Himalaya: The exploration and conquest of the greatest mountains on earth

At some 1500 miles long and 250 miles at its widest the Himalaya range is home to the fourteen greatest mountain peaks on the planet. Each mountain towers over 8,000 metres. Sacred to both the Hindu and Buddhist religions, these peaks have also inspired, fascinated and terrified western explorers and adventurers for some 300 years.

Himalaya examines the geographical origins of the region, its earliest peoples and the onward western discovery and exploration commencing with the Jesuits, progressing through myriad nineteenth-century gentleman surveyors, exhilarated visionaries, the pioneering 'mountaineers' of the 1920s and culminating in Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's iconic triumphal ascent of Everest in 1953.

Celebrated as it is, the Everest climb is just one point in our long relationship with this massive mountain system, the 'Abode of Snow'. Himalaya recounts the whole of that rich history, including the equally heroic pioneering ascents of each of the 'eight-thousander' peaks including K2 (1954), Nanga Parbat (1953), Annapurna (1950), Kangchenjunga (1955), and Lhotse (1956) and carries the story of the mountains into our own era when new routes and new techniques have heralded achievements that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago.

This volume brings together an esteemed selection of award-winning writers, among them some of the world's most respected climbers, to produce a compelling, accesible and comprehensive survey of the Himalaya in all its aspects. Twelve overview maps have been specially commissioned to present the routes taken on the principal mountaineering expeditions. Furthermore, this rich history includes a superb selection of rare mountain imagery, ranging from the masterpieces of Vittorio Sella to the striking Himalayan work from some of the world's leading adventure photographers.

PHILIP PARKER (General editor) is a historian specializing in the classical and medieval worlds. He was general editor of The Great Trade Routes: A History of Cargoes and Commerce Over Land and Sea (2012) and a contributor to Mountaineers: Great Tales of Bravery and Conquest (2011). Among his other works are The Empire Stops Here: A Journey around the Frontiers of the Roman Empire (2009) the Eyewitness Companion Guide to World History (2010) and The Northmen's Fury: A History of the Viking World (2014).

FRONT COVER: An American climber makes his way carefully along the side of a ridge during the celebrated 1963 American expedition to Everest in a photograph by Barry C. Bishop (National Geographic/Getty Images)

HIMALAYA

Himalaya Contributors

PHILIP PARKER (General Editor) is a historian specializing in the classical and medieval worlds. He was General Editor of The Great Trade Routes: A History of Cargoes and Commerce Over Land and Sea (2012) and a contributor to Mountaineers: Great Tales of Bravery and Conquest (2011). Among his other works are The Empire Stops Here: A Journey around the Frontiers of the Roman Empire (2009) the Eyewitness Companion Guide to World History (2010) and The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World (2014).

PETER HILLARY is the son of Sir Edmund Hillary and he has been on over 40 mountaineering expeditions around the world, including five on Mount Everest. He works with his father’s Himalayan foundations to provide health, environment and education services for the people in the Himalaya – all programmes are at their request and with their cooperation. Peter is a writer, speaker and adventure travel operator.

MADELEINE LEWIS (Chapter 1) is a creative multime-dia specialist focusing on the environment and sus-tainability. She has worked as a BBC online and ra-dio producer, and a freelance writer, including co-writing, with Richard Sale, The Times Explorers: A History in Photographs (2004).

GEORGIOS T. HALKIAS (Chapter 2) holds a DPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from the University of Oxford. He has extensive fieldwork experience in India and Nepal. His specialized interests are Hi-malayan history and culture, Tibetan Buddhism and the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. He has written several works on the cultural and religious history of the northwestern Himalaya. He has been a Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Buddhist Studies since 2009.

STEWART WEAVER (Chapters 3 and 4) is a Professor of History at the University of Rochester in Roch-ester, New York. He is the co-author (with Maurice Isserman) of Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (2008).

AMANDA FABER (Chapter 5) is an independent film, television and theatre producer and director. In-troduced to climbing by Commander Jim Simpson and Mike and Sally Westmacott, she worked as a trek leader for a number of years and has climbed, mountaineered and trekked in Europe, the USA, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, the Himalayas and Central Asia. She is a fellow of the RGS (with IBG), an aspirant member of the Alpine Club and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During a mountaineering career spanning more than 40 years, STEPHEN VENABLES (Chapter 6) has made many first ascents in South America, Antarcti-ca and the Himalaya, where he became the first Brit-on to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen. Of his 11 books on mountain travel and mountain-eering history, two have won prizes at the Banff In-ternational Mountain Festival and his first, Painted Mountains (1986), won the Boardman Tasker Prize. He also wrote the screenplay for the IMAX film ‘The Alps’ and has taken part in several radio and televi-sion documentaries. He has lectured throughout the world and leads regular sailing-climbing expedi-tions to the mountains of the Southern Ocean.

MICK CONEFREY (Chapter 7) is a documentary maker and writer specializing in exploration and moun-taineering. He is the director of ‘The Race For Ever-est’, made for the BBC to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first ascent, and author of the widely acclaimed book, Everest 1953 (2012).

PETER GILLMAN (Chapter 8) is one of Britain’s leading mountaineering writers. His biography of George Mallory, The Wildest Dream, co-authored with Leni Gillman, won the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing in 2000. He has won a record six awards from the British Outdoor Writers & Pho-tographers Guild.

DOUG SCOTT (Chapter 9) has made 45 expeditions to the high mountains of Asia and has summited 40 peaks, half of which were first ascents, and all were climbed by new routes or for the first time in Alpine style. Doug and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to summit Everest in 1975 when they made the first ascent of the Southwest Face. He is a past president of the Alpine Club. He was made a CBE in 1994, and in 1999 he received the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron’s Medal for his con-tribution to mountaineering and the knowledge of mountain regions. Following on from Walter Bonat-ti and Reinhold Messner, Doug was awarded the Piolet d’Or in 2011.

Contents

Himalaya Contributors

Foreword by PETER HILLARY

Introduction by PHILIP PARKER

Chapter 1

Anatomy of the Himalaya: The formation and topography of the range

MADELEINE LEWIS

Chapter 2

Early Kingdoms of the Himalaya: The political and cultural history of the region to 1700

GEORGIOS T. HALKIAS

Chapter 3

Early Travellers and Adventurers: The Himalaya to 1815

STEWART WEAVER

Chapter 4

Surveying the Himalaya 1815–1892

STEWART WEAVER

Chapter 5

The Opening Phase 1891–1918

AMANDA FABER

Chapter 6

Himalaya Between the Wars 1919–1939

STEPHEN VENABLES

Chapter 7

The Conquest of Everest 1940–1953

MICK CONEFREY

Chapter 8

The ‘Golden Age’ 1953–1960

PETER GILLMAN

Chapter 9

Opening New Frontiers: 1961–the Present

DOUG SCOTT

Further Reading

Picture Acknowledgements

Foreword

PETER HILLARY

The Himalaya is the greatest mountain range on Earth and its story is equally grand in all the realms: geology, biology, meteorology, human culture, migration and high adventure.

The story starts with the incredible formation of the mountains caused by the plate tectonic collision around forty-five million years ago and the extraordinary consequences of when continents collide. A youthful range of mountains rose that changed the weather and the nature of the monsoons, concentrating the force of the rains to the south of the Himalaya and sentencing the high plateaux of Central Asia to aridity in the rain-shadow of this great divide.

A rich abundance of forests, shrubs and animals thrived upon the flanks of the mountains and they dominated the convoluted landscape of the growing Himalaya for tens of millions of years. This was an astounding richness of vegetation and of wildlife that filled a narrow band from south to north of just 100 kilometres (60 miles), ranging from tropical to Alpine: from elephants and the mighty gaur on the plains, to langur monkeys in the jungle-clad foothills, and the secretive snow leopard, the lammergeyer and the Alpine chough along the crest of the Himalaya. The Himalaya was all theirs until out of Africa came a bipedal being that spread along the coasts of southern Asia and much later colonized the great plains of the Indus Valley and the Ganges.

For millennia stacked upon millennia the land that we would eventually call India received waves of immigrants. Different ethnic groups and traditions were absorbed, creating India’s rich multicultural mix of peoples. And as people tilled their fields down by the life-giving river personified as the mother goddess Ganga, they would look to the north and see the glistening white of the ‘Abode of Snow’, the Himalaya. This was where the rivers originated, where the monsoon clouds rose in billowing columns and thunder boomed; for them it was the abode of the gods. As Indo-Aryan people colonized the foothills from the south and Tibeto-Mongolian people colonized the Himalayas from the north, a tapestry of ethnicities and traditions spread across the valleys of the greatest mountain range on Earth.

People have always been fascinated by the Himalaya. Hindu ascetics travelled up the rivers into the high Himal in search of inspiration and enlightenment. Temples were built deep among the mountains and pilgrims would come and go. Buddhist and Muslim theologies followed a thousand years apart, and all the while the mountain farmers cut their tracks, dug terraced fields and built stone houses in improbable locations upon the flanks of the rising Himalaya. For them this was home; the landscape spoke to them, and they in turn felt a part of the Himalaya.

More recently great empires came to the edge of the mighty Himalaya. Ashoka brought Buddhism to his Indian empire in 500bc, the Mughals brought Islam and architecture, and the British brought railways and commerce. The Himalaya was a political boundary between these empires and the ones in the north: the Tibetan empire, the marauding Mongols and the procession of dynasties in China. And then as the ‘Great Game’, as Kipling called it, developed between Russian and British ambitions in Central Asia, there was a small group of eccentric British bluebloods who took up a pursuit called ‘mountaineering’.

This new pastime evolved in the European Alps, but as the Great Game expressed itself across the wide Himalaya as a thirst for geographical knowledge and influence among its peoples, the opportunity to climb where no one had gone before began in earnest throughout the Himalaya.

The great French mountaineer Lionel Terray described Alpine climbers as ‘Conquistadors of the useless’ but he knew better than most that mountain climbing was a quest for the human spirit. Anyone who has reached the summit of a mountain knows that long after the blisters and the wretched fears of vulnerability have subsided the pleasure of having gone ‘beyond’ is with you always.

When my father and Tenzing on the British Mount Everest expedition were making their attempt on the summit of Mount Everest on the morning of 29 May 1953 they had their doubts about the conditions. Just below the South Summit the snow was dangerous and prone to avalanche, and my father reflected that if he were back in the Southern Alps he would most likely have chosen prudence and turned around, but something snapped inside of him and he told himself, ‘Ed, my boy. This is Everest!’ As a child he told me that sometimes you have to go ‘the extra distance’ to achieve your goal – and up there on Everest was one of those times.

The truth is we are all liberated by the successes of others because their successes show that it can be done. And that is what the first ascent of Mount Everest or any of the Himalayan giants came to symbolize. For me that makes any great endeavour to be one about stretching human potential – and that has been the history of the Himalaya, and will no doubt continue to be into the future. Today the great mountaineers push this envelope every day and the Himalaya is their ultimate playground – the abode of mountaineers – but the world’s greatest mountain range has for far longer been a place for human self-realization and philosophical development.

Nowhere is the search for wisdom or the spirit of exploration better manifested than in the Himalaya.

Peter Hillary

www.peterhillary.com

www.edhillary.com

www.himalayantrust.org

Father and son Peter Hillary with his father Edmund in 1990, shortly after he made his own first ascent of Mount Everest

Introduction

It is now more than 60 years since the first summiting of Everest, the world’s highest mountain. Undeniably one of the defining achievements in mountaineering history, it also signalled a key moment in mankind’s interaction with Earth’s greatest mountain range. Celebrated though it is, that climb by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay is just one point in our long relationship with the Himalaya, the ‘Abode of Snow’.

Himalaya recounts the whole of that rich history, from the first ancient accounts in the Hindu scriptures, through the establishment of complex cultures and kingdoms in the region, to the beginnings of European exploration in the seventeenth century, the great surveys of the region (principally under British direction from 1800) and then the birth of Himalayan mountaineering in the late nineteenth century. The book relates the astonishing decades from the 1920s when the peaks were first climbed in earnest, and then conquered one by one, and carries the story of the mountains into our own era, when new routes and new techniques have heralded achievements that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago.

The Himalaya, whose crowning peak Everest is, contains all of the world’s 14 summits in excess of 8,000 metres (26,246 feet), strung across Central Asia like a lofty but lopsided smile. The mountains were already old when our own species was young, their vast 2,400-kilometre-long (1,500-mile) bulk formed some forty-five million years ago by the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. The discovery of the Himalaya was a long process, as full of misunderstandings as of sudden revelations. The first mention of the range in European sources, in the writings of Herodotus, the fifth-century bc Greek historian, refers to the ‘gold-digging ants’ to be found there, a species even more elusive than the yeti, a huge (and shy) hairy anthropoid whose traces various twentieth-century expeditions to the Himalaya are said to have come across.

From the earliest times, the Himalaya have sat upon a series of fault lines, as much psychological as the physical one that gave birth to the range; they have held a fascination for all who encountered them, an allure both fascinating and terrifying, that at various stages in human history has manifested itself either as religious awe or an exhilarating determination to tread on their uppermost reaches. And they sit on a political fault line, too, where the historical leviathans of China and the Indian subcontinent rubbed against the complex and shifting cultures of Central Asia and the mountains themselves – a process that the solidification of frontiers in the twentieth century has not halted entirely.

The first Europeans to venture into the Himalaya, Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, did so for practical reasons, first to garner converts and then, when the crop seemed unlikely to be a rich one, to act as diplomatic conduits to the ruler of the region and, especially, to reach the most mesmerizing destination of all: the court of the Dalai Lamas of Tibet. The desire of the nineteenth-century British imperial administrators of the Great Trigonometrical Survey to measure, define and capture the mountains, to set them down in clearly defined contour lines on a map, makes them seem like heirs to this pragmatism, but theirs was soon succeeded by a spirit that combined both a sense of adventure and one of pilgrimage, as the first mountaineers came to test themselves against the peaks.

Eastern Himalaya

A NASA Terra satellite false-colour composite image of the easternmost Himalaya creates a dramatic perspective on the range. The mountainous slopes and snow-capped ridges are highlighted in red and white respectively, while the rivers, which snake through the valleys between the peaks, are picked out in blue.

Siniolchu A view of the crest of Siniolchu taken by the great Italian mountain photographer Vittorio Sella during Douglas Freshfield’s 1899 expedition to the area around Kangchenjunga. In viewing the 6,888-metre (22,598-foot) peak across the Zemu Glacier, Freshfield remarked that the beauty of its ice and snow-encrusted precipices stood out among the surrounding peaks in the manner of ‘Giotto’s Tower to the rest of the Italian Domes and Campanili’.

The century and a quarter that separates Martin Conway’s pioneering 1892 expedition to the Karakoram from today’s organized tourist expeditions to the summit of Everest have seen so many achievements, so many expeditions, conquered peaks, acts of bravery and, sadly, deaths on the unforgiving slopes, that it is impossible to pick out any without doing an injustice to the rest. Suffice it to say that the topmost reaches of the Himalaya, the 8,000-metre (26,246-foot) peaks, resisted all attempts to conquer them until Maurice Herzog and his climbing partner Louis Lachenal summited Annapurna on 2 June 1950. From then on the pace quickened, until in 1986 Reinhold Messner, from Italy’s South Tyrol, became the first person to have reached all the 8,000-metre summits (including the first ascent of Everest without oxygen), beginning a select club that to date has only around 30 members.

In this book the achievements of Conway, Herzog and Messner are catalogued, as well as those of scores of others, from Fanny Bullock Workman, a precocious pioneer of women’s mountaineering in the early twentieth century, to George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, who disappeared high on Everest in 1921, the mystery of whether they reached the summit never yet fully resolved, and the Tibetan-Chinese team that summited Shisha Pangma, the last of the 8,000-metre peaks to be scaled, in 1964.

Yet even when the principal peaks had been climbed, the story of the exploration of the Himalaya was not done, and the final chapter of this book recounts the further pushing of the boundaries of Himalayan mountaineering, with the pioneering of new routes, the conquest of summits solo or without the use of oxygen, the introduction of Alpine climbing techniques and the achievement of ever more technically difficult summits. New challenges have emerged, too, as the advent of large-scale tourism in the region has raised problems both environmental, as the melting of glaciers due to global climate change modifies the landscape and an increased use of the mountains brings with it a higher level of pollution, and ethical, as the growing number of tour companies wishing to reach the summit of mountains such as Everest brings dangers of its own (while at the same time, as with tourism everywhere, local communities in the Himalaya may not derive the benefit they should from this influx).

Managing these difficulties will make the coming years among the most testing in mankind’s long history in the Himalaya. New entries, too, will be added to the chronicles of the explorers, pioneers, pilgrims and adventurers who have travelled its valleys and scaled its peaks. And, as time goes on, even the long-established contours of the mountains will change as the Indian tectonic plate is rising steadily, a process that outweighs the countervailing trend of erosion.

The matter of heights in the Himalaya is, indeed, a vexed one, with minor variations appearing in the literature over the years as more accurate surveys become available. To take just one example, the height of Everest itself, long agreed to be 8,848 metres (29,029 feet), may soon be subject to a slight raise, as a National Geographic Survey in 2012 measured it 2 metres (6.5 feet) higher (though this change was not immediately accepted by the government of Nepal).

I would like to thank all the contributors to this volume, who worked to an unforgiving schedule and responded to all the demands of the General Editor with surprising good humour. Together they have produced a compelling, accessible and comprehensive survey of the Himalaya in all its aspects. Thanks are also due to the editorial and design team who have turned that raw material into a polished and lavishly illustrated book: John Lee, the publisher at Conway, whose vision and patience have been fundamental to the project; Christopher Westhorp, for whose exceptionally skilful editing I am sure all the contributors are grateful; Jen Veall for her resourceful picture research, which has unearthed a trove of fantastic imagery; Martin Brown for his wonderfully crafted cartography, which illustrates the routes taken on the principal mountaineering expeditions; and Friederike Huber and Georgina Hewitt for the design that so beautifully creates the panorama within which the story of the Himalaya can be told.

Philip Parker

London, May 2013

1

Anatomy of the Himalaya: The formation and topography of the range

MADELEINE LEWIS

For thousands of years the Himalaya has captured the imaginations of explorers, writers, and those who have lived among this spectacular, remote and often dangerous landscape. This is a land that demands superlatives – it is the highest mountain range in the world, one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, home to all of the world’s independent mountains exceeding 8,000 metres (26,246 feet) above sea level, the ‘eight thousanders’, and some of the greatest rivers systems on Earth.

The Himalaya is 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) long and spans Bhutan, India, Nepal, China and Pakistan, bounded at either end by the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers. It reaches from Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat in the west to Tibet’s Namcha Barwa in the east, and – as in this book – it is normally taken to include the Karakoram range in the northeast. Himalaya, properly used always in the singular, means ‘Abode of Snow’ in Sanskrit. By sheer virtue of its size, the range acts as a barrier between the warm, wet monsoon weather to the south and the dry, cold winds from the north. And just as it is instrumental in the climate of the regions around it, it is instrumental to their water supplies too.

The Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers provide not only transport and irrigation for the millions of people living in their river basins in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, but also carry the sediments that make this region so fertile for agriculture. Largely originating north of the mountains in Tibet, these waterways cross through the Himalaya and