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"Eric Bailey has brought home thirteen Tibetan dogs and is going to make a fortune by them." The above sentence is from the letter written in October 1929 by Sir Francis Younghusband to his daughter. Twenty five years preceding that observation make a fascinating story of how men and events moved to create history. The British had for long wanted to have a "presence" in Tibet but all their efforts were summarily rebuffed. So in 1903-04, Lord Curzon dispatched Maj Francis Younghusband to Lhasa, escorted by an Indian Army Brigade, to negotiate a trade treaty with Tibet. The Tibetans were naturally militarily outmatched but certainly not outwitted. Even as the Union Jack was triumphantly hoisted in August 1904 at the military encampment in the shadow of the Pota La, the Dalai Lama, along with his "Kashang" (Supreme Council), quietly slipped away from Lhasa, leaving Younghusband no one to negotiate the treaty with! Maintaining the stiff-upper-lip, Younghusband parlayed with the second-rung administrators of the Dalai Lama while the rest of the mission fraternised with the locals. It was on one such idle afternoon that Lieutenant F. M. (Eric) Bailey saw an old lady, carrying a hairy creature smuggled inside the folds of her Yak-hair garments. Intrigued, Bailey followed her discreetly. On reaching a sunny spot by the Lhasa rivulet, the lady put down what turned out to be a dog, the kind Bailey had never seen before. The frolicsome canine had the softest and longest hair of any breed, piled in a thick fleece, covering the entire body and drooping down to the pads. With such perfect camouflage, Bailey could not tell its face from its hind quarters, till it emitted a sharp "woof, woof"! Hopelessly smitten by
the dog, Bailey gestured to buy it but the Tibetan would not part for
all the Indian silver rupees on offer. Bailey then turned to Lhasa’s
prominent families to solicit their help with its purchase. Like the
proverbial nail-biting-finish, the old lady finally relented on
September 23, 1904, minutes before the Mission’s departure for
India.
Happy as a lark, Bailey handed all the money he had but the Tibetan would not so much as touch it. Rather, she sought from Bailey his word of honour that he would never abandon or neglect the creature’s comforts. Shortly zoologists would classify Bailey’s acquisition as of the apso breed and by 1905, it would become the toast of the canine world. But it would take several years till a mate was found to make the breed commercially available in the kennels of the world. Now this is where the hand of providence showed up again. On January 24, 1906, Capt. F. M. Bailey was posted to the British political office at Gangtok and given the charge of the British Trade Mart at Gyantse (Tibet). So over the next four years, Bailey painstakingly gathered the essential breeding-stock of the Lhasa apso at his bungalow at Gyantse. After a three-decade-long commitment, Lt-Col F. M. Bailey, at last, transported to London, 13 Lhasa apsos, which would thenceforth become the much-sought after pets of dog lovers. Now it is generally
believed that the experience of a lethal battlefield tends to
brutalise the psyche of some combatants while in others it arouses the
instincts for the aesthetic. That Bailey belonged to the latter class
is evident from the fact that of the dozen-odd British officers in the
Mission to Lhasa, he alone had the eyes to spot an unusual flower
blossom in a meadow, two marches short of Lhasa. Thus on 17 July,
1904, the florists added the Himalayan blue poppy to the inventory of
the worlds flowers and named it "Meconopsis aculeate Bailey"
it.
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