14,000 feet above sea level and trapped at Tibet's Tashilhunpo Monastery until spring, 27 year old Scotsman George Bogle was having the time of his life. For six months in winter 1774-5, when the first Briton to visit the Panchen Lama's court was not discussing the world by the Panchen Lama's side, he was hunting and feasting with the Lama's nephews; at other moments, in the chambers of the Lama's niece, there was even a suggestion of romance. "When I look on the time I have spent among the Hills," he wrote home to his sister Elizabeth, "it appears like a fairy dream."
The main purpose of the trip was not however fun and games. An employee of the East India Company (EIC), Bogle was private secretary to Warren Hastings, the Calcutta-based governor of Bengal. In 1773 Hasting had received a letter from the Panchen Lama, a hitherto distant figure now reaching out to the British, asking the Governor to halt a military operation against neighbouring Bhutan. Bogle's mission was to deliver Hasting's friendly reply personally to the Lama, open diplomatic relations and just maybe a new trade route to the Chinese market, where British interests were currently limited to a toe-hold in distant Canton.
Since the 16th Century, spiritual and political life in Tibet had been dominated by the Gelugpa sect, a school of Buddhism that controlled the region's key monasteries. There were political connections with China - Chinese amban (residents) were stationed in the capital, Lhasa, their powers of supervision backed up by a garrison. But attitudes to Tibet's senior Lamas were respectful : the Qing Emperors - ethnically Manchu rather than Han Chinese, with an incentive to emphasise their empire's multicultural base - had taken up the cause of Tibetan Buddhism, sponsoring huge religious projects around the capital and allowing Beijing-based Tibetan religious figures privileged access to the imperial ear.
The two senior religious and political figures in Tibet were the Dalai Lama based in Lhasa's Potala Palace, and the Panchen Lama, based to the south at Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse...........
