another interesting article:
Secret past of the man who conquered Everest
Sherpa
Tenzing Norgay, who accompanied Edmund Hillary to the summit of the
world's highest mountain in 1953, was Tibetan and not Nepalese, a new
book reveals. Ed Douglas reports
It is one of the most romantic legends in
mountaineering - the story of how a young Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay
tended his father's yak herds on a high mountain pass below Everest
before becoming, with Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach its
summit in 1953.
But
while Hillary and the expedition's leader Lord Hunt both believed the
Sherpa had been born in a remote mountain village in Nepal, a new book
by American mountaineer Ed Webster claims that not only was Tenzing
born in Tibet, but he spent much of his childhood there. The world's
most famous Sherpa was not really a Sherpa at all.
Even after
Tenzing's death in 1986, the truth was considered too sensitive to
disclose, not least for fear of embarrassing the Indian government
which had supported Tenzing after his ascent. It would have handed a
propaganda coup to the Chinese authorities in the Tibetan capital Lhasa
that a 'Chinese climber' was the first to climb Everest. But now
Webster has been given permission by the family to reveal the truth
about Tenzing's real origins.
Throughout his life, Tenzing
remained vague about his background. In his autobiography, Tiger of the
Snows, he obscured the truth of his childhood without quite denying it,
telling ghostwriter James Ramsey Ullman he grew up in the village of
Thame, in Nepal. In fact, his parents migrated there during the early
1920s after a period of financial hardship and debt to a local Tibetan
governor.
Tenzing, however, was more forthcoming about his
birthplace, saying: 'I was born in a place called Tsa-chu, near the
great mountain of Makalu, and only a day's march from Everest.' Tenzing
also explains that when he was born, his mother had been on a
pilgrimage to the nearby monastery at Ghang La, the name of Tenzing's
house in Darjeeling.
When Tenzing climbed Everest in 1953 he
was hailed by the Nepali government in Kathmandu as a local hero who
happened to live in India. Nepal's fledgling constitutional monarchy
feared political domination by the new Indian republic and both
countries saw great propaganda value in claiming Tenzing, the first
humble-born Asian of the modern era to achieve global fame, as their
own.
Tenzing's caution about revealing his true origins was
partly explained by this political wrangling. 'After we climbed
Everest,' Hillary said, 'and Tenzing was invited to England, we were
really in a jam because Tenzing had no passport.' The crisis was
averted only when the Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru stepped in and
personally ensured Tenzing received an Indian passport - something for
which the Nepalese authorities never forgave him. Nehru became
Tenzing's patron and authorised the establishment of a mountaineering
school in Darjeeling, which Tenzing helped to run. To avoid political
embarrassment, Tenzing described himself as 'born in the womb of Nepal
and raised in the lap of India,' but that was far from the whole story.
Now the full story has been revealed in Webster's Snow in the
Kingdom, which describes an expedition in 1988 to the rarely visited
East Face of Everest which approaches the mountain through the Tibetan
Kharta Valley where Tenzing's home village of Moyun is located.
Included
in the team was Tenzing's oldest surviving son, Norbu, who was born in
the Sherpa community at Darjeeling in India where his father had
started his career as a climber after migrating there in the early
1930s.
Norbu, like most Sherpas, knew all about his father's
secret and, while in Tibet, he was able to meet long-lost relatives,
including Tenzing's half-brother Tashi, and also to solve the riddle of
Tenzing's birthplace.
'If Tenzing had come out with the truth
that he was, in fact, a Tibetan, he would only have magnified his
nationality problems, greatly disappointing India where he then lived,'
Webster told The Observer. 'It's possible some Sherpas might have
ridiculed him as something of an imposter, and as a social and cultural
inferior.' All of Tenzing's three wives were Sherpas and he remains a
potent hero in Darjeeling and the Khumbu.
'I believe Tenzing
was a sensitive and a sincere man,' says Webster. 'His writings make
this clear, so Tenzing never lied outright about his family origins -
but he never told the full truth either. Perhaps he believed he was
simply a mountaineer, and nationality didn't matter.'
During
the expedition in 1988, Webster identified the monastery at Ghang La as
Namdag Lhe Phodang - the 'pure god's palace' - high in the Kama Valley
of Tibet. The region is very sacred to Tibetan Buddhists, regarded as a
'heavenly refuge' in times of war and famine. Tsa-chu, or more
accurately Tshechu, is another holy site in a remote side-valley not
far from Ghang La. The yak pastures around the monastery command a
superb view of Everest and are almost certainly where Tenzing spent his
childhood summers. Both the family house and the monastery were
destroyed following the Chinese invasion in 1950.
Ironically,
the Sherpa people originated in Kham in eastern Tibet, more than 1,000
miles from Everest, and migrated to Nepal in the sixteenth century.
They still number only a few thousand in a Nepali population of 22
million but are world famous for their contribution to mountaineering.
While
the Sherpa homeland is considered to be the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal
south of Everest, the Sherpas have always had strong cultural and
economic links with Tibetans across the border. Tenzing's cousin, a
famous reincarnate lama called Ngwang Tenzin Norbu, founded monasteries
at Rongbuk on the Tibetan side, and at Tengpoche on the Nepali side.
Tenzing Norgay's cousin also gave him his name, which means 'fortunate
supporter of religion'.
The tradition of mountaineers hiring
Sherpas began in Darjeeling at the start of the twentieth century; the
hill men quickly proved the most reliable and physically capable
porters. The best Sherpas were termed 'Tigers' and awarded medals.
Mountain tourism proved lucrative and more migrated from the Everest
region to India. Until 1949, Nepal remained closed to almost all
Europeans.
For Tenzing, whose parents were struggling to make a
new life for themselves in the Khumbu, Darjeeling offered a chance for
economic success, but his early years there were plagued by money
problems as he sought to make his mark as a porter for Western
mountaineers. Tenzing never saw his father again, and didn't return to
the Khumbu to see his mother until 1952. When news of his sudden fame
reached his homeland in Tibet, he was overwhelmed by 'all sorts of
relatives I had never seen or heard of before'.
Now, Sherpas
earn thousands of dollars a year helping Western clients on Everest
but, with the opening of Nepal to tourism, they no longer migrate to
Darjeeling to look for work. Many Sherpas have become wealthy in a
country where per capita income is $200 a year. The influx of tourists
to the region Tenzing helped make famous has caused environmental
problems, but has also helped alleviate the economic hardship caused by
the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
After the invasion of Tibet in
1950, China also claimed sovereignty of the Khumbu region of Nepal,
which it saw as ethnically Tibetan.They mounted a number of
Sino-Tibetan expeditions to Everest following the occupation for their
propaganda value and still control access to the mountain. Kate
Saunders of the Tibet Information Network told The Observer: 'The
Chinese will understand very well the propaganda value of Tenzing's
birth. They have never wasted an opportunity to stress Chinese
sovereignty in Tibet.'
Perhaps Webster's most intriguing claim
is that the seven-year-old Tenzing Norgay may have met George Mallory,
who disappeared on Everest in 1924 and whose body was discovered last
year. According to the diary of fellow climber Guy Bullock, during the
first expedition to Everest in August 1921, Mallory spent a day at
Tenzing's home village before trekking through the summer pastures used
by Tenzing's family to the foot of the mountain's East Face.
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WTF is this ????)
