Siege of Shangri-LA The Quest for Tibet's Sacred Hidden Paradise

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 fMcRae, Michael is the author of 'Siege of Shangri-LA The Quest for Tibet's Sacred Hidden Paradise' with ISBN 9780767904858 and ISBN 0767904850.