The Siege of Shangri-La: The Quest for Tibet's Sacred Hidden Paradise - Hardcover

McRae, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767904850 ISBN 13: 9780767904858

Publisher: Broadway, 2002

Synopsis

The story of the quest for a real-life Shangri-La in the darkest heart of the Himalayas– a century-long obsession to reach the sacred hidden center of one of the world's last uncharted realms.

At the far eastern end of the Himalayas in Tibet lies the Tsangpo River Gorge, known as “the great romance of geography” during the nineteenth century's golden age of exploration. Here the mighty Tsangpo funnels into an impenetrable canyon three miles deep, walled off from the outside world by twenty-five thousand foot peaks. Like the earthly paradise of Shangri-La immortalized in James Hilton's classic 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the Tsangpo River Gorge is a refuge revered for centuries by Tibetan Buddhists–and later in Western imagination–as a sanctuary in times of strife as well as a gateway to nirvana.

The Siege of Shangri-La tells the story of this fabled land's exploration as both a geographical and spiritual destination–and chronicles the discovery at the end of the last millennium of the truth behind the myths and rumors about it. Veteran journalist Michael McRae traces the gorge's exploratory history from the clandestine missions of surveyor-spies called pundits and botanical expeditions of naturalists in the early twentieth century to the recent investigations of scholars, adventurers, and pilgrims seeking the "Hidden Falls," of the Tsangpo, which purportedly rivals Niagara in size and serves as the gateway to paradise. Each explorer's narrative provides increasing evidence of why the gorge has been mythologized in Eastern and Western lore as one of the world's most alluring blanks on the map–and a supreme test of human will.

Taking readers on a guided tour of the gorge's landscape, physical and metaphysical, McRae presents an insightful look at the pursuit of glory and enlightenment that has played out in this mysterious land with sometimes disastrous consequences. The Siege of Shangri-La is a fascinating journey through the inner recesses of a remote, mystical world and the minds of those who have attempted to reach it.

About this title

About the Author

Michael McRae is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure, a correspondent for National Geographic and Outside, and a contributor to Audubon, Geo, Life, Men's Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, and numerous other magazines. He lives in southern Oregon.

From the Back Cover

"Michael McRae has a bar-room tale knack for describing the flavors and rhythms of remote destinations."
–Tim Cahill

"McRae is the secret adventurer within us all, the artful voyager down the far edges of the known world by the odd, the mysterious, and the beautiful."
– Joe Kane

"In THE SIEGE OF SHANGRI-LA, Michael McRae expertly guides us down a river of fable and succeeds in the considerable task of making it real. But here’s his greater trick: In making it real, McRae does nothing to rob this fabulously fabulous place of its enchanting purchase on our literary and exploratory souls."
-Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers

Reviews

A contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure and correspondent for Outside magazine, McRae wonderfully documents the history of exploration, both geographical and spiritual, in Tibet's Tsangpo River Gorge, an acknowledged "power place" in Tibetan Buddhism and believed for centuries to be the gateway to nirvana. McRae begins in the 1920s and focuses on the work of naturalist Francis Kingdon-Ward, an Englishman bent on unraveling the mystery behind the Tsangpo's precipitous drop in elevation. (He thought it was caused by a hidden waterfall.) McRae then looks at contemporary tourism in the region. In the 1990s the Chinese government opened southeastern Tibet to foreigners for the first time since the 1959 takeover, and since then, it's become a hot spot for modern-day explorers. McRae's leading men include a low profile wilderness guide from Tucson, Ariz., who got the attention of the Guinness Book of World Records when he claimed that, by his calculations, the gorge was the world's deepest canyon; Ian Baker and Hamid Sardar, American expatriates living in Kathmandu; and Arizona land developers Gill and Troy Gillenwater, who became violently ill after bathing in a sacred spring and returned to America to write about their exploits for an outdoor clothing catalogue. In his previous offering, an essay collection called Continental Drifter, McRae opined that the Chinese were turning Tibet into a religious theme park. He elaborates, though with reporting that sometimes feels detached, on that lament here, exposing Western bravado against the backdrop of one of the East's most mysterious-and beautiful-places.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Tsangpo River Gorge, in southeastern Tibet, is a fascinating place. Threaded by a torrential river, walled in by lofty peaks, plagued by foul weather and earthquakes, its beauty nonetheless casts a spell on both Eastern and Western imaginations. Revered by Buddhists as a sacred place, it was reimagined and dubbed Shangri-La by James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon and has been the site of repeated incursions by Westerners, whether botanists, budding Buddhists, or adventurers. McRae, an experienced travel and outdoors writer, has expanded two previously published articles into a broad overview. Only 80 years ago a 10-mile stretch of the Tsangpo was still unexplored; at present, China plans to build resorts and draw hordes of tourists to this pristine place. But while McRae does a fine job of recounting the various expeditions to paradise and placing them in social context--and has an eye for the unfortunate human habit of despoiling places-- some readers may tire of his only somewhat credulous and fairly lengthy descriptions of the region's sacred geography. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Small wonder . . . that Tibet has captured the imagination of mankind. Its peculiar aloofness, its remote unruffled calm, and the mystery shrouding its great rivers and mountains make an irresistible appeal to the explorer. There are large areas of Tibet where no white man has ever trod.
-Francis Kingdon-Ward, Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges

In early 1924, when Francis Kingdon-Ward set sail from London bound for Calcutta and, eventually, the Tsangpo River Gorge in southeastern Tibet, he was under no illusions about the challenges ahead. At thirty-nine, Kingdon-Ward was among the world's most experienced and successful plant collectors. Having served for thirteen years as a field agent in Asia for the Cheshire seed firm of Bees & Company, he was responsible for having introduced scores of exotic species to the gardens of England, from the showy yellow-bloomed rhododendron R. wardii, named in his honor, to numerous primroses, lilies, and poppies. His first commission for Bees, in 1911 as a young man of twenty-five, had taken him to the mountains of south-central China's Yunnan Province and the adjoining ranges of Tibet, not far from his intended destination on this expedition. Traveling with a personal servant and an enormous Tibetan mastiff called Ah-poh that he had found as a stray, he had spent the better part of 1911 hunting for hardy alpine species that he felt would thrive in England's temperate climate. The work was time-consuming and, because he was toiling at a breathtaking altitude, exceptionally demanding. After locating likely candidates while they were still in flower, he would have to return months later to collect their seeds, sometimes having to excavate marked specimens from beneath several feet of snow at ten thousand feet above sea level. Afterward, the seeds and plants--he was also collecting whole specimens for private herbariums and for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh--had to be painstakingly dried, cataloged, and packed for shipment home to England. And he had to record his field notes faithfully, every night.

By the end of a year, Kingdon-Ward had collected some two hundred species, twenty-two of them new to science. He completed his fieldwork with a forced march of three weeks, finally straggling into the Chinese town of T'eng-yueh, where he'd started out. He looked frightful: "My hair was long and unkempt, my . . . feet were sticking out of my boots, my riding breeches torn and my coat worn through at the elbows," he wrote in The Land of the Blue Poppy, the second of his twenty-five books and, according to his biographer Charles Lyte, his best work. For six months after exhausting his food stores, Kingdon-Ward had managed on meager rations of native fare: tsampa (the roasted barley flour that is the staple of Tibetan diets), bitter brick tea, yak milk and butter, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and eggs when he could find them. He and his servant, Kin, had suffered illnesses, awful weather, mutinous muleteers and porters, landslides, and loneliness (especially Kingdon-Ward, who waged a lifelong battle against bouts of black depression). A revolution that rocked Yunnan Province after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911 had filled the hills with army deserters, who turned to banditry for survival. As a foreigner traveling with loaded pack animals, Kingdon-Ward was a prime target, and he was also subject to repeated questioning by wary officials. After all, it had been only seven years since British forces under Col. Francis Younghusband had made a bloody march on Lhasa, Tibet's capital, to impose British will over the recalcitrant nation. Until then Tibet had rebuffed British overtures to align with the empire and to resist Russian advances in Central Asia, and had sealed its borders. Younghusband, an archimperialist and key player in a political intrigue known as the Great Game, led a force of twelve hundred soldiers, ten thousand porters, and as many pack animals from Darjeeling, India, over the Himalayas and into the "Forbidden Kingdom." His troops slaughtered seven hundred poorly armed Tibetans in one infamous skirmish alone, and ultimately forced the government to sign a treaty of cooperation.

While Tibet was a perilous place for foreigners in 1911, its great river gorges were a plant hunter's nirvana. As Kingdon-Ward explained, there are actually two Tibets: the high, arid plateau where rivers such as the Tsangpo, Salween, and Mekong trace their upper courses, and the more formidable gorge country that comprises the rivers' middle sections. It is in the latter regions, after having meandered eastward and southeastward across the plateau, that the rivers turn south and bore through the Himalayas and barrier ranges east of Namche Barwa, the last major peak in the chain. After rampaging down through the mountains, the rivers spill out onto the plains of northern India, Burma, and Laos to eventually make their way to the sea.

Waxing eloquent, Kingdon-Ward described the gorge country as a land "of dim forest and fragrant meadow, of snow-capped mountains and alpine slopes sparkling with flowers, of crawling glaciers and mountain lakes and brawling rivers which crash and roar through the mountain gorges; . . . of lonely monasteries plastered like swallows' nests against the cliffs, and of frowning forts perched upon rocky steeples, whence they look down on villages clustered in the cultivated valleys at their feet."

In this prettified, Shangri-La-esque portrait, however, he neglects to point out that the gorges are also nightmarishly inhospitable. Their jungles teem with leeches, gnats, stinging nettles, venomous snakes, and large, dangerous animals, including Bengal tigers. The densely forested slopes are horrifically steep and often trackless. There are few villages, little cultivation, and not much food to be had. The weather is abominable for most of the year--wilting heat, pouring rain, snow and ice at higher elevations. Catastrophic floods and landslides rearrange the landscape with alarming regularity.

The idea of a Tibetan jungle might seem incongruous given the semidesert conditions that prevail north of the Himalayas. But Tibet lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, just as Death Valley does in that of the Sierra Nevada. The range forms a barrier to monsoons that batter the Indian subcontinent with rain. By the time their moisture-laden winds have been deflected up and over the mountains and sweep down onto the Tibetan Plateau, they have dropped their burden and turned dry and hostile to plant life.

But at the eastern end of the Himalayas, east of Namche Barwa's icy ramparts, the monsoon is able to find a way through the mountains by funneling up the gorges. Kingdon-Ward called the roughly two hundred miles between Namche Barwa and the foot of the Yunnan Plateau "the Achilles' heel in that otherwise impenetrable mountain defence which rings Tibet like a wall." Storms rush furiously up through the chasms, dumping quantities of rain and snow as they rise. Thus drenched, the canyon lands are thick with rhododendrons and giant bamboo; higher up, they are blanketed with lovely woodlands of pine, cedar, and poplar, which spread out in fanlike formations behind the Himalayas and then quickly disappear as the arid conditions on the plateau take hold. This breach in the mountains was Kingdon-Ward's lifelong hunting ground, the source of most of the twenty-three thousand species he collected during his career.

In the thirteen years that Kingdon-Ward had been tramping the divide, he had explored every major watershed in it except the Tsangpo's. Approaching its gorge, either from the top by traversing the Tibetan Plateau and following the river downstream or from the bottom by marching upstream from the state of Assam in northeastern India, posed serious problems, due not least to the political upheaval in China and the presence of hostile aborigines in the Abor and Mishimi foothills below the gorge. Still, it was not for lack of trying that he had failed to reach his hoped-for destination.

In 1913, for instance, after chronicling his first expedition in The Land of the Blue Poppy, Kingdon-Ward had returned to China uncertain of his itinerary. But now he had the added support of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which had made him a fellow and was eager to have him survey the region. One of his missions, in addition to mapmaking for the RGS and collecting seeds for Bees & Co., the Cheshire plant firm that launched his career as a plant hunter, was to trace the middle course of the Brahmaputra River, or Tsangpo as it is called in Tibet, through the gorge. The connection between the two rivers had been a matter of guesswork until around the turn of the century, when British survey expeditions determined that the Tsangpo fed the Brahmaputra. Yet none of these teams had managed to penetrate the Tsangpo's rugged central canyon. In 1913, it remained a black hole to geographers.

The name Brahmaputra had been fixed in Kingdon-Ward's mind since he had heard it as a boy. His father, Harry Marshall Ward, was a distinguished botanist at Cambridge, and scholars and explorers returning from abroad would often stop at the university to see him. One whom young Frank met had been to India and spoke of the Brahmaputra as a river of mystery. "There are places up the Brahmaputra where no white man has ever been," he is reported to have told the boy. The remark captured Kingdon-Ward's imagination and stayed with him for years. In 1925, when he was writing The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, he would repeat very nearly the same line about Tibet as a whole.

It was on the 1913 expedition that Kingdon-Ward wanted to solve the "riddle" that had been a source of fascination from the drawing rooms of Mayfair to the meeting halls at the RGS: How could the same river that flowed past Lhasa at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet lose so much elevation so rapidly after spilling off the Tibetan Plateau? By the time the river emerges in the Abor Hills at the bottom of the gorge, roughly two hund...

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0767904850
• ISBN 13: 9780767904858
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240