Himalaya: A Human History

by Ed Douglas

Overview

A magisterial history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures, and adventures among the world’s highest mountains.

For centuries, the unique and astonishing geography of the Himalaya has attracted those in search of spiritual and literal elevation: pilgrims, adventurers, and mountaineers seeking to test themselves among the world’s most spectacular and challenging peaks. But far from being wild and barren, the Himalaya has been home to a diversity of indigenous and local cultures, a crucible of world religions, a crossroads for trade, and a meeting point and conflict zone for empires past and present. In this landmark work, nearly two decades in the making, Ed Douglas makes a thrilling case for the Himalaya’s importance in global history and offers a soaring account of life at the "roof of the world."

Spanning millennia, from the earliest inhabitants to the present conflicts over Tibet and Everest, Himalaya explores history, culture, climate, geography, and politics. Douglas profiles the great kings of Kathmandu and Nepal; he describes the architects who built the towering white Stupas that distinguish Himalayan architecture; and he traces the flourishing evolution of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism that brought Himalayan spirituality to the world. He also depicts with great drama the story of how the East India Company grappled for dominance with China’s emperors, how India fought Mao’s Communists, and how mass tourism and ecological transformation are obscuring the bloody legacy of the Cold War.

Himalaya is history written on the grandest yet also the most human scale—encompassing geology and genetics, botany and art, and bursting with stories of courage and resourcefulness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393882469
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	618
Sales rank:	360,618
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ed Douglas is an award-winning writer with a passion for the Himalaya. The author of a dozen books, including a biography of Tenzing Norgay, he has reported from the region for more than twenty-five years, covering the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the Tibetan occupation. He lives in Yorkshire, England.

Table of Contents

List of Maps ix

1 Pilgrims 1

2 Origins 19

3 The First Explorers 32

4 Lost Kingdoms 58

5 The Architects of Xanadu 80

6 The Rise of Gorkha 106

7 The High Road to Tibet 126

8 Trade Wars 151

9 The Hard Road to Sagauli 175

10 Mapping the Himalaya 201

11 The Tyrant and the Scholar 227

12 Crossing Borders 261

13 'Forbidden' City 290

14 The Plant Hunters 320

15 The First Mountaineers 349

16 Everest Diplomacy 371

17 Utopias 409

18 Summit Fever 440

19 Songs from a Dark Cell 472

20 Claiming Chomolungma 500

Acknowledgements 527

A Note on Sources 529

Bibliography 532

Index 551

Editorial Reviews

"Douglas has achieved something more valuable than describe current events: he has examined the ancient origins of those events with a scholarly yet entertaining synthesis of hundreds of years of history."

Financial Times - Victor Mallet

"An extraordinarily rich and wide investigation into the exhilarating story of the Himalaya. Ed Douglas knows this story in his bones, from his travels and a wonderful range of scholarship, which leaves him perfectly placed to fill a huge gap in our view of how the world fits together."

Michael Pye

"The candor of Douglas’s telling shows us that in the Western mind Utopias were 'simply orientalist fantasies projected on Himalaya.' His gripping storytelling achieves a summit at a vista overlooking the Himalayas in words that no photo could conjure."

Air Mail - Christopher King

In Himalaya: A Human History, the journalist Ed Douglas untangles the history of the mountains starting from when they were formed, about 50 million years ago, to the Everest climbing craze today. His book is the fruit of an enormous amount of research that focuses on the conquest of the mountains and the interconnected kingdoms and states that vied for control. His observations are sharp, and in many passages, his writing glows.

The New York Times Book Review - Jeffrey Gettleman

11/02/2020

Extreme landscapes, vibrant cultures, and tumultuous politics animate this sweeping history of the Himalayan region. Journalist Douglas (Tenzing: Hero of Everest) surveys the dazzling geology and ecology of the world’s highest mountain range and the unique civilizations it fostered, which produced a flowering of Buddhist philosophy, art, and architecture during Tibet’s medieval glory days. He also probes the tectonic geopolitical forces that molded Tibet and Nepal as they confronted powerful neighbors in China and British India and then diverged in the post-WWII era, with Tibet succumbing to Chinese colonization while Nepal struggled through monarchical dictatorships and Maoist insurgency to become a democracy and tourist mecca. It’s a colorful story, full of bloody palace intrigues in Kathmandu and Lhasa and nervy exploits by the many foreign (primarily British) outsiders drawn to the region—merchants, missionaries, cartographers, and, above all, mountaineers, whose conquests of Himalayan peaks Douglas recounts in vivid detail. Providing a corrective to romantic Western stereotypes of the region as the homeland of spiritual purity, Douglas notes the allure of Himalayan cultures but is clear-eyed about the prosaic economic motives that shape life there. Written in elegant prose with sharply etched profiles of historical figures, this engrossing account offers a fresh, revealing portrait of a much-mythologized place. Photos. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Himalaya]is the fruit of an enormous amount of research. . . [Douglas’s] observations are sharp, and in many passages, his writing glows."

Jeffrey Gettleman

"[An] ambitious, learned account….Douglas portrays a complex, populated landscape and an intricate patchwork of cultures. …His book seeks to reclaim humans from geography, and to recapture the lived experience of the Himalaya."

New Yorker - Akash Kapur

01/01/2021

Instead of concentrating on a single country, the entire Himalaya region is covered in this latest work by award-winning writer Douglas, with a focus on Tibet and Nepal and secondarily, Bhutan. Most of the history is drawn from European sources and viewpoints, first from missionaries and traders, followed by East India Company and British officials, and expanding to include some local sources closer to present day. Nonetheless, a comprehensive outsiders' view of tribal and royal intrigue is explored in detail, often to dizzying effect given the vast locations, time, and number of individuals involved. Nearly half the book covers history until the mid-1900s, with the current era, including the impact of mountaineering, rounding it out. Sections highlighting geography, botany, and natural history add further context. Douglas helpfully includes details of how Buddhism gained prominence in the region, the influence of trade routes, and how the tectonic forces that created the world's tallest mountain shaped events as much as the two regional superpowers, China and India, with an invasive and oversized role played by the East India Company and Britain. VERDICT For readers interested in a detailed, wide-ranging overview of the history and people of the Himalaya in relation to outside influences.—Zebulin Evelhoch, Deschutes P.L., OR

Library Journal

★ 2020-10-13
Robust history of the vast South Asian mountain range and its hold on the imagination.

British mountaineering writer Douglas, who has visited the region more than 40 times, has obviously combed through several libraries’ worth of material on all things related to the Abode of Snow, as the Sanskrit word Himalayas translates. Certainly he has found hitherto obscure connections—for one, the central place of explorers who would later turn out to be Nazis, such as Bruno Beger, a German anthropologist who merrily took skull measurements of the people he encountered and considered the Tibetan aristocracy to demonstrate “evidence of a common Aryan ancestor” and progenitors of the German people. “The murderous racial theories of the Third Reich meant about as much in prewar Lhasa as Hollywood’s version of Shangri-La, or the fertile imaginings of the Theosophists,” writes Douglas. “These were simply orientalist fantasies projected onto the Himalaya.” Many other fantasies come into play in his lucid account, sometimes held by local people—the Dalai Lama two incarnations ago who harbored a dream of making Tibet a pan-Asian stronghold against China—and sometimes by outsiders, such as the Arizona-born flimflam man Theos Bernard, who bothered people with his “intrusive photography” and was murdered. Numerous Europeans came to the Himalayas, Douglas chronicles, in an attempt to spread Christianity to people already steeped in religion, and many of those Europeans came away with an intense interest in Buddhism, hastening its spread globally. Others didn’t quite get the message; Douglas writes dismissively of “the self-absorbed ramblings of Helena Blavatsky,” whose Theosophy was theoretically grounded in Tibetan Buddhism but was instead a garbled mess. Many well-known figures populate these pages, including British administrator and linguist William Jones, who, well before accurate measurements were secured, figured out that the Himalayas were the world’s tallest mountains, “without excepting the Andes.”

A towering addition to any geography or mountaineering buff’s library.

Kirkus Reviews