The French for Shangri-La: Tibetan landscape and French explorers

Abstract

The French exploration of Tibet (1846–1912) and its resulting culture has been largely neglected by critics. Accounts of French-speaking travellers in Tibet have mostly been subsumed into the imperial and geopolitical framework of British policy in the region. This framework, which came to be known as the Great Game, informed all British expeditions of the imperial period. Yet the insights and representations developed by French explorers in fact constitute a largely separate and specific cultural paradigm. The approach of the earliest Tibetan explorers is paradoxical inasmuch as they perceived both the land and its inhabitants to be so wild and savage that the existence of a Tibetan culture seemed impossible. Working with a diverse range of French texts and accounts dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century, I shall explore this attitude under the heading of what I propose to entitle the ‘Tibetan paradox’. But this paradoxical approach to Tibetan landscape and its inhabitants was to be definitely superseded by one the most unusual travellers ever to explore the country, Jacques Bacot (1877–1965). On the basis of his expeditions, from 1906 to 1910, in uncharted parts of the country, Bacot came to play a leading role in the development of French Tibetology. In the accounts of his travels, Bacot pays close attention to how Tibetans themselves represent their environment. This change in focus signals the emergence of a new understanding of Tibet, for which the term ‘Tibetan médiance’ − to borrow a neologism from the French geographer Augustin Berque − might profitably be coined. Bacot’s perspective marked the first step in the development of an entirely new set of questions that were to arise within the human sciences in France during the twentieth century. As such it constitutes a cornerstone in the literary history of French representations of Tibet.