeed, but at the moment passive. I started up its gentle slopes at the south-east end in sun; but once embarked on the long ridge, down came the mist. Suilven is made up of three humped masses connected by very narrow bealachs; as I came over the top of Meall Bheag, the first hump, I could dimly see the slopes of Meall Meadhonach, the second, but I could not see down to the bealach in between; when I had groped my way down I found that it consisted of one rock, across which you could straddle – a nice place, and by some freak of wind the mist cleared to the south-west as I sat there a minute, and though I could not see the top I had left five minutes ago, I could see the hills of Skye forty miles away.” – Janet Adam Smith, Mountain Holidays (1946).

At the Edge of the Cliff, by Dame Laura Knight

As with Virginia Woolf, writing in 1927, reading an anthology such as this one is somewhat akin to Woolf’s imaginative reflections upon roaming the streets of London in search of inspiration through her observing the lives of other people: “Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?” – Or in this anthology’s case, the lives of our fellow women who choose to walk and reflect in writing their personal journeys undertaken on foot. In this respect, Way Makers opens up a wonderful array of horizon-broadening paths which will be of interest, inspiration and enjoyment to anyone who is curious about the nexus that bonds human nature and the world at large through the medium of the written word, a medium which can be both a window and a mirror, inviting us to see the world and ourselves anew.

 

Virginia Woolf

 ~

I would like to thank Fran Roberts and Reaktion Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of Way Makers:An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews (Reaktion, 2023).

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'Person & Place' - The Essence of Good Travel Writing

What Is Place?

Mountain Climbing by Mistake

Research Note - Kalon Lama Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (1870–1923)

 

Kalon Lama Champa Tendar, from 'China in Turmoil' by L.M. King (1927)

This post is intended to be a useful note for Tibet Researchers interested in the Kalön Lama Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

 

I noticed a photograph posted recently on Twitter (10 May 2023; see here) which mistakenly identifies the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Tenpa Jamyang (Bstan pa ’jam dyangs, 1888–1944) as Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

 

The photograph was sourced from The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950, which is a fantastic on-line resource jointly created quite a number of years ago now (c.2006?) by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London. It seems likely that the error was derived from the biographical record which is incorrectly connected to the image on the Tibet Album website. None of the eight images associated with this biographical record are of Champa Tendar, who died in 1923. They all appear to be of Tenpa Jamyang, who succeeded him as Kalon Lama, as the range of dates given for each photo (between 1936-1937 & 1940-1941) on the Tibet Album would seem to suggest. None of the records/transcriptions given alongside these images actually specifies which Kalon Lama they depict, although, the ‘Glossary of Terms’ which they all link to (see here) states: “Kalon Lama. He was the ecclesiastical Cabinet Minister in the Tibetan government. The post was held by Jampa Tendar at the time of the 1936 mission.” – which, given Champa Tendar/Jampa Tendar’s date of death (1923), is evidently incorrect.

 

I first noticed this error several years ago and I did mention it to Frank Drauschke, from whom the Tibet Album’s biographical information for Champa Tendar was derived, and also to my former colleagues at the British Museum, who were involved with the creation of the Tibet Album, but no one at that particular time seemed to know who was then maintaining the website.

 

So, having been reminded of it by seeing this error pop up again recently, I thought I would post some information here in the hope that it might act as a useful signpost to researchers who are interested in the lives and biographies of these two Kalon Lamas, mainly in order to point such researchers in the direction of a relatively recently published paper which gives the best information on these two individuals, and so thereby help to clarify their identities. The article is titled: Monk Officials as Military Officers in the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang Army (1895–1959), by Alice Travers in Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, Vol. 27 (2018), pp. 211-242 (See, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/asie.2018.1512 | JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26756586) – NB: the article is in English, and is freely accessible on-line (via the DOI link).

 

In posting this short research note here on my blog I do not mean to criticise or detract in any way at all from the hard work and great effort which many people far more qualified and knowledgeable than myself contributed to the AHRC funded Tibet Visual History 1920-1950 project. Indeed, the Tibet Album, as I have acknowledged above, is a truly fantastic and authoritative resource which is and continues to be immensely useful to Tibet researchers everywhere. And it has certainly been a great help to me in my own research. Nor do I wish to criticise the Twitter account that I have referred to above, which also posts very valuable information concerning the visual history of Tibet via that social media site. It is clear that the errors of association and attribution which I point out here were unintentional mistakes.

 

My own interest in the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923) derive from two angles; firstly, from my PhD research concerning Western explorers in East Tibet, and, secondly, from my family connection to Tibetan writer, Rinchen Lhamo (1900-1928) and her husband, British Consul, Louis Magrath King (1886-1949). King knew Champa Tendar personally and wrote about him in China in Turmoil: Studies in Personality (London: Heath Cranton, 1927) – Chapter 15: A Frontier Incident, as Travers discusses in her article, along with a number of other primary and secondary sources regarding both Kalon Lamas. Travers also correctly identifies the images of Tenpa Jamyang on the Tibet Album, reproducing one as part of her article, and includes three very clear images of Champa Tendar sourced from books by Eric Teichman, Rinchen Lhamo and Louis Magrath King. This makes it very easy to distinguish the respective visual likenesses of the two Kalon Lamas.

 

Kalon Lama Jampa Tendar (via Wikimedia Commons)

See also: Jamyang Norbu's "Shadow Tibet" - 'Black Annals' (19 July 2008)

& Alice Travers, Marching into View: The Tibetan Army in Historic Photographs 1895–1959 (Tethys, 2022), p. 64, Plate 39

 

Related posts on ‘Waymarks’

China & Tibet – Through Western Eyes

Rinchen Lhamo – A Woman of Kham

 

And information on my PhD research & related publications:

"Empirical Adventurers: Science and Imperial Exploration in East Tibet, 1900-1949"

Tim Chamberlain – Birkbeck College, University of London (2015 onwards)

Edge of Empires, The British Museum Magazine (2010)

Books of Change, Journal of the RAS China (2013)

"Closing the Gap" on the Yarlung-Tsangpo River

 

The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place by Ian Baker (Penguin, 2004)

This is a good, pacey and engaging travelogue, which – in the tradition of ‘an American abroad’ – reminded me a little of Peter Hessler’s River Town.

 

 

F.M. "Eric" Bailey & Frank Kingdon Ward

I read The Heart of the World primarily because I am interested in the lives and travels of Eric Bailey and Frank Kingdon-Ward (who could almost be this book’s co-author, given how often he is quoted throughout!). And also because I am interested in how the Tibetan Buddhist concept of ‘beyul’ (sBas yul) has been co-opted and adapted into the Western idea of ‘Shangri-La’ – for which this book offers a number of interesting insights and points to other literary works which it might have been hard to find or trace otherwise. The journeys made over several years which Baker recounts are tough trials of stamina, both physical and spiritual, with obstacles which are both natural, seemingly supernatural, and, of course, bureaucratic. However, I do agree with the comments (made on GoodReads) regarding the authorial persona; which, perhaps ironically for someone who presents himself as an aspiring Buddhist practitioner, comes across at times as somewhat egocentric. Similarly, while Baker is often at pains to stress that he is not a privileged white-man of the old explorer mould – this is exactly what he is at most points in the text, especially when, towards the end of the book, he and his companions are attempting “to close the gap” on the “last unexplored” five-mile stretch of the Tsangpo, utilising indigenous labour to enable them to do so (not that there would be any other option, of course).

 

There is a clear desire to complete (or exceed?) the endeavours which Bailey and Kingdon-Ward failed to achieve themselves; and, in the closing pages of the book, there is an equally palpable desire to beat a large Chinese expedition to find and measure ‘the last’ major waterfall on the Tsangpo. Although Baker is very evidently self-aware of these particular flaws, and perhaps understandably circles around them uneasily and inconclusively. No matter how well informed he is about the region, its spiritual geography and local traditions, he cannot escape the fact that he is an outsider. However deeply he manages to enter this remarkable place in all its forms, he always has to reconcile himself with the fact that he must ultimately leave again at the end of whichever trip it is he is narrating. Naturally, the reader is drawn to empathise. But the book does also indulge time-and-again in poetic and spiritual flights of fancy which skate a little too close to cliché in places (e.g. – to give but one example, how often it seems that the weather brightening up is attributed to the possible intervention of divine favour, or a lama happening to appear on the scene at the moment the sun comes out), which, for me at any rate, raised a bit of a barrier between reader and author.

 

 

That said though, I have read a particularly mind-numbing Chinese book (in translation; The Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon: The Last Secret World, by Zhang Jimin) about the enormous Chinese expedition (that features in the closing chapters of Baker’s book), which mangles all its references to Kingdon-Ward, including something as simple as getting his name right. Baker is by far a much better guide. But both books give rise to complicated and seemingly unresolvable feelings. One can’t help but sympathise with the local Tibetans’ conflicts of interest in wanting Pemako to remain unviolated by outsiders, whilst also being acutely aware that they need to make a living in such an ‘out-of-the-way place’ by acting as porters to comparatively affluent external interlopers. No matter how difficult or sacred the terrain, in the covetous eyes of such outsiders (Baker as much as the Chinese), the lure to conquer and possess these ‘unknown realms’ – real or imagined; physical or spiritual – in the end amounts to the same outcomes.

 

All too often, it’s simply a matter of time until others encroach and transform a place into something other than what it once was to those who have gone before, and even moreso to those who have always called such places home. Perhaps in this sense, Baker is an eloquent witness to the completion of a process which was begun long ago by those whom he has sought to emulate (i.e. – Bailey, Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor). Hence, one can’t help but feeling both forlorn and perhaps vicariously a little complicit too (having very much enjoyed the narrative of Baker’s journeys), when closing this book after reading its concluding chapter. – The truth of ‘Shangri-La,’ perhaps, is both its mutability and its transience; because even here change is the only constant thing.

Ian Baker

Also on 'Waymarks'

Exploring the Land of the Blue Poppy - Frank Kingdon Ward & Tibet

 

See also: 'A Man Who Heeded The Call of Shangri-La,' by Susan Salter Reynolds in Los Angeles Times (7 January 2005).

'In Search of the Hidden Lands: The Hero’s Journey of Explorer Ian Baker,' by Rebecca Wong in Buddhistdoor Global BDG (12 December 2024).

And the Tibet Hidden Falls website by the Gillenwater brothers, who travelled with Ian Baker in the 1990s.

Plus, Hamid Sardar-Afkhami, ‘An Account of Padma bkod: A Hidden Land in Southeastern Tibet,’ Kailash, Vol. 18, No.3 (1996), pp. 1–21

Flowers & Fantasy - 'Plant Hunting' As Colonial Era Board Game

 

Whose turn is it? 

I’m not an avid board game player, but some of my friends are, and so I have often been corralled into playing with them. A friend of mine even invented a board game which was based on our group of friends and the archaeological excavation we used to spend our summers working on. It was ingenious and the playing of it even managed to reveal real-life gossip and secrets which some of the players had been unaware of previously, so whenever we played, it was always immensely good fun – although sometimes game-play could go on for hours and hours!

 

When I was a child, I remember seeing a board game advertised on TV, which I must have nagged my parents to get me for Christmas one year. It was called Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs (Waddingtons, 1985). It was a kind of Indiana Jones meets The Lost World, or The Land That Time Forgot themed game (NB – it came out well before the first Jurassic Park movie) in which players had to cross a valley to reach an Aztec temple and retrieve a treasure of gold coins, but there were a number of obstacles which could stop you. As I recall these were primarily either falling into a swamp and going round in circles until somehow you were able to get out; that is, if you didn’t get eaten by a swamp monster. Similarly, you might get eaten by marauding dinosaurs or a pterodactyl swooping down while you tried to cross the board. The routes across which might also become cut-off if a volcano erupted and lava subsequently began to spread across the board. It was really good fun, and I played it many times over the years with both family and friends.

 

The theme of the game being exploration evidently belied the childhood interests which in later life would lead me on to researching and writing a PhD dissertation about early twentieth-century explorers in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Indeed, Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs has some echoes of the search for fossilised dinosaur eggs in 1920s China. A genuine fossil hunt in which the fedora hat-wearing Roy Chapman Andrews is often touted as the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones himself. But it was the so-called ‘plant hunters’ who perhaps have interested me the most alongside the possibly better-known archaeologists and anthropologists. As regular readers of this blog will know – ‘plant hunters’, such as Frank Kingdon-Ward, George Forrest and Joseph Rock, Reginald Farrer and Bill Purdom, as well as Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff, have all been featured in various blog posts here on Waymarks. And I am always on the look out for new information about all of them, but one thing I wasn’t expecting to appear was a board game loosely based on their wider botanical cohort's endeavours. Botany – A Victorian Expedition … A Game Full of Adventure, Intrigue and Flowers (Dux Somnium, 2023).

 

The promotional blurb for this particular board game, which doesn’t appear to have been released yet, seems to imply it is based on the plant hunters of an earlier era – perhaps more along the lines of ‘eminent’ Victorians, such as: Robert Fortune, Richard Spruce, Walter Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin – perhaps with some ‘indomitable’ women explorers, of the likes of Isabella Bird, Amelia Edwards, Mary Kingsley, Nina Mazuchelli, or Lizzie Hessel, added in for good measure. What strikes me the most though is the tone of its promotional blurb which seems weirdly out of joint with our current times. It reads like a ringing endorsement of colonialism. Almost as though it were an entertaining-yet-educational tool for instilling a colonialist ethos in the impressionable minds of a rising generation of young board game players and would-be empire builders!

 “Adventure, intrigue, and flowers! Botany is a strategy board game where you take on the role of a Victorian Era flower hunter as you explore the world to gather fortune and fame and be named the Royal Botanist. In Botany, each player takes on the role of a character whose abilities will shape the way they play the game. Will you focus on exploring the globe in search of the most valuable specimens? Will you make quick and efficient trips to gather reputation quickly and build your estate?

 Each player begins the game with a set of randomized goals that they then use to plot their path to victory. When players set out from their estate, they have access only to the coins they can carry with them. They can use these coins to traverse the globe and gain crew members and items to improve their odds of surviving the unknown, enhance their abilities, and increase the efficiency with which they traverse the map. However, there is danger in spending too freely, and players must ensure they have enough wealth on hand to return to England with their specimens intact.

 Turns in Botany are streamlined in order to minimize downtime and keep players engaged. Players will move around the map, build their character, and experience the story of their rise to fame, all with an eye for efficiency. Points are gained by improving the quality of your garden, retrieving live specimens from around the globe, and adding preserved flowers to your botanical press. The specimens that players hunt, the goals they focus on to achieve victory, and the events they experience create a unique feel across each game.” – [description from publisher; see here]

 

The board game’s website seems to be using a nostalgia for empire, particularly in the form of its aesthetics, quaintly emphasising ‘Beautiful Victorian Artwork – Historical illustrations and photography immerse the player in the world of Victoran [sic] plant hunters. Enjoy learning about the flowers of the world with this incredible art.’ As well as, ‘Unique Characters and Entertaining Events – Botany’s characters and events paint a story as you traverse the globe to become the ultimate flower hunter.’ This appears to be a kind of “fighting fantasy” version of colonial capitalism in the form of a board game. Monopoly (Parker Brothers, 1935) for die-hard, flower-fancying imperialists, perhaps? – From an academic point-of-view, I am thoroughly intrigued. We are all highly accustomed to seeing the tropes of imperialism and a colonial worldview consistently perpetuated in TV dramas and Hollywood films. Such themes are invariably tweaked a little to fit our times, or as a sop to our current sensibilities. It is often highly debateable (and much debated) as to whether or not these tweaks either veil or highlight the iniquities of the past, or virtue signal by equivalence the (hopefully) more enlightened attitudes of our present age. How does such a newly invented board game fit into this present era of decolonisation, ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, versus the rise of populist nationalism and other politically conservative agendas, such as a nostalgia for empire? ... Consequently, I’d be fascinated to know more about this new board game – particularly how it was first conceived and how it came about; what source material was used to create it; and what it is actually like to play it.

I may well have to call up my old board-game-loving digging pals and see if they’d like to assist me with some further research.

 

In the meantime – for anyone who might be reading this who is also intrigued by the questions raised above and would like to know more about the actual history of ‘plant hunting’, economic botany, science and empire – I very much recommend the following books and websites as good places in which to start:

 

Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979)

Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)

E.H.M. Cox, Plant Hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (London: Collins, 1945)

 

The Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens

The Mobile Museum Project

How Victorian Plant Hunters Shaped British Gardens

See also:

Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games, by Mary Flanagan & Mikael Jakobsson (MIT Press, 2023)

 

Related Reading on ‘Waymarks’

 

Botanical Beginnings in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

Hyperbole Most Florid – Reginald Farrer & William Purdom

Language & Landscape in West China & Tibet

Exploring the Land of the Blue Poppy – Frank Kingdon-Ward & Tibet

Frank Ludlow & George Sherriff’s “Botanical Endeavours”