[Note: This is an abstract of a presentation to be delivered at the "Hitting the Road! Experiences and writing of travellers in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras" Conference (University of Tours, 2-3 February, 2023). — Taylor Tomko]
his paper will discuss the controversy surrounding the Tibetan travels of Victorian explorer and artist Arnold Henry Savage Landor.
Landor, the grandson of English poet Walter Savage Landor, was a prodigious traveller who wrote books and articles about numerous countries, but his 1897 Tibetan expedition would prove contentious after questions were raised about the reliability of his 1898 book, In the Forbidden Land. In this exciting but troubling account, Landor claimed to have undertaken feats of endurance that seemed virtually impossible, and experienced mountaineers and explorers from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and the Alpine Club were predictably sceptical. Landor was pointedly not invited to give a lecture about his expedition to the RGS in London, despite having been trained and supplied with surveying instruments by the Society, and an exchange of angry letters to the Times ensued between Landor and the Alpine Club President Douglas Freshfield.
The truth about Landor's activities in Tibet remains unclear even now. Some of his claims are almost certainly exaggerated, but there is no doubt that he visited Tibet and was imprisoned and ill-treated before his return to India. Tibet held a special place in the British colonial imagination at this time. Nominally part of China's sphere of influence, it was also regarded with both fascination and suspicion by British Raj officials wary of Russian expansionism to the north, and was a potential pawn in the so-called Great Game, while its forbidden reputation fired the imagination of potential explorers. While it was clearly beyond the reach of most travellers, accounts by the few intrepid individuals who did enter the country soon reached a wider audience and fired the imaginations of many in late Victorian Britain and beyond. French, Japanese, Russian and other explorers joined the attempt to breach Tibets jealously guarded mountain passes and reach the capital, Lhasa. The determination of Tibetans to repel foreign visitors (and in particular to keep them away from Lhasa, where the Dalai Lama was based) would end with the slaughter inflicted by the 1903-04 incursion by the British under Francis Younghusband.
Travel to the fabled land of Tibet was thus inextricably linked with the more prosaic political realities of British power in India, and the concerns of officials both in India and back in the imperial centre in London with keeping Russia at bay and creating a reliable buffer zone to the north of Britain's most prized imperial possession. In some respects, Landor's activities and the way he wrote about them chimed perfectly with this project. His approach to the people of Tibet and indeed of all the countries he visited was anthropological and ethnographic, and he was tireless in compiling data about the places he visited and people he met. On the other hand, his quirky, irreverent approach to travel distanced him from the standard approaches of, for example, Alpine Club mountaineers at the time. Landor was a critic of the Alpine Club and claimed to ignore the standard techniques and equipment of mountaineering just at the point when mountain climbing was becoming codified and standardized. His writing style is self-aggrandizing and hyperbolic, and in this as in many other respects he was far from a typical late-Victorian explorer. This paper will attempt to put Landor's travels in the context of Britain's relationship with Tibet, and will discuss his other travels in countries as diverse as Japan, China, Australia, Brazil and Abyssinia.
Created 16 January 2023