Lot 96
Younghusband Expedition to Tibet, 1904
Photographs attributed to Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Irvine Davys
Auction: Other Properties | Wed 25 February from 10am | Lots 63 to 255
Description
51 small photographs, each c. 10.5 x 8cm, mainly silver gelatin prints, taped into a ruled notebook at the corners with ink captions to pages, many also captioned “copyright”, pencil notes to rear of images, many images quite faded, notebook is lacking covers:
In camp near A? Choo‘Irvine in the centre holding up the Board…'At Breakfast Camp ChumbieTwo of the Local SentryDavys operating on wounded Tibetan…The ? near ?Lingmothang Pass? erected near Ch??Tibetan women bringing in ? to the camp in ChumbieThe village of Olal ChumbieA typical village in South Central TibetThe village of Ch?Fort G??? and Davys and two ? Gazelle10th June? 1904Glaciers…June 10th 1904 … snowA desert storm mouth…Gazelle headsGlacier and …? & Davys with two Tibetan gazelleThe first ?A Coolie being flogged and tied to a triangleTibetan defences beyond ChumbiOur camp in the snow? Government MullocksLoading upThe great fort of Phari‘The roof of the World’Chumbi StoriesLoose photograph annotated in pencil to reverse: ‘The Tibetan ? who commanded the left garrison(?) at that ? He is dying, his left hand shot away and his right leg torn to pieces by a shell’Trading a Yak in Southern TibetUpper Tibet. Camp in the Snow? when we were passing throughImperial Tibetan group. Sepoy in the fur coatThe road near ?A typical Tibetan house…In a blizzard with the dying ?Grass cutters and loads. They are nearly all womenOn the way to Phari with the flying ?In the State of Tibet-Gutury?…? fire 80,000 pounds of stores were destroyedCamp…‘The only captive Ipowa? [possibly a Tibetan red deer] in the world. The rarest deer known.’Yaks at camp near ChumbiA group of visitors to campThe top of Phari fortA view of Phari village…The frozen waterfall…Provenance
By family repute attributed to Gerard Irvine Davys (1879-1967), army medic and amateur photographer on the Younghusband Expedition, and thence by descent to the current owner.
Footnote
The British mission to Tibet in 1903-4 under the command of Major Francis Younghusband was ostensibly to establish British political and commercial links with the region and to survey it. However, it soon developed into a military expedition. Reinforced with a mainly Indian fighting force, eventually exceeding 10,000, the expedition advanced in stages towards the Tibetan capital Lhasa. The Tibetans’ attempts at armed resistance were rendered futile by the far superior weaponry of Younghusband’s troops. The massacre of Tibetans in combat and the treaty negotiated by Younghusband in Lhasa in 1904 caused public unease in Britain. The government believed that he had exceeded his instructions by negotiating a treaty. Recent appraisals of the Tibet mission have regarded it 'as the embodiment of empire at its overstretched zenith' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
Thanks to advances in camera technology, with hand-held cameras being widely used, various photographic records of the Younghusband expedition are known to exist in library and museum collections. The best-known images were taken by the engineer and Indian civil servant John Claude White, who had been appointed as Younghusband’s deputy for the mission and who was an accomplished photographer. The collection presented here is curious - a series of small, captioned images, many stating ‘copyright’, taped into a lined notebook lacking the covers. They are a more informal and personal record of the expedition, lacking the polished nature of the White photographs, and have the more immediate quality of snaps taken on the spot with little planning.
The photographs are attributed to Gerard Irvine Davys, then a lieutenant in the Indian Medical Service, who took part in the mission. However, Davys is referred to in the third person in two captions and there is a photograph of him treating an injured Tibetan which suggests that another person took some of them. None of the photographs in this collection have been traced to contemporary illustrated publications about the mission written by participants, notably Perceval Landon’s ‘Lhasa: an account of the country and people of central Tibet’ (1905), C.G. Rawling’s ‘The great plateau’ (1905), W.J. Ottley’s ‘With mounted infantry in Tibet’ (1906) and Younghusband’s own account in ‘India and Tibet’ (1910). Davys’s photograph of the fatally injured Tibetan soldier, present in this collection, and others by him and John Claude White did appear in a 2017 exhibition in Tibet ‘Capturing Tibet: Colonialism and the Camera during the Mission to Lhasa,’ a collaboration between the Tibet Museum, National Museums Liverpool and the University of Manchester.