He mapped forbidden Tibet one counted step at a time, slipping a prayer bead every hundred paces.
100 beads, not 108 · each bead = 100 paces · every tenth bead larger
In the 1860s Tibet was closed. Local officials turned back nearly every outsider who tried for Lhasa, and the British, who badly wanted a map of the country, could not send their own surveyors in. So the Great Trigonometrical Survey trained men from the Himalayan borderlands to go in disguise. The best of them was a Bhotia trader's son from Kumaon named Nain Singh. He walked with a stride drilled to exactly 33 inches. He counted his steps on a rosary of 100 beads instead of the usual 108, and he kept his notes rolled inside a prayer wheel.
On 10 January 1866 he walked into Lhasa, and by the boiling point of water and the stars he fixed where it was and how high it stood. Over three secret journeys he added more to the map of Asia, a London geographer said, than any other man then living, and for years London knew him only as "the Pundit."
From the Johar valley to the roof of the world
The lifeline
1830
Born in Milam, a Bhotia village under the Milam glacier in Kumaon
1856
Goes to Ladakh with the German Schlagintweit brothers and learns survey instruments
1866
Reaches Lhasa in disguise and fixes its position and altitude
1874
His last journey: Leh to Lhasa and on to Assam, across land no one had mapped
1877
Awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Patron's Medal
1882
Dies of cholera at Moradabad, aged about 51
By the numbers
A survey made of footsteps
33in
The stride he was trained to hold, uphill or down, so paces could become miles
1,319mi
Of route surveyed in 1874–75, and 1,200 of those miles had never been mapped
3,420m
His boiling-water reading for Lhasa's altitude. The true figure is about 3,540 m
26
Pack sheep that left Ladakh with him in 1874. Only four or five walked the whole way to Lhasa
Three journeys into a closed country
The deeds
1865–66
Nepal to Lhasa. A secret route survey to the Tibetan capital. He spent the winter there teaching merchants accounts, then followed the upper Brahmaputra (the Tsangpo) west toward its source.
1867
The goldfields of Thok Jalung. He reached them on 26 August and later called the place the coldest he had ever known. The same journey mapped the Sutlej, checked the position of Gartok and ran an 850-mile route survey.
1874
Across the Chang Tang. He left Leh on 15 July dressed as a priest and reached Lhasa on 18 November, 1,095 miles later. On the way he fixed the eastern end of Lake Pangong and mapped a chain of lakes no outsider had recorded.
1875
Out through Tawang. He fled Lhasa after two days when a merchant recognised him. He gauged the Tsangpo's depth with the ferry poles, then crossed the Himalaya and reached Udalguri, Assam, on 1 March.
1876–79
Teacher of explorers. With his eyesight worn down by years of observing at altitude, he trained the next generation of pundits, among them Sarat Chandra Das in 1879.
Honoured as a code name, then half-forgotten
Recognition
In his lifetime
His reports appeared under "the Pundit"; his name was not made public until 1876
Discovery in Tibet would have meant prison or worse, so every reading was taken in secret
His RGS medal was accepted in London by Henry Yule on his behalf
His reward was a village in Rohilkhand, a pension and a gold watch from the Paris Geographical Society
Today
India Post honoured him on a 2004 stamp marking the Great Trigonometrical Survey
A Tibetan mountain range, the Nain Singh Range, carries his name
His diaries were published in 2006 as Asia ki Peeth Par, in three volumes
Google marked his 187th birthday with a Doodle in 2017
A village that empties every winter
Milam, Johar valley
Milam sits at the head of the Johar valley, at the foot of the glacier where the Gori Ganga begins. Its Bhotia families crossed the passes each summer to trade in the markets of western Tibet, and young Nain went with his father. That is how he learned the Tibetan language, customs and manners that later let him pass unnoticed.
Jun–Oct
The only months of the year the upper Johar villages are lived in
4
Pundits from one family: Nain, his brother Kalian, and their cousins Mani and Kishen Singh
1816
The year Kumaon passed from Gorkha to British rule
"His observations have added a larger amount of important knowledge to the map of Asia than those of any other living man."
— Henry Yule, accepting the RGS Patron's Medal for Nain Singh, 1877
