Chris Bonington - Kongur: Chinas elusive summit

Fragments of History

by Michael Ward

The mountains that form earths bones jut starkly out of the high deserts of Central Asia. This antique land has always stimulated the curiosity and imagination of travellers with a strong sense of history. Better known to older civilisations than our own and described for thousands of years as the Roof of the World, this is the home of gold-digging ants, of men who know the arts of levitation and self-warming without fire and of peaks on whose slopes grow herbs that cause heads to ache.

The ancient worlds of Greece, China and India joined in this vast upland waste of wind, stones and ice and the Silk Roads were the tenuous link between cultures. In 1951 when I was exploring the Nepalese side of Everest with Eric Shipton, he often talked of his years as Consul General in Kashgar. Every journey that he made on horseback outside this oasis town could bring him within minutes to the borders of the known world. This laid a train of hope that smouldered for thirty years. Expeditions are created by individuals and our venture in southern Xinjiang bore the imprint of my desires, wishes and interests. In 1972 I started my extended search for a passport to the uplands of Central Asia. Not surprisingly this failed, despite a request being taken to Peking by a mission led by Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

From occasional articles in Scientia Sinica and other sources, I knew that Chinese teams had been carrying out a series of projects in Central Asia, concerned mainly with geology and glaciology. In the course of these a number of peaks, including Everest in 1960, were climbed by them and medical research on the effects of altitude was completed. It seemed to me that a project with a similar pattern containing both scientific investigation and mountaineering would have the best chance of success. Also research and exploration have dominated my attitude and interest towards mountains. Over the next few years I wrote innumerable letters to the British Embassy in Peking and the Academia Sinica, and persuaded some of the relatively few people, politicians, scientists or businessmen, who were able to visit China to plead the cause of such a project.

In 1977 as acting chairman, and in 197880 as chairman of the Mount Everest Foundation, my main task was to bring this to fruition. My requests to the Chinese were always for areas that I thought would be politically insensitive xiv and I therefore chose regions as far away from frontiers as possible. One of the main ranges of the world and one of the least known is the Kun-lun, the Mountains of Darkness, that separate the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau from the Taklamakan desert. This range stretches from the Pamirs on the Russian border with China eastwards for a thousand miles or more. In the centre is a peak called Ulugh Mustagh (7,724 metres) which was discovered by Sven Hedin during his travels in North Tibet over eighty years ago. This was my prime target, though I mentioned a number of other areas as alternatives.