After determining that one of the central Himalayan peaks was the world’s highest in the early 1850s, Andrew Waugh, the head of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, was responsible for naming it. He asked around and decided it had no one local designation and named it after his predecessor and mentor, George Everest. The name Mount Everest has stuck ever since.

Waugh was mistaken. The people who lived at the mountain’s base, Tibetans in Dingri and Shelkar to the mountain’s north and the Sherpas in Solu Khumbu to the mountain’s south, had known the mountain as Chomolungma for centuries, perhaps longer. It was named for the lifelong goddess who occupied its peak, a goddess whose full name is Miyo Langsangma, ‘the immovable, good woman of the willows’. Waugh’s decision to name the mountain after a British man obscured the goddess’s central role in the mountain’s story. Although Tibetans and Sherpas have continued to revere her, the mountain’s international history has misrepresented or ignored her. Waugh’s mistake lives on, but we can bring the goddess out of the surveyor’s colonial shadows by telling and retelling her story.

When Buddhist religious teachers and texts introduce their audiences to a deity, they often begin with a physical description. As Himalayan gods can be multi-headed, multi-armed, multi-coloured, hold precious objects in their hands, and ride a variety of animals, their descriptions start with the enumeration of the deities’ appendages, their facial expression, their colour, the things they hold, and the animals they ride. All these heads, hands, colours, possessions, and animals tell us something about the deity to whom we are being introduced.

Getting to know Miyo Langsangma means learning what she looks like and what this look means. She has one head and two hands, a peaceful expression, golden yellow skin, and rides a tiger. In some images, she holds a bowl of rice in her left hand and a mongoose that spits jewels in her right hand. In others, she holds a tray of riches with her left hand and a banner with the other. Her singular head, two hands, and peaceful expression tell us she is approachable. Her golden colour associates her with the south, the earth element, autumn, harvests, material increase, and giving, which is also why she holds trays of riches, a jewel-spitting mongoose, or rice. The banner she sometimes holds marks her as a worldly deity, a bodhisattva rather than a fully awakened Buddha. The banner’s presence in some images and absence in others suggests there is some debate about her status. Those who draw her without it are claiming she is awakened. The goddess is, furthermore, usually drawn as part of a group with her five sisters, the Tseringma Chenga, who are all long-life deities (see Figure 1.1).

This description gives us a sense of the goddess and her connection to a broader sacred geography that stretches across the Himalaya and back through multiple Buddhist lineages and community histories. If we follow these lineages and histories back through time, we discover the origins of the goddess’s names and what they tell us about her. We also learn she has a thousand-year story, much of which was preserved in the biographies of two famous Buddhist yogis, Guru Rinpoche and Milarepa. Rituals and stories accreted to her and her sisters as highland settlements pushed into the valleys below their mountains. This process of settlement and sacralisation continued into the early twentieth century, when a young Tibetan reincarnate guru named Dzatrul Ngawang Tenzin Rinpoche (1867–1940) established a monastery at Dza Rongpu (Rongbuk) below the mountain’s north face. While in retreat there in the 1930s, Dzatrul Rinpoche wrote the Guide to Dza Rongpu’s Sacred Sites,¹ which describes the goddess’s abode in detail.

Like Waugh’s surveying, the longer sacralisation recorded in Dzatrul Rinpoche’s Guide has also had an enduring legacy. It described an alternative vision of the mountain that long preceded the surveyors or mountaineers. Tibetans and Sherpas maintain its legacy by insisting on the goddess’s continuing presence despite pressure from nationalist projects to reimagine the mountain as a Chinese and Nepali national space and the climbing industry’s commodification of it.

Into the etymological willows

Much of the goddess’s story is encoded in the connected local names by which she and the mountain are known. These names are from the Tibetic languages spoken around the mountain: the Tó and Tsang languages spoken north of the mountain, and Sherpa, spoken to its south.² In these languages, the most common contemporary names for the mountain and the goddess are Chomolungma – also transliterated as Jomolangma – and Miyo Langsangma.³ These are two versions of the same name with many of the same components. Miyo Langsangma has three parts. Miyo is a Tibetan neologism invented to reflect the Sanskrit term acala, which means ‘immovable’. Lang has several meanings. It most likely means ‘willows’, but it could also mean ‘ox’ or even ‘elephant’, which is called a ‘great ox’, langchen in most Tibetic languages. The syllable ma indicates the thing being described is female. Sang means excellent or wholesome. These syllables most likely mean ‘immovable, good woman of the willows’.

Figure 1.1 The Tseringma Chenga (Five Sisters of Long Life). This nineteenth-century image depicts the central deity of Tseringma, associated with Gaurisankar, and her sisters including Miyolangsangma, associated with Chomolungma (Everest), the yellow goddess in the top right corner. Courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art, gift of Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, F1996.10.2 (HAR 433).

Chomolangma contains the same lang and ma syllables. They are preceded by the word chomo, also transliterated as jomo. Chomo/Jomo is an honorific title meaning ‘noble lady’, used to address royalty, religious adepts, mountain deities, and those beings, like Chomolungma, who are considered royal, religious, and divine. The name Chomolungma, therefore, most probably means ‘noble lady of the willows’. The mountain is sometimes also called Jomo Kangkar or Gangkar, which means ‘noble lady of the white snow’, ‘goddess of the white snow’, or, at a stretch, ‘goddess of the glaciers’. This term is more of a descriptor than a name and describes all female snow mountain deities.

The title Chomo/Jomo connects the goddess and the mountain to other sacred female peaks. One of Gaurishankar’s (7,181 metres) Tibetan names is Jomo Tseringma, named for Miyo Langsangma’s divine older sister. Jomolhari (7,326 metres) sits on the Chinese–Bhutanese border, and there is a mountain in central Tibet named Jomo Khanag. Cho Oyu (or Chowo Yu, ‘turquoise lady’; 8,188 metres) contains a version of the same title. It is also worth noting that the mountain goddesses are not the region’s only famous Chomo/Jomo. The central Himalaya were also home to a group of human female adepts titled ‘Jomo’ who lived in Dingri, just north of Chomolangma and Cho Oyu, in the eleventh century.⁴

For much of the goddess’s history, the two versions of her name, Chomolungma and Miyo Langsangma, were used interchangeably to describe her and her mountain. When Dzatrul Rinpoche wrote the Guide to Dza Rongpu’s Sacred Sites in the 1930s, for example, he listed ‘the well-known Chomolungma’ among the region’s ‘beautiful snow-mountain deities’.⁵ The goddess and the mountain are still both called ‘Chomolungma’ in contemporary Tibetan sources.

Over the last few decades, however, Buddhist teachers living south of the mountain have become more specific in their use of these versions of her names, referring to the mountain as Chomolungma and the goddess as Miyo Langsangma. They seem to have done this for pedagogical reasons. In the Buddhist worldview, it is important to distinguish the goddess from the mountain. The mountain is one of the goddess’s né (abodes), but her existence stretches beyond it in time and space. As Buddhism holds that all matter arises in dependence on the mind, she may infuse the mountain with her presence or manifest a physical mountain, but that mountain is not her. She can travel away from it and will outlive it. Giving the mountain and the goddess two different names clarifies this separation.

In Tibetan written sources, the meaning of the goddess’s name is relatively straightforward, but as there are many homonyms in Tibetan, some who have heard rather than read her name have understood it differently. The early twentieth-century British emissary to Tibet, Charles Bell (1870–1945), who arranged the passports for the first British expedition to the mountain in 1921, heard the mountain’s name as ‘Lho (southern) Cha-ma-lung’. Chama can mean ‘female birds’, and he read lang as lung, which means ‘valley’ or ‘land’ in Tibetan. Combining the meaning of these words, he chose to translate the mountain’s name as ‘the southern district where birds are kept’.⁶ Everyone I asked while visiting Khumbu in January 2023 also associated the mountain’s name with a bird, but this time a chicken. The mountain’s name, they assured me, meant ‘standing chicken’s comb’ because their view of the mountain from Khumbu looked like a raised chicken’s comb. Etymologies of the goddess’s name grew more creative as they crossed cultures. For example, her name is often translated as ‘goddess mother of the world’. While it may be understandable to gloss Chomo as ‘goddess mother’, her name can only mean ‘of the world’ by following Bell’s misreading of lang as lung and ignoring his reference to birds.

The other name that has stuck to her remarkably well is, of course, ‘Everest’.⁷ Unlike other colonial names, which are slowly falling out of use, ‘Mount Everest’ remains the mountain’s most common international title, and even locals, who view the mountain as the goddess’s abode, refer to it as ‘Everest’ when they speak to foreigners. There are multiple reasons for this. The mountain and the goddess have always been known by multiple epithets, and in this cultural context, Everest can be added to the mountain’s list of names without displacing the others. The name ‘Everest’ also performs a significant socio-cultural function for the local, minoritised communities that live around the mountain. ‘Everest’ connects them directly to the international community, allowing them to bypass the Nepali and Chinese nationalist stories of the mountains. They are known as the people of the mountain, and the mountain is connected directly to them.

These communities rarely use, by contrast, the names their national governments insist on calling the mountain. According to official Chinese history, Chinese geographers first mapped, named, and, therefore, ‘discovered’ the mountain during the Qing Empire’s reign. The current government’s claim that this map is ‘Chinese’ ignores the fact that the Qing Empire, and therefore their mapping project, was Manchu, and Tibetan monks conducted the surveys that produced the maps. But they are correct in stating that the Qing court produced Manchu and Chinese language maps of Tibet with the goddess’s name on them as early as 1720.⁸ Since 1720, various Chinese governments have written the mountain’s name in at least six transliterations but seem to have settled on two transliterations by the second half of the twentieth century: Zhumulangma Feng (珠穆朗玛峰) in Chinese characters or Qomolangma in the official Pinyin transcription of Tibetan. Many Tibetans view these spellings and the pronunciation they suggest as symbols of China’s disputed sovereignty over Tibet and refuse to use them.

The Nepali government calls the mountain Sagarmāthā, a Sanskrit name. The origin and etymology of this name are unclear. Some argue that māthā means ‘forehead’ or ‘head’, and sagara means ‘sky’, so the name means something like ‘head in the sky’. The Nepali nationalist historian and school administrator Baburam Acharya (1888–1971) was the first to publish this name for the mountain in an essay entitled ‘Sagarmāthā or Jhyāmolongmā’ in the Nepali-language monthly Shāradā in 1939.⁹ At the time, this publication got him in trouble with the Nepali government, which threatened to deport him for insulting the British by proposing a Nepali name for Everest. He later claimed he had heard the name Sagarmāthā from locals living near the mountain. Given the rarity of Nepali speakers in the region at that time, and the even lower rates of Sanskrit literacy, this seems strange, and his claim that this was an old name for the mountain is unlikely. Despite the name’s history, the Nepali government accepted Sagarmāthā as the official Nepali name after Nepal–China boundary talks in the early 1960s and now insists it is the mountain’s national name.¹⁰

In the god’s realm

The local histories of the goddess, found in Tibetan texts, images, and rituals, are centuries older than their Nepali, British, or Chinese counterparts. Texts written over almost a millennium describe or invoke the goddess. She is part of a larger community of supernatural beings that, according to Asian Highland lore, are the Highlands’ original inhabitants. These supernatural beings are roughly divided into three categories, depending on where they live: (1) lha (territorial deities) live in mountains and heavens; (2) sinpo, tsen, and nojin (demons) live in intermediate spaces; and (3) sadak (earth lords) and amphibious, snake-like lu live underground and underwater. The most common term to describe these beings is lha-lu, meaning ‘from the gods in the heavens to the lu underground’. Lha-lu control the elements – earth, water, fire, air, and ether – and create disasters when insulted. As it is hard for ordinary beings to know when, how, and why they have offended lha-lu, they rely on people with great spiritual power, either yogis or royalty, to intervene with the lha-lu.

The lha-lu’s abodes are called né, and the mountain abodes of lha (territorial deities) are particularly revered. These mountain deities were often associated with clans, and clan leaders were sometimes said to have descended from them. The importance of individual mountains changed over time as clans’ power rose and fell and settlement patterns changed. Early human settlements were concentrated in central Tibet’s river valleys, and they venerated deities like Yarlha Shampo, whose mountain sits at the head of the Yarlung Valley in central Tibet. He is said to be the ancestor of the Tibetan Empire’s rulers (sixth to ninth centuries CE). Over time, however, other mountain deities, such as Nangthen Thanglha on the plains north of Lhasa and Amnye Machen in the Plateau’s northeast, rose in prominence.

The central Himalaya’s mountains were visible to larger settlements to their north across the Pelmo Thang Plain for millennia, but they tended to see them from afar and describe them as a collective. At some point before the tenth century CE, these mountains became associated with two groups of goddesses that both belonged to a class of lha known as Zhingkong Sungma (Earth Guardians). The Tenma Chunyi (Twelve Stabilising Deities) congregated on Pelmotang Plain, and the Tseringma Chenga (Five Sisters of Long Life) lived among the mountain’s peaks. Both groups of goddesses were fierce. The Tseringma Chenga were known to eat the flesh of those who entered their realm.

The life stories of the adepts who converted the goddesses to Buddhism preserve knowledge of their fierce pre-Buddhist lives. As Hildegard Diemberger notes, the lha-lu did not make ‘specific ontological claims’ – like those of a universalistic creator god – and could, therefore, be incorporated into the Buddhist world.¹¹ The adepts’ tales are set in the sixth to tenth centuries but were written down from the eleventh century onwards. One of their central themes is the protagonists’ calming and conversion of the lha-lu.

As the lha-lu became Buddhist, so did their abodes, and the Buddhicisation of the lha’s mountain abodes was a significant marker of Buddhism’s success in the Highlands. Some mountain lha were reimagined as fully awakened Buddhas, and their né rose in importance.¹² Others were still considered worldly gods, and their influence remained local. The status of others was open for debate; one person’s lha was another’s Buddha. Chomolangma and her sisters, the Five Long-Life Goddesses, belong to this last category; their status was and is an object of debate. Different authors described them as one or the other. The two most well-known versions of this story were their guest roles in episodes of Vajrayana Buddhism’s two most famous life stories, those of the beloved yogis Guru Rinpoche and Milarepa.

Two Buddhist gurus and Five Long-Life Goddesses

Guru Rinpoche, also known as Padmasambhava, is one of the most influential figures in Tibetan and Himalayan history and one of its most historically elusive. Extant eighth-century sources say that an Indian specialist in tantra named Padmasambhava visited the Tibetan Emperor’s court to teach Buddhism.¹³ He may also have offered advice on rearranging Tibet’s irrigation systems.¹⁴ However, the version of his life story better known in the mountains is the one retold in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by a series of terton (treasure revealers). The terton claimed to be reincarnations of his eighth-century disciples and to have access to revealed ter (treasure texts) that Guru Rinpoche had hidden away centuries earlier for them to find. In these texts, Guru Rinpoche is reimagined as the second Buddha who brings the dharma to Tibet, converts its people, and calms its lha-lu.

The ‘calming’ or ‘subduing’ process – dulwa in Tibetan – is a complicated cultural phenomenon that manifests differently across the Highlands and through the centuries. In Guru Rinpoche’s stories, he engages in supernatural competition with the deities, outperforms them, and then extracts from them a vow to practise Buddhism and aid Buddhists. In later stories, other yogis and tantrikas remind the lha-lu of this vow and then re-negotiate, asking them to forgive offences or bring boons.

Guru Rinpoche’s story became rooted in the sacred landscapes of the Highlands. The many caves, lakes, and mountaintops where he meditated or tamed lha-lu are local and trans-local pilgrimage sites. All Vajrayana Buddhists revere him, but he is mainly associated with the Nyingma (Old Ones) lineage, which is very influential in the central Himalaya.

Milarepa (1040/52–1123/35)¹⁵ continued Guru Rinpoche’s work negotiating with the lha-lu, converting non-Buddhists, and encouraging those who had converted to practise. He started life as a black magician, causing many deaths, before seeking redemption through a life of solitary meditation in the mountains. He mastered the yogic technique of inner fire and became renowned as a repa (cotton-clad one) who could withstand the fierce, high-altitude winters in caves. He was also celebrated for his songs, through which he communicated his realisations. Milarepa spent much of his life in the central Himalaya, and his most sacred sites are just west of Chomolungma, in the Rongshar, Labchi, and Nyalam Valleys. Like Guru Rinpoche, Milarepa is revered by all lineages of Vajrayana Buddhism but, unlike his predecessor, he is mainly associated with the Kagyu (oral transmission) lineage.

Although Guru Rinpoche’s story is understood to be older, the geo-biographies of these two adepts developed around the same time and overlapped and enhanced each other. Their stories also contained, maintained, and promoted the narratives of central Himalayan goddesses. One of the most significant episodes in Guru Rinpoche’s story was his calming of the Twelve Tenma (stabilising deities) on the Pelmotang Plain, eighty-six kilometres north of Chomolungma.¹⁶ The oral traditions Dzatrul Ngawang Tenzin Rinpoche relied on to write the Guide to Dza Rongpu in the early twentieth century also claimed that Guru Rinpoche visited the Dza Rongpu Valley, where he tamed a flesh-eating demoness. Guru Rinpoche’s visit prepared the Dza Rongpu Valley for human habitation, and after he had blessed it with his presence, it was considered a good site for meditation.¹⁷

Milarepa’s geo-biography misses Dza Rongpu Valley but includes the most detailed descriptions of Miyo Langsangma and her sisters, who were his partners in sexual yoga. Sexual yoga, it should be emphasised, is not sex but the transmutation of sexual energy to bring about insight into reality. As it brings direct insight into the nature of reality to all who engage in it, the story of Milarepa’s awakening can also be read as the story of the five sisters’ awakening, but not everyone reads it this way. Some writers and painters describe and paint them as Buddhas; others as non-awakened deities. Their colours, positioning, and attributes align them with the Five Great Self-Arising Buddhas: Vairocana, Amoghasiddhi, Amitābha, Ratnasambhava, and Akṣobhya. Miyo Langsangma’s eldest sister, Jomo Tseringma, is white like Vairocana, sits at the centre of her sisters, and represents wisdom. Miyo Langsangma is yellow like Ratnasambhava, sits to the south, and represents giving. But unlike these Buddhas, the sisters are not seated and ride animals like other non-realised protector deities. Their role as non-awakened protector deities is clear when they are depicted with banners. When they are not, their status is ambiguous.

All five sisters are said to abide on Gaurishankar, which the Tibetan texts describe as a ‘five-peak’ mountain. The texts sometimes name the mountain Jomo Tseringma for the Tseringma Chenga’s oldest sister and sometimes call it Tonting Gyelmo (azure queen).¹⁸ None of the goddesses spend all their time on this mountain. They maintain né (abodes) in Bhutan’s Paro Valley, among other sites, and several of them are associated with other central Himalayan peaks. A number of ritual texts prepared between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the second sister, Chomolungma/Miyo Langsangma, maintaining a né on another peak near her sister.¹⁹ Miyo Langsangma’s né existed, therefore, within this cultural geographic web. It was not the region’s most important sacred site, but it was not unimportant either.

From the fifteenth century onwards, the central Himalaya’s sacred geography also came to include a series of beyul (hidden lands) south of the watershed, hidden by Guru Rinpoche so that his followers could access them during times of strife. This strife came in abundance during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as various Mongol and Manchu armies aligned with Tibet’s religious lineages competed for power across the Highlands. At the end of this period, the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lozang Gyatso (1617–82), and his Gelug lineage had established the Ganden Podrang government in Lhasa, and the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages had been pushed to the periphery. The primarily Nyingma Sherpa made their way from eastern Tibet to the beyul south of Chomolangma in the Khumbu region. They continued to be called Sherpa, ‘easterners’, even after living in the Khumbu for hundreds of years.

Chomolungma was not prominent in Khumbu’s sacred geography; all but its ‘chicken comb’ was hidden behind closer mountains. Another closer mountain, Khumbila (or Khumbu Yul-Lha, ‘Khumbu’s territorial god’), became the beyul’s most important mountain deity. But the Sherpa maintained close associations with Nyingma and Kagyu Buddhist yogis who lived north of Chomolungma and circulated stories of the goddess. After the Gelug’s ascendancy, the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages became more closely linked, along with the stories of their most famous adepts, Guru Rinpoche and Milarepa. Guru Rinpoche’s taming of a flesh-eating demoness in the Dza Rongpu Valley was intertwined with Milarepa’s story, particularly his interactions with the Tseringma Chenga, who had been flesh-eating demonesses before their conversion to Buddhism. Proponents of each lineage respected each other’s sacred sites but tended to promote those associated with their own lineages. Thus, the Dza Rongpu Valley, home to Nyingma practitioners, was more closely associated with Guru Rinpoche than Chomolungma.

New mountain views, new mountain names

Along with these Tibetan texts, another unexpected place where the goddess’s name appears is on the previously mentioned maps produced by the Qing imperial court in the early eighteenth century. The Qing court composed these maps after expelling the Dzungar Mongols from Tibetan territory and establishing a choyon (priest-patron) or protector relationship with the Dalai Lamas in the early 1700s. As Tibet was not a Chinese province and was difficult to reach, the map makers sent Tibetan monks trained in cartography to survey it. The monks’ surveys led to the most comprehensive series of maps of Tibet hitherto produced, and the transliterated names of the goddess and her sister, Jomo Tseringma, appear on several maps at the edge of Tibetan territory in the central Himalaya. The maps were reproduced in French later in the same century by cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville in his Nouvel atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise, et du Thibet. On d’Anville’s map of Tibet, he names the mountain ‘Tchomour Lancma Mt’,²⁰ a twice transliterated interpretation of Chomo Langma.

At around the same time the Tibetan cartographer monks surveyed Tibetan territories for the Qing court, a group of nuns were establishing a community in the upper Dza Rongpu (Rongbuk) Valley at the mountain’s base. Their daily rituals involved prayers to the goddess, and they depended on her grace to continue living in the valley’s challenging environment. As far as we know, the nuns did not write down their prayers, but we know about them from Dzatrul Ngawang Tenzin Rinpoche’s writing. Dzatrul Rinpoche was a Nyingma yogi who came from a prominent family in the nearby settlement of Dingri. He moved to Dza Rongpu Valley late in the nineteenth century, and while meditating down the valley from the nuns, he experienced a vision of Guru Rinpoche encouraging him to establish a monastery there. Following the vision, he inaugurated Dza Rongpu Monastery in 1902.

Dzatrul Rinpoche’s reputation as a genuine meditator and kind guide to monks, nuns, and lay villagers spread on both sides of the mountain, and he became a key figure in Tibetans’ and Sherpas’ religious life.²¹ He wrote an autobiography describing his life at Dza Rongpu and penned a Guide to Dza Rongpu’s Sacred Sites for the region’s inhabitants. His description of the area focuses on Guru Rinpoche’s sojourn at the mountain’s base and his conversion of the goddess from flesh-eater to yogini, but he also acknowledges Milarepa’s legacy and his relationship with the Tseringma Chenga and Miyo Langsangma. Dzatrul Rinpoche was there to greet and raise concerns about the British ‘sahibs’ who began visiting his valley in the 1920s and 1930s, intent on ‘conquering’ the world’s highest mountain. He wrote of his concern about their ‘back-the-front views’ of reality and the pointless risks they took with their and others’ safety.²²

The British obsession with Chomolungma had begun seventy years earlier, when the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India determined in 1856 that the world’s highest peak sat just outside their territory in the Nepali–Tibetan borderlands. They established the peak’s height through theodolites and triangulations from hundreds of kilometres away, but it took them decades to receive permission to approach its base. In these intervening years, they established their own mythology of the mountain, embedded within imperial ambitions.

British claims that there were ‘multiple names’ for the mountain suggest they were not talking to the right people or looking at d’Anville’s map. Most of the ‘multiple names’ in circulation from the 1850s were British mistakes rather than local names for the mountain. Some confused Chomolangma and her elder sister, claiming the peak’s real name was Gaurishankar.²³ Another alternative name for the mountain was proffered by a group of British people living in Darjeeling, who insisted locals told them the mountain’s name was ‘Deodhunga’. They must have been unaware that Deodhunga (or Deo Ḍhuṅgā) means ‘stones of the gods’ or ‘stone altars’ in Nepali and is a name given to all high mountains and temples with stone altars in them.

To be fair, confusion about the mountain’s name was not confined to the region’s British inhabitants. When Charles Bell sought permission from the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa for British climbers to enter Dza Rongpu Valley, no one in Lhasa knew of the mountain either. The passport the government granted the climbers reads in part, ‘Minister Bell has suggested that Sahibs should be granted a pass to explore the snow mountain in Karta that he calls Chamalung.’²⁴

The climbing expeditions to Dzatrul Rinpoche’s valley also occasioned a discussion in the first Tibetan-language newspaper, Melong (Mirror), based in Kalimpong, about the ‘proper name of the Mount Everest’. The paper’s proprietor, Dorje Tharchin (1890–1976), ran a series of articles about the mountain’s name from March 1933. In the first article, he was convinced that the world’s highest mountain’s proper name was Tonting Gyelmo, Gaurishankar. He seemed to be more confused about which mountain the British were describing than the mountain’s name. After all, Tonting Gyelmo is the home of the oldest sister, Jomo Tseringma, and a much more important mountain in the region’s sacred geography. What is more, from Tharchin’s home in Kalimpong, Tonting Gyelmo looks higher than Chomolungma. In his very next edition of the Melong, however, he was less convinced. The Sherpa trade official Wang Penpa had insisted to him that the British were talking about another mountain, ‘the abundantly snowy terrestrial realm of the auspicious long-life goddess, Miyo Langsangma or Chomolungma’. He had also begun to have doubts, he said, after hearing that Dzatrul Rinpoche had written about the British interest in the mountain named ‘Chomolungma’.²⁵ He included a drawing with this second article that showed how prominent Tonting Gyelmo was in his view of the mountains and the smaller-looking Chomolungma to its right, at the back of the mountains (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 ‘The proper name of the Mount Everest’, detail, 1933. Chomolungma is the smaller of the mountains in the back right of this illustration for an article by Gegen Dorje Tharchin in his Tibetan language newspaper, Melong (The Mirror) (Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long), 7 (1933), 27. Tharchin Collection; Series 1; C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. Courtesy of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University.

These exchanges suggest that many Tibetans and Sherpas had a general image of snow mountains as special, associated the central Himalaya and the Tseringma Chenga, and Tonting Gyelmo (Gaurishankar) with the oldest sister, Jomo Tseringma. Only those who lived close to the mountain, including Sherpas like Wang Penpa, knew which specific peak the British were talking about and its association with Miyo Langsangma.

Shortly after Tharchin published his musings on the mountain’s proper name, the region was thrown into decades of geopolitical turmoil that reconfigured international perceptions of the mountain. The Second World War, decolonisation, and the Himalaya’s territorialisation within the mid-twentieth-century sovereign-state-based world order saw the goddess’s abode reimagined as an international border. The border transecting the mountain not only separated two sovereign states – the Kingdom of Nepal and the People’s Republic of China – but also the communist and Western spheres of influence. Dza Rongpu Monastery was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and fleeing monks carried Dzatrul Rinpoche’s body across the mountain passes into Nepali territory in Khumbu, where they offered him a proper funeral.²⁶ Nepal and China both added the world’s highest mountain to their invented nationalist traditions, renaming it accordingly.

As mentioned earlier, after geopolitics split the region, the name ‘Everest’ lost some of its colonial sting and became a name that connected the central Himalaya to the world beyond the nationalist Chinese and Nepali projects. Everest is not the mountain’s oldest name, nor its proper name, but neither is Zhumulangma Feng nor Sagarmāthā. The region’s complicated geopolitics have forestalled local efforts to decolonise the mountain’s names. These kinds of renaming efforts usually come from below when empowered postcolonial local communities demand that colonial names be removed. This probably will not happen to Chomolungma soon. But perhaps the international community could make an exception to this rule and start calling this mountain by its oldest local name, Chomolungma, honouring the goddess and the people of the region who have such a long history with her. Learning to name and see the goddess would go some way to undoing Waugh’s mistake and removing the stain of colonialism left behind on the mountain.