Affair of the Dancing Lamas

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Tibetan “Lamas” in London , December 1924

The Affair of the Dancing Lamas (Eng. "Affair of the dancing lamas ") was a diplomatic upset between Tibet and Great Britain that lasted almost a decade . The occasion was a visit by a group of Tibetan monks to Great Britain from autumn 1924 to 1925. The group was part of an advertising campaign for the official film made by John Noel about the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1924 .

Both the Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatsho and the Tibetan government protested sharply both against the expedition film, which showed Tibetans licking each other, and against the appearances that the Tibetan monks made before the film was shown to the public. As a result of the incident, which was perceived as an affront to religious customs, the Tibetan government stopped further foreign expeditions to Tibet for several years. It was not until 1933 that a British expedition was allowed to travel to the Tibetan part of the Himalayas again.

The consequences of the Affair of the Dancing Lamas for Tibet were more serious. There the influence of monastic traditionalists increased considerably, who were thus able to largely undermine the reform attempts of the 13th Dalai Lama to modernize the country and the Tibetan army based on the western model. This development led to a long-lasting political and military weakening of Tibet. Historians have repeatedly speculated whether a more reformed Tibet according to the wishes of the Dalai Lama could have more successfully opposed the 1950 annexation by the People's Republic of China.

Relations between Great Britain and Tibet at the beginning of the 20th century

Relations between Great Britain and Tibet were marked by misunderstandings and misjudgments, some of which had drastic consequences, for decades before the Affair of the Dancing Lamas.

Tibet and "The Great Game"

Major Francis Younghusband with some soldiers during the British Tibet campaign in 1904

The British-Indian government considered Tibet to be one of India's most problematic neighbors. The almost inaccessible country, about whose circumstances little was known, was considered backward and its deliberate isolation from the outside world was interpreted as an attempt by the religious upper class to keep the Tibetans deliberately ignorant of the outside world. However, a number of Britons who had influence in British India believed that Tibet was more open to advances by Tsarist Russia. In the so-called Great Game , the conflict between Great Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia that has been going on since 1813, this would have weakened Great Britain's position considerably.

In complete misunderstanding of the country's geographic features, parts of the British and British Indian governments feared that Tibet could become a Russian gateway to British India. After the attempt to forcibly establish diplomatic relations with Tibet in 1903 failed, the British Tibet campaign began at the end of the same year because the Indian viceroy Lord Curzon felt compelled to act out of fear of a Russian threat. The leader of the campaign, Francis Younghusband , found no traces of Russian activities in Tibet: there was neither the presumed Russian arsenal nor a Russian-built railway. Edmund Chandler, who had accompanied the expedition for the Daily Mail , stated for his readers that the idea that British colonial rule could be endangered by an advance of Tsarist Russia into geographically isolated and inaccessible Tibet was absurd. The only consequence of the campaign was that the Chinese government was able to document its unchanged claim to sovereignty over Tibet. The alleged threat to the British-Indian borders from tsarist Russia proved to be non-existent as early as 1907. In August 1907, under pressure from France, Russia buried its disputes with Great Britain and promised to leave the borders of British India untouched.

British-Tibetan rapprochement

Charles Bell , Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal and Thubten Gyatsho 1910

The consequence of the British Tibet campaign was that China felt compelled to invade there to demonstrate its claim to Tibet. The Chinese General Zhao Erfeng , feared because of his brutality, occupied eastern Tibet in 1906 and then all of Tibet in 1910. There were numerous atrocities. The British Tibet campaign had also led to high losses on the Tibetan side and in the so-called Guru massacre more than 600 Tibetan soldiers were killed who had not offered any resistance against the British, who were clearly superior in military terms. Unlike the Chinese, however, the British had not abused the Tibetan civilian population, did not pillage any of the monasteries or slaughter monks and pay for requisitioned food, fodder and wood. The Dalai Lama, who had found exile in Mongolia during the British Tibet campaign and had only returned to Lhasa in 1909, sought British protection this time and fled first to Sikkim and then to Darjeeling in 1910 , where the British diplomat Charles Bell provided him with a house . This ushered in a phase of political rapprochement between the two countries that was only briefly interrupted by the First World War. After the Chinese Xinhai Revolution in 1912 led to the Chinese troops being withdrawn from Tibet, Great Britain briefly supplied weapons to Tibet, which the British had now classified as independent. After the end of the First World War, concerns about a resurgent Russia gave both sides the desire to strengthen relations between the two countries.

The friendliness and helpfulness that Charles Bell showed towards the Dalai Lama in 1912 paid off in 1920. Bell was the first European to be invited to Lhasa by the Tibetan government. Bell stayed in Lhasa until October 1921 and advised the Dalai Lama on his reform efforts, which among other things aimed at modernizing and expanding the Tibetan army. The resistance of the more conservative forces within Tibet against these plans was so great that Bell at times feared that attacks would be carried out on him.

The British Mount Everest Expeditions

The third pole

The Mount Everest set for a number of British the "third pole" represents example, wrote the deeply patriotic mountaineers. Alexander Kellas in his later expedition colleague Sandy Wollaston :

“We missed the pole after ruling the seas for more than 300 years, and we will definitely not miss the chance to explore the area around Mount Everest after having been the dominant power in for more than 160 years India were […]. I would be proud to go there with two to ten porters, even go solo, to secure that bit of exploration for Britain. "

Since the route via Nepal into the Mount Everest area was not open, only a route via Tibet came into question. However, until 1920 the Tibetan government had strictly refused to permit a British expedition. Both Alexander Mitchell Kellas and John Noel had secretly carried out expeditions to the region. For example, Noel was disguised as a local, only accompanied by a Nepalese Sherpa and a childhood friend from North India, who advanced into the region of the Tibetan highlands. He followed the river valley of the Tista and came within sight of Mount Everest . His masquerade as a local was exposed shortly afterwards and he was forced to return to Sikkim by Tibetan officials .

It was thanks to the influence of Charles Bell, who was repeatedly harassed with this matter by Francis Younghusband - now chairman of the Royal Geographical Society - that in 1921 the approval was finally given that British expeditions were allowed to travel to the area of ​​the Tibetan highlands.

The three expeditions

Members of the 1921 British Expedition
Standing: Wollaston, Howard-Bury, Heron, Raeburn
Sitting: Mallory, Wheeler, Bullock, Morshead

There were three British expeditions in total. The first in 1921, in which Alexander Mitchell Kellas died, had the sole aim of mapping the area around Mount Everest. The second (1922) and third (1924) expeditions specifically aimed at the first ascent of Mount Everest. The expeditions came at a time when Tibet had not yet acquired the reputation of a deeply spiritual land in the Western mind. The translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into a Western language appeared for the first time in 1927, the travel reports by Nicholas Roerich , who dealt intensively with the culture of the Himalayan region, not until 1930. The publications by Alexandra David-Néel also came out after the last British expedition . Accordingly unprepared, the expedition members of the three British expeditions in the 1920s encountered a completely different world of ideas, in which people only bathed once a year, practiced polyandry , fed corpses to vultures and monks made music on human bones. On all three expeditions there were violations of the religious customs of the Tibetans. Passes were crossed without observing the prescribed rituals, game was hunted in regions where this was prohibited for religious reasons, and ponds were used for bathing at times when this could evoke the wrath of the gods. These violations, together with an association of the expeditions with a military advance, contributed significantly to the fact that large parts of the Tibetan upper class were hostile to them.

John Noel's expedition documentaries

George Mallory , 1915

John Noel had not been able to take part in the first expedition in 1921 because the British War Department was unwilling to release him from his army service. On the second expedition, however, Noel took on the role of photographer and cameraman. The film that Noel made during the expedition was one of the measures the RGS used to encourage the British population to climb again , along with the lecture tours of the two mountaineers involved in the expedition, George Mallory and George Ingle Finch . Climbing Mount Everest ran for ten weeks in the Philharmonic Hall in London and was reasonably successful after a failed premiere and the subsequent addition of music. Box office sales were £ 10,000 and the Royal Geographic Society, which owned the film rights, made £ 500 from the film.

Noel had founded a private company in 1924, which acquired the photo and film rights to the third expedition for 8,000 British pounds, and thus contributed significantly to the financing of this renewed attempt at ascent. 8,000 pounds was an extremely high sum for the time. Noel had only been able to finance such a purchase price for the film and photo rights with the help of investors like the Aga Khan and Francis Younghusband. Noel was determined to make the film a success regardless of the outcome of the expedition. Should the first ascent fail, it should turn into a documentary about the still unknown Tibet.

A total of 14 cameras were available to Noel, including a small, pocket-sized model that the climbers were supposed to take with them to the summit. Noel accompanied the last ascent with his special camera up to the north ridge (North Col) at an altitude of 7000 meters. George Mallory and his young companion Andrew Irvine did not return from this last attempt at the first ascent on June 8, 1924 . A brief note from Mallory to Noel is the last contact that the expedition members who were not involved in the ascent attempt had with Mallory.

The film The Epic of Mount Everest

For those on the expedition, the alleged deaths of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were a tragedy. However, it was inconceivable for the expedition participants what sympathy the disappearance of the two climbers in Great Britain triggered. British newspapers, which soon learned of the disappearance of the two climbers, puzzled whether they had reached the summit before they died. At the memorial service at London's St Paul's Cathedral which took British king , the Prince of Wales , the Duke of York and the Duke of Connaught part. That same evening there was a commemoration of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Alpine Club in the Royal Albert Hall , which was attended by the leading figures of the British mountaineering world.

A kangling ( rkang gling ), a Tibetan trumpet made from thigh bones, as used by the Tibetan monks during their performances. Exhibit in the British Museum.

The death of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine forced John Noel to redirect the film from scratch. Noel briefly toyed with the idea of ​​cutting two films from the material: one on the attempt to climb Everest and a travel documentary about exotic Tibet. Ultimately, however, he decided to make a film, which should be more than just a cinema experience. He hired a well-known set designer who designed the superstructures and transformed the cinema halls into a Tibetan courtyard, with the mountain peaks of the Himalayas in the background. To give it a more local flavor, Noel asked John Macdonald, a Briton living in India who had been on-site support for both the 1922 and 1924 expeditions, to send seven Tibetan monks to London to make sure that they brought out equipment typical of Tibetan rituals had: cymbals , copper horns, bells and swords as well as trumpets made from human thigh bones and drums made from human skulls. According to Noel's plans, these monks should go on tour with the film and appear before the film is shown. The public attention was correspondingly great. Headlines appeared in one of the British daily newspapers such as High dignitaries of the Tibetan Church arrive in London , Bishop dancing on stage , music of skulls . In fact, they were mostly simple monks, only one of the seven monks was actually a lama , a spiritual teacher.

Reaction of Tibet

Because of the attention that Tibetan monks received in Britain, it was inevitable that the Tibetan government would find out. She handed over an official diplomatic protest note . Obviously one saw oneself culturally exposed by individual scenes in the film, the appearance of the monks and the images of Mount Everest, a holy mountain for Tibetans, violated the religious customs of the country. The Tibetan Prime Minister also sent a diplomatic note to the British official in Tibet, FM Bailey, demanding that the British government force the monks to return. The diplomatic protest ended with the statement that no permits for expeditions to Tibet would be issued in the future. The Dalai Lama ordered the arrest of the monks as soon as they returned to their homeland. The immediate result was a noticeable slowdown in relations between Tibet and British India.

The aristocratic class in Tibet in particular was outraged by scenes showing Tibetans licking their children and then eating the lice. Tibet's attitude also found support in neighboring countries. The Maharajah of Sikkim found the lice scene so humiliating that he forbade John Noel from entering Sikkim.

The seven monks had traveled abroad without their abbot's permission. The fact that they were now being marketed as a fairground show in London aroused the ire of the conservative monastic faction in Tibet, whose influence in Lhasa was on the rise. In Noel's film, Tibet was a wonderfully old-fashioned land where time stood still. In fact, in 1924, Lhasa was on the verge of revolution and there were even plans to overthrow the Dalai Lama. From the point of view of the Dalai Lama and the liberal forces in Tibet, the Affair of the Dancing Lamas came at a time that could hardly have been more unfavorable: with the support of FM Bailey, the influence of the conservative monasteries was to be curtailed. What happened in detail is not known, but this project failed. Both the liberal Tibetan army chief and the police chief went into exile in Sikkim in 1924/1925. Instead of modernizing Tibet, the conservative forces emerged stronger and successfully suppressed any attempts at modernization by the Dalai Lama. There is broad consensus that a politically and militarily modernized Tibet would have been better able to resist the annexation by China in 1950.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lawrence James: Raj. The Making of British India. P. 390
  2. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 60.
  3. ↑ Lawrence James: Raj. The Making of British India. P. 392.
  4. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 119.
  5. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 58.
  6. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 121.
  7. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 122.
  8. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence . P. 124.
  9. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 79. The original quote is: We missed both poles after having control of the sea for 300 years, and we certainly ought not to miss the exploration of the Mt. Everest group after being the premier power in India for 160 years ... I for one would be glad to go in with 2 to 10 coolies, or even solo, so as to secure this little bit of exploration for Britain.
  10. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 82.
  11. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 247.
  12. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 248.
  13. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 300.
  14. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 303.
  15. ^ Peter Hansen, The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s. P. 719.
  16. ↑ Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 127.
  17. ↑ David Breashears, Audrey Salkeld: Mallory's Secret. What happened on Mount Everest? Steiger 2000, ISBN 3-89652-220-5 .
  18. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 467.
  19. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 468.
  20. ^ A b c Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 561.
  21. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 560.
  22. ^ A b c d Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 562.
  23. ^ Peter Hansen, The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s. P. 712.
  24. ^ A b c Wade Davis: Into the Silence. P. 563.