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Asia Times, 19 August 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Back to the future in Tibet
The High Road to China by Kate Teltscher
Kate Teltscher doesn't ask what 18th-century imperial envoy George Bogle might have thought of the newly opened Golmud-to-Lhasa railroad, a feat of Chinese engineering as impressive and controversial as the Three Gorges Dam. But truth is he might just have approved; the 26-year-old Scotsman did, after all, enter Tibet on a trade mission, sent in 1774 by the British governor of Bengal to talk turkey with the Panchen Lama, open Tibet to British goods and, just maybe, forge a new route into the still-elusive Chinese market.
High Road to China is Teltscher's historical reconstruction of this effort, telling the story of two separate overland journeys. First we have Bogle's passage through the plains and marshlands of viceregal Bengal, via the tensions of a Bhutan teetering on the brink of civil war, to the Himalayan plateaus of Tibet and the Panchen Lama's monastic court; and then, five years later, the slow procession of the Panchen Lama to Qing Dynasty Beijing, to pay his respects at Emperor Qianlong's birthday party, where, aided by the presence of a British Indian agent, he was to bring Bogle's request to the imperial ear.
A senior lecturer in English literature at London's Roehampton University, Teltscher is an expert in early British attitudes to India, and the Calcutta-based George Bogle is undoubtedly the star of her show. Her account of Bogle's journey and time in Tibet relies heavily on the young man's own expansive account, as he manages his bearers, decks himself out in Tartar furs, and flirts - and then some? - with a pair of tonsured Tibetan princesses.
For Bogle the trip was the highlight of a spectacular but short-lived career, riding an imperial fast track to influence and riches tailor-made for a young Briton with the right sort of zest for life. Son of a financially troubled family of Glasgow merchants, Bogle joined the East India Company as a clerk in 1770, age 22. In Bengal he soon caught the eye of Warren Hastings, First Lord of Calcutta and the biggest imperial hitter in the East; by 1774 he was Hastings' private secretary and, as star protege, the man the governor chose to open diplomatic relations with Lobsang Palden Yeshe, fifth incarnation of the Panchen Lama and a living god.
Bogle is aided by a strong supporting cast. The Panchen Lama - ambitious, shrewd and welcoming - affects the reader just as he did Bogle; the men become genuine friends, with Bogle even contributing to the Fifth Lama's great literary legacy, a geography of India, Buddhism's historical home. As British governor of Bengal, Hastings displays all the ruddy confidence that will lead to his attempted impeachment back in London 14 years later. And finally there is Emperor Qianlong - remote, deeply spiritual and, projecting magnificence by war and art from his Forbidden City in distant Beijing, the most powerful man in the world......
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HH19Ad02.html
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