Black Hills

This practice reflects the view of the Orient as a passive object to be discovered and appropriated by the West. Tibetans (and maybe many non -Tibetans too) were of course familiar with the poppy. But it required a Western man to name it, taxonomize it in a "universal" scheme of things, and thus become its discoverer. Interestingly, in the movie The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), the eponymous villain learns how to distill a vicious poison from the "Black Hill poppy" of Tibet thanks to the papers of the Younghusband expedition, where the complete secret of the plant is meticulously laid down. In some instances scientific names of Tibetan flora and fauna are hybrids, such as Ovis ammon dalailamae przevalskii (1888) (named after the Dalai Lama and the Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky) for one variant of argali, the wild sheep. [33] In fact, after his Lhasa expedition Younghusband involved himself in nonconventional mystical activities. In an obituary for Younghusband, the New York Times merged the man who had led the British invasion with the Hollywood myth: "If as James Hilton strongly suggests in Lost Horizon, Shangri-La is somewhere in Tibet rather than merely somewhere- anywhere… then Sir Francis Younghusband probably came closer than anyone else to being Robert Conway" (French 1995, 202). [34] Missionaries had their own romantic vision of Tibet, often emphasizing the darker aspects of Tibetan culture in order to highlight the country's need for Christian enlightenment ...»