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On
November 18, 2006, there was an endearing pen-picture of the Lhasa
Apso supported by two charming photographs in the Saturday Extra supplement
of The Tribune. The male dog showcased his tawny-golden, fleecy
coat at its luxuriant best. There is nothing quite to match his pelt
in any other dog breed of the world. And in the other photograph, the
puppy, of course, was a lovable bundle of mischief. This dog breed
was not known to mankind outside of Lhasa’s precincts till 1904,
when Lt F.M. (Eric) Bailey of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)
chanced to encounter one strange-looking dog, cradled snugly inside
the warm woollen apparel of a venerable old Tibetan woman. Well, the
British had launched an unethical and a totally unprovoked war on
Tibet under the garb of establishing bilateral commerce. So a
brigade-sized force comprising three infantry battalions (Sikh
Pioneers, Gorkha and Royal Fusiliers) supported by two Maxim machine
guns (the most lethal killers at that time) and four pieces of
mountain artillery guns had set out to persuade and/or intimidate the
Dalai Lama to accept British suzerainty over his country. The
ill-equipped Tibetans were so out-matched that the very first
firefight north of Chumbi village was like a dress rehearsal for the
Jallianwallah Bagh atrocity. In less than half an hour, the BEF
recorded 628 Tibetans dead and 222 wounded with no loss to them. And
the first booty of note from this was what we now know as the
"Shahtoosh". This incredibly warm, smooth and lightweight
wool comes from the inner pelt of a Chirru or the Tibetan Gazelle. To
begin with, the BEF had laid siege to Khamba Dzong in southwestern
Tibet in 1903 hoping to bring the Dalai Lama to the negotiating table.
Much like what happened to Napoleon at Moscow, the Tibetans simply
refused to take note of the BEF’s presence. Tired of waiting (which
was to last for more than four months), the officers took to hunting.
With the shooting of Chirrus was born the idea of exploitation of its
wool for the commercial manufacture of the now infamous Shahtoosh
shawl. That also marked the beginning of the end of this most elegant
looking of all Gazelles. The Chirru is close to extinction
today. Many a trans-Himalayan butterflies and Alpine flowers, too,
were encountered by the BEF not known to science till then. Both Col
Sir Francis Younghusband, the diplomatic head of the BEF, and Lieut
Eric Bailey were avid collectors. Today, one of the exotic lillies
from the Chumbi Valley carries Younghushand’s name. And it was often
stated in catalogues in the UK that the more eye-catching blooms in
home-gardens of England and Europe were a result of the seeds of
alpine flowers collected to begin with by Bailey from the Himalayas
and the trans-Himalayas. As the BEF advanced towards Lhasa, short of
Gyantse, they came to a glacier called "The Field of Milk"
by the Tibetans. In the scheme of Nature when winter recedes, the
glaciers begin to melt triggering the flowering of plants and shrubs.
It was on the fringes of this glacier that Eric Bailey discovered the
dainty Blue Himalayan Poppy, promptly named "Meconopsis
Baileyea", though now called "Meconopsis
aculeata". Once the BEF reached Lhasa around August (?) 1904,
there was no Dalai Lama to confabulate with. So while Col Sir Francis
Younghusband parleyed with the Dalai Lama’s Council of Ministers,
the officers of the BEF once again spent their days in polo matches
and horse races with the locals having the Pota La as the backdrop.
They also visited monastries and Lhasa proper as any tourist would. It
was on one such idle afternoon that Eric Bailey had spotted an old
lady with her pet dog outside the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s
summer palace in the shadow of the Pota La. After days of canvassing
with Lhasa’s affluent families, Eric Bailey did succeed in obtaining
honourably three or five of these dogs which science later classified
as of the Apso breed. It would appear that Colonel Bailey first
introduced this breed to the kennels of the world in October 1929 when
he went on "home" leave. After lunching with him, Sir
Francis Younghusband wrote to his daughter that "Eric Bailey has
brought home thirteen Tibetan dogs and is going to make a fortune by
them!" But the acquisition of a booty, which required nerve and
daring horsemanship was the lassoing of the Kyangs, the Tibetan wild
Ass. In due course two were successfully lassoed. Unfortunately one
drowned during the crossing of the Sangpo river as the BEF traced its
steps back to India. The one Kyang that survived was ultimately
housed at the London Zoo. Much to the chagrin of the 7 Mountain
Artillery Battery gunners who had lassoed it and justly considered it
as their trophy, but somehow it became a custom with the Royal
Fusiliers to borrow it from the zoo for a day when they paraded
through the streets of London annually, as per an old tradition. But
henceforth with a difference in as much that the Kyang also paraded as
their Regimental Mascot! That Tibetan Kyang lived happily to a ripe
old age siring many offsprings with a female of the species procured
from Mongolia. Those Kyangs on display in the London zoo today are
said to be his bloodline! With the passage of one hundred years, we
may look at the floral and faunal booty, mostly acquired by the BEF
from wilderness, with a sense of equanimity. But it would be hard to
forgive Lt Col A Waddell, the senior medical officer and an amateur
anthropologist, for the outright plunder of priceless Tankhas and tons
of sacred manuscripts from monastries. The pity of it all is that
nearly half were destroyed and damaged by rain, snow and damp before
reaching the London Museum. Waddell published his account and
justification in his book Lhasa and its Mysteries in 1905. But
it was left to Edmund Candler of the Daily Mail, who had
accompanied the BEF, to sum up the deep-down human sorrow, at the
soiling of Lhasa as it were, with the arrival of the BEF there in his
book, The Unveiling of Lhasa (1905) thus: "It was
impossible for the least sentimental to avoid a certain regret for the
drawing back of that curtain that had meant so much to the imagination
of mankind... With the unveiling of Lhasa fell the last stronghold of
the older romance`85" In hindsight it can now be said that the
first decade of the 20th Century marked for the Tibetans "the end
of living and the beginning of survival". These words were
uttered in 1854 by the anguished Red Indian Chief Seattle when he and
his tribe as indeed all other Red Indians too were dispossessed of
their home and hearth and became refugees in the land of their
forebears. That was the result of another booty of another war, though
separated by oceans and continents from Tibet but in essence of the
same consequences.
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