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TRESPASSERS
ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
Also by Peter Hopkirk
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road:
The Search for the Lost Cities and
Treasures of Central Asia
Setting the East Ablaze:
Lenin’s Dream of Empire in Asia
The Great Game:
The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
Like Hidden Fire:
The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire
TRESPASSERS
ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
THE SECRET EXPLORATION OF TIBET
PETER HOPKIRK
KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL
New York • Tokyo • London
Kodansha America, Inc.
575 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.
Kodansha International Ltd.
17-14 Otowa 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112, Japan
Published in 1995 by Kodansha America, Inc.
by arrangement with John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., London ^
First published in 1982 by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., London.
First American edition published in 1983 by J. P. Tarcher, Inc.,
Los Angeles.
This is a Kodansha Globe book.
Copyright © 1982, 1995 by Peter Hopkirk.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hopkirk, Peter.
Trespassers on the roof of the world : the secret exploration of
Tibet / Peter Hopkirk.
p. cm. — (Kodansha globe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56836-050-9
1. Tibet (China)—History. I. Title. II. Series.
DS786.H6177 1995
951'. 5—dc20 94-48629
Printed in the United States of America
03 04 RRD/H 10 9876543
Contents
Sources of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements • •
Vll
Prologue
i
Tibet - The Forbidden Land
I 5
The Unholy Spies of Captain Montgomerie
2 20
With Prayer-Wheel and Sextant to Lhasa
3 28
Panning for Gold on the Roof of the World
4 37
The Race for the Holy City Begins
5 55
6 Four Dreams of Lhasa 68
Death of an Explorer
7
92
8 The Bizarre Adventure of Henry Savage Landor
H4
The Nightmare of Susie Rijnhart
9 137
Lhasa - at Last
io 159
ii ‘Golden Domes like Tongues of Fire’ 184
12 The Riddle of the Snows 206
13 Lhasa Lowers its Guard 220
Jumping into the Land of God 237
14
Red Guards in Lhasa 248
15
Afterword 267
Bibliography of Principal Sources 269
Index 273
About the Author 277
Sources of Illustrations
Nos. i 2, 4, 5, 9, io and n from Tibet, the Mysterious by Sir Thomas
Holdich, published by Alston Rivers, London; No. 3 by courtesy of the
Royal Geographical Society; No. 6 from Three Years in Tibet by Ekai Ka¬
waguchi, published by Theosophical Publishing Society, 1909; No. 7 from
With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple by Dr. Susie Rijnhart, published by
Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1901; No. 8 from Two Lady Missionaries
in Tibet by Isabel Robson, published by S. W. Partridge, London; No. 12
from India and Tibet by Sir Francis Younghusband, published by John
Murray, 1910; No. 13 from Peking to Lhasa compiled by Sir Francis Young-
husband, published by Constable, 1925; No. 14 from My Journey to Lhasa
by Alexandra David-Neel, published by William Heinemann, 1927; No. 15
from In the Forbidden Land by H. S. Landor, published by William
Heinemann, 1898; No. 16 from Francis Younghusband by George Seaver,
published by John Murray, 1952; Nos. 17, 18, 22 and 23 by courtesy of
the National Army Museum; No. 19 from Trans-Himalaya by Sven Hedin,
published by Macmillan, 1909; No. 20 sketch from The Great Closed Land
by Annie Marston, published by S. W. Partridge, London; No. 21 photo
by F. Spencer Chapman; No. 24 from With Mounted Infantry in Tibet by
Major W. J. Ottley, published by Smith, Elder and Co., 1906; No. 25 from
Lhasa: The Holy City by F. Spencer Chapman, published by Chatto and
Windus, 1938; No. 26 from The People of Tibet by Sir Charles Bell, published
by Oxford University Press, 1928; No. 27 from On the Frontier and Beyond
by Sir Frederick O’Connor, published by John Murray, 1931.
Maps by Denys Baker.
Acknowledgements
In piecing together this narrative my greatest debt must be to
those remarkable men and women - all long dead and little
remembered - who took part in the race to reach Lhasa. Their
adventures and misadventures, as related at the time, provide
much of the book’s drama. I owe a similar debt to those other
travellers whose trespasses into Tibet also form part of the
story. Without their first-hand accounts of what befell them in
this wild and remote Asian backwater this book could not have
been written. All these sources, today long forgotten and out of
print, are acknowledged in my bibliography.
For my knowledge of the political and diplomatic history of
the period I owe much to Professor Alastair Lamb’s works,
particularly to his Britain and Chinese Central Asia, a book
which no one writing on modern Tibet can afford to ignore.
Like him I have spent illuminating hours combing the so-called
political and secret files, and I am grateful to the staff of the
India Office Library and the Public Records Office for their
help. For my understanding of more recent events in Tibet, I
found Hugh Richardson’s Tibet and its History invaluable, its
author having personally witnessed many of them and partici¬
pated in not a few.
The individual to whom I owe most, however, is my wife
Kath whose thoroughness in all things has contributed so much
to this book at every stage. Others to whom my gratitude is due
for assistance include Dr Michael Aris of Wolfson College,
Oxford, and Zara Fleming, formerly of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, both Tibetan specialists. I am also indebted to Mrs
Joan Mary Jehu of Fulham who, as a pre-war teenager, was the
Acknowledgements
- Vlll -
second Englishwoman ever to visit Lhasa (her mother being the
first), and her memories of it were a valuable source of insight to
me. My gratitude, too, is due to Janina Slater, once of Peking,
now of The Times, who battled against the clock to produce the
final typescript and who suggested a number of useful clarifica¬
tions.
Finally I must thank my publisher and editor, John R.
Murray, without whose constant encouragement this book
would have remained no more than a synopsis scribbled on the
back of an Income Tax demand.
Peter Hopkirk
