J. M. Davis, portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805, oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child.
In the orbit of the Romantics, Manning was the best friend of Charles Lamb, close to the mad poet Charles Lloyd, and friendly with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. He knew Tom Paine and Madame de Staël in Paris, and was considered a handsome charmer in its aristocratic and intellectual salons. He spent twelve years in China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and was attached as a freelance interpreter to Lord Amherst’s disastrous expedition to Peking, which was expelled from the Forbidden City after one day, as Amherst had refused to “kowtow” to the emperor. He was perhaps the greatest English Sinologist of his time, before Sinology existed in England, and was the only one for most of the century who was not a missionary or religiously motivated. As an undergraduate, he had written a two-volume textbook on algebra. It was said that he spoke fifteen languages. He was anti-colonialist and anti-clerical, expelled from Cambridge for refusing to sign allegiance to the Church of England. In Asia he was on his own as an impoverished scholar, working for neither the British government or the East India Company, whose functionaries he found exasperating. He was famous in the cantonments for his erudition, his self-fashioned “Oriental” dress of silk robe and turban, and his waist-length beard.
Lamb wrote that Manning was “A Man of great Power—an enchanter almost. Far beyond Coleridge or any man in power of impressing— … I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.” Thomas Allsop, a disciple of Coleridge and later a close friend of Karl Marx, said, “I cannot at all convey an adequate notion or even image of his extraordinary and very peculiar powers.”
Manning left no trace of these powers. He wrote a few unmemorable poems and an academic article on Chinese jokes, translating some forty of them in a deadpan manner. His letters to Lamb are largely puns and sophomoric wit, often about drinking. His one piece of extensive writing is the journal he kept on the trek to Tibet and back, which was published decades after his death as, according to its editor from the Geographic Society, a curious “relic.”
The journal is notable in that it makes almost no observations about the things he was the first Westerner to see. The splendor of the Himalayas goes unmentioned. He was uninterested in Tibet, which he considered merely as a back door he could take into China, then forbidden to foreigners. In the months that he was there, he only once begrudgingly visited a temple. He enjoyed going to the Potala to play games with the Dalai Lama–who died at age ten a few years later–and otherwise amused himself by writing homophonic translations of squibs of Latin. In the journal, he is almost comically oblivious to his surroundings, preoccupied with his clothes, his comfort, his health, his food, his sleep, the inferior qualities of the local liquors, his disputes with his servant, and the maintenance of his beard. On the historic day when he finally reaches Lhasa, his journal entry begins: “Our first care was to provide ourselves with proper hats.”
His Chinese servant was arrested by the authorities. Manning was not allowed to enter China and was expelled from Tibet. He walked back to Calcutta alone. On his voyage home, he survived a shipwreck in the Java Sea and was marooned on an uninhabited island. Ultimately securing passage on a second ship, along with an orangutang, he stopped off for a visit with Napoleon on Saint Helena. He spent his last decades as a recluse in the English countryside in an unfurnished house, still dressed as an Oriental, his long beard now white, willing to answer letters with specific philological questions about Chinese, but no longer in contact with his old friends.
At his death, he left no unfinished manuscripts. Lamb had lamented that Manning “will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is.” In 1844, the critic William Bodham Donne wrote: “Chinese Manning … one of the most remarkable men of his age, was unfortunately one of those whom [Adrien] Baillet might have put on his list of ‘the learned who meant to write something.’”
Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu was published by New Directions in spring 2024. His Art of the Essay interview appeared in issue no. 253.
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