The High Road to China
by Kate Teltscher
Bloomsbury, HK$144
Kate Teltscher tells history well. In The High Road to China she draws readers into the special friendship that formed between George Bogle and the third Panchen Lama, a man whose 'frank and genial manner' captivated the young Scot from the start of his 1774 mission. The task of Bogle, the East India Company's envoy to Tibet, was to persuade the spiritual leader to support British traders, who longed to foster relations with Qing-dynasty China. Bogle's boss in Bengal figured that if he could ingratiate himself with the lama, whom the Qianlong emperor revered, China would remove barriers that had led to a troubling trade deficit between the two countries. Britain's appetite for tea thus had much to do with Bogle's six-month trek that resulted in his becoming the first Briton to set foot in Tibet, absorbed as a protectorate of the Chinese empire in 1750. The book is based mostly on the journals and private letters of Bogle, although it also borrows from Tibetan biographies of the Panchen Lama and the writings of the emperor. Although little came of the relationship between Bogle and the lama, Teltscher notes that it 'stands out in the history of encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans because it was neither violent nor exploitative'.