Shangri-La Centennial

Through the parallax view of history, the Younghusband Mission to Tibet, 1903-04, could be one of many things. It could be the last great Vi...

Through the parallax view of history, the Younghusband Mission to Tibet, 1903-04, could be one of many things. It could be the last great Victorian adventure, though it began over two years after Queen Vic actually died. It could be an almost mystical search for Shangri-La, the unspoilt paradise that is mankind8217;s eternal if doomed quest.

It could be a political masterstroke: establishing Curzonian India8217;s grip on the buffer with the perennially recalcitrant Chinese, a grip Nehruvian India was to loosen, to its peril. Finally, Colonel Francis Younghusband could be seen as an early forerunner of Hans Blix, sent into the unknown to unearth mythical weapons of mass destruction in yet another twist to what the Russians called the Tournament of Shadows and the rest of us remember as the Great Game.

Like the blundering imperialists they were, Younghusband and his compatriots accommodated all of these attributes. No wonder, in retrospect, momentous events can appear almost comic.

On page 287, Charles Allen writes of the climax of the stated quest of Younghusband8217;s Missionaries: 8216;8216;The city8217;s arsenal was visited and, to the disappointment of the forward-policy men, found to be devoid of all Russian rifles. Lhasa8217;s 8216;rifle factory8217; turned out to be little more than a cottage workshop run by two Indian Muslim renegades. 8216;During the whole campaign,8217; Edmund Chandler had now to admit, 8216;we did not come across more than 30 Russian government rifles, and these must have drifted into Tibet from Mongolia8230; The reports of Russian arms found in Tibet have been very much exaggerated.8217; The whole business of Russian influence and the czar8217;s ambitions was quietly dropped.8217;8217;

There were other dashed hopes too. 8216;8216;At his meeting with the Ti Rimpoche in Lhasa8217;8217;, Dr Austine Waddell, later to become London8217;s leading Tibetologist 8216;8216;had been greatly disappointed to learn that there were no teachings of ancient wisdom preserved there by the 8216;Mahatmas8217; after the sinking of Atlantis8217;8217;.

This book, like any of the Raj chronicles that bear the Charles Allen imprint, is so excruciatingly rich in detail that it sometimes tends to get in the way of the story. Nevertheless, the author takes his reader through the twin lives and competitive urges of Younghusband and James Macdonald, respectively political and military commander of the Mission to Lhasa.

Macdonald comes across as the wronged hero, drawing the sympathy that may have been Allen8217;s intention in the first place. He was quite a majestic figure himself, this Scotsman called Macdonald. Prior to the trek to Tibet, he had built 8216;8216;railways in Baluchistan and forts on the North-West Frontier8230; when civil was broke out in Uganda8230; he arrived in Kampala in May 1892 with a detachment of Indian troops8217;8217;. He was also a Boxer Rebellion veteran.

Allen8217;s book is not a biography of either Younghusband or Macdonald. It is, determinedly, a recounting of the progress 8212; or regress, if military massacres move you 8212; of the Mission. It is also an attempt to set the record straight, correct the impression than Macdonald was somehow the man who got in Younghusband8217;s way. It8217;s a book for the buff, the few who survive to know that the Younghusband legend was flesh-and-blood, not an old wives8217; tale.