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

Chapter 4:  The Axis Mundi Appears (mid-nineteenth century)

Since the sacred mountain is an axis mundi connecting earth with heaven, it in a sense touches heaven and hence marks the highest point in the world; consequently the territory that surrounds it ... is held to be the highest among countries.
-- (M. Eliade [1959. p.38])

Method in the Mountains

In 1869 Nina Mazuchelli, English despite her Italian-sounding name, became the first Western woman to see the famed Mount Everest. 'It was', she exclaimed, 'the dream of my childhood to see this nearest point of Heaven and Earth ... As I stand in these vast solitudes I do so with bent knee and bowed head as becomes one who is in the felt presence of the Invisible.' [1] Mount Everest had been declared the highest mountain on the globe some seventeen years previously, during the course of a decade that was a watershed in the British relationship to Tibet.

It began with the publication in English of Huc and Gabet's account of their famous journey to Lhasa in 1846. For the first time a widespread and well-informed public had access to an eyewitness account of this elusive and mysterious city. The first edition immediately sold out. [2] Joseph Hooker's Himalayan Journals, which described his extensive botanical journeys through Sikkim and up to the Tibetan border, was similarly an instant success when first published in 1854. [3] Between 1846 and 1847 the western Himalayas were subjected to an exhaustive survey by the three members of the commission established to define Tibet's boundary with the British 'protected' territories of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. Alexander Cunningham, Thomas Thomson and Henry Strachey compiled extensive reports that covered the culture, geology, geography, botany and history of this region. Cunningham's Ladak, published in 1853, is still used as a basic reference. [4]

Between 1854 and 1858 the Schlagintweit brothers journeyed extensively through the Himalayas and Central Asia gathering information that would eventually result in the publication of Buddhism in Tibet, the first overview study of its kind. [5] A major survey of the Himalayan peaks was undertaken between 1846 and 1855. [6] The Himalayas were hence no longer unknown territory, nor was British understanding of this mountain region fragmented and unsystematized. The tireless Brian Hodgson, from his bases in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, had, since early in the century, produced paper after paper documenting and classifying everything Himalayan: from the geography to the religions, from the racial characteristics of the hill tribes to their languages. His systematization of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon provided a cornerstone that still supports Western understanding of that religion. [7]

In 1849 Hodgson wrote:

I had been for several years a traveler in the Himalayas, before I could get rid of that tyranny of the senses which so strongly impresses all beholders of this stupendous scenery with the conviction that the mighty maze is quite without a plan. [8]

Tibet and the Himalayas were a part of this search for an imaginative coherence, a plan. The great German scholar Max Muller subsequently praised Hodgson for producing a 'rational grammar' of the mountain chaos. [9] Hodgson applied the same energy to classifying what he called the 'babel' of the hill tribes and fitting them into a schema of cultural evolution. The mid-century seemed obsessed with 'blank spots' or 'gaps' on the map. [10] People wanted a world in which everything fitted and had its place, but the plan seemed constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the plenitude of new discoveries.

These comprehensive studies were the culmination of nearly a century of Himalayan and Tibetan exploration by the British and allowed, in their turn, the compilation of several complete regional studies of Tibet. In addition to Schlagintweit's comprehensive work on Tibetan Buddhism, H. Prinsep's Tibet, Tartary and Mongolia (Their Social and Political Condition, the Religion of Boodh As There Existing, Compiled from the reports of Ancient and Modern Travelers) was published in 1852. Much shorter, but of a similar intention, was Dr. C.H. Gutzlaff's 'Tibet and Sefan', published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1851. [11] These works were of a totally different order to the summary statements about Tibet compiled by Warren Hastings or by others earlier in the century.

The publication in 1859 of R. Latham's massive two-volume Descriptive Ethnology shows just how successful Britain had been in gathering and classifying an astonishing amount of ethnographic material from around the entire globe. [12] This was British imperialism at its most confident. The Great Exhibition of 1851, at the Crystal Palace in London, symbolized the calm assurance of British global identity. Prince Albert opened it with the words:

Nobody who has paid attention to the peculiar features of the present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points -- the realization of the unity of mankind. [13]

Nineteenth-century nationalism provided idealized images of coherence, unification and identity which belied intense internal social fragmentation and conflict. Hooker and other global travelers played a crucial part in the creation of the Great Exhibition. [14] It expressed so well all the cultural contradictions, spiritual hopes and imperial assumptions that underlay British global identity. The globe was presented as a supermarket of fascinating images. Travel and exploration gave these global images a cohesion that was both sensual and visual. British travelers, whether journeying for science or sport, increasingly saw themselves as citizens of the globe.

The Imaginal Transformation of Tibet: from Fascination to Expectation

In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Tibet was overshadowed by events elsewhere on the globe, especially in the Arctic and in Africa. The search for Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition, and then for the source of the Nile, dominated British interests in exploration, adventure and geographical research. [15] How did it happen, then, that by the last quarter of the century curiosity about Tibet became transformed into a fascination bordering on compulsion; that a sober concern for scientific observation became attenuated into an attitude of intense spiritual expectation? Of course, even in mid-century one can detect signs of this final transformation. Hooker, for example, could scarcely disguise his excitement when actually standing inside Tibet, even if he was there for only four days. Gutzlaff, perhaps, summed up the general mid-century feeling:

Tibet, situated on the highest plateau of Asia, and encompassed by the most stupendous mountains of the globe, is a wonderful country ... It is ... a territory where extremes meet, and where everything is extraordinary. The inhabitants, not satisfied with their strange country, have strongly contributed to enhance the wonderful by their curious mode of life and creed. [16]

Yet his fascination with what he called 'this magic land' was not unequivocal. About its religion he wrote: 'In mockery of common sense, a preposterous superstition has been established.' He complained about 'the maintenance of innumerable priestly drones', of a 'priest-ridden' country. How different was such an evaluation from Turner's, some sixty years earlier, with its appreciation of the mutual reciprocity of sacred and secular activities. [17] Gutzlaff observed, with some frustration, that 'Tibet remains impervious to civilization and progress.' Yet by the end of the century, this archaic timelessness would be precisely the quality that the West would seek to protect.

But we need to step back from the Himalayas and Tibet, to take note of other events of the 1850s. The uprising of 1857 known as the Indian Mutiny resulted in the final demise of the British East India Company. India came firmly under the control of the British government. The rebellion was a turning point in British imperialism on the subcontinent. A fundamental sense of security was destroyed and the British in India, from that moment, always felt vulnerable to foreign 'trouble making'; were always fearful about the loyalty of their Indian subjects. With the resumption of rivalry with imperial Russia in the 1870s after a mid-century lull, such an erosion of confidence was crucial for Britain's relationship with the Himalayas and Tibet. As we shall see in the next chapter, more than anything else the intensification of the 'Great Game' proved critical for the final imaginative transformation of Tibet into a fully formed sacred place.

Even further removed from the Himalayas than the Indian Mutiny was the publication of two books within a few years of each other. So widespread was their influence that the imaginative transformation of Tibet into a deeply meaningful place is incomprehensible without taking them into account. 1859 saw the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The Himalayas had played a direct and critical part in the development of Darwin's revolutionary ideas through his close collaboration with Joseph Hooker. Indeed, Hooker's Himalayan Journals were dedicated to Darwin, and Hooker took Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as a model for his own travel journals. [18] Whilst Hooker's botanizing in the Himalayas contributed to the genesis of evolutionary theory, the rapid acceptance of this theory, especially in the form of social evolution, would in its turn influence the whole shape of Tibetan imaginings.

The other book was no less significant, but easier to overlook. Volume 4 of John Ruskin's Modern Painters was published in 1854; it systematized the quintessence of advanced Victorian ideas about mountain landscape aesthetics. This book emerged at the very apex of British enthusiasm for mountains, often called the 'Golden Age' of Alpine exploration. Its impact was therefore decisive; its influence profound. [19] During this time, climbing was described as an activity that was half-spiritual, half-sport. Like Darwin, Ruskin must be considered as a founder of the modern relationship to the natural world, but his theme was the imaginative experience of natural beauty -- the aesthetics of ecology, not abstract classification. In Volume 4 he tried to establish the rules for an entirely new way of seeing and relating to the landscapes of the world.

Perhaps even more important for the final transformation of Tibet was the sudden collapse of mid-Victorian confidence after 1865. The carefully orchestrated mid-century synthesis, the 'best of all possible worlds', seemed to peak and then, just as quickly, to vanish. An era of spiritual doubt and social anxiety took its place. [20] It is instructive in this regard to compare Gutzlaff's comprehensive study of Tibet, written in 1851, with Andrew Wilson's popular account The Abode of Snow, written in 1875 at the very end of this period. For Gutzlaff, as we have seen, Tibet was indeed a 'magical land', yet hardly one that evoked Western inspiration. Wilson, on the other hand, prefaced his otherwise fairly sober account with a remarkable series of associations. The true 'Abode of Snow', he wrote, was not the Himalayas, nor even the Arctic, but the Antarctic. He argued that as the ice accumulates around the South Pole, a point must be reached when:

the balance of the earth must be suddenly destroyed, and this orb shall almost instantaneously turn traversely to its axis, moving the great oceans, and so producing one of those cyclical catastrophes which ... have before now interfered with the development and the civilization of the human race. [21]

The mid-century global confidence no longer rested on firm ground. Globalism, which had brought the promise of a secure imperial identity only twenty-five years earlier, now seemed to have brought its own anxieties. Wilson continued:

How near such a catastrophe may be, and whether when it occurs, a few just men (and it is to be hoped, women also) will certainly be left in the upper valleys of the Himalayas, I am unable to say; but it is well to know that there is an elevated and habitable region of the earth which is likely to be left underpopulated ... Whether humanity will lose or gain by having to begin again from the simple starting point of 'Om mani padme haun', is also a subject on which I feel a little uncertain. [22]

This was an extraordinary fantasy; one which prefigured the desperate hopes of many twentieth-century Tibetophiles and their images of Shangri-La. Tibet was linked here not just to a concern about Western identity and aspirations but to the very survival and continuance of civilization, even of humanity itself. Like a Himalayan Ararat, Tibet was imagined to rise above the global catastrophe and 'the jewel in the lotus' to seed the civilization of the future. For Wilson, this famous Tibetan mantra seemed to contain the beautiful and mysterious quintessence of 'many hundreds of human generations'. [23]

With Wilson's fantasies in The Abode of Snow, we have reached the final limit of imaginative preparation. As the fin-de-siecle uncertainty intensified, Tibet would be summoned to play its part in the West's spiritual search. The cosmic sympathy expressed by Nina Mazuchelli for Mount Everest would be displaced on to Lhasa. This city, with the Potala palace at its 'centre', would become an axis mundi, an opening to the transcendent at the very centre of the world. Tibet would then echo Eliade's assertion that 'an entire country ...[can] well present an imago mundi'. [24]

Imaginative Resonance

There are moments during the process of imaginative creation when seemingly diverse fantasies start to beat in time and then swell into a single resonance. A great chord is struck and held for a while. Both participants and listeners seem overcome with the primordial, archetypal purity of the sound. Everything then becomes a signifier for this great imaginative chord. At this moment the sacred place is truly born; its imaginative history begins. It then has its own coherence and logic. In the case of Tibet such a moment occurred about three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century. The harmony of the great chord was then inexorably stamped upon Western fantasies about Tibet. Its presence continued to linger and echo well into the twentieth century, long after the conditions for its birth had dissipated and the separate fantasies had moved on.

A complete realignment of fantasies took place. Old images and themes either acquired new meaning or were repositioned and hence became imbued with fresh, and often more potent, significance. These various imaginative themes on Tibet had had nearly a century to attune themselves to each other. The arrival of new, additional ones precipitated the final transformation. If Ruskin's new way of perceiving and experiencing landscape, Darwin's evolutionary theory, Himalayan mountaineering, photography and tourism were the catalysts, then the last, intensely competitive, phase of the 'Great Game' provided the necessary energy for the alchemical reaction. The process occurred in three stages. First there had to be a build-up of meaningful fantasies, of both intimate associations and compendious facts. These disparate themes then needed to realign themselves, to establish a correspondence with each other. Finally this cohesive set of fantasies had to organize themselves around a common core, condense themselves into a common image which would then become transferred to -- and focused upon -- Lhasa.

An Empirical Imagination

So often in these travel accounts the moment of entering Tibet reveals, most consistently, the depth-imagination at work. As Wilson laboriously ascended a pass into Tibet, he remarked that it was, at 16,000 feet, 'above the height of Mont Blanc': [25] simple fact, yet pregnant with meaning for the Alpine-loving British travelers. We have also come a long way from the vague Romantic generalizations so common earlier in the century. For example, Wilson enthused about a view 'that was savage and grand beyond description'. Yet describe it he does, and in such a way as to reveal a casual familiarity with sophisticated mountain details:

A mountain rose ... almost sheer up from the Sutlej, or from 9,000 feet to the height of 22,183 feet, in gigantic walls, towers, and aiguilles of cream colored granite and quartz, which had all the appearance of marble ... In appearance it was something like Milan Cathedral divested of its loftiest spire, and magnified many million times ... Here and there the white rock was streaked with snow, and it was capped by an enormous citadel with small beds of neve; but there was very little snow upon the gigantic mass of rock because the furious winds which forever beat and howl around it allow but little snow to find a resting place. [26]

In this passage, Wilson achieves a blend of empirical accuracy and imaginative eloquence that expresses so well the new way of perceiving landscape championed by Ruskin. Ruskin stamped his influence upon the entire Victorian era. Whether he was addressing landscape, morality, painting, sculpture, architecture, economics, politics or science, his method was always the same: sharp analytical eye and a controlled imagination were combined to produce a critical aesthetic appreciation and critique of the environment in which he lived. By 1875, when Wilson was traveling through the Himalayas, Ruskin was already a national institution. [27]

Ruskin was highly critical of both vague reverie and mere geographical accuracy. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was the latter in particular that had the most status. Hooker, for example, wrote:

I have been precise in my details, because the vagueness with which terms are usually applied to the apparent altitude and steepness of mountains, is apt to give false impressions. It is essential to attend to such points where scenery of real interest and importance is to be described. [28]

These are sentiments with which Ruskin would have been in total agreement, yet at the same time he would consider that they told only half the story. Ruskin insisted that the imagination, too, was both indispensable for a 'true' description and also subject to a rigor and discipline no less demanding than scientific observation. He was concerned with what he called the branches of 'scenic knowledge', in which precision of description was matched by intensity of feeling. [29]

Ruskin was therefore engaged upon two fronts. Certainly the language of Thomson's Western Himalayas and Tibet (1852), acclaimed as 'one of the most substantial books on Himalayan exploration of the 19th century', would have been antithetical to his project. [30] The only adjective Thomson seemed to know was 'remarkable' -- 'a very remarkable outburst of granite'; 'a very long and remarkable bend of the river': etc. [31] This work exactly fitted the prevailing mid-century mood: scientific exploration and no-nonsense observation. Thomson's friend and fellow-traveler, Hooker, despaired of exploration without science, and his journals have been acclaimed as classics in the field of scientific travel, [32] but the greatness of these volumes lies precisely in his ability to blend empirical observation with moments of reverie. His attention to light and sound, for example yielded passages of lyrical beauty:

As the sun declined, the snow at our feet reflected the most delicate peach-bloom hue; and looking West from the top of the pass, the scenery was gorgeous beyond description, for the sun was just plunging into a sea of mist, in a blaze of the ruddiest coppery hue. [33]

The landscape, he continued, was bathed 'in the most wonderful and indescribable changing tints'. He was reminded of Turner's paintings. In these he had 'recognized similar effects ... such are the fleeting hues over the ice, in his "Whalers", and the ruddy fire in his "Wind, Steam and Rain", which one almost fears to touch. Dissolving views give some idea of the magic creation and dispersion of the colors ...'. It was no coincidence that Ruskin was the great champion of Turner's empirical accuracy and astute observational powers, as well as his ability to interpret the experience of the landscape.

1. Mountaineering

Ruskin's new way of looking had been precipitated by the increasing familiarity with mountain-forms: not in terms of distant views, but through a close engagement with them. As we have seen, mountaineering was now in its 'Golden Age'. By mid-century, generations had grappled directly with mountains -- seeing them, as it were, from the inside; listening to them. Vague, detached descriptions could no longer suffice among lovers of mountain scenery; they were now connoisseurs. Himalayan travel was no exception to this demand for specific details. By this time the imaginative world of mountaineering had made its mark on the Himalayas: there were disputes about altitude records, general competitiveness, and a sharing of experiences. [34]

Whilst Himalayan climbing was still in its infancy, Alpine exploration had come of age and its history had begun to be compiled: it had its own meticulous chronicler in W. Coolidge. [35] Details became extremely important. Vagueness and inaccuracies were simply not tolerated. Alpine precision was often invoked in an attempt to bring rigour to Himalayan experiences. For example, at one point Hooker compares Himalayan and Alpine peaks in much the same manner as a wine taster would assess different vintages:

The appearance of Mont Cervin, from the Riffelberg, much reminded me of that of Junnoo, from the Choonjerma pass, the former bearing the same relation to Monte Rosa that the latter does to Kinchinjunga. Junnoo, though incomparably the more stupendous mass, is not nearly so remarkable in outline, so sharp, or so peaked as is Mont Cervin: it is a very much grander, but far less picturesque object. The whiteness of the sides of Junnoo adds also greatly to its apparent altitude; while the strong relief in which the black cliffs of Mont Cervin protrude through its snowy mantle greatly diminishes both its apparent height and distance. [36]

One could not be much more specific. Here is a developed art of mountain landscape aesthetics and perception within which the Himalayas were being contextualized.

2. Photography

The other catalyst for this new way of viewing, this empirical imagination, was the development of photography. When Wilson arrived at Dankar, the capital of Spiti, in 1875, he exclaimed: 'Its appearance is so extraordinary, that I shall not attempt any description of it until able to present my readers with a copy of its photograph.' [37]

Since the 1840s, British photographers had been touring the Empire in search of the extraordinary and the picturesque. In 1861 Samuel Bourne became the first to take a camera into the high Himalayas. Hampered by an immense quantity of bulky, unwieldy and fragile photographic material, he was constantly frustrated by the sheer scale of the scenery.

The scenery in some places was grand and impressive. Huge mountains, frequently clothed with forests of pine, towered aloft on every hand ... And yet, with all its ponderous magnificence and grandeur, strange to say this scenery was not well adapted for pictures -- at least for photography ... The character of the Himalayan scenery in general is not picturesque. I have not yet seen Switzerland except in some of M. Bisson's and Mr. England's photographs; but judging from these ... I should say that is far more pleasing and picturesque than any part I have yet seen of the Himalayas. [38]

The age of photography has truly arrived when Bourne judges the Himalayas by comparing their photogenic qualities with photographs of the Swiss Alps. Himalayan views would continue to elude photographers until Smythe's sensitive work in the early twentieth century, combined with the associated technical breakthrough in portable cameras. In general, photography would be used for recording architectural details, ethnographic objects and people for classification, or for postcard views. As John Berger comments:

All over the world during the nineteenth century, European travelers, soldiers, colonial administrators, adventurers, took photographs of the 'natives', their customs, their architecture, their richness, their poverty, their women's breasts, their head-dresses; and these images, besides provoking amazement, were presented and read as proof of the justice of the imperial division of the world. The division between those who organized and rationalized and surveyed, and those who were surveyed. [39]

The Himalayas were therefore drawn into a global photomontage that was demanded and created by scientists and public alike. A photograph was treated as 'a visual fact, a discrete bit of information within a materialistic, encyclopaedic view of the world'. [40] Photographs gave the illusion of power: scientific, administrative, aesthetic, voyeuristic.

The very power of photographic 'realism' posed the new landscape aesthetics with a puzzle. As early as 1839 the issue of visual accuracy, precision and fidelity was raised:

Travelers may perhaps soon be able to procure M. Daguerre's apparatus, and bring back views of the finest monuments and of the most beautiful scenery of the whole world. They will see how far their pencils and brushes are from the truth. [41]

Ruskin, too, was unsure of the relation between the new, supposed realism of photography and the specific character of landscape. For him, photographs seemed to lack 'veracity' and a kind of imaginative truth:

Even in the most accurate and finished topography, a slight exaggeration may be permitted; for many of the most important facts in nature are so subtle, that they must be slightly exaggerated, in order to be made noticeable when ... removed from the associating circumstances which enhanced their influence, or directed attention to them in nature. [42]

Bourne would have agreed. He observed that panoramic views in the Himalayas were generally unsatisfactory as photographic subjects. An artist, he mused, can foreshorten perspective, exaggerate and emphasize dominant characteristics in order to produce a result that is more aesthetically accurate, if less topographically literal. [43]

Ruskin's attempt to resolve the tension between empirical literalism and imaginative interpretation was crucial for the late-Victorian appreciation of landscape. However at odds the two positions were, or however tenuous was their attempted synthesis, if Tibet was ever to be a vital place in the British imagination both forms of perception were needed. Without empirical accuracy any description would have been discredited, given the prevailing scientific Weltanschauung. But without interpretation, any place would be imaginatively irrelevant. Also, for the axis mundi to appear in Tibet in the late nineteenth century, that land had to be of sufficient character to attract inexorably both ways of viewing in equal measure. So, for example, even Thomson, that traveler so dedicated to facts, was forced to exclaim from time to time over the wonderful view. The activity of photography, perhaps more than the actual photographs themselves, seemed to symbolize this meeting of science and imagination. As Samuel Bourne writes:

It was impossible to gaze on this tumultuous sea of mountains without being deeply affected with their terrible majesty and awful grandeur ... and it must be set down to the credit of photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these and renders it more susceptible of their sweet and elevating impressions. For my own part, I must say that before I commenced photography I did not see half the beauties in nature that I do now ... [44]

In this passage, science, technology and the cultivation of the natural sublime dovetail delightfully. In the Himalayas it seemed impossible to remain aloof and objective. The immense landscape always stimulated the imagination.

The Need for a Context: Intimate and Global

The resolution between empirical accuracy and imaginative interpretation was only one aspect of the new way of perceiving landscape championed by Ruskin. He also realized that it was essential for any landscape to belong to a social and historical context. Landscape needs such associations; without them there is only meaninglessness and placelessness. [45] In 1871 Leslie Stephen wrote:

The snowy ranges of California or the more than Alpine heights of the Caucasus may doubtless be beautiful, but to my imagination at least, they seem to be unpleasantly bare and dull, because they are deprived of all those intricate associations which somehow warm the bleak ranges of Switzerland. [46]

If the Himalayas -- and ultimately Tibet -- were to become sacred places for the British, they had to be an intimate part of British identity. Without this connection these wild landscapes could never provide the location for an axis mundi. Such a fundamental reference point must belong, in the most intimate way, to a culture, to its sense of itself, to its quest for meaning. The sacred has the paradoxical quality of being both remote and yet also close to the heart.

By 1847 the Himalayas had acquired at least one crucial quality: they were felt to belong to Britain. Thomson called them 'our northern Indian mountains'. [47] Over the next quarter of a century, the process of drawing these mountains deeply into the British imagination was undertaken in earnest. It occurred on many levels, but always through the twin processes of familiarization and globalization. As we have seen, by mid-century Britain had already adopted a global identity. The Himalayas then took their position within a worldwide mosaic of imaginatively significant places. Familiarization moved in the opposite direction. By naming and making intimate comparisons (of fauna, flora, landscape, culture), sentiments could be transferred from Britain to the Himalayas, and vice versa. Gradually the landscape became familiar and known. A network of associations was established between the British Isles and its imperial perimeter. Finally, Himalayan and Tibetan exploration was of sufficient vintage to have acquired its own history. Particular places began to echo with generations of travelers' tales. Names, dates and events started to recur. The Himalayas and Tibet therefore became firmly integrated into the stories the British told about themselves.

1. Familiarization

Hooker, for example, on his famous journey of 1848-9, constantly compared details of Himalayan scenery with their Alpine equivalent. [48]  As we have seen, this practice was also common among earlier travelers but by mid-century it was of a totally different order in terms of exactitide and familiarity. So upon his entry into Tibet, Hooker observed:

The mean height of Palung Plains is 16,000 feet: they are covered with transported blocks, and I have no doubt their surface has been much modified by glacial action. I was forcibly reminded of them by the slopes of the Wengern Alp, but those of Palung are far more level. The ice-clad cliffs of Kinchinjhow rise before the spectator, just as those of the Jungfrau, Monch and Eigher Alp do from that magnificent point of view. [49]

But the Swiss Alps were not the only point of comparison; even more familiar was the landscape of Britain itself. Hooker brought the plants of the Himalayas and Tibet into close association with the flora of 'our British moors' and 'our English gardens'. Comparisons were made with British insects, caterpillars and butterflies, ferns, sedges and strawberries. [50] Given the mid-Victorian enthusiasm for botanizing and gardens, such associations would have helped to draw these alien regions of Asia closer to the Victorian bosom. [51] The extensive transportation of exotic plants from the colonial outposts back to Britain also enhanced this familiarization process. As one writer commented at the time: 'Many of the plants [rhododendrons] ... to be found in English gardens are due to the seeds gathered by Sir Joseph Hooker.' The naming of fauna and flora also played its part in giving the Himalayas an intimate place in British fantasies: 'A beautiful yellow poppy-like plant grew in clefts at 10,000 feet; it has flowered in England, from seeds which I sent home, and bears the name of Cathcartia ...'. In a footnote Hooker tells us: 'The name was given in honor of the memory of my friend, the late J.F. Cathcart, Esq. of the Bengal Civil Service ...'. [52] Such small-scale naming was perhaps more important than the largely unsuccessful attempts to change the names of the major Himalayan peaks. Of these only Everest has proved enduring. As Gaston Bachelard has stressed in his Poetics of Space, it is generally the corners and intimate spaces that evoke meaning, soul and a sense of belonging. [53]

Wilder fancy also played its part in moving the Himalayas and Tibet into a circle of familiar associations. Each era seemed to use its own imaginative criteria by which to establish archaic, almost mythic, connections. Turner in 1783, related Tibet and Ancient Egypt through a common lion symbolism. Sir Richard Temple, writing about a hundred years later, made the same imaginative connection between Tibet and Ancient Egypt, but now, appropriately for the industrious Victorian era, through reflections upon a common system of labor. Even the sober Hooker paused en route to reflect upon the relationship between these two cultures:

The similarly proportioned gloomy portals of Egyptian fanes naturally invite comparison; but the Tibetan temples lack the sublimity of those; and the uncomfortable creeping sensation produced by the many sleepless eyes of Boodh's numerous incarnations is very different from the awe with which we contemplate the outspread wings of the Egyptian symbol, and feel as in the presence of him who says, 'I am Osiris the Great: no man hath dared to lift my veil'. [54]

Comparison has continued to be made between Tibet and Egypt right up to the present. In Hooker's day, Ancient Egypt was considered to be the exemplary home of archaic mystery, alongside which Tibet was thought inferior. However, by the time of Madam Blavatsky, some forty years later, an equality would be imagined between these two places and their religions. In our own era, Tibetan religion has emerged from the shadows of its Egyptian counterpart and is often considered its superior. [55]

Apart from Ancient Egypt, Tibet has evoked other cultural comparisons. In the twentieth century attempts have been made to relate Tibetans with Australian Aboriginals, North American Indians, Aztecs, Gnostics, and so on. [56] In 1875, the word Tartar and its possible connection with tartan drew Wilson's fancy. During a series of ingenious associations, he wrote:

It struck me forcibly before I left Zanskar that there must be some unknown relationship between the people of that province and the Scottish Highlanders. The sound of their varieties of language, the brooches which fasten their plaids, the varieties of tartan ... even the features of the people, strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders. [57]

Such reflections as these drew the Himalayas and Tibet deep into the mythological regions of the British psyche.

The Himalayas and the Tibetan borderland also provided the locations for numerous spiritual experiences. The scientist Hooker, for example, exclaimed:

In such scenes ... the mind wanders from the real to the ideal, the larger and brighter lamps of heaven lead us to imagine that we have risen from the surface of our globe and are floating through the regions of space ... [58]

Wilson, too, whilst admiring what he called 'the most picturesque, weird, astounding and perplexing' mountains of Zanskar, experienced a profound spiritual questioning. 'What am I?' he asked. And in reply he quoted the Buddhist hymn, "all is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is without substance"'. [59] Such experiences as these were to recur time and again, imbuing the region with yet another kind of intimacy, that of the spirit. The Himalayas and Tibet would become a veritable repository of singular spiritual experiences for generations of British travelers.

2. Globalization

The Himalayas and Tibet were also part of a wider, more global contextualizing. By mid-century the whole surface of the earth had become a market, a playground and a laboratory for the British. Hooker, for example, having already been to the Antarctic, wanted to visit a temperate zone and had to choose between India and the Andes (imperial connections swayed the final choice); Lambert, in his journal of 1877, presents cogent arguments as to why the Himalayas was the best place to visit for a shooting trip, rather than Europe, Africa, America or elsewhere in Asia.  Similarly, Markham selected the Himalayas as a change after having previously hunted in Canada. [60] The Himalayas were clearly just one -- albeit very attractive -- place within Britain's global map.

This global referencing of the Himalayan region extended to its fauna and flora. Hooker commented: 'there were few mosses; but crustaceous lichens were numerous, and nearly all of them of Scotch, Alpine, European, and Arctic kinds ... I recognized many as natives of the wild mountains of Cape Horn, and the rocks of the stormy Antarctic ocean'. [61] Geologically too, the Sikkim Himalayas reminded Hooker of 'the West coasts of Scotland and Norway, of South Chili, and Fuegia, of New Zealand and Tasmania'. Vegetation was described as 'European and North American', or' dry Asiatic and Siberian', or 'humid Malayan'. [62]

As Himalayan travel accounts took their place within the wider story of global exploration, the martyrs of this tradition were created. Tales of explorers' hardships and deaths were utterly essential for the Victorian British. Burnes, Moorcroft, Hayward, Dr Stolicza, Adolph Schlagintweit and Csoma de Koros were names that would constantly recur as the Himalayan tradition established itself. Stories such as the arrest and ill-treatment of Hooker and Campbell had importance not only for Sikkim and Darjeeling but also for Britain's more global presence and authority. The blood of Europeans was already mingling with the pristine Himalayan snow. An essential heroic darkness was beginning to be drawn into British imaginative associations with the region.

Light and Colour: the Wilderness Redeemed

As the Victorian era progressed, a disenchantment with mountain Romanticism began. Poetry, literature and art began to turn away from the earlier transcendent vision. Instead, more concern is shown towards the urban social problems that accompanied industrialization. The earlier Romantic landscape tradition increasingly came to be considered irrelevant, even indulgent, by the new generation among whom sobriety, reason and morality were more esteemed. [63] Tourism had also played its part in diluting the spontaneity and freshness of the mountain experience.

By the 1870s the Victorian crisis in confidence was reflected in the changed view of wild landscape. A profound ambivalence now characterized attitudes towards such places. For some, wildernesses were barbaric wastelands that should be avoided; for others they were places of sanctuary and healing. Some viewed wildernesses as mere distractions from pressing social reforms; others looked to them as sources of primal energy which alone could shatter rigid social conventions. [64]

The Himalayas played a unique part in the changing attitude to wild landscape. In Britain the sprawling urban centres, with their gross problems, occupied centre-stage, pushing mountains and the natural sublime to the periphery of concern. At the fringe of Empire, however, such concern for social injustice was muted by the prevailing racist and imperialist ideologies. This allowed the Romantic landscape tradition to linger on and indeed never to be really lost in the Himalayas. As we have seen, even in the heyday of scientific travel these vast mountains continued to evoke lyricism and mystery. It was therefore in these and other similar regions that a genuine aesthetics of wilderness was forged late in the century.

The contextualization of the Himalayas within British history and the close attention given to empirical details combined to bring meaning to this mountain wilderness. For example, when Hooker reached the top of the Donkia Pass into Tibet he was confronted by a 'featureless' landscape: without houses, trees or even snow. Yet he still discovered something of interest:

I found one flowering plant on the summit; the tufted alsinaceous one ... [and] at 18,300 feet 1 found on one stone only a fine lichen, the 'tripe de roche' of Arctic Voyagers and the food of the Canadian hunters; it is also abundant on the Scotch Alps. [65]

As anyone who has traveled in apparently featureless landscapes will testify, it is the patient attention to such details that reveals their beauty. Paradoxically, the vast spaces often support minute, retiring life-forms and encourage an appreciation of subtlety. Also, by mid- century a study of comparative wildernesses was developing. As the passage from Hooker shows, the wild, empty and barren parts of the world could be related through the most minimal of evidence. Connoisseurs of wilderness were emerging; individuals familiar with the lonely spaces of the planet to be found in the Arctic and Antarctic, North and South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, the oceans, and on the mountain summits. Regular engagement with wilderness provoked the development of a new aesthetic.

Of course, explorers and travelers continued to refer to such places as 'dreary', 'desolate' 'sterile'. [66]  Yet even in these instances a kind of balance point was often reached and evaluation would then topple over into a different world of appreciation. Thomson, for instance, at one point is forced to exclaim:

I find it extremely difficult to describe in an adequate manner the extreme desolation of the most barren parts of Tibet, where no luxuriant forest or bright green herbage softens the nakedness of the mountains, but everywhere the same precipices, heaps of rocks, and barren monotonous desert meets the eye. The prospect before me was certainly most wonderful. I had nowhere before seen a country so utterly waste. [67]

The 'waste' was so absolute that it had become 'wonderful'. Wilson, also, gives us numerous examples of this decisive shift in aesthetic balance once the extreme edge of the earlier Romantic paradigm had been reached. A revolution was taking place in the 'scenic sciences' of the West. [68] When Wilson wrote: I was entering the wildest and sublimest region of the earth', he had reached the limit of one aesthetic paradigm. Subsequently he reported:

The view over the Spiti ranges ... was very extensive and striking; for though it was a land of desolation on which we gazed, it was under an intensely dark-blue sky; it was beautifully colored with snow and cloud, and variegated rock ... [69]

He called it 'that beautiful yet awful scene', and then referred to 'the wild sterility of these Tartar plains,' 'the sublime and terrific character of the scenery'. [70] In this passage can be seen a crucial movement in the emergence of a wilderness aesthetic: a subtle appreciation of colors and light, rather than an exclusive reliance on bold, varied physical forms, or on striking panoramas. In another place Wilson recounts:

The color of these precipice walls was of the richest and most varied kind. The predominant tints were green, purple, orange, brown, black and whitish yellow ... In certain lights the precipices appeared almost as if they were of chalcedony and jasper. The dark-brown manganese-like cliffs looked exceedingly beautiful. [71]

Travelers were attracted by two qualities of this light that was to be found in the Himalayas and in the Tibetan wilderness: its clarity and the subtlety of its changing colors. So Hooker writes:

The transparency of the pale blue atmosphere of these lofty regions can hardly be described, nor the clearness and precision with which the most distant objects are projected against the sky. [72]

Such comments had, of course, been made before, but with less frequency and without a context. Far from being incidental features, they were now increasingly sought out by travelers in the Himalayas and Tibet. The light and color became part of the region's attraction. The colors never seemed fixed:' ... floods of light shot across the misty ocean, bathing the landscape in the most wonderful and indescribably changing tints.' [73] Even the most reserved of travelers could scarcely restrain their enthusiasm for the colors and light. Sir Richard Temple, on a tour through Nepal in 1876, was forced to exclaim:

Emerald, azure, turquoise -- all these phases combined can give you no impression of the indescribable beauty of the color ... To a spectator on the hills themselves, their color would be of the dullest and most opaque yellow ochre; but the effect of distance in this clear atmosphere is to throw a sort of etherealized pink-purple over the mountains which has the most lovely effect. [74]

In these regions there was, as Hooker wrote, both 'desolation and grandeur'. [75] Attention to details of light and color helped to sustain paradox and overcome monotony:

The deep dark blue of the heavens above contrasted with the perfect and dazzling whiteness of the earthly scene around. The uniformity of color in this exquisite scene excited no sense of monotony. [76]

It is no coincidence that at the moment of Hooker's most intense aesthetic experience he should reach towards Turner's paintings for assistance. It was Turner who, as Ruskin insisted, was most responsible for first capturing both the empirical and imaginative 'truth' of light and colors in landscape. [77]

A Million Pairs of Lungs: Mountain Air and Tourism

As the Europeans climbed the summits, they discovered not only splendid views but also mountain air. As we saw in chapter 2, curiosity about the air was a feature of mountain exploration right from the beginning. Speculations about the air are an important guide to the depth-imagination because, like the gods, the purest mountain air is to be found at the summits and, like them, it has an elusive insubstantiality.

By mid-century, mountain air was unequivocally equated with good health. Wilson was only one of the many who took to the higher Himalayas for health reasons. The hill-stations of Darjeeling, Simla and Dharmsala, among others, were testaments to the efficacy of mountain air:

I believe that children's faces afford as good an index as any to the healthfulness of a climate, and in no part of the world is there a more active, rosy, and bright young community, than at Dorjiling. It is incredible what a few weeks of that mountain air will do for the India-born children of European parents. [78]

Yet at work within such a seemingly innocent equation as that established between mountain air and health is a more complex metaphor. For Ruskin, mountains, air and clouds, formed a marvelous unity. 'The second great use of mountains', he writes, 'is to maintain a constant change in the currents and nature of the air.' Elsewhere he insists that 'our whole happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live in the cloud.' Above all, he is adamant that the clouds associated with mountains are superior to those found in the lowlands. [79] As Tyndall, the well-known Victorian mountaineer, commented: 'There is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains.' [80] The pollution of such air was therefore more than simply a matter of physical well-being: it struck a moral and psychological chord. For Ruskin the pollution of his beloved mountain air echoed his disenchantment with nature and provided a bitter criticism of capitalist exploitation.

Leslie Stephen wrote in 1871: 'The Alps ... are places of refuge where we may escape from ourselves and from our neighbors. There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pair of lungs'. [81] Clearly, for Stephen, the pure air of the mountains symbolized the antithesis both of the crowded urban centres of the British Isles and of the upsurge in popular tourism that was threatening the exclusiveness of the Alps. In the Himalayas also, the purity of the air acted as a metaphor for escape. Even in those immense mountains, tourism had become familiar by the final quarter of the century. As Wilson complained in 1871:

... go almost where he may, the lover of peace and solitude will soon have reason to complain that the country round him is becoming 'altogether too crowded'. As for the enterprising and exploring traveler ... his case is even worse. Kafiristan, Chinese Tibet, and the very centre of Africa, indeed remain for him, but, wherever he may go, he cannot escape the painful conviction that his task will ere long be trodden ground. [82]

Cook's Tours began in 1841 and was a revolution unwelcomed by the earlier breed of upper-class travelers. Within a generation or two, lamented Wilson, 'it will be only a question of money and choice ... as to having a cruise upon the lakes of Central Africa, or going to reason with the Grand Lama of Tibet upon the subject of polyandry'. [83] Traveler's Angst drove explorers deeper into the rapidly shrinking uncharted lands of Central Asia or up ever higher and more inaccessible peaks. Steamships, railways and efficient roads caused a dramatic change in travel throughout the whole world, and the Himalayas were no exception. Already by mid-century a road had been constructed between Simla and the Tibetan border: 'the great Hindusthan and Tibet road', as it was called. Further east, 'a regularly engineered road' led from Darjeeling to the Jeylap-la Pass, 'on the future highroad between India and China via Tibet'. [84] With measured irony, Wilson continued: 'Nowadays, old ladies of seventy, who had scarcely ever left Britain before, are to be met with on the spurs of the Himaliya.' [85]

Wilson, in fact, bowed to the inevitable and the profitable, so before turning his attention to the 'untrod' higher mountain regions he gave detailed advice to prospective Himalayan tourists: preparations, routes, itineraries. But he carefully reserved the higher sense of aesthetics for the educated classes. Mountain splendors, he wrote, 'to the undeveloped mind of Tommy Atkins ... soon become exceedingly tiresome'. [86] It was as if he was reassuring both himself and his readers that the exclusiveness of the mountains was unlikely to be troubled by the curiosity of the masses.

At times, Wilson's book reads like a travel brochure:

Whether the traveler be in search of health, or sport, or sublime scenery, there is no other place from which he can have such convenient access as Simla to the interior of the Himalayas, and to the dry elevated plains of Central Asia. [87]

The Tibetan border, Kashmir and the capital of Ladakh at Leh were all within easy reach of Simla. 'Indeed,' exclaimed Wilson enthusiastically, 'now that the Russians have established a post-office at Kashgar, it would be quite possible, and tolerably safe, to walk from Simla to St. Petersburg, or to the mouth of the Amur on the Pacific coast.' [88] As the Himalayas became increasingly familiar and well trodden, the land to the north, protected by both its terrain and its policy of exclusion, became more attractive. A kind of empathic relationship began to be established between the mountain peaks, with their pure, uncontaminated air, and the exclusive solitudes of the Tibetan plateau. As the century progressed, this relationship would reach a pitch of intensity. By then travel in the lower reaches of the Himalayas had become almost routine. As one aristocratic traveler wrote, rather wearily, in 1889: 'The subject of Himalayan travel and sport is now so old a story that an attempt to create further interest in it is an almost hopeless undertaking.' [89]

A Morality of the Wilderness

The emergence of a genuine wilderness aesthetic and an appreciation of these previously rejected regions was vital to the eventual creation of Tibet as a sacred place in the Western psyche. Without this revolutionary breakthrough in landscape perception, Tibet might still have been fascinating and mysterious, but it would not have become intimate and essential, to Europeans and Americans. When Hooker traveled to Palestine in 1860 he used the word 'Tibetan' as the supreme adjective for describing desolate landscape.  The 'general character of the scenery', he wrote, was 'Tibetan and wretched'. [90] Clearly the aesthetic redemption of wilderness and the imaginative fate of Tibet were inseparable.

Appreciation of wilderness is not a natural phenomenon -- indeed, an aesthetic relationship to such places appears to be unique to industrial cultures. It developed under specific historical, social and psychological conditions. This does not lessen its imaginative significance -- in fact, quite the reverse. If we understand the subtle complexity of its genesis, the appreciation of wilderness can be seen as a symbol of great power. Within it are condensed layer upon layer of discrete fantasies. Perhaps the most important of these, especially for the Victorian era, was the question of morality.

Ruskin insisted that there was a direct relationship between natural landscape and a natural morality. This was a two-way process: society's appreciation of landscape was a direct indication of its level of civilization. But he also considered landscape to have its own morality, independent of any cultural interpretation or psychological projection. Here was a protoenvironmental -- an anima mundi -- psychology in the making, one that used morality for its base. [91] The Victorian era expressed high regard for certain moral qualities, especially sobriety, steadiness and patience. To be boring or monotonous was definitely viewed by many as a lesser evil that being impatient or unreliable. Such moral characteristics were even attributed to the Tibetan people themselves. So Wilson writes:

I found it impossible to move among these people, especially in the more primitive parts of the country, without contracting a great liking for them, and admiration for their honesty, their patience, and their placidity of temper ... [92]

Wilderness regions seemed to embody these moral qualities, so respected by many Victorians, to a high degree.

In one remarkable passage, Ruskin shows clearly just how important the regard for these moral qualities was for the imaginative redemption of landscape that had previously been rejected or overlooked because it was dreary or monotonous. He referred to 'a spot which has all the solemnity with none of the savageness of the Alps ... And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony ... Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds.' [93] Ruskin's influential studies of precipices also offered a kind of redemption of the wilderness: 'Forever incapable of comfort or of healing from herb or flower, nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life on buttress or ledge, but, to the utmost desolate ...'. Yet he considered that such places were not destitute of significance, nor of sombre dignity. They were, he wrote, 'robed with everlasting mourning'. [94]

Ruskin reserved similar respect for the pine tree, that denizen of 'scenes disordered and desolate'. Like the ocean, it was a signifier of the infinite: 'The pine is trained to need nothing, and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained, desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted completion. Tall or short, it will be straight.' [95] Wilson, on his journey through the Himalayas, was similarly struck with the character of trees and their relationship to the wild landscape that is their home. For him they were a reminder 'that the struggling and half-developed vegetable world aspires towards heaven, and has not been unworthy of the grand design'. [96]

The Victorian penchant for attributing moral characteristics to landscape has often been the source of ridicule, yet as we have seen, this habit was a precursor to an environmental psychology. It played an important role in initiating a more sympathetic relationship to apparently bleak and barren environments. [97]

Origins, Ancestors and Evolution

The general acceptance of Darwin's theory during the second half of the nineteenth century drew all the landscapes of the world, with their associated races, fauna and flora, into a deep relationship with each other. They suddenly all shared the same immense evolutionary context. The final transformation of Tibet into a sacred landscape was, to a significant extent, a child of evolutionary theory. Tibet and the Himalayas suddenly became positioned on a trajectory that involved fantasies about sources and origins, missing links, evolutionary directions and goals, and about the survival of the fittest. Even the most desolate wilderness or the most primitive life-form could not now be overlooked or rejected, for it too played its part in the global evolutionary and ecological context. In particular, such ideas quickly found their way into ethnography, and sociological and anthropological theory. Whilst there were a number of different forms of Social Darwinism, they all shared the same root-metaphors. [98]

When Wilson stood atop the Kung-ma Pass into Tibet and contemplated the mountain 'Lio Porgyul', he was moved to comment: '[It] might well be regarded as a great fortress between Iran and Turan, between the domains of the Aryan and the Tartar race.' [99] From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the term Aryan suddenly came into common use, not philologically, nor only mythologically, but as a concept of 'scientific' ethnography. Its usage was embedded within broad racial and cultural concerns which involved descriptions, classifications, evaluations and a kind of ethno-ecology, a study of the relationship between culture, race and environment.

By mid-century a vast quantity of basic ethnographic data had been gathered by Himalayan travelers. The attempts to organize this material rationally were usually based upon either comparative linguistics or the measurement of skulls or the use of racial stereotypes. [100] Although the study of cranial characteristics continued throughout the century, it was the use of racial stereotypes that became almost the trademark of travel texts. The principal theme of these stereotypes was the idea of racial character. Hooker's comments about the inhabitants of Sikkim were typical:

A more interesting and attractive companion than the Lepcha I never lived with: cheerful, kind and patient with a master to whom he is attached; rude but not savage, ignorant and yet intelligent ... In all my dealings with these people, they proved scrupulously honest. Except for drunkenness and carelessness, I never had to complain ...  [101]

The interest of travelers in racial character was generally orientated towards practical purposes rather than disinterested science. For example, the Himalayan hill tribes were to be administered, controlled and put to use by the British, as well as just studied. By means of such stereotypes the character of different races could be compared and their relative value to the British assessed. A point was subsequently reached where some ethnographic training was considered desirable for any aspiring colonial administrator. [102]

'The Lepcha is timid, peaceful and no brawler; ... the Ghorkas are brave and warlike, the Bhotanese quarrelsome, cowardly and cruel.' A mixture of physical, moral, historical and behavioral observations, these stereotypes were pithy portraits and allowed instant evaluations to be made. They became a kind of traveler's shorthand, yet were embedded within the prevailing ideas of ethnographic science. Such assertions were characteristically unequivocal and precise:

The Bhutias may be divided into three classes -- those of Tibet, Sikim, and Bhutan ... Taking the inhabitants of Bhutan ... as the type, they are a dark, powerful, finely made race, Tibetan in feature, language and religion; but of a very unpleasing character, being described as vain, rude, inaccessible, sulky, quarrelsome, turbulent, cowardly and cruel, and grossly immoral and drunken withal. Their brethren of Sikkim and Tibet -- especially the latter -- share their bad qualities in a lesser degree, are fairer ... and more robust. [103]

As Europe and America shifted their attention to the origin, evolution, success and decay of cultures, these racial stereotypes acquired heightened imaginative power due to the emergence of the Aryan myth.

Whilst the term Aryan had first arisen in the eighteenth century through the discovery of a linguistic relationship between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, by the 1850s it had outgrown its philological origins. It became associated with the idea of an 'original race' who formed the light-bearing vanguard of true civilization. Darwin's evolutionary theory gave the Aryan fantasy a much-needed scientific framework which also dovetailed beautifully with imperial demands. Races were hierarchically assessed in terms of their cultural achievements, military prowess, intelligence, linguistic complexity, brain size, religion, physical beauty, or whatever theme was deemed important. As Latham wrote in his comprehensive, descriptive ethnology of Asia, Africa and Europe (1859):

We may look ... upon the divisions and sub-divisions of the numerous groups that have been under notice, with a view of deciding upon their relative importance as material or moral forces in the history of the world. [104]

Not surprisingly, the 'Aryans' always came out on top, thereby justifying the West's right to global dominance. Sir Richard Temple, for example, whilst Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, journeyed through Sikkim and commented:

The Lepchas are the aboriginal race and a pleasant people, hardy enough, but weak in character and decreasing in numbers ... The Bhutias ... are of Tibetan origin and somewhat stolid ... The Paharis from Nepal are of the Aryan race ... They are industrious and enterprising cultivators, greatly superior to other races in this quarter, and destined to do more and more for the settlement and colonization of these hills. They are the men who break up the land with the plough, and show the other races how to give up the barbarous method of tillage without it. [105]

The Aryan myth was above all part of a search by the West for its origins. As a spiritual crisis deepened in Europe, so new beliefs were sought. [106] The Aryan myth combined the compelling root-metaphors of a racial homeland with a racial purity unweakened by urban life and undiluted by intermarriage, added to a heroic science of struggle and survival.

The Aryans were the long-lost 'ancestors'; vigorous, dominant, heroic. Brian Hodgson at one point wrote of 'our ancestors when they burst the barriers of the Roman Empire'. Hooker referred to the ancient invasion of India 'by the Indo-Germanic conquerors'. [107] The 'Turanian' Tibetans, by contrast, while brave and ferocious, lacked sensitivity, intelligence and passion. Wilson, for example, argued that the violence of Chinese and Tartar punishment had its basis in physiology; 'it is certain that the Turanian race is remarkably obtuse-nerved and insensitive to pain, which goes some way to account for the cruelty of its punishments.' [108] As for the 'curious and revolting' custom of polyandry, whatever its merits for controlling population, Wilson insisted that:

This could only happen among a race of a peculiarly placid, unpassionate temperament, as the Turanians unquestionably are, except in their fits of demoniacal cruelty. They have no hot blood, in our sense of the phrase ... [109]

The Tibetans were also not considered to be a heroic race;

The Tibetan population is hardly ... of sufficiently strong morale, for heroic or chivalric efforts, such as have been made by the ancient Greeks, the Swiss, the Waldenses, the Scotch Highlanders, and the mountaineers of some other parts of Europe, and even of Asia. [110]

In contrast to Aryan vigor and energy, the Tibetans were considered lazy. Similarly, their religion was often thought to be an evolutionary dead end. When referring to the 'Aryan' Sikh conquest of Ladakh, Cunningham wrote that 'the indolent votaries of an almost worn-out faith were no match for the more active and energetic worshippers of Mahadeo and Parbati'. [111] Wilson, too situated Tibetan religion within the framework of Social Darwinism:

This tendency of Budhists to seclude themselves from the world has interfered with Budhism being a great power in the world ... It is forced to give way ... whenever mankind reaches a certain stage of complicated social arrangements, or, as we call it, civilization; but there is a stage before that, though after the period of tribal fighting, when a religion like Budhism naturally flourishes. Now Tibet is still in that position at the present day, and so Budhism (in the shape of Lamaism) is still supreme in it ... [112]

Some British considered the Himalayas a fit place for Anglo-Saxon colonization, almost as if its inhabitants were not of sufficient stature to do justice to this mighty landscape. [113]

A variety of quests for many disparate origins converged, upon these elevated regions. By 1825 Csoma de Koros had already made his way towards the land to the north of Tibet in an attempt to discover the source of the Hungarian people. The mid-century had also witnessed the search to find the sources of the great rivers of India -- the Sutlej, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra. [114] Most of the major rivers of southern Asia seemed to have their origins somewhere within Tibet. The nineteenth century seemed obsessed with searching for the source of the world's great rivers, of which the Nile was probably the most famous. Rivers are rich symbols -- holy, life-giving metaphors for life itself. An imaginative resonance was struck between this symbolism and the quest to find the source of the 'Aryan nation'. Wilson expressed the pregnancy of these underlying fantasies; upon his first sight of the Himalayas he exclaimed excitedly:

These were the Jumnotri and Gangotri peaks, the peaks of Badrinath and of the Hindu Kailas; the source of mighty sacred rivers; the very centre of the Himaliya; the Himmel or heaven of the Teuton Aryans as well as of Hindu Mythology. Mount Meru itself may be regarded as rising there its golden front against the sapphire sky; the Kailas, or 'Seat of Happiness', is the coelum of the Latins; and there is the fitting, unapproachable abode of Brahma ... [115]

A triple process of imaginative realignment, focusing and condensation can be seen at work in this enthusiastic passage. At the summit of the mountains and on the high-altitude plateau of Central Asia are assembled the Aryan gods, pure air, a pure race, the source of the world's rivers and of European ancestral origins, the source of the world's true civilization. These regions represented -- and at the same time evoked such qualities as heroism, patience, vigor, ruggedness, freedom, steadiness. Most importantly, this land is the highest in the world. As Hooker remarked whilst gazing into Tibet: 'There is no loftier country on the globe ...'. [116]  If this was the highest region on the globe, then the air must surely be the purest and the racial ancestors the most vigorous. In addition to being the highest, this land was conceived to be the centre of the world'. [117] Wilson quoted the Arabs who, he claimed, called the Himalayas 'The Stony Girdle of the Earth'. [118] Finally, this region was referred to as the 'Roof of the World'. Davies has recently encapsulated the Aryan fantasy in a clear and forceful way: 'This original race "in columns of masterful men" had once marched "down from the roof of the world, founding empires and civilizing the West".' [119]

Admittedly, the precise boundaries of the region are somewhat vague: Everest was obviously the exact highest point in the world; the Pamirs in particular were known as the 'roof of the world'; the 'stony girdle' applied to the whole mountain range; Tibet was specifically called the highest country. Yet concern with such geographical precision quickly began to yield before an imaginative focusing. Eventually the Potala palace at Lhasa would provide the core-image around which these metaphors would cluster. [120] It would then come to signify the axis mundi of the globe, providing at one and the same time a connection with memoria, with the Ancients, with archaic beginnings, as well as with renewal, hope, aspiration, the gods.

Such fantasies also influenced British expectations about the people who inhabited these regions. So, Hooker mused: 'the Lepcha in one respect entirely contradicts our preconceived notions of a mountaineer, as he is timid, peaceful and no brawler.' [121] The Tibetans, too, hardly measured up to the ideal of the mountaineer, and it was something of a contradiction that these illustrious summits should be inhabited by such an unheroic race. [122]

Highroads and Back Doors: Lhasa and its Lamas

But what circumstances caused these disparate images to be gathered together, condensed and then subsequently displaced and focused so specifically on to the city of Lhasa? [123] As the mid-century travelers mapped, hunted, fought, classified, preached or just enjoyed themselves in the Himalayas, it seemed as if all roads, both real and imagined, led to Lhasa. Yet simultaneously, every entrance was denied.

Four literal highroads towards the Tibetan border were available to British travelers in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1870, T. Cooper reported that a regular route existed between Peking and Lhasa. As it became possible for Westerners to travel freely through China, this route had distinct possibilities. [124] The other three roads all began in territory that was either British or within British influence. From Ladakh in the west, there was another well-trod ancient route between Leh and Lhasa. From the south, but still towards the western end of the Himalayas, the British constructed 'the Great Hindusthan-Tibet Road'. Wilson gave a graphic description of what was more like a 'cut bridle-path', and recounted the numerous deaths that had befallen travelers attempting the journey from Simla to the Tibetan border. [125] Finally, the British had high hopes that the road from Darjeeling, at the eastern end of the Himalayas, would soon have its terminus at Lhasa. [126]

By the 1870s, three generations of British travelers had optimistically journeyed along these and other routes in an attempt to enter Tibet. Entry stories had become an inevitable motif of Himalayan travel accounts. Indeed, advice was freely given on how to behave when stopped by Tibetan border guards. A traveler's lore began to develop. For example, when a certain Captain Bennett of the Royal Fusiliers reached the expected turning point at the frontier whilst on a shooting trip, he was prepared:

I had previously read Dunlop's book, 'Hunting in the Himalayas', and took care not to waste time sitting down and arguing the point with them, but determined to have my own way and proceed accordingly. [127]

Bluff, bluster, persistence, disguise, trickery or courting favor by using Western medicine were the usual methods adopted in an attempt to get across the border. The Tibetans generally resorted to passive resistance. A kind of game, or ritual, seemed to be regularly enacted at the border, with little animosity between the players, either British or Tibetan. [128] Serious and frustrating as such incidents were, they were seldom violent. Often the traveler might gain a few miles or a few days, but eventually always yielded to Tibetan pressure. By thus repeatedly thwarting the representatives of British imperial power, albeit on a small scale, the Tibetans gained a kind of grudging, if somewhat patronizing, respect from British travelers. It seemed absurd that the all-powerful and otherwise irresistible British should be denied by these strange, unwarlike people, with their superstitions, bizarre religion, and disarming good nature. Unlike elsewhere in Asia, here the British were confronting non-Europeans on more or less equal terms. The ritual was territorial, each side making lots of noise and gestures yet preserving the status quo. It was the sort of direct, 'man-to-man' contact that the confident British travelers could respect. These were not shadowy officials, but ordinary people. The sportsman and hunter F. Markham, for example, after being prevented from entering Tibet, referred to the Tibetans as a, 'good humored, jolly looking race'. Cooper ended up joking with the border guards. [129]

However, away from the personal side of these encounters, many thought that such exclusion was detrimental to British status in the region. Wilson, for example, complained:

It hurt our position in India for the people there to know that there is a country adjoining our own territory into which Englishmen are systematically refused entrance, while the nations of British India and of its tributary states are allowed to enter freely, and even to settle in large numbers at the capital, Lassa. [130]

Here was the painful twist. While the all-conquering British were excluded from Tibet, the people they had conquered could move with relative ease across the border. Elsewhere, for example in the Arctic, exploration was, by mid-century already a matter of national pride and British manhood. [131] Like Tibet, the Arctic was a closed land, but unlike Tibet it was closed only physically. It presented a simple struggle between British heroism and its technology on the one hand, and the raw, untamed powers of nature on the other. Tibet, however, was a closed land through a mixture of both physical and political impediments. On the face of it neither barrier seemed insurmountable, but together they were strangely effective. As the quest for the North Pole lost its grip on the popular imagination, Tibet would replace it as the next mysterious but far more complex, closed land.

Even the position of Tibet, 'on high', made it seem as if the people living up there entertained presumptuous and aristocratic airs of superiority over the British, who had to toil upwards just to meet them, only then to be unceremoniously turned down. For example, the influential Captain Montgomerie, who organized the use of Indian pundits to survey Tibet secretly, was outraged that every year, before allowing traders to enter, the Tibetans would enquire about the 'political and sanatory condition of Hindustan'. He continued: 'The inquiry seems to be carried out with all that assumption of lofty superiority for which Chinese officials are famous. Looking down from their elevated plateaux, they decide as to whether Hindustan is a fit country to have intercourse with.' [132] One can understand his chagrin. Here was Britain -- 'the most powerful government in the East', as Hooker wrote -- being regularly humiliated and forced to scramble around looking for back doors. [133] To add insult to injury, the British never seemed able to find any Tibetan officials with whom to open normal diplomatic relations.

Nevertheless, exclusion heightened the pleasure and excitement when travelers did eventually manage to gain even a brief glimpse of the forbidden land. Expectation, too, was intensified. Captain Bennett's remarks were typical: 'I was curious to see a place which was so studiously shut out from European eyes.' [134] As the Himalayas became more familiar, so the attraction of the mysterious, unknown land over the border increased.

Not only did all roads seem to lead to Lhasa in a literal sense, but also in terms of the routes of power. Over the course of nearly a hundred years the British had become increasingly aware of the influence of Lhasa throughout the Himalayan region, but by the middle of the nineteenth century their accumulated evidence and experiences had crystallized into a more fundamental appreciation of the city's hegemonic position. In Hooker's journal of 1855, he made repeated reference to Lhasa: it was the focus of pilgrimage; the centre of craft, art and culture; the seat of religious, judicial, political and military decision-making; its soldiers were feared by the hill peoples and even the British in Darjeeling were nervous about an attack from over the border. [135] When Wilson traveled close to the Tibetan border in 1875, he was prey to fantasies about being poisoned by 'agents of the Lassa Government, whose business is to prevent Europeans passing the border'. [136]

Gutzlaff, in his 1849 report to the Royal Geographical Society, shows how far British fantasies about Lhasa had developed by mid-century:

The soil throughout the Lhasa district is fertile ... the inhabitants of the less favoured parts ... therefore look upon L'hasa (the seat of the Dalai-Lama) as a paradise ... So many sacred objects are here accumulated that it surpasses in wealth Mecca and Medina, and is visited by pilgrims from all the steppes of Central Asia, with occasionally a devotee from China ... [137]

The Dalai Lama and the Potala palace began to provide an even sharper focus for these fantasies: they somehow seemed to embody the fantastic essence of Tibet. Tibet therefore regularly came to be referred to as the 'domains of the Grand Lama', who, as we have seen, was frequently compared with the Pope. Western travelers were repeatedly confronted with evidence of the Dalai Lama's prestige. [138] The Potala palace was a similar object of Western fascination, and Gutzlaff drew a vivid image of it:

The palace of the Dalai-Lama ... is 367 feet in height, and has above 10,000 apartments, being the largest cloister in the world. Its cupolas are gilded in the best style; the interior swarms with friars, is full of idols and pagodas, and may be looked upon as the greatest stronghold of paganism ... There is, perhaps, no spot on the wide globe where so much gold is accumulated for superstitious purposes. The offerings are enormous ... and the Dalai-Lama is said to be the most opulent individual in existence. [139]

No wonder the first task assigned to the Indian pundits was to investigate Lhasa. Nain Singh, trained in survey work, set out in 1864 with a compass fixed to the top of his walking staff and notes hidden inside his prayer wheel, he used rosary beads to measure the vast distances by counting his regulated paces. He fixed Lhasa's exact position and altitude and brought an eyewitness description of the city back to the British in India. [140]

The degree of attention beginning to be given to Tibet and Lhasa necessarily brought its all-important religion into the spotlight. Certainly Buddhism in general had long been recognized as a major world religion. As Hooker remarked, it was:

... a religion which perhaps numbers more votaries than any other on the face of the globe. Boodhism in some form is the predominating creed, from Siberia and Kamschatka to Ceylon, from the Caspian steppes to Japan, throughout China, Burmah, Asia and a part of the Malayan Archipelago. Its associations enter into every book of travels over these vast regions ... [141]

In addition to being of global significance, Buddhism was generally respected philosophically, but by 1875, the Tibetan variant was already being considered as a degeneration from 'the highly philosophical faith of the older books, with which ... Mr. Edwin Arnold has made the British reader familiar'. [142]

Western distaste with Tibetan Buddhism during this period revolved around four issues: the gross superstition of its practitioners, the irrationality of its practices, its Tantric philosophy and the autocratic power of its lamas. Wilson wrote, with some degree of exasperation:

In a certain formal sense the Tibetans are undoubtedly a praying people, and the most pre-eminently praying people on the face of the earth. They have praying stones, praying pyramids, praying flags ..., praying wheels, praying mills, and the universal prayer. 'Om mani pad me haun', is never out of their mouths. [143]

To the British upper-class travelers, deeply embedded within the Victorian industrial culture with its ethics of efficiency, material progress, practicality and thrift of time as well as money, such an excess of prayful zeal was almost a sin. Wilson commented on the proliferation of mani-walls, sometimes miles long, consisting of stones carved with religious prayers: 'These stones are usually prepared and deposited for some special reason ... [but] the prodigious number of them in so thinly peopled a country indicates an extraordinary waste of human energy.' [144]

Tantra was especially singled out for vitriolic abuse by British travelers at this time. Temple, for example, was scathing, calling it the 'evil teaching of the Tantrik philosophy' and 'the filthy esoteric doctrines of the Tantrik philosophers'. [145] The explicit, often violent, sexual and occult symbolism of Tantric Buddhism was unacceptable even by the moral standards of secular art in mid-Victorian Britain, let alone within a religious system. To these well-read travelers it was simply inconceivable that such doctrines bore but the barest relationship to the noble philosophy of self-denial that was believed to constitute original, pure Buddhism. Tantra was blamed for much of the supposed corruption in Tibetan Buddhism.

Whilst such ideas could be found in earlier British travel accounts, they had achieved a new coherence by the 1870s. Buddhism, like so much else about the Himalayas, had been definitively mapped, systematized, evaluated and located within a framework of global evolution. At the same time, Britain had consolidated its own identity -- global, imperial, progressive -- a new Roman Empire bringing peace, prosperity and civilization to the world. Previously isolated ruminations about Tibet suddenly became congealed into facts, and these in their turn reinforced British certainty and confidence.

During the middle years of the century a new element emerged in Britain's estimation of Tibetan Buddhism, which was eventually to have far-reaching consequences. It was a direct outcome of the feeling of certainty about Britain's imperial identity and shows clearly how fantasies about Tibet were a part of this. While travelers seemed to have mixed feelings about individual lamas -- fat and jolly, pious and compassionate, lazy and indolent -- opinions about the system of power they exercised over the populace were uniformly negative. Lamas as a group were invariably described as crafty and devious in their ability to manipulate the ordinary people of Tibet and the Himalayan region. It was even reasoned that the Chinese Emperor paid homage to the Dalai Lama and his religion only in order to exploit the Lama's capacity to manipulate and control the previously aggressive Mongolian tribes. [146] The ambivalence towards the Tibetan system shown by earlier travelers such as Bogle and Turner was beginning to harden into an unequivocal antipathy.

The high lamas of Lhasa were blamed for the policy of excluding Europeans from Tibet. It was reasoned that they were jealous of their privileges, afraid of losing their power. Tibet was described as 'priest-ridden'. Much was made of the terrible punishments meted out by the autocratic lamas of Lhasa. It even seemed as if the ordinary Tibetans would welcome Europeans, were it not for their deep fear of the lamas' social, spiritual and physical power. As Wilson commented after being denied entry:

no wonder that the people of that country are extremely afraid of disobeying the orders of the Government ... crucifying, ripping open the body, pressing and cutting out the eyes, are by no means the worst of these punishments. [147]

A fantasy was beginning to take shape in which Britain would eventually see itself as a possible liberator of Tibet from the unpopular, oppressive and cruel dictatorship of the high lamas in Lhasa. The country's theocratic bureaucracy gradually seemed to function as the shadow of Britain's autocratic bureaucracy in India. As the latter became increasingly viewed as an exemplary form of benign paternalism, so the system in Lhasa would be envisaged as exploitative and dictatorial. Paradoxically, the Dalai Lama would never be tainted by the supposedly evil system of which he was the undisputed ruler. Like the individual lamas, he was always imagined at a remove from the excesses of the system.

A strange division was made in the European -- and particularly the British -- fantasy between individuals and a shadowy, Kafkaesque bureaucracy populated by invisible, ruthless officials. Such a belief dovetailed nicely with prevailing mid-century reasoning about British superiority in Europe: this superiority was based not so much on racial characteristics as upon minimal government interference, free enterprise, true competition and trust, as well as freedom from tariffs, bureaucracies and the secret police that plagued continental Europe. [148] The lamaistic government of Tibet seemed to combine some of the worst features of the European police states with the excesses of oriental totalitarianism. In addition, its resemblance to Papism confirmed the worst fears of the British travelers.

As knowledge about Tibet increased, so did the paradoxes and contradictions, which could no longer be regarded as anomalies. Somehow they had to be integrated into the 'place' of Tibet, and it was always to the land itself that British fantasies returned in order to give focus and coherence to the paradoxes. As Hooker mused from the top of the Donkia Pass:

I took one more long took at the boundless prospect ... There is no loftier country on the globe than that embraced by this view, and no more howling wilderness ... Were it buried in everlasting snows, or burnt by a tropical sun, it might still be as utterly sterile; but with such sterility I had long been familiar. Here the colorings are those of the fiery desert or volcanic island, while the climate is that of the poles. [149]

Even as a wilderness Tibet seemed to combine the most extreme of paradoxes, and it was the British experience of this wilderness that was to be so important in the last part of the nineteenth century.

In Search of the Grand Design: Tibet and the Wilderness Experience

At about the same time that Hooker was grappling with the contradictions of the Tibetan landscape, the British public were attempting to come to terms with another wilderness, the Arctic. The loss of the Franklin expedition and the report that its ill-fated members had resorted to cannibalism administered a profound shock to British sensibilities. [150] The Arctic quest symbolized the struggle between human confidence, courage and intelligence and the awesome, immense power of nature. Many were simply unwilling to accept that the wilderness would win out and crush the finest, heroic aspirations Britain could produce. A few years later, the deaths of Britain's most experienced and respected climbers on the Matterhorn also provoked deep soul-searching about the wisdom and sanity of such activities.

During this period a crucial shift was taking place in the British relationship to natural wilderness. A new 'wilderness experience' was taking shape alongside the earlier appreciation of the natural sublime. This previous experiential paradigm relied upon a sense of danger, fear, immensity and awe to evoke uplifting emotions. Hooker, for example, recorded one night in the mountains:

In such scenes ... the mind wanders from the real to the ideal, the larger and brighter lamps of heaven lead us to imagine that we have risen from the surface of our globe and are floating through the regions of space, and that the ceaseless murmur of the waters is the Music of the Spheres. [151]

Even when such reveries threatened to overwhelm the traveler and the immensity seemed to reduce the individual to insignificance, a kind of spiritual confidence remained to give hope and cohesion. As the pioneering British photographer Samuel Bourne recounted in 1886:

What a puny thing I felt standing on that crest of snow! -- a mere atom, and scarcely that in so stupendous a world! To gaze upon a scene like this till a feeling of awe and insignificance steals over you, and then reflect that in the midst of this vast assemblage of sublime creation you are not uncared for nor forgotten, cannot fail to deepen the veneration ... for that Almighty, but Beneficent Power, who upreared the mountains ... [152]

But the calamities in the Arctic and in the Alps combined with a growing loss of confidence both in orthodox religion and in material progress. Whereas in mid-century the crushing of individual human significance by the awesome scale of nature was viewed as an unthinkable catastrophe, two decades later this very same experience was the basis of a new landscape sensibility. [153] In 1875, Wilson beautifully expressed this experiential shift:

At night, amid these vast mountains, surrounded by icy peaks, shining starlike and innumerable as the hosts of heaven, and looking up to the great orbs flaming in the unfathomable abysses of space, one realizes the immensity of physical existence in an overpowering and almost painful manner. What am I? What are all these Tibetans and Paharries compared with the long line of gigantic mountains? And what the mountains and the whole solar system as compared with any group of great fixed stars? [154]

On and on goes Wilson in this reverie, into vaster and vaster imaginings. It is sobering to compare his anguished vision with those of Bourne or Hooker only a few years earlier. We have clearly entered a different cosmology, one in which the old faith seems lost and bewildered by the new discoveries of science and by the new awareness of wilderness landscape. Wilson painfully reflected on the seeming futility of life: 'Our civilizations reach a certain point, and then die corruptly, leaving half-savage races, inspired by coarse illusions, to reoccupy the ground and react the same terrible drama.' [155] He mused on the 'enormous waste and the useless, endless cruelty of Nature'. This is the shadowside of a global identity, a kind of supreme overview that ends with Wilson gloomily intoning: 'All is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is without substance.' [156]

The experience of wilderness did not fill him with confidence, but rather emptied everything of significance. Yet precisely at this moment of desperation, Wilson found some comfort, some meaning: 'How wonderful the order and perfection of the inorganic universe as compared with the misery and confusion of the organic!' He then continued: 'There is some refuge ... for the spirit in the order and beauty of this unfeeling inorganic nature.' [157] He called this order and beauty 'the grand design', and in it we can detect a profound shift into a kind of ecological faith. The years of meticulously observing, collecting, classifying and systematizing every conceivable kind of data from around the globe, while destroying long-established beliefs, slowly produced in their stead a new order of faith, a new ground of being. [158]

The combination of empirical observation and controlled imagination, as championed earlier by Ruskin, gave a steadiness to the centre of this new wilderness experience. As Wilson averred, 'Logical thought becomes impossible when we rise into these 18,000 feet regions of speculations; and it may be safer to trust our instincts, such as they are.' [159] It was precisely in these isolated regions that these new wilderness experiences were taking shape -- in fact, were being welcomed, however terrifying they may have seemed at first. And it was in these wilderness regions that the axis mundi would arise, bringing renewed hope of a connection between humanity, nature and the Divine.

Tibet and the Alchemical Gold

As we have seen, the ideas of Ruskin and Darwin prepared the ground for the final transformation of Tibet into a sacred landscape for the British and other Europeans. By evolving a new way of perceiving and experiencing the natural world, they helped to redeem the bleak and awesome wildernesses. In addition, they drew Britain, Europe, the Himalayas and Tibet into an evolutionary kinship, a shared social, historical and natural context. New activities such as Himalayan mountaineering, photography and tourism brought to a climax nearly a century of travel and exploration in these regions. As the Himalayas became increasingly familiarized, Tibet, by virtue of its exclusion policy, grew in fascination. But although it was unexplored by the British, it was by no means unknown. Fantasies about Tibet had acquired density and coherence; Tibet's boundaries were well defined. By mid-century it had become a paradoxical land in the imagination of British travelers. With growing spiritual and social uncertainty in Britain and Europe, eyes were already turning towards the Himalayas and Tibet in some kind of expectation. As an ancestral source of the Aryan race, these lofty regions were quietly beginning to evoke deep longings.

In addition to these new themes, old ones were being reworked and imbued with fresh significance. We have already seen how the established fantasies about mountain air and Ancient Egypt were revitalized and brought into line within a new imaginative context, but one such theme in particular, which had constantly been present in Western fantasies about Tibet since earliest times, came to symbolize many of the new aspirations. The association of gold and Tibet had first been made by Pliny, Megasthenes, Herodotus and Ctesias. As we saw in chapter 2, ancient rumors told of gold-digging ants in the mountains to the north of India. Gold was consistently mentioned in Western accounts about Tibet, but it was never a major focus of attention. [160] By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, gold had become a small but important symbol in European fantasies. It is a perfect illustration of Freud's theory of condensation in the formation of dream symbolism. Whilst Lhasa and the Potala palace would eventually become the prime focus around which disparate fantasies would assemble themselves, before this occurred the same process could be seen at work, albeit on a smaller scale, around the core-image of gold. It was a precursor to the final, massive condensation and displacement of fantasies on to Lhasa. [161]

The key issue for mid-century British travelers was obviously the rigid policy of exclusion that kept them out of Tibet. 'Why is it', asked Wilson, 'that the Lassa authorities are so extremely anxious to keep all Europeans out of their country?' [162] He was not alone in asking this question, and many answers had been proposed. Wilson eliminated the reasons usually given: 'It has by no means such an amount of fertile land as to make it a desirable object of conquest ...' Moreover, the lamas had shown considerable tolerance towards Christians, so it could hardly be religious jealousy which kept the doors so firmly shut.  Quietly but confidently, Wilson asked: Is it possible that gold ... deposits in Tibet may have something to do with the extreme anxiety of the Chinese to keep us out of that country?' Psychologically, this is a classic example of reversal. Instead of  asking why British travelers went to such extremes in their attempts to enter Tibet, Wilson shifted the focus entirely on to the Tibetans and tried to puzzle out why they went to such lengths to keep the British out. As in all such cases, the accusation reveals more about the fantasies of the accuser than it does about the accused. Why, therefore, were the British so anxious about Tibetan gold, and what connection did it have with their fantasies about Tibet as a closed land?

The British were certainly curious. The Panchen Lama had sent gold dust and ingots to Warren Hastings in 1775, first stimulating British interest. Mid-century reports consistently mentioned the great quantities of gold rumored to be found in Tibet. Then in 1867 the experienced Pundit Nain Singh was clandestinely sent to investigate the largest of the gold fields. He produced a detailed account of the community and the mines at Thok Jalung in western Tibet. [163]

The reports of gold kept coming in. In 1870 Cooper, fording a river on his journey from China into eastern Tibet, was amazed to see an abundance of gold dust stirred up by the hoofs of his cattle: 'But gold, like all else of a yellow color in Tibet is sacred to the Grand Lama ... and I was forbidden even to take up a handful of the golden sand.' [164] Tibet never exploited its apparently rich gold and mineral resources. According to Cunningham, this was due to a belief that it disturbed the spirits of the land.

In these reports, a number of themes were beginning to overlap: the restriction on Westerners entering Tibet paralleled the restriction on the mining of gold within Tibet itself; the sacred color yellow related gold to the power and prestige of the lamas through the distinctive color of their robes and their ceremonial hats; the relationship between gold and the religion was mirrored by the connection between gold and the genius loci. Gold therefore drew land and religion into a direct conjunction. But it was the mid-century gold rushes in California and Australia that most profoundly affected the aristocratic sensibilities of Himalayan travelers. In 1853 Cunningham wrote: 'The crowds that have flocked to the recent "diggings" in California and Australia have fully justified the fears of the Gyalpo.' [165] But this was sheer speculation. Cunningham had absolutely no idea what the high lamas were concerned about. Once again, the traveler's own fears are being assigned to the Tibetans. Over twenty years later Wilson repeated the same fears, but in much stronger terms:

... the Mandarins have quite enough information to be well aware that if it were known in Europe and America that large gold-fields existed in Tibet, and that the auri sacra fames might there, for a time at least, be fully appeased, no supplications, or prayers either, would suffice to prevent a rush into it of occidental rowdies ... [166]

Here is another projection of the traveler's own anxieties. Quite clearly, the extensive gold deposits in Tibet were no secret. Nain Singh's report of 1869 had given the West a detailed eyewitness account of what it had already suspected. Wilson was really afraid of the desecration of Tibet's untrod purity by the masses, the 'occidental rowdies'. Such fears have already been encountered in the fantasies about polluted mountain air and in the nervous self-assurance that uneducated Westerners would quickly be bored with mountain scenery.

Gold therefore embodied the paradoxical position in which Wilson and other travelers found themselves as regards Tibet's rigid exclusion policy. Without such a policy, Tibet would quickly lose much of its mystery and inevitably yield to global tourism. It therefore began to symbolize an uncontaminated place, outside the social problems of industrialization and urbanization. For the disgruntled elite and disenchanted social reformers alike, Tibet held out hope of escape. The continued closure of this land was therefore essential and Wilson, whilst protesting against it, was unconsciously defending this policy: if the real 'secret' about the 'wealth' of Tibet ever leaked out, the place would surely be overrun and hence made worthless.

Gold is, of course, a major symbol for the goal of psychic transformation. For the alchemist it represented both the aspiration and the completion of the opus, the spiritual journey. As Jung writes, gold is a symbol of eternity, of paradise, and hence of the psychological centre. In relation to gold, he quotes an alchemical text: 'Visit the centre of the earth. There you will find the global fire.' [167] Wilson echoed these sentiments when he wrote:

It is no wonder, then, that a Chinese proverb speaks of Tibet as being at once the most elevated and the richest country in the world ... If the richest mineral treasures in the world lie there ... there is abundant reason why strangers should be kept out of it and why it should be kept sacred for the Yellow religion ... The great cluster of mountains called the Thibetan Kailas ... well deserves to be called the centre of the world. It is, at least the greatest centre of elevation. [168]

What better symbol than gold to embrace the aspirations and fears, the hopes and resentments, being slowly conjured up by Tibet in the imaginations of Western travelers? Even within this fantasy we can feel the inexorable pull of the Potala palace, drawing the imagination like a magnet: 'Its cupolas are gilded in the best style ... There is perhaps no spot on the wide globe where so much gold is accumulated for superstitious purposes.' [169] The Potala palace was not just a receptacle for pagan gold and Tibetan superstition; it would also soon become that place on the whole globe where the greatest accumulation of imaginative gold, the aspirations of Western travelers, could be found.

Gold speaks of salvation, paradise, boundless wealth, the centre of the world, the meeting point of earth and heaven. It also has other, darker associations: greed, jealousy, intrigue, lust and power. In the mid-nineteenth century the gold was still mainly in the ground, unworked, but even then the gold-capped spires of Lhasa were glinting on the horizon, and British aspirations would soon shift dramatically towards the complexio oppositorum, the towering mass of contradictions contained within the Potala palace.

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