There was no shortage of extraordinary stories about Crowley himself. A member of the occult Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Englishman had published erotic poetry that shocked his contemporaries, and a long prose poem that he claimed had been dictated to him in Egypt by a supernatural being. He had been joint-leader of the first ever attempt to scale K2, in 1902, and of an equally abortive attempt on Kanchenjunga, in 1905; the latter was a disastrous expedition during which four of the party died – partly Crowley’s fault, it was rumoured.
He was considered too much of a bisexual libertine even for the drug-taking and far-from-buttoned-up circles in which he moved, and the British press was later to label him, probably to his satisfaction, “the wickedest man in the world”.
Litton was not wrong. To hear of the self-titled Great Beast 666 in such an obscure corner of China was extraordinary in itself. Yet here he was.
Monkey attacks, sexism, a punch-up: welcome aboard the cruise from hell
Crowley was heir to a fortune made in brewing, but he did not travel in style. His entry to China from British-controlled Burma was on horseback – a week on a winding mule track that carried all the Sino-Burmese trade that it was Litton’s responsibility to monitor.
Traffic was light. Yunnan’s principal export, the opium with which Crowley would later experiment, was forbidden by the British authorities.
The tourism promoters of sunny Yunnan have never mentioned Crowley’s visit in their promotional materials, perhaps because of his decided view that there was an atmosphere of horror, and he saw the most ordinary events there as evidence of the supernatural at work. These included being kicked by a mule and a misstep by his horse that sent both it and rider tumbling down a slope but left them both unharmed – hardly events to make hairs rise on the back of the neck.
But while staying at the mud-built Tengyueh consulate, Crowley did have a brush with the truly macabre. A fellow guest was the celebrated plant hunter George Forrest, an Indiana Jones-like figure whose reports on species previously unknown to Western science were already the toast of assorted horticultural societies.
Earlier in 1905, Forrest had been staying with French Catholic missionaries in remote, Tibetan-dominated Tzekou (Cigu), on the Mekong River, 500 mountainous kilometres north of Tengyueh, when local lamas had led an uprising, slaughtering foreign Christians and converts to Christianity alike.
Forrest, tracked by hunting parties, made an intrepid multiweek escape during which the rest of his party perished. In what must have been the most racy account ever to appear in the somnolent pages of The Gardeners’ Chronicle, he described what he later heard of the death and disembowelling of his captured missionary companions, including one Père Dubernard.
“His captors broke both arms above and below the elbow, tied his hands behind his back, and in this condition forced him to walk back to the blackened site of Tzekou. There they fastened him to a post and subjected him to most brutal mutilation; amongst the least of his injuries being the extraction of his tongue and eyes and the cutting off of his ears and nose.”
Parts of the bodies were, it was claimed, distributed among the various lamaseries in the region.
Crowley repeated the story with relish, but added details including the ghostly apparition of one murdered missionary who supposedly pointed Forrest in the safest direction in which to flee. He also added, “It was the custom of these lamas to devour the hearts and livers of their enemies in order to acquire their vitality and courage […] I think it is practical common sense.”
There was direct contact with death when in early January the 39-year-old Litton died while on a routine inspection tour, and Forrest and Crowley went out to retrieve the body. The consulate’s Bengali doctor proved both incompetent and fearful of approaching the corpse, despite receiving a whipping from Crowley as an encouragement. He finally declared the cause of death to be a bacterial infection, and for once Crowley failed to propose any supernatural alternative.
Forrest turned down the invitation to join Crowley’s next attempt at Kanchenjunga, and the Beast set off for Yunnan-fu (Kunming) on a route already plotted out for him by the late consul.
Crowley barely mentions Rose or their baby anywhere in his account but he wrote with unaccustomed, albeit short-lived, sunniness on the beauty of the mountainous landscape before describing the Salween (also known as the Nu), which he crossed, as “the most dangerous river in the world”.
He wrote of one local minority that it was “addicted to head hunting, kidney chasing, phallus fishing and testicle trapping, so that their cooks are famous for stewed spleen, pancreas puddings and appendix on toast”.
En route Crowley tried opium, but, he wrote, felt no effect. He decided that he had used up his capacity for enjoying it in a previous incarnation, and denied its harmfulness.
“The philosophical phlegmatic temperament of the Chinese finds opium sympathetic,” he wrote. It was harmless, and any damage to British, French or American opium-eaters was the fault of their own dispositions.
Crowley persistently mocked missionaries. At Dali, a Dr Clark, “received us with great courtesy and hospitality. I found him a sincere and earnest man; more, even an enlightened man, so far as it is possible for a missionary to be so; but that is not very far.”
In Yunnan-fu he found that six of them had produced merely four converts to Christianity in four years.
For all his intrepidness, Crowley craved the comforts of home.
“We had some tins of coffee and milk, and we had come to the last portion of the last tin. We treasured it for days, looking forward to enjoying it on some great occasion as never an epicure looked forward to a bottle of rare wine.”
His wife accidentally knocked it over. “It would be hopeless to try to express the bitterness of our disappointment.” The man who prided himself on his stoicism in face of the terrors of Yunnan could nevertheless cry over spilt milk.
Crowley and his party – which included mule men and porters – arrived at Yunnan-fu in late February, where an official complaint concerning the aforementioned whipping filed by the doctor in Tengyueh caused the otherwise genial British consul general William Wilkinson to decline his visitor hospitality and to levy a fine.
Crowley abandoned his plan to cross China down the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) and instead headed south, to French-controlled Vietnam, keen, he claimed, to return to Europe and organise another attempt at Kanchenjunga.
A week’s walking south brought him to Mengtze (Mengzi), “a French outpost with all the civilisation, culture and cooking that heart of man can wish”, and where the customs inspector, C.H. Brewitt-Taylor, invited him to stay. “At first sight he could hardly believe that I was an Englishman,” wrote Crowley. “The journey had reduced me to rags; I had no chance of washing or trimming my beard; the skin of my face was torn by the wind. I must have looked simply frightful.” But new faces were always welcome in small colonies. “Everyone invited us everywhere, including a garden party where I played lawn tennis for the first time in 10 years.”
Amid all this incongruously jolly socialising there was still time to find the macabre in inaccurately mocking the French for bringing 8,000 railway construction labourers down from chilly Manchuria, all but 500 having subsequently died from the heat.
According to Isidore Cyril Cannon, Brewitt-Taylor’s biographer, the customs inspector’s diary entry on Crowley was succinct. “Altogether he is a queer man, such an one as is usually styled mad as a hatter.”
The final stretch of Crowley’s journey was south to Manhao, on the Red River, “which competes with the Salween for pre-eminence in deadliness, both from disease and demons”.
There was time for the last of several altercations with his guides and porters, whom he held at bay with his rifle while the crew of the dugout he had rented cast off for a trip downriver, through rapids, to Hokow (Hekou). He arrived to get “gloriously drunk”, celebrating the success of a cross-Yunnan trip he had continuously insisted was horror-haunted and dangerous, but now compared to a trip across London.
“The awe-inspiring adventure had proved as safe as a bus ride from the Bank to Battersea.”
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