Spies in monks’ clothing
The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was a key instrument of Britain’s 19th-century imperial expansion. The enterprise was launched in 1802 by Colonel William Lambton, an infantry officer, whose plan was to undertake a scientific mapping of India from a spot near Madras to north of the Himalaya.
Lambton’s ingenious scheme consisted of laying out a network of triangles, each drawn from three points of reference and then stacked alongside one another to form a grid. The chain of triangles could then be protracted in any direction across a landmass for the purpose of measuring distance. This took the form of a Great Arc of the Meridian, tracing a line some 2,600 kilometres up the spine of the Indian subcontinent.
With the Empire in rapid expansion, it was crucial to know what lay beyond its frontiers, but this knowledge came to a halt at the foot of the great Himalayan barrier. By the mid-19th century, the survey still had but the vaguest notion of the location of strategic cities such as Lhasa. Similarly, the question of whether the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers were joined at some remote spot was a mystery. And Gilgit, Chilas and Chitral, key outposts of India’s North-West Frontier, remained unexplored. Yarkand was 160 kilometres out of position on the survey’s map and, in fact, the entire landmass of Central Asia was a vast geographical enigma.
Enter Captain Thomas George Montgomerie of the Royal Engineers, who arrived in Bombay in 1850 and joined the survey a year later. At the time, the survey possessed a fairly reliable set of data on some 100,000 square kilometres of trans-Himalayan territory, but this still left a blank on the map roughly the size of India itself. Montgomerie estimated that some 3.6 million square kilometres of unexplored land north of the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges could be penetrated from India. What sent the government’s antennae flailing was the fact that, conversely, this same immense territory was a potential gateway to British India for a foreign invader.
Into Tibet
The place that drew the earliest European explorers to the region was Tibet. The Portuguese Jesuit Bento de Goes was one of the first and most courageous of these travellers. Goes had picked up some totally unsubstantiated stories about sightings of Nestorian Christian communities in China and was so fascinated by these tales that during the early 17th century, he set out on a two-year trek to become the first European since Marco Polo to set foot in that kingdom.
Goes failed to save a single soul, and he didn’t lay eyes on a single Nestorian, but he did manage to irritate enough people in China to get himself murdered. This was to set a precedent for European explorers, and it was also the raison d’être for putting together the small band of explorers known as the pundits.
Montgomerie, who served as the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s Colonel Creighton in Kim, was posted to Dehra Dun, where he took charge of the Himalayan Survey in Kumaon and Garhwal. It wasn’t possible to dispatch European officers – as Montgomerie was painfully aware, following the murder of several explorers – but there was no reason why Indians shouldn’t be sent across the Himalaya to conduct secret surveys and reconnaissance missions.
Montgomerie’s first recruit was Nain Singh, a school teacher in Kumaon, and a Bhotia of Tibetan origin. He was in deep financial distress because of what the survey rather diplomatically called his father’s ‘social misdeeds’. He was offered the opportunity to undertake a mission for the survey in unexplored parts of Tibet.
Put through the paces
At Dehra Dun, Singh was put through a training course that lasted nearly two years. Montgomerie wanted his fledgling pundits to be competent in reconnaissance work, which entailed using a sextant to determine latitude and a compass to take bearings, the basics of astronomy for night navigation, the use of a thermometer for measuring elevation (by reading the temperature of boiling water) and how to keep accurate records of the terrain and distance covered.
Recording the ground covered each day was indispensable for map making. This was addressed by one of the most ingenious contrivances in Montgomerie’s entire bag of tricks. Tibetans count off their prayer beads while chanting a holy mantra, usually the six-syllable om mani peme hung. Their rosary, or mala, has 108 beads. But 108 is an awkward number for mental calculation, so Montgomerie had eight beads removed to leave a mathematically convenient 100, with little risk of the missing beads being noticed. The pundits were taught to slip one bead every 100 paces, so that each circuit signals 10,000 paces. The mala has one larger bead, and this was slipped to record a completed circuit.
It was all very well counting paces, but surveying requires that distances are measured to a high degree of accuracy, so the pundits spent months learning to take a pace of the same distance, regardless of the terrain. Montgomerie had their feet tied with a cord measuring what he considered to be the ideal stride for each pundit. In the case of Singh, this worked out to 33 inches (84 centimetres), so that 1,920 paces would equal one mile.
The pundit would also need somewhere to stash his notes with the record of his daily route. The ideal place was within the copper cylinder of the Tibetan prayer wheel, which holds a scroll with the sacred six-syllable mantra. Later, the Dehra Dun spy workshop began assembling prayer wheels that could also hold the pundits’ compass. Larger pieces of equipment such as sextants were concealed in the false bottoms of their travelling cases.
Into the unkown
Montgomerie sent his pundits out disguised as Tibetan holy men on pilgrimage. The flowing red robe was an ideal garment for concealing small instruments and bits of paper. By 1865, Singh had passed out a fully qualified operative of the survey, and was now ready to embark on his first trans-Himalayan mission. The plan was to send him through Nepal to Lhasa. Montgomerie instructed him to carry out a route survey from Lake Manasarovar eastward through Gartok to the Tibetan capital.
For Singh, this turned out to be a journey of 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres), or about 2.5 million paces. By the time he returned to India, he had surveyed some 1,200 miles, and his findings brought about a complete revision of the map of Tibet. Sir Clements Markham, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, praised Singh as ‘the greatest scientific traveller that India has produced’. He was awarded the RGS Patron’s Medal and was hailed as a hero in scientific circles in Britain and India. He said this was as all fine and well, but he would have preferred a gold watch to replace the one stolen by a Pathan merchant.
The two famous pundits of the post-Singh era were Sarat Chandra Das and Kintup, but there was an interesting pundit sandwiched between these great figures: Lama Ugyen Gyatso.
In 1883, Gyatso left Darjeeling with his wife and brother-in-law in tow and set off for Tibet at the height of the monsoon. The journey to Lhasa took about four months, and when they reached the city, his troubles grew worse by the day. The little party was forced to shift from one set of lodgings to the next in order to keep a step ahead of the suspicious Chinese authorities. Nevertheless, Gyatso set about surveying the city, which he did while sitting in a central square and using as his cover, quite literally, an umbrella, under which he concealed his instruments.
He was able to calculate that it took exactly 9,500 paces to do a full circuit of Lhasa. He also found it necessary to discourage his wife from forming too close a friendship with the Chinese official resident, lest questions be asked about why her husband spent his days wandering about Lhasa with a suitcase and an umbrella.
On his return to Darjeeling, the survey lavished great praise on Gyatso, who filled a vital gap in frontier geography and mapped, and also surveyed a number of previously uncharted rivers and lakes.
Photographic memory
The last of the great pundits was Kintup, who became a pundit entirely by default. Kintup was an illiterate tailor’s assistant from Darjeeling who possessed extensive knowledge of trans-Himalayan territory and a photographic memory. At the time, there was in Darjeeling a Mongolian lama whose name doesn’t appear in the survey records, but who was obviously a trusted government agent. This was the man chosen to lead the next expedition, to the lower reaches of the Tsangpo.
Kintup was offered the opportunity to guide the lama on his voyage, which was organised by survey officer Captain John Harman. Kintup crossed the frontier into Tibet in 1880; his troubles began almost immediately. The lama, it emerged, was a scoundrel, a womaniser, an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler.
From Lhasa, they stopped in the village of Thun Tsung, where the lama decided he had fallen in love with the headman’s wife. So there they remained for four months, until their host discovered the shenanigans taking place behind his back and threatened the lama with dreadful reprisals. The lama managed to buy his way out, and they plodded on to stay with the district official at a place called Gyala.
One day, the lama said he had been called away on urgent business, and would be gone two or three days. After three months, there was still no sign of him, and Kintup discovered that before he left, the lama had sold him into slavery.
He eventually fled the village and made his way north to a small monastery in the Pemako district, pretty much the last settlement before the Tsangpo disappears into the great unexplored gorge. He was given sanctuary at the local monastery, where he spent four and a half months as the abbot’s servant.
Foolproof plan
But now it was time to get on with his mission. He knew what had to be done. He was present when Captain Harman explained the procedure to the lama. The task was to cut 500 logs, each a foot long, with a marking that would make them recognisable.
It was a brilliant plan, simple and foolproof. Once the pundit had travelled as far as he could along the banks of the Tsangpo, he would cut the logs and send a letter through to Captain Harman in Darjeeling, saying that the logs were shortly to be released, 50 every day, into the river. If they were sighted passing a pre-determined spot on the Brahmaputra, the mystery of the Tsangpo was solved, for the two rivers obviously met somewhere in the deep gorge.
Kintup left the monastery and trekked about 15 miles through the jungle to Giling, where he spent his time hacking away until he had fashioned 500 logs of the correct size. He then carried the logs, tied in bundles on his back, and hid them in a deep cave.
Now, he had to get a message through to Darjeeling. He marched westward, 250 miles back to Lhasa, where he came across a Sikkimese district official, who wrote a letter to the survey on Kintup’s behalf. This official’s wife was about to set off for Darjeeling, so she was given the letter to deliver to Captain Harman.
Kintup went trotting back 250 miles to the cave where he had stashed his logs. He spent ten days by the riverbank and in batches of 50, the logs were released into the water.
Once the job was done, in November, 1884, after four years and three months away, this humble tailor’s assistant made what he envisaged to be a triumphal entry into Darjeeling, only to be dealt the most bitter disappointment of all. The Sikkimese official’s wife had reached Darjeeling much later than planned. In the interval, Captain Harman had died, the letter went undelivered, and the logs drifted unseen into the Bay of Bengal.
Kintup went back to working as a tailor’s assistant and spent years eking out a meagre living in a Darjeeling shop. Colonel Frederick Bailey tracked him down in 1913 and prevailed on the government to reward him for his years of service. This was done the following year, just before Kintup, age 65, died.
Riddle solved
It fell to another great adventurer, the plant hunter Francis Kingdon-Ward, to confirm the link between the two great rivers during his expedition into the hidden gorge of the Tsangpo. In 1924, Kingdon-Ward set out from London with six cases of jam, chocolate, tea and other provisions from Fortnum & Mason.
After many months of hardship, he reached a point from which almost the entire gorge was visible, with the exception of an eight-kilometre stretch that he described as ‘so dark and narrow that it seemed to disappear into the depths of the Earth’. Nevertheless, the riddle of the Tsangpo was pronounced solved.
September 2011
Lambton’s ingenious scheme consisted of laying out a network of triangles, each drawn from three points of reference and then stacked alongside one another to form a grid. The chain of triangles could then be protracted in any direction across a landmass for the purpose of measuring distance. This took the form of a Great Arc of the Meridian, tracing a line some 2,600 kilometres up the spine of the Indian subcontinent.
With the Empire in rapid expansion, it was crucial to know what lay beyond its frontiers, but this knowledge came to a halt at the foot of the great Himalayan barrier. By the mid-19th century, the survey still had but the vaguest notion of the location of strategic cities such as Lhasa. Similarly, the question of whether the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers were joined at some remote spot was a mystery. And Gilgit, Chilas and Chitral, key outposts of India’s North-West Frontier, remained unexplored. Yarkand was 160 kilometres out of position on the survey’s map and, in fact, the entire landmass of Central Asia was a vast geographical enigma.
Enter Captain Thomas George Montgomerie of the Royal Engineers, who arrived in Bombay in 1850 and joined the survey a year later. At the time, the survey possessed a fairly reliable set of data on some 100,000 square kilometres of trans-Himalayan territory, but this still left a blank on the map roughly the size of India itself. Montgomerie estimated that some 3.6 million square kilometres of unexplored land north of the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges could be penetrated from India. What sent the government’s antennae flailing was the fact that, conversely, this same immense territory was a potential gateway to British India for a foreign invader.
Into Tibet
The place that drew the earliest European explorers to the region was Tibet. The Portuguese Jesuit Bento de Goes was one of the first and most courageous of these travellers. Goes had picked up some totally unsubstantiated stories about sightings of Nestorian Christian communities in China and was so fascinated by these tales that during the early 17th century, he set out on a two-year trek to become the first European since Marco Polo to set foot in that kingdom.
Goes failed to save a single soul, and he didn’t lay eyes on a single Nestorian, but he did manage to irritate enough people in China to get himself murdered. This was to set a precedent for European explorers, and it was also the raison d’être for putting together the small band of explorers known as the pundits.
Montgomerie, who served as the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s Colonel Creighton in Kim, was posted to Dehra Dun, where he took charge of the Himalayan Survey in Kumaon and Garhwal. It wasn’t possible to dispatch European officers – as Montgomerie was painfully aware, following the murder of several explorers – but there was no reason why Indians shouldn’t be sent across the Himalaya to conduct secret surveys and reconnaissance missions.
Montgomerie’s first recruit was Nain Singh, a school teacher in Kumaon, and a Bhotia of Tibetan origin. He was in deep financial distress because of what the survey rather diplomatically called his father’s ‘social misdeeds’. He was offered the opportunity to undertake a mission for the survey in unexplored parts of Tibet.
Put through the paces
At Dehra Dun, Singh was put through a training course that lasted nearly two years. Montgomerie wanted his fledgling pundits to be competent in reconnaissance work, which entailed using a sextant to determine latitude and a compass to take bearings, the basics of astronomy for night navigation, the use of a thermometer for measuring elevation (by reading the temperature of boiling water) and how to keep accurate records of the terrain and distance covered.
Recording the ground covered each day was indispensable for map making. This was addressed by one of the most ingenious contrivances in Montgomerie’s entire bag of tricks. Tibetans count off their prayer beads while chanting a holy mantra, usually the six-syllable om mani peme hung. Their rosary, or mala, has 108 beads. But 108 is an awkward number for mental calculation, so Montgomerie had eight beads removed to leave a mathematically convenient 100, with little risk of the missing beads being noticed. The pundits were taught to slip one bead every 100 paces, so that each circuit signals 10,000 paces. The mala has one larger bead, and this was slipped to record a completed circuit.
It was all very well counting paces, but surveying requires that distances are measured to a high degree of accuracy, so the pundits spent months learning to take a pace of the same distance, regardless of the terrain. Montgomerie had their feet tied with a cord measuring what he considered to be the ideal stride for each pundit. In the case of Singh, this worked out to 33 inches (84 centimetres), so that 1,920 paces would equal one mile.
The pundit would also need somewhere to stash his notes with the record of his daily route. The ideal place was within the copper cylinder of the Tibetan prayer wheel, which holds a scroll with the sacred six-syllable mantra. Later, the Dehra Dun spy workshop began assembling prayer wheels that could also hold the pundits’ compass. Larger pieces of equipment such as sextants were concealed in the false bottoms of their travelling cases.
Into the unkown
Montgomerie sent his pundits out disguised as Tibetan holy men on pilgrimage. The flowing red robe was an ideal garment for concealing small instruments and bits of paper. By 1865, Singh had passed out a fully qualified operative of the survey, and was now ready to embark on his first trans-Himalayan mission. The plan was to send him through Nepal to Lhasa. Montgomerie instructed him to carry out a route survey from Lake Manasarovar eastward through Gartok to the Tibetan capital.
For Singh, this turned out to be a journey of 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres), or about 2.5 million paces. By the time he returned to India, he had surveyed some 1,200 miles, and his findings brought about a complete revision of the map of Tibet. Sir Clements Markham, then president of the Royal Geographical Society, praised Singh as ‘the greatest scientific traveller that India has produced’. He was awarded the RGS Patron’s Medal and was hailed as a hero in scientific circles in Britain and India. He said this was as all fine and well, but he would have preferred a gold watch to replace the one stolen by a Pathan merchant.
The two famous pundits of the post-Singh era were Sarat Chandra Das and Kintup, but there was an interesting pundit sandwiched between these great figures: Lama Ugyen Gyatso.
In 1883, Gyatso left Darjeeling with his wife and brother-in-law in tow and set off for Tibet at the height of the monsoon. The journey to Lhasa took about four months, and when they reached the city, his troubles grew worse by the day. The little party was forced to shift from one set of lodgings to the next in order to keep a step ahead of the suspicious Chinese authorities. Nevertheless, Gyatso set about surveying the city, which he did while sitting in a central square and using as his cover, quite literally, an umbrella, under which he concealed his instruments.
He was able to calculate that it took exactly 9,500 paces to do a full circuit of Lhasa. He also found it necessary to discourage his wife from forming too close a friendship with the Chinese official resident, lest questions be asked about why her husband spent his days wandering about Lhasa with a suitcase and an umbrella.
On his return to Darjeeling, the survey lavished great praise on Gyatso, who filled a vital gap in frontier geography and mapped, and also surveyed a number of previously uncharted rivers and lakes.
Photographic memory
The last of the great pundits was Kintup, who became a pundit entirely by default. Kintup was an illiterate tailor’s assistant from Darjeeling who possessed extensive knowledge of trans-Himalayan territory and a photographic memory. At the time, there was in Darjeeling a Mongolian lama whose name doesn’t appear in the survey records, but who was obviously a trusted government agent. This was the man chosen to lead the next expedition, to the lower reaches of the Tsangpo.
Kintup was offered the opportunity to guide the lama on his voyage, which was organised by survey officer Captain John Harman. Kintup crossed the frontier into Tibet in 1880; his troubles began almost immediately. The lama, it emerged, was a scoundrel, a womaniser, an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler.
From Lhasa, they stopped in the village of Thun Tsung, where the lama decided he had fallen in love with the headman’s wife. So there they remained for four months, until their host discovered the shenanigans taking place behind his back and threatened the lama with dreadful reprisals. The lama managed to buy his way out, and they plodded on to stay with the district official at a place called Gyala.
One day, the lama said he had been called away on urgent business, and would be gone two or three days. After three months, there was still no sign of him, and Kintup discovered that before he left, the lama had sold him into slavery.
He eventually fled the village and made his way north to a small monastery in the Pemako district, pretty much the last settlement before the Tsangpo disappears into the great unexplored gorge. He was given sanctuary at the local monastery, where he spent four and a half months as the abbot’s servant.
Foolproof plan
But now it was time to get on with his mission. He knew what had to be done. He was present when Captain Harman explained the procedure to the lama. The task was to cut 500 logs, each a foot long, with a marking that would make them recognisable.
It was a brilliant plan, simple and foolproof. Once the pundit had travelled as far as he could along the banks of the Tsangpo, he would cut the logs and send a letter through to Captain Harman in Darjeeling, saying that the logs were shortly to be released, 50 every day, into the river. If they were sighted passing a pre-determined spot on the Brahmaputra, the mystery of the Tsangpo was solved, for the two rivers obviously met somewhere in the deep gorge.
Kintup left the monastery and trekked about 15 miles through the jungle to Giling, where he spent his time hacking away until he had fashioned 500 logs of the correct size. He then carried the logs, tied in bundles on his back, and hid them in a deep cave.
Now, he had to get a message through to Darjeeling. He marched westward, 250 miles back to Lhasa, where he came across a Sikkimese district official, who wrote a letter to the survey on Kintup’s behalf. This official’s wife was about to set off for Darjeeling, so she was given the letter to deliver to Captain Harman.
Kintup went trotting back 250 miles to the cave where he had stashed his logs. He spent ten days by the riverbank and in batches of 50, the logs were released into the water.
Once the job was done, in November, 1884, after four years and three months away, this humble tailor’s assistant made what he envisaged to be a triumphal entry into Darjeeling, only to be dealt the most bitter disappointment of all. The Sikkimese official’s wife had reached Darjeeling much later than planned. In the interval, Captain Harman had died, the letter went undelivered, and the logs drifted unseen into the Bay of Bengal.
Kintup went back to working as a tailor’s assistant and spent years eking out a meagre living in a Darjeeling shop. Colonel Frederick Bailey tracked him down in 1913 and prevailed on the government to reward him for his years of service. This was done the following year, just before Kintup, age 65, died.
Riddle solved
It fell to another great adventurer, the plant hunter Francis Kingdon-Ward, to confirm the link between the two great rivers during his expedition into the hidden gorge of the Tsangpo. In 1924, Kingdon-Ward set out from London with six cases of jam, chocolate, tea and other provisions from Fortnum & Mason.
After many months of hardship, he reached a point from which almost the entire gorge was visible, with the exception of an eight-kilometre stretch that he described as ‘so dark and narrow that it seemed to disappear into the depths of the Earth’. Nevertheless, the riddle of the Tsangpo was pronounced solved.
September 2011
|
FIND OUT WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT ON TWITTER:
| |
 |
