1634 - Antonio de Andrade & Manuel Marques

1632-1642

Tibet

Antonio de Andrade

Born at Oleiros, Portugal, in 1581, Antonio de Andrade[1] should go down as one of the greatest pioneer missionaries in history, and is credited as being the first Westerner to ever step foot inside Tibet.

Andrade entered the Jesuit order at the age of 16 and three years later was sent to the Portuguese colony of Goa in south India to complete his training. He was assigned to the Moghul Mission in the north Indian city of Agra, the location of the world-famous Taj Mahal. In 1624 Andrade travelled to Delhi where he met a group of Hindu pilgrims planning to cross the Himalayas into Tibet. The zealous Portuguese missionary decided to go with them, and in March 1624, disguised as a Hindu pilgrim, Andrade

“…outwitted hostile local officials, made his way north into the Himalayas, endured altitude sickness and snow blindness, fought his way over a 17,900-foot pass into Tibet, and finally reached Zaburang, capital of the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge. There he impressed the king and queen with his piety, and they gave him permission to return, establish a mission, and preach the Gospel.”[2]

Travel across the Himalayas was an extraordinarily challenging experience, as Andrade’s 31-page journal makes clear. Poorly equipped for the hardships and cold, he wrote,

“We began to climb these lofty mountains, which have not their like perhaps on the surface of the globe. It took us two days’ march to cross one. In some places the passage between them is so narrow, that we could only just put one foot before the other, and for a long way we had to go first on one side and then on the other, clinging to the rocks with our hands, and at a single false step we should have been dashed to pieces.”[3]

In another account Andrade described one section of the journey,

“Immediately beyond this place there rise lofty mountains, behind which lies an awful desert, which is passable only during two months of the year. The journey requires twenty days. As there is an entire absence of trees and plants here, there are no human habitations, and the snowfall is almost uninterrupted.”[4]

The desert experience seems to have been the worst, and found the Portuguese priest despairing of life:

“We plunged into the desert and struggled on with difficulty, sometimes up to our waists in snow, sometimes up to our shoulders, and never less than knee deep, and occasionally dragging ourselves at full length along the surface of it, as if we were swimming. Such were the labours of the day, and the night brought us but little rest. We spread our cloaks upon the snow, and covered ourselves as well as we could with others, but very frequently the snow fell so thick upon us that we were obliged to rise and shake it off that we might not be buried. The cold was so severe, that we had lost all feeling in various parts of the body,—principally the hands, feet, and face.

Once when I tried to hold something, a bone came out of one of my fingers, but I was not aware of it till I saw the blood on my hand; while our feet were so swelled and numbed, that if a hot iron had touched them we should not have felt it.”[5]

His destination was Zaburang (Tsaparang, or Caparangue, as he called it in his letters), part of the ancient Guge kingdom that was situated on the massive Ngari Plateau in northwest Tibet. The Guge kingdom, which was founded in the first half of the 10th century and lasted for more than 700 years with 28 lineal kings, is largely a barren desert sitting at an average altitude of 4,500 meters (14,760-feet) above sea-level. There the oxygen content in the air is only about one-third than at sea-level.

When Antonio de Andrade’s report of his journey through Kashmir, Ladakh, and into Tibet made its way back to Europe, most people thought it was a work of fiction, or a scurrilous account of exaggeration and lies. Tibet had appeared as an empty space on maps at the time. Many years’ later travellers proved Andrade’s account was accurate, and indeed little has changed for pilgrims wishing to travel this route today. To cross the Himalayas on foot once is more than most people can endure, but Andrade completed the journey several times as he sought to establish God’s kingdom on the ‘roof the world.’

After his initial visit, Andrade returned to Zaburang in 1625 with four coworkers. As the group entered Tibet they found to their delight that the king had “sent men four days’ journey to meet us, with horses and many presents, and orders that we were to be honourably received in all the places we should pass through.”[6] Andrade and his coworkers made good progress in acquiring the local Tibetan dialect, and soon he was preaching. In September 1625, Andrade wrote that while he preached on the torments of hell, “The king looked very sorrowful and the queen wept silently. Among the twenty courtiers present some said that it was a blessing God had caused us to be born so that would teach them.”[7]

The king was so interested in the missionaries’ work that on April 12, 1626, he personally laid the cornerstone of the Church of Our Lady of Hope—the first church of any description in Tibet. The king “paid for all the building costs and often came into the church to pray and ask the missionaries deep questions about Christianity.”[8] In 1627 Andrade anticipated that Zaburang would become “one of the most flourishing missions,” but his optimism soon proved unfounded. Unfortunately for the five Catholic missionaries their entrance into Tibet coincided with a time of political upheaval. Various factions were fighting for control of the nation, and the Buddhist lamas at Zaburang, “alarmed at their king’s interest in the new religion, incited a revolution.”[9] The king and his family were exiled to Ladakh (now in northern India).

Antonio de Andrade was recalled to Goa, India, in 1629. The following year the revolution ravaged the Zaburang mission, and Andrade found all efforts to re-enter Tibet and continue the work were blocked. The Tibetan Christians were singled out for retribution. They were either sold into slavery or sent into exile, while the church and missionaries’ houses were demolished.

Ruins of the ancient Tibetan kingdom of Guge, where the first ever Tibetan church was established in 1626.

Antonio de Andrade suddenly died while attempting to return to Tibet in 1634. Some accounts say he was poisoned by an enemy, while others blame the Muslims for the Portuguese missionary’s death. Although he died in India, Andrade’s heart and soul were among the Tibetan people that he loved so dearly.

The missionaries continued with efforts to re-establish their work. Seven workers were sent to Tibet in 1635, but three fell sick on the way and two more died from the extremities of the trip. Just two made it alive. In 1642 there was just one Jesuit missionary, Manuel Marques, remaining in Zaburang. He “reported that he was being attacked and had been injured. From that point on, the records fall silent. It is believed that he later died in prison.”[10] A Christian remnant remained in the Zaburang region until the work was finally abandoned in 1650. By then the kingdom of Guge had collapsed, and all traces that the gospel had ever been there soon vanished.

One modern explorer had this to say of Antonio de Andrade: “He stands like a milestone on the highroad of the centuries, a boundary cliff in the stream of time, and he marks the point from which the history of Tibetan exploration really begins.”[11] Andrade’s journals were rediscovered in Calcutta in the 19th century. They captured the imagination of author James Hilton, whose novels depicting Shangri-La owed much to the Portuguese martyr’s accounts from 300 years earlier.

1. Some accounts spell his family name Andrada, while others use Antoine for his given name.
2. Marku Tsering, Sharing Christ in the Tibetan Buddhist World (Upper Darby, Pa: Tibet Press, 1988), 75.
3. Huc, Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet, 251.
4. C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924), 54.
5. Huc, Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet, 257-258.
6. Huc, Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet, 266.
7. Tony Lambert, “The Lost Kingdom of Guge: A Forgotten Chapter in the Evangelization of Tibet,” China Insight (July-August 2000).
8. Lambert, “The Lost Kingdom of Guge.”
9. Tsering, Sharing Christ in the Tibetan Buddhist World, 75.
10. Lambert, “The Lost Kingdom of Guge.”
11. Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya Discoveries and Adventure in Tibet, Vol.3 (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1913).