Rout in the Pamirs

Records say the 10,000 strong cavalry led by Korean general Kao Hsin-Chih first engaged with Tibetans in Wakhan.

Late in the summer of 747, the population of Baltistan, then busily engaged in bringing in their ripe apricots and fodder for the long, harsh winter ahead, would have been surprised by the flurry of activity taking place in the fort of Skardu. They would have made little sense of the clamour, the gathering together of everything the garrison owned, and the worried, even frantic looks on the faces of the Tibetan soldiery. Something drastic was afoot; but the common folks had no idea what it was.

Even as September rolled up, a great flood of soldiers seemed to burst forth from the west. The very same Tibetan soldiers, who the elders remembered had marched west, defiantly singing their battle songs only four decades earlier, limped up along the gorge of the Sindhu River. Battered men, wounded in battle, bleeding to death from arrow or sword wounds, they came as if some floodgates had opened somewhere in the west.

In the absence of Balti chronicles we do not know if these people knew what had happened. But the court of the T’ang emperor in Chang’an recorded history as it unfolded. From those documents we learn that the ten thousand strong cavalry led by the Korean general Kao Hsin-Chih having set out of Chang’an in March 747, had its first engagement against the Tibetans in Wakhan in August.

The Tibetans were routed. They fled south across the Broghal Pass and over the Darkot Glacier into the Yasin Valley. General Kao’s soldiers however balked at the sight of the sheer icy descent down the south side of the glacier — a condition true to this day. Perhaps from the intelligence gathered from captured Tibetans, the general had known of glacial conditions and aware that most of his Chinese troops had never been on a glacier, might have foreseen just such a situation.

Very cleverly and in secret, the general sent some of the locals ahead to meet him and his army at the top of the Darkot Pass. These men were to pretend to be natives of Anu-yueh and feign welcome for the liberating army with the news that the going was not hard at all. Sir Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-British archaeologist, finds in Anu-yueh the ring of Arniya. This was the name, he tells us, that Yasin went by even as late as the early 20^th century.

The ruse worked. Advancing to the far side of the So-yi River (present day Ghizer) at Gupis, General Kao ordered destruction of the bridge. This was a precaution against the Tibetans resuming their garrisons in Wakhan: if they opted to return after the Chinese withdrawal, they would have to rebuild the bridge — a daunting enough task in those days. Then he went in pursuit of the fleeing Tibetans. But he never caught up with them. At Gilgit, the triumphant general turned north into the gorge of the Hunza River. It was a harrowing journey along a treacherous mountain path back to Tashkurghan and Kashgar en route to a jubilant entry into Chang’an.

The rout of the Tibetans in Wakhan, their garrisons in the Ghizer River valley as well as in Gilgit was so complete that their governor in Skardu seems to have lost heart. The flurry of uneasy activity that local people witnessed in late August 747 was sign of the impending emptying of Baltistan of the Tibetans. And as soon as the soldiers, defeated and broken from the rout in the high Pamirs, limped into Skardu, a general evacuation took place.

Before September was half through, Baltistan was emptied of its Tibetan warlords. Surely, this epoch-making event was recorded in local annals. And surely over the generations and through the dynasties that ruled over Baltistan, these histories were preserved. We know that Raja Ahmad Shah, who came to the throne of Skardu in 1800, maintained a sizeable library. Surely some of those ancient works were preserved in this collection.

In the 1840s, the Dogras annexed Baltistan after a brief war. The royal library was one of the buildings that were sacked. The history, not only of the Tibetans and their withdrawal, but of everything else went up in smoke. The Tibetans were forgotten, only their language and gene pool remained to educate the anthropologists of the 20^th century and to earn for Baltistan the name ‘a living anthropological museum’.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st,  2011.