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