BOOK
REVIEW Back to the future in
Tibet The High Road to China
by Kate
Teltscher
Reviewed by Fraser Newham
Kate Teltscher doesn't ask what
18th-century imperial envoy George Bogle might
have thought of the newly opened Golmud-to-Lhasa
railroad, a feat of Chinese engineering as
impressive and controversial as the Three Gorges
Dam. But truth is he might just have approved; the
26-year-old Scotsman did, after all, enter Tibet
on a trade mission, sent in 1774 by the British
governor of Bengal to talk turkey with the Panchen
Lama, open Tibet to British goods and, just maybe,
forge a new route into the still-elusive Chinese
market.
High Road to China is
Teltscher's historical reconstruction of this
effort, telling the story of two separate overland
journeys. First we
have
Bogle's passage through the plains and marshlands
of viceregal Bengal, via the tensions of a Bhutan
teetering on the brink of civil war, to the
Himalayan plateaus of Tibet and the Panchen Lama's
monastic court; and then, five years later, the
slow procession of the Panchen Lama to Qing Dynasty Beijing, to
pay his respects at Emperor Qianlong's birthday
party, where, aided by the presence of a British
Indian agent, he was to bring Bogle's request to
the imperial ear.
A senior lecturer in
English literature at London's Roehampton
University, Teltscher is an expert in early
British attitudes to India, and the Calcutta-based
(now Kolkata) George Bogle is undoubtedly the star
of her show. Her account of Bogle's journey and
time in Tibet relies heavily on the young man's
own expansive account, as he manages his bearers,
decks himself out in Tartar furs, and flirts - and
then some? - with a pair of tonsured Tibetan
princesses.
For Bogle the trip was the
highlight of a spectacular but short-lived career,
riding an imperial fast track to influence and
riches tailor-made for a young Briton with the
right sort of zest for life. Son of a financially
troubled family of Glasgow merchants, Bogle joined
the East India Company as a clerk in 1770, age 22.
In Bengal he soon caught the eye of Warren
Hastings, First Lord of Calcutta and the biggest
imperial hitter in the East; by 1774 he was
Hastings' private secretary and, as star protege,
the man the governor chose to open diplomatic
relations with Lobsang Palden Yeshe, fifth
incarnation of the Panchen Lama and a living god.
Bogle is aided by a strong supporting
cast. The Panchen Lama - ambitious, shrewd and
welcoming - affects the reader just as he did
Bogle; the men become genuine friends, with Bogle
even contributing to the Fifth Lama's great
literary legacy, a geography of India, Buddhism's
historical home. As British governor of Bengal,
Hastings displays all the ruddy confidence that
will lead to his attempted impeachment back in
London 14 years later. And finally there is
Emperor Qianlong - remote, deeply spiritual and,
projecting magnificence by war and art from his
Forbidden City in distant Beijing, the most
powerful man in the world.
These days the
West may have largely forgotten George Bogle. But
for Tibetans and Han Chinese these two meetings
that Teltscher re-creates have a very real
political significance. Qianlong's audiences with
the Panchen Lama, first at the imperial resort
town of Chengde and then in Beijing, have been
regularly revisited; in particular, opposing sides
have leaped on conflicting accounts of the
protocol of the first meeting, each presented as
evidence of the "true nature" of Beijing's
relationship with Tibet. Everyone agrees that
Qianlong was devoted to Tibetan Buddhism; but did
the Lama kowtow before him, as the Chinese
historical record suggests - or, as the Tibetan
record would have it, did Qianlong behave in the
manner of a disciple welcoming his religious
master?
Certainly Teltscher is sensitive
to the broader significance of the events she
describes. She places Bogle's trade venture in the
wider context of late-18th-century British efforts
to expand Chinese trade (at the time restricted to
a toehold in Guangzhou), looking forward to Lord
Macartney's visit to Beijing in 1793, doomed to
failure despite then being the most expensive
British diplomatic mission of all time. In an
epilogue she relates how Bogle's own mission has
now become a diplomatic football - in the first
years of the 21st century, the Chinese Foreign
Ministry even posted an account of Bogle's
undertaking on its website to demonstrate that,
whatever the government of Prime Minister Tony
Blair is saying, Britain had traditionally
recognized Chinese sovereignty in Tibet.
At times, though, the author pulls her
punches. Her final chapter details the Panchen
Lama's death by smallpox, four months after his
arrival at court; with a succession crisis
threatening to engulf the Tibetan world, as
Teltscher recounts, Qianlong offered his Tibetan
subjects the gift of a golden urn, intended to be
the centerpiece of a ceremonial lottery then and
in future times of crisis. Yet even though the urn
provides this final chapter with its name, we hear
nothing of the part this gift would play in
Tibet's turbulent final years of 20th century.
In 1995 the search for the 11th Panchen
Lama culminated with Beijing and the Dalai Lama's
government in exile proclaiming rival child
candidates, and Chinese officials seized on
Qianlong's urn as a symbol of legitimacy and
sovereignty, physically placing it at the very
heart of their stage-managed ceremony. Meanwhile,
as the authorities wheeled out the antiques, the
Dalai Lama's candidate (who also lived in mainland
China) was placed in detention, publicized at the
time by pressure groups as the youngest political
prisoner in the world. His whereabouts remain
unclear today.
A more political approach
might also have taken the opportunity to compare
British imperial intentions with those of the Han
Chinese settlers for whom Tibet has emerged as a
land of opportunity, a place where salaries are
three times those in the heaving cities of
Sichuan, Anhui and beyond. Western commentators
routinely bemoan the spread of characterless
Chinese architecture in Tibetan cities - yet if
Bogle had succeeded, Lhasa today might look more
like an Indian hill-fort town than Lanzhou,
perhaps complete with old statues of Queen
Victoria in the spots where Chinese tourists now
pose for holiday photos. A fair-minded, humane
young man like Bogle might well have decried
human-rights abuses and the economic disadvantages
with which many Tibetans currently contend, but he
might not have denied an honest trader the right
to set up his shop.
For her part,
Teltscher is more interested in telling a good
story, and invoking time and place; and in Bogle
she has certainly found a likable and interesting
guide. In the Scotsman's hands the monastery town
of Tashilhunpo becomes a magical place among the
clouds, as he idles for six months with the
Panchen Lama and his circle while awaiting the
melting of the snows. His letters home bring out
both the intense spirituality of the Tibetan way
of life, and also the hearty welcome he receives
from his good-humored hosts. "When I look upon the
time I have spent among the hills," he writes, "it
appears like a fairy dream."
Only six
years after his return, Bogle's life would be cut
short, in tragic farce - slipping as he left his
rooftop bath at his Calcutta home. But he was the
first to write in English of Tibet in such glowing
terms; and ultimately his view stuck, contributing
to contemporary ideas of Tibet as the Himalayan
paradise. As a literature specialist, Teltscher is
at her best showing how Bogle's writing reflected
the intellectual currents of his age - and how it
influenced later generations, from the character
of Rudyard Kipling's Teshoo Lama to Lost
Horizon, James Hilton's best-selling novel of
the 1930s in which Bogle's view of Tibet
resurfaces as the hidden kingdom of Shangri-la.
This might just be Bogle's most enduring
legacy - after all, the Tibetan cause retains a
powerful sense of romance, and popular opinion in
the West generally holds to the narrative of a
paradise under threat, as witnessed once again in
reporting of the completion of the Golmud-Lhasa
railway last month. Teltscher may be most
interested in her 18th-century protagonists and
their own mental worlds, but she raises issues
that powerfully inform our understanding of one of
the prickly issues of our time.
The
High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama
and the First British Expedition to Tibet by
Kate Teltscher, Bloomsbury, London, August 21,
2006. ISBN 9780747584841. Price US$38, 316 pages.
Fraser Newham is a freelancer
and China specialist. His website is
www.frasernewhamfreelancing.com.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
Dynasty Beijing, to
pay his respects at Emperor Qianlong's birthday
party, where, aided by the presence of a British
Indian agent, he was to bring Bogle's request to
the imperial ear. 
