Number of words: 624

This mystery was centred on the belief shared by a large slice of humanity that somewhere between China and India there stood a sacred mountain, an Asian Olympus of cosmic proportions. This mountain was said to be the navel of the earth and the axis of the universe, and from its summit flowed a mighty river that fell into a lake and then divided to form four of the great rivers of Asia. It was the holiest of all mountains, revered by many millions of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains as the home of their gods. In metaphysical form it was called Meru or Tisé ; in its earthly manifestation it was Kailas, the crystal, or Kang Rinpoche, jewel of snows, an isolated snow-peak on the Tibetan plateau.         

Not a whisper of this belief, so ancient and powerful in Asia, reached the West before the seventeenth century. Even in our own day the legend of the holy mountain and its attendant waters is hardly known outside Asia, partly as a result of the dominance of the Western cultural viewpoint which until recent years tended to disparage all things oriental, partly because of the sheer size and inaccessibility of the area in question. Kailas, its lakes and all the sources of the major rivers of South Asia lie behind the greatest natural barriers on earth; by the Himalayan ranges to the south and west and the deserts of Takla Makan and the Gobi to the north and east. Even its outermost ring of defences appeared, in the view of a nineteenth-century surveyor, as ‘a mighty maze without a plan’.

Forced to choose between highly improbable oriental beliefs and the solid cartographical reasoning of Ptolemy, European cartographers preferred to stay with Ptolemy until well into the eighteenth century. As late as 1800 Sir James Rennell, who has been described as the father of modern Indian geography and is generally acclaimed as the first man to put the Himalayas on the map, was still toeing the classical line when it came to setting down the supposed source of the river Sutlej on his charts.

Not until British power had actually begun to lap up against the walls of the Himalayan barrier in the first decade of the nineteenth century was there any serious attempt made to examine the mysteries that were said to lie beyond. In 1808 two British officers and an Anglo-Indian soldier of fortune entered the Nepalese-held mountain country of Garhwal to explore the headwaters of India’s most sacred river, the Ganga. A century later, when Sven Hedin returned from the last of his great journeys through Central Asia in 1908, the process of discovery was all but complete. The last of the great white patches on the map of Tibet had been filled in – and the legend of Mount Kailas and the sources of the great rivers of Asia was shown to have its basis in solid geographical fact.

This century of Tibetan exploration coincided with Britain’s rise as an imperial power, and it was largely through the window of British India that the world looked into Tibet. The Victorian appetite for expansion in the name of trade had given rise to that tough and enterprising breed, the Victorian traveller, to whom Tibet’s historic inaccessibility proved an obvious and tantalizing lure. After Timbuctoo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tibet’s holy city of Lhasa became one of the most sought after of far-off places, the Blue Riband of the exploring world. No less enticing were the sources of the four greatest rivers of India Sutlej, Ganga and Brahmaputra – whose upper courses all lay hidden behind ramparts of the Himalayas.

Excerpted from page 12–14 of ‘A Mountain Tibet ’ by Charles Allen