It was a forbidden place, and thus irresistible.
A timeless land in the sky, an other worldly people,
and no use for the wheel but as a spinner of prayers.
And so they came,
Westerners intent on exploring Tibet and its elusive capital Lhasa.
Few survived the trials of fire,
ice and violence that awaited them on Tibet's natural ramparts.
Where so many others had failed, two would succeed.
One prevailed through stealth,
a spy whose feats of espionage still rank among the greatest in the world,
but have almost been forgotten.
The other prevailed through force, leaving a trail of blood and tears
that would shock the world and utterly transform the victor.
These are the tales of their epic journeys
in the fantastic and deadly race for Tibet.
Winter, 1865.
An over burdened caravan descends from the snowy passes of the Himalayas
into the forbidden land.
Few tread lightly here.
Most foreigners are turned back or killed.
But these hearty merchants carry coveted goods from neighboring lands.
The caravan has picked up a pious hitchhiker of sorts,
a lone holy man on a pilgrimage.
The only other kind of incursion that Tibetans welcome.
But strangely, the Buddhist's strides are all exactly the same length.
His rosary is missing several beads,
and his prayer wheel contains no prayers.
He is a spy, not a monk.
If discovered, he will die.
The roots of Nain Singh's secret journey run as deep and old as
the world's obsession with the magical kingdom on the rooftop of the world.
At the heart of Asia,
thrust some three miles in the air by a clash of continents,
Tibet is an astounding natural fortress the size of Western Europe.
For hundreds of years, Tibetans saw no need to bar foreigners.
Only a handful survived the trek
through the surrounding mountains and deserts.
And these proved no threat to their cherished Buddhist theocracy.
Here every fourth person was a monk or a nun.
But by the 1800s,
Tibet began to feel the pressure of two new powers in Asia.
Britain, effectively in control of India since 1833,
had been steadily expanding its influence northward into the Himalayas.
Russia, meanwhile, was swallowing up territory in Central Asia
as it pushed its empire eastwards.
Tibet knew little about the outsiders,
except that both powers were Christian, not Buddhist.
Fearing for their way of life, the land of monks closed its borders.
Paradoxically, it was the closing of Tibet
that ensured the West would have to pry it open again.
And this was during the era of exploration
where people wanted to get to Antarctica, the North Pole,
they wanted to go up the Nile, and so Lhasa became a real,
as we might say today, a real destination.
But nobody could get there.
You had the last European in Lhasa in 1811.
And then you suddenly have a gap
Right up until the very end of the 19th century
where you get no foreigners or no Europeans mentioned going to Tibet.
And this creates this great kind of mystery of Tibet,
and the idea that somehow people had to break through
and sort of reach the Forbidden City of Lhasa.
In India, paranoia, much as curiosity,
drove the need to get into neighboring Tibet.
It was the era of the "Great Game",
a cold war between Russia and Britain for the domination
of Central Asia.
The British feared that
if the Russians were to gain a foothold in Tibet,
they might use it as a base for invading India.
The forbidden land became the center square
on the chessboard of the "Great Game"
one that needed to be explored and mapped at all costs.
The Russians were coming, and this created a great deal of anxiety.
The problem was that Tibet was basically closed.
So that left the Brits with a problem
how do you map Tibet if you can't get in to have a look?
It was a young officer in the Royal Engineers
who hit upon Britain's best hope in the race for Tibet.
Thomas George Montgomerie had spent years
overseeing natives in the great trigonometrical survey of India,
a massive British effort
to create an accurate map of the entire Indian subcontinent.
He'd also noted that Indians often passed freely into Tibet
where no white man would be allowed.
Perhaps an Indian spy, trained in the arts of espionage and surveying,
might penetrate Tibet, disguised as a trader or holy man.
Captain Montgomerie, in typical colonial fashion,
had some doubts whether a native of sufficient intelligence and raw
nerve might be found,
but obtained permission to give his plan a try.
Thus began the unlikely career of one of the most successful spies
in the history of espionage.
Nain Singh, then a 33 year old school teacher,
had grown up in the shadows of the Himalayas.
His family had traded in Tibet and he could read and write Tibetan.
He quickly accepted the assignment, despite its dangers.
Nain Singh was just one of those people.
You know, they are individuals who are great achievers.
There was this man living in a very remote village.
I mean, what kind of opportunities
did he have to really accomplish something really great?
In 1863, the young schoolteacher reported for duty
at the survey of India's headquarters in Dehra Dun.
There, he would undergo two years of intensive training
in the arts of surveying.
He learned the use of the sextant and the compass,
and to locate his position using the stars.
Through endless repetition,
the novice spy learned to walk at an exactly measured pace
31 and a half inches a stride.
Or 2,000 paces to the mile.
He would keep track of those paces on a rosary.
The Buddhist rosary contains 108 beads, a holy number.
Nain Singh's rosary would have only 100 to more easily
keep track of the strides.
Montgomerie had dubbed him the Pundit,
Hindi for the "wise one" and sent him on his way.
His daunting task, to find his way to Lhasa,
the Forbidden City,
to chart his course counting every stride along the way
and to spy on the political, religious and economic life of Lhasa
for as long as possible.
Nain Singh knew what fate awaited him
if he were caught an almost certain death.
It would take Nain Singh eight frustrating months to cross into Tibet.
At first, the Pundit had tried to enter through Nepal
disguised as a horse trader,
but suspicious border guards turned him away.
He managed to slip by those same border guards a few weeks later,
disguised as a holy man.
He had already acquired an escort, the first of several caravans
that would offer him protection on the dangerous journey.
In the outlying areas of Tibet, bandits far outnumbered monks.
Singh seem to be quite the favorite with these caravans,
some of whom would vouch for him
when Tibetans they encountered grew curious.
But sometimes the Pundit had to travel alone.
Once, when his companions had the chance to travel by river,
he had to make his excuses to continue on foot.
Without his measured pace, his survey would have gone awry.
With numb feet, he strode his perfect 31 and a half inch stride.
With numb fingers, he counted those strides on his rosary.
He kept his surveying notes where no one would think to look
in a cleverly modified prayer wheel.
Usually the wheel contains a scroll with a holy incantation on it.
Each turn sends the Buddhist prayer whirling heavenward.
While his companions slept,
the Pundit would slip a thermometer into the camp pots.
The boiling point of water would tell him his altitude,
a vital part of the survey.
Five months into the journey, the Pundit was beginning to worry.
The caravan was approaching the town of Shigatse,
where they planned to stay several months.
The Forbidden City was still a long way off,
and Nain Singh's funds were almost exhausted.
Once in Shigatse, the resourceful Pundit managed to support himself
by teaching accounting to merchants.
But he also received a most unwelcome invitation
to the great Tashilhunpo monastery,
home to some 3,000 Buddhist priests.
To refuse would be to arouse suspicion.
But could a Hindu pretender remain undetected
among so many true Buddhists?
Even worse, he would have an audience with the monastery's leader,
the Panchen Lama.
Second only to the Dalai Lama in power,
the Panchen Lama was reputed to be able to see into the hearts of all men.
Nain Singh would have to offer the Lama a gift of silk,
then respond to any three questions the Lama asked.
"Is your king well? Does your country prosper?
Are you in good health?"
With amazed relief, the Pundit realized that
the Panchen Lama was an 11 year old boy,
who seemed to have no interest in peering into the heart of a spy.
But it was a close call.
How long could a pretender in a land of monks escape detection?
In December the caravan moved on with their Buddhist holy man in tow,
the mind numbing rhythm of the Pundit's walking survey resumed.
Tedium, punctuated by fear.
Anyone who's walked in Tibet, trekked, hiked,
tried to get around Tibet on foot knows that it is exhausting.
I mean, the altitudes are extremely high.
You go up passes 16, sometimes 17,000 feet
where you're just barely able to put one foot in front of the other.
The oxygen is thin.
You have a terrible splitting headache.
I mean, there was no roads, there were no wheels.
There was no nothing.
Above all, it was risky because you might be discovered.
Several times the nightmare of all caravans in these badlands occurred.
A violent attack by bandits.
Once the Pundit was forced to escape by horseback
a desperate maneuver that would foil his plans
to walk off every yard to Lhasa.
He vowed to make it up by pacing the journey on his return trip.
January 10th, 1866.
Exactly one year since he set out from India,
the fabled city of Lhasa lay before the Pundit.
He had counted over a million strides to get here.
But now the most crucial and dangerous phase
of his cloak and dagger existence had just begun.
He would be living on borrowed time.
We arrived this day at Lhasa and, soon after my arrival,
engaged two rooms: One was well adapted for taking star observations.
After fixing the position of Lhasa,
Singh set about fulfilling the rest of his mission
to gather as much intelligence on the political, economic
and religious life of the Forbidden City as possible.
Singh's rooms situated just 20 yards from the Jokang,
the holy central square of the city, were perfect for the task.
In the center of the city stands a very large temple.
The idols within it are richly inlaid with gold and precious stones.
This temple is surrounded by bazaars and shops.
On a low hill, there is a large and strong fort,
called the "Potala" which is the residence of the Lama Guru.
The Lama Guru is the chief of all Tibet,
but he does not interfere with state business.
He is looked upon as a guardian divinity, and is supposed to never die,
but transmigrates into anybody he pleases.
I observed there is but little order and justice to be seen in Lhasa.
In the Forbidden City,
the Pundit's position was more precarious than ever.
The threat of discovery a constant dread.
Once, a chance encounter with merchants from his professed homeland,
exposed his deceit.
Somehow, he managed to convince them not to turn him in.
Not long after his arrival,
Nain Singh would once again receive an invitation he could not refuse.
This time, an audience with the Dalai Lama himself in the great Potala.
And once again, the Pundit would find himself before a living god
who could peer into the hearts of men, it was said
only to find himself gazing into the eyes of a child of 13.
But his luck could not hold forever.
And the price of discovery was about to become terrifyingly clear.
One night on the street, Singh witnessed firsthand
what happened to foreigners unwelcome in Lhasa.
In this case,
a Chinese man who did not have permission to be in the capital.
He was brought out before the whole of the people
and beheaded with very little hesitation.
Owing to my alarm,
I changed my residence and seldom appeared in public again.
When Singh heard that the caravan that had conveyed him to Lhasa
was ready to head back out of Tibet,
he knew it was time to begin the 500 mile walk home.
October 1866.
An exhausted Nain Singh crosses the Himalayas once again
and descends from the Rooftop of the World
into his homeland in the foothills of northern India.
He has been gone almost a year and a half.
He has walked two and a half million paces on his 1,200 mile trek,
counting virtually every step of the way.
He has lived undetected
in the Forbidden City of Lhasa for three months.
He has returned to the Survey of India in Dehra Dun
with a treasure beyond the wildest imaginings of his mentor,
Captain Montgomerie.
By these really in a way quite primitive techniques,
they were able to map the whole of sort of southwestern Tibet.
What is interesting is that the Survey of India maps,
which are around today,
are still based on quite a lot of information
which were obtained by the Pundit.
Until Nain Singh went to Lhasa,
the western world had no idea, really what was where in Tibet.
It didn't really even know where Lhasa was... they knew it was up there.
Years later,
it would be confirmed that Nain Singh had calculated the position of Lhasa
correct to within half a degree of latitude a remarkable feat.
Montgomerie, while keeping the identity of his super spy to himself,
detailed Nain Singh's amazing journey
to the president of the Royal Geographical Society.
I'm quite sure he would make a good impression anywhere.
And I can quite understand his being an immense favorite
with the Ladhakis who conveyed him into the sacred city.
The Pundit, I think, deserves all praise.
His work has stood every test, capitally.
Captain George Montgomerie.
Nain Singh would go on to make two more secret journeys into Tibet.
He then helped Montgomerie recruit and train other Pundits
who continued filling in the blank spaces
on the map of the forbidden land.
Some never came back.
Others, like Nain Singh himself, would never be the same.
Nain Singh paid a very heavy cost in terms of his health.
He was totally worn out.
His eyesight had also been affected.
I mean, there was no way to protect himself
for snow blindness and the glare.
He just had to retire.
He couldn't undertake any more journeys.
For his extraordinary work,
Singh was quietly awarded a gold medal from the Royal Geographic Society
and a small pension.
He was the first native to be recognized
by the Royal Geographical Society as having accomplished something
that was the equivalent of any of the greatest explorers of the West.
So in a certain sense, that was a real breakthrough.
The Pundits suffered the same fate as so many spies,
which is they don't really get much recognition for what they do;
everything is shrouded in secrecy.
What I think is extraordinary is really
how little recognition or thanks they got
for the remarkably dangerous work that they undertook
on behalf of the Survey of India and, you know,
ultimately the British Empire in India.
Nain Singh,
one of the most extraordinary spies the world has ever seen,
died in obscurity at the age of 53.
Almost four decades would pass before a European,
following in the Pundit's footsteps, would reach the Forbidden City.
This journey, unlike Nain Singh's, would be marked by bloodshed.
March 31 st, 1904.
On a desolate plain some 10,000 feet in the air,
two forces eye each other warily.
They are divided by a crude stone wall,
and a tragic chasm of culture, time and faith.
The defenders: Tibetan peasants and monks,
bearing arms that are centuries out of date.
The invaders: A British force
equipped with the new killing machines of the 20th century.
No one who watches the terrible four minutes that follow will be unmoved.
The man responsible will be utterly transformed
by the maelstrom he unleashes here.
As the 19th century pushed to its close,
Tibet was much on the minds of many Europeans.
Being the first to reach Lhasa
since the closing of Tibet's borders had become the holy grail of explorers,
as well as for the spies playing out the "Great Game" in the Himalayas.
For about I'd say about 1870-1880 onwards,
you get increasingly sort of obsessive interest in Tibet.
Tibet was seen as this inaccessible, forbidden, foreign Shangri La.
And I think there were probably
hundreds or thousands of British officers
hanging around in the Himalayas at the end of the 19th century,
all of whom wanted to be the first one to break through and get to Lhasa,
The Forbidden City that no European had been to since 1811.
And it created this great race in the latter part of the 19th century
to be the first to get to Lhasa.
And many tried, and many failed.
Russian Colonel, Nikolai Prejevalsky, made five failed attempts,
even though he was escorted by heavily armed Cossacks.
American diplomat and scholar, William Rockhill,
disguised as a Chinese pilgrim, also failed twice.
Renowned Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, he too disguised as a pilgrim,
was turned back just five days' march from Lhasa.
British missionary Annie Tayler
made it to within three days' march of Lhasa,
before being betrayed by her Chinese guide and taken prisoner.
Canadian Susie Rijnhart's story is the most tragic.
Physician and missionary,
she watched her infant son perish from altitude sickness,
then lost her Dutch husband to bandits
after Tibetan officials forced them to turn back.
At the close of the 19th century,
Tibet had managed to repel some 11 Western attempts
to reach Lhasa in four decades.
But its medieval weapons could not hold off the modern world forever.
The man who would win the Europeans race
for Tibet was born in India in 1863,
the year Nain Singh arrived at spy school in Dehra Dun.
The son of a British army officer, Francis Edward Younghusband
would be sent off to England at four to be raised by two spinster aunts,
a religious pair who beat him regularly.
"I lost my childhood happiness, and became serious,"
Younghusband would later write.
At 12, he would be sent off to boarding school at Clifton,
an institution designed to mold young men of empire.
Already oversensitive, repressed and shy,
the small statured Younghusband found his more rambunctious schoolmates
intimidating and made few friends.
It was not until he was 16 that
he would find his soul mate in his previously distant sister, Emmy.
After he fainted in chapel one night, she nursed him back to health,
and the two would exchange strangely passionate letters
for much of their adult lives.
After graduating from Clifton and then military academy,
he left a distraught Emmy behind and set off for India.
Like his father before him,
he would serve on the Northern Frontier in the ing's Dragoons,
and take his place in the "Great Game".
Shy, but fiercely ambitious,
Younghusband was a natural 'Great Gamer,'
a true believer of the righteousness of empire,
and a vocal worrier about Russian designs on all of Asia.
But regimental life proved stifling to the young man,
and once again his seriousness isolated him from his peers.
Francis had always imagined himself living a life
more like that of his uncle and childhood hero, Robert Shaw.
A flamboyant adventurer and tea planter,
Shaw had traveled to many exotic lands beyond the Himalayas.
He had earned himself a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society,
as well as a penchant for dressing in native costumes.
At age 21, Younghusband trekked into the Himalayas
not far from his late uncle's house, and was enchanted.
From this moment forward,
his urgent ambitions would take the shape of these mountains.
And for the rest of his life, mountains would stir odd mystical longings
that his strict religious upbringing had never satisfied.
I had caught just a glimpse of the other side of the Himalayan range,
but I thirsted for more mountain beauty.
I determined to go to Tibet,
and to come to know the curious people of that secluded country,
make a great name for myself,
and be known ever after as a famous traveler.
It was China, not Tibet,
that would give Francis Younghusband his first taste of fame.
1887 found the 24 year old officer in the middle of the Gobi Desert,
retracing a path followed by no European since Marco Polo.
He had managed to convince his superiors
that he could find a new land route from China to India.
The promised route would take him to the Mustagh Pass,
the watershed between India and China,
and long considered impassable.
Under the shadow of 2, the world's second highest peak,
this small man found himself once again
spiritually transformed by a mountain.
"Having once seen that,"
he would later write, "how could I ever be little again?"
The ice precipice at the crest of the Mustagh
did indeed look impassable to Younghusband,
but when his native guide started down the other side, he followed.
On slick leather boots and without ice crampons,
it was a near suicidal descent,
but it would earn Younghusband the fame he craved.
Some called it the greatest feat of mountaineering yet accomplished,
and the Royal Geographical Society would award him
the coveted gold medal for his journey.
His exploits would also bring him to the attention of another 'Great Gamer'
called George Curzon, who shared his fascination with Tibet
and would one day cast Younghusband's fate in the forbidden land.
Younghusband was now one of the world's most eligible bachelors,
but only on paper.
Around any woman other than his sister Emmy,
the daring explorer was in agony, desperately wishing
himself miles away,
preferably alone in the Himalayas.
He was terrified of women. He found them baffling.
He found them strange.
He didn't really know how to get on with them or relate to them.
If you like, he could express himself probably better by climbing a mountain
than he could by having a conversation with somebody.
Francis, for his part, was agonizingly aware of his plight.
A beautiful young socialite had agreed to marry him,
but broke it off when the smitten Francis could not overcome his stiff,
nearly mute panic in her presence.
I am losing my darling May.
All the time I am cold and stiff and formal.
Dejected, Younghusband set his sights once more on Tibet.
He requested leave to slip into the forbidden land
disguised as a Himalayan merchant.
But his superiors had had enough of his adventures.
And 15 years would pass
before fate would give him his shot at Tibet.
In January 1899, a miserable Francis Younghusband watched
as his friend George Curzon was installed as Viceroy of India
amidst great pomp and circumstance.
While Curzon's star had risen, Younghusband's own had fallen,
his early fame eclipsed by a reputation as a bit of a loose cannon.
His army career had plateaued early.
And his personal life was desperately unhappy.
He had married an older woman
who made him promise that they would never have sex.
Somehow the couple managed to have children,
but the marriage was never a happy one.
Approaching 40, the once great explorer was now going nowhere fast.
He has really reached this point by his late 30s
where his career has stagnated and almost stopped.
And that's the moment when suddenly he gets the call
from the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon,
who is a personal friend of his.
He says to him would he like to lead a small expedition into Tibet.
Curzon, from all accounts, was a fairly paranoid person
when it came to the potential designs of Russia.
Tibet was important for him because he felt that
if imperial Russia was to move down and to sort of win Tibet over,
then they would have the Russian bear right at the door of the British Raj.
But the 13th Dalai Lama had refused to open the country to British trade,
to allow Curzon's emissaries beyond the border,
or even to open Curzon's letters.
The Viceroy decided it was time for more forceful measures,
and his friend heartily agreed.
I have no hesitation in recommending that
the power of the monks should be so far broken
as to prevent them any longer selfishly obstructing the prosperity
of both Tibet and of the neighboring British districts.
Francis Younghusband
Thus it was that in 1903 Younghusband led 2,000 British and Indian soldiers
over the 14,000 foot high Jelap Pass into Tibet.
Behind them marched a ragged support column
of some 10,000 coolies and a handful of English journalists
dying for the scoop of the new century.
Also pressed into service were six camels, 3,000 ponies,
5,000 yaks and buffaloes, and 5,000 bullocks,
and more than 7,000 mules most doomed to die on the journey.
The whole strange caravan trailed telegraph wire
that stretched back into India like an umbilical cord to the modern world.
Younghusband would be in charge of negotiating with the Tibetans.
The military leader was an undistinguished General named McDonald.
Younghusband and McDonald detested each other,
a situation that probably contributed to the tragedy ahead.
The British would meet little resistance
on the first leg of the journey,
but the conditions would be harsher than any
the British and Indian soldiers had encountered before.
Twenty men of the 12th Mule Corps were frostbitten,
and 30 men of the 23rd Pioneers were so incapacitated that
they had to be carried on mules.
On the same day,
there were 70 cases of snow blindness among the 8th Gurkhas.
Edmund Candler,
The Daily Mail
Outwardly, Younghusband himself seemed impervious to the elements,
taking cold baths each morning and spending long periods reading,
writing and meditating out in the elements.
In his journal, he was already writing about mental telepathy,
extra terrestrials and out of body travel.
Four months into the journey as the mission approached the town of Guru,
the Tibetan resistance finally materialized.
In the middle of a barren plain,
massed behind a small hastily built wall,
some 1500 Tibetan troops lay in wait.
They vastly outnumbered the British advance guard,
but their firepower was 300 years out of date.
If you read the Tibetan accounts of this period,
it seems that the Tibetans say we're not going to fight,
but were not going to go away.
And the British are baffled by this.
You've got to remember the whole idea of passive resistance
was not something that was understood in 1903, 1904.
And Tibet's reaction was, just please go away.
Younghusband's reaction was, we've got to talk.
He went further and further and further,
and it was an enormous tragedy by the end.
The whole thing must have been incomprehensible to these poor men.
No order had been given to them to retire.
Gathered together in a body,
heir enormous superiority in numbers must have struck them.
They had no idea, of course, of the advantage which we possessed.
Perceval Landon,
The Times, London.
In my view, I think the Tibetans actually knew that
they were up against a formidable force.
I think it is wrong to say that
they were so naive that they thought they really could resist the British.
They had no other choice,
even if they knew they would be slaughtered, but to oppose that.
The Tibetan general rode out to plead his case.
He begged Younghusband to turn back,
retreat to the border and negotiate there.
But Younghusband was unmoved.
He gave the general 15 minutes to begin disarming.
15 minutes later,
General McDonald ordered his troops into fighting positions,
assuming the Tibetans would simply hand over their arms
when confronted with his machine guns, modern rifles and heavy artillery.
But each Tibetan carried on his chest a small pouch
containing a blessing from the Dalai Lama,
designed to render him impervious to English bullets.
McDonald gave the order to approach and begin disarming the Tibetans.
What exactly happened next is still unclear.
That it was one of the bleakest moments in military history is not.
According to British reports,
it was the Tibetan general who resisted and fired the first shot.
Immediately the British began firing their terrible weapons
into the mass of the Tibetan soldiers.
The Tibetans poured over the wall,
while the artillery and automatic weapons cut them down in waves.
To the horror of the British manning the guns against them,
the few Tibetans still standing did not run away, they walked.
I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire.
Though the General's order was to make as big a bag as possible.
Lt. Hadow, Commander, Maxim Gun Detachment
The impossible had happened: Prayers and charms and mantras
the holiest of their holy men had failed them.
They walked with bowed heads,
as if they had been disillusioned with their gods.
Four appalling minutes after it all began,
some 700 ragged Tibetans lay dead or dying on the field,
their useless charms strewn among them.
Francis Younghusband, who had served for over 20 years in the army
but had never seen battle, was horrified.
"It was a terrible and ghastly business,"
he would later write.
It may have been even more ghastly than his British sensibilities
would allow him to admit.
According to the Tibetan and Chinese accounts of the battle,
the Tibetans had extinguished the fuses of their ancient matchlocks
as a sign of non aggression,
rendering them useless for several minutes.
If so, the British were firing artillery and military weapons
into a mass of people armed with swords, slingshots,
and perhaps five modern rifles.
The British set up a field hospital to save the wounded Tibetans.
Baffled by kindness on the heels of slaughter,
the Tibetans nonetheless quickly won over their captors
with their spirit and stoicism.
Daily Mail correspondent, Edmund Candler,
who had lost a hand in the first few seconds of the battle wrote:
They were consistently cheerful,
and they never hesitated to undergo operations.
Did not flinch at pain, and took chloroform without fear.
Everyone who visited the hospital at Tuna
left it with an increased respect for the Tibetans.
It would take four more months for the British force to reach Lhasa.
On July 30th, 1904,
in anticipation of the inevitable, the Dalai Lama fled the city.
Five days later, the British marched into the Forbidden City.
Younghusband, who had once hoped to make it to Lhasa as a spy,
now entered at the head of an army, only to find the place nearly empty.
Undaunted, he arranged a sort of parade
to impress the remaining citizens,
and was greeted by what he thought was a conqueror's welcome.
They'd clap at them, like that.
Younghusband thinks this is a very good sign that he is being welcomed.
Later on when I looked at this, I talked to some Tibetans about it
who said that it is a way of driving out evil spirits.
They'd go like... (claps)
So, I think Younghusband thought they were so happy that
they were lining up and clapping.
This, again, you know, the culture difference.
Finally, Younghusband rounded up some high ranking monks
with whom to negotiate.
After a month of wrangling,
he had achieved all his king and country had asked of him.
He had inspired his troops to follow him through hundreds of miles
of the most hostile geography that
British and Indian soldiers had ever encountered.
He had pried open the doors of Tibet,
and negotiated a trade settlement highly favorable to Britain.
But Tibet would not bestow its real gift on Younghusband
until the moment of his departure.
On the day before Younghusband is due to leave Lhasa,
having gotten the treaty in his pocket,
he goes off into the mountains on his pony,
and he's suddenly infused with this kind of cosmic joy.
He's infused with this very strong mystical or spiritual experience.
The exhilaration of the moment
grew and grew until it thrilled me with overpowering intensity.
Never again could I think evil, or ever be at enmity with any man.
All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy, glowing radiancy.
That single hour on leaving Lhasa,
was worth all of the rest of a lifetime.
I was boiling over with love for the whole world.
That world, however, had already begun to lament the despoiling of Lhasa.
There are no more forbidden cities
which men have not mapped and photographed.
Why could we not have left at least one city out of bounds?
Candler, The Daily Mail
Even Lord Curzon was shaken by the taking of Lhasa:
"I am almost ashamed
to have destroyed the virginity of the bride to whom you aspired,"
he wrote to Swedish explorer Sven Hedin.
Almost immediately London began to distance itself
from Younghusband's invasion.
Soon, it would negate it entirely.
What happens a couple of years later is that
a liberal government comes to power in London,
and three years after his expedition, a new agreement is signed
which effectively takes away all the privileges and benefits
that Younghusband has gained through the Treaty of Lhasa.
And so the great irony of Younghusband's invasion of Tibet,
is that, from a political point of view,
it gains almost nothing for the British.
Far more than Tibet itself,
Francis Younghusband would emerge forever changed
by his hollow victory and the tragedy he created there.
Outwardly, he remained the good imperialist,
serving as provincial governor,
president of the Royal Geographical Society
and coordinator of the first four expeditions to Mt. Everest.
But he also became a passionate advocate of Indian self rule,
and founded his most lasting legacy,
the World Congress of Faiths, a group dedicated to bringing together
people of all religions in a spirit of tolerance.
Like many of his time,
he would write enthusiastically about spiritualism, the occult,
and even extra terrestrials.
His ideas become increasingly kooky.
You can actually get this sense from his diaries that
he is going to official functions,
and people are slightly thinking
"What on earth has happened to Francis Younghusband?"
His prolific writings ranged from confident predictions of a new messiah,
to tracts on the sanctity of marriage,
though his own marriage was an empty shell.
As his daughter Eileen would later say:
He had an essential warm heartedness,
but it always, somehow, missed the mark.
But finally, at age 76 and for the first time in his life,
Francis Younghusband fell in love.
His passionate affair with the much younger Madeline Lees,
a married mother of seven,
brought back to him the happiness he had lost in childhood.
You know, the Tibetans very interestingly think that
ultimately they actually conquered Younghusband.
"Well, you know, he came and conquered us,
butchered us, but in the end, he went back kind of converted
and found the right path for himself."
And this is very much part of our kind of notion of Tibet,
that it has this quality to heal, transform,
change and to highlight for people,
if you could just get there, the spiritual side of life.
The two men who marched to Lhasa did no favors to Tibet,
but they revealed to the rest of the world the land
that would become the symbol of humanity's spiritual yearnings.
In July 1942,
Sir Francis Edward Younghusband died in the arms of his beloved Madeline.
His last request, a tombstone,
carved with the place of his terrible triumph
and his strange redemption Lhasa,
the Forbidden City at the heart of the once and future forbidden land.