China's Great Mt. Everest Hoax
POPE, QUENTIN
Report that the Chinese have conquered the world's tallest mountain is pure fabrication CHINA'S GREAT MT. EVEREST HOAX By Quentin Pope Hong Kong The valley floor below majestic Mount Everest...
...In the first rank of this parade strode a lumberjack, a fireman and an intellectual...
...Wang and Chou got down as far as 26,000 feet...
...The Chinese story of the saga of the mountain says exactly nothing of the work of the Tibetan porters who got them up there...
...It said: "Good weather tomorrow...
...And then, after a halt for a meal, they continued climbing down the mountain during the night...
...It has been surpassed several times by British expeditions and it is below the spot at which the Chinese say their oxygen ran out...
...Communist China was celebrating the return of the climbing team which, Peking said, had conquered Everest from the northern side...
...It took more than half-an-hour to tackle a rock one meter high and long halts were needed after each step...
...The Indian team was driven off the mountain by conditions of intense cold, high wind and snow...
...When Edmund Hillary, a greatly experienced climber of the highest caliber, conquered Mt...
...But correspondent Kuo Chao-jen, who also was not there, has a version more worthy of the moment...
...There is great loss of water from the lungs due to the increased breathing rate in the thin air...
...At the conference which followed, the intellectual Wang was again the spokesman...
...Now each step forward meant a gigantic effort...
...They made the whole of the assault without taking any food or drink...
...There is also muscular wastage...
...Did they collapse in utter exhaustion after the longest and highest climb in the history of mountaineering...
...Had he been a mere capitalistic climber, untoughened by the care of the Chinese Communist party, that sleep would undoubtedly have been his last...
...It was almost totally dark, the only light came from the stars...
...To climb the mountain is a task given us by the Party," cried Wang...
...On March 19, the expedition leaders sitting around at the foot of the mountain were about to begin an expedition for which they were still ordering by special delivery such items as "the choicest concentrated foods and beverages" and specially designed crampons (climbing irons) Quentin Pope, a veteran Far Eastern correspondent now in Hong Kong, has reported for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune...
...At some unspecified time after dusk had fallen and a piercing wind had risen, the climax came...
...In the five following days all the climbers completed the descent of the mountain...
...The climbers, we are told, "had forgotten to bring a flashlight along...
...The tented camp streamed flags and banners signalling China's challenge to the future...
...His comrades gave him a true Communist answer...
...Even so he was out of oxygen in seven and a half hours...
...The climbers were down on all fours "for greater safety," crawling through the snow...
...One after the other they tried taking the lead...
...He tore a page from his diary and scribbled a note to this effect...
...Finally, Wang moved in front to cut the steps for the others...
...The three tossed aside their oxygen apparatus...
...And then he fell asleep...
...Above 21.000 feet a man's resistance to cold drops, his mental activity flags, the acid-alkali balance of the blood is disturbed, the respiratory center of the brain is affected...
...Now that is interesting, because we know this altitude can be reached...
...Between there was an oval shaped space...
...They took no photographs "because it was too dark to do so," though it was light enough for them to collect rock specimens for Mao...
...Acute headaches, troubled vision, excessive panting and feebleness tortured them cruelly...
...they had almost 900 feet of the most difficult work still ahead of them and the life of their oxygen equipment must have been strictly limited...
...How was this done...
...What happened here is the subject of different versions...
...On the evening of May 23 the assault team was at the last camp, 27,-790 feet high...
...The equipment was also to be the same: Oxygen cylinders, aluminum ladders with which to cross crevasses, nylon ropes, protective garments of down beneath the wind-proofs, and even outer clothing of Western mountain blue...
...Finally they would establish an assault base at around 27.600 feet, from which the summit would be attacked...
...Everest along with Tenzing, a man who was climbing the great mountain for the seventh time, it took them five hours to get from their 27.900 foot advanced base to the summit and two and a half hours to get back...
...One Chinese story is that the party climbed transversely along the cliff, another that they were defeated by the rock and had to follow a course along the base until they discovered a chimney...
...The day had gone now...
...They could not find Camp VI so they spent the night, their second in succession, out in the open...
...Gompa the Tibetan, who had not been allowed any opinion as to whether he wanted any part in this lunatic climb, was given a voice this time...
...And now let us look at the three final points which clinch the argument that the Chinese lied about the Everest ascent: 1. The day the Chinese launched their final assault, an Indian climbing team was also moving against the summit...
...But Lieu was not to go...
...But their climbing was not so good...
...Yet the Chinese claim to have been able to send their fledgling team to the summit area (Gomba had made only one big climb before) and stay there almost twice as long as Hillary and Tenzing during the assault alone...
...Suddenly they saw a signal from Camp III...
...One says: "Hey, George, why can't we just fake the last couple of chapters...
...The Chinese say they just forgot about this...
...It will be dangerous to continue our advance...
...China was using a team of 219, many of them "newly liberated Tibetan serfs...
...he reports Wang as saying, "The three of us should shoulder the task of the assault upon the summit...
...And at precisely 10 AM a blue-clad column of men carrying green rucksacks and shouldering ice axes marched with military precision into the glen...
...They were still 700 feet below the summit and the advance had become even more difficult...
...Our oxygen has run out...
...China would conquer Everest with four elephant-herd rushes up the peak, each one starting at the foot, even the final climb...
...But their own reports of the earlier climbs show that they were not equal to Western climbers...
...They still had 1010 feet left to climb when they came smack up against the great obstacle which the Chinese call the Second Step, a steep rock barrier estimated at 100 feet high and rising from the mountain slope at an angle of from 60 to 70 degrees...
...To go on might be very dangerous," he said in the mountaineering understatement of the year...
...Gompa took off his rucksack and pulled out the plaster bust of Mao and the five-starred flag of Red China...
...To counter the fluid loss, from five to seven pints of liquid a day are essential...
...But what the Chinese claim is that after having used up seven hours of oxygen supply to get up 320 feet they managed to ascend another 700 feet before their oxygen cylinders ran out and did this in darkness and over an unknown route...
...Westerners might work out elaborate schedules to acclimatize their high-level teams, moving from one mountain to another...
...On March 20, 1954, just one day under six years before the Communists held their planning meeting at the foot of Everest, The New Yorker published a cartoon of two mountaineers who have already climbed a long way and are now at the foot of an overwhelming peak...
...In fact, it had come straight up from the valley floor, from 16,700 feet to 27.790 feet, finishing the ascent the day before the summit thrust was made...
...obedient peasants held bouquets of flowers awaiting the big moment or stood around flying colored balloons...
...Lucky Lieu...
...In addition the New China News Agency claims that they climbed all night without oxygen...
...Did they do it...
...When Hillary calculated his oxvgen needs for the climb, he set the cylinder flow for himself and Tenzing at three liters a minute...
...Did they finally manage to pull themselves out of a state of exhaustion to begin a slow and painful and oxygenless descent...
...But "a deeper breath of oxygen brought him to," we are told, "and he thought of his comrades still battling up the mountain...
...We'll go on...
...By now they had been climbing for seven hours and risen only 320 feet...
...So the climbers swung around to the northeast and then struck upwards again...
...This, of course, departed from the Western practice of establishing climbers somewhere around the 20,-000-foot level, the highest point at which man can live without having to meet major physiological strains —even the famous Sherpa porters have difficulty above 19,000 feet...
...At length, Lieu decided to hoist his companions up on his back...
...They passed two rocky slopes, apparently at different angles, and then met snow again...
...And then...
...The tale is all of the magnificent heroism of the climbers plus one local "Sherpa Tenzing," a Tibetan named Gompa who was a member of the assault team...
...After accounts of the acclimatization marches in which some improbable things occur—such as the discovery of four routes over the North Col during a five-hour snowstorm—we are launched on the story of the incredible climax...
...But can we withdraw...
...It means, also, as far as one can judge from the Chinese story, that their oxygen would have run out before they were 400 feet above their assault base and with 800 feet of difficult climbing ahead...
...Their description of scenery could not be more vague...
...at, three men, conquered Mount Jolo Lungma [the Chinese name for Everest] 04:20, May 25, 1960...
...And at 7 AM local time the next day four of them set out: Wang Fu-chou, a geologist from Peking, Chou Ying-hua, a lumberjack from Szchewan, Lieu Lien-man, a fireman from the North, and Gompa, the Tibetan mercenary, who had climbed only one peak in his life...
...The Chinese say they had special weather on their side...
...But had they really climbed it...
...Yet Hillary and Tenzing, running a test of equipment for Hunt, climbed from 17,900 feet to 21,200 feet in five hours, including a 45-minute rest...
...They stayed on the summit for 25 minutes, searching for eight different types of rock specimens to present to Mao Tse-tung and then they plunged on the downward trail...
...And then, at 28,800 feet, their oxygen ran out...
...2. The Chinese assault team which toiled toward the crest for 19 hours had already been climbing for seven successive days...
...And so, only half-conscious, they left him...
...Did they sprawl around for hours slowly rebuilding themselves after 19 hours in rarified air, many of them without oxygen...
...They did not...
...But they hoisted and clawed one another up to the top of the rock face and only then did theys discover they had taken five hours to conquer this barrier...
...Its angle sharpened and it became yet more treacherous...
...What they were able to see did not demand many words from the reporters...
...A rock slab blocked the climb, Gomba crossed it and after half-an-hour's rest he summoned up the energy to pull his exhausted companions up to him...
...The object was to carry out the final climb as fast as possible...
...Not long before the end it was the Tibetan's turn for the superhuman deed...
...Even if the Chinese equipment were 50 per cent superior to that used in the British expedition, this still gives an oxygen supply lasting only about 11 hours which means the Chinese climbed for about eight and a half hours at the highest altitudes without oxygen...
...The Communists had laid down a plan to climb the mountain which was magnificently totalitarian...
...3. The Chinese have no proof whatever that they were ever near the summit...
...First they would go to 22.200 feet, then to 23,800 and 27,100...
...They put the message in a woollen glove and placed it under a small heap of stones...
...Westerners might be limited to puny totals of men on Everest like the 47 climbers and porters in the party led by Britain's Sir John Hunt in 1953...
...It took them until 6 pm to reach the assault base camp 1,230 feet below and on the way they found Lieu and his tiny supply of oxygen and wept with him a little...
...As a non-Communist, Gompa the Tibetan was not asked his opinion...
...Exhausted by his heroic and superhuman exertions he had been falling every other step...
...Maybe that's where the Chinese got the idea...
...The assault base would be placed as high as the climbers could reach...
...He switched off his oxygen apparatus in a heroic, self-sacrificing effort to save the remaining precious oxygen for them...
...But otherwise the whole operation was almost a carbon copy of Hunt's tactics...
...which had to be manufactured in a hurry...
...The massif was a wall of gloom, only the crest appeared against the sky...
...Shall we press on without oxygen...
...His hands were frozen stiff, but he left no room for any nonsense about whether a Chinese or a Tibetan was first to the top of the world...
...On they went in their dangerous and unprecedented effort, the climbing of the top-most levels of Everest without oxygen...
...he loyally chorused with lumberjack Chou, according to the report of the New China News Agency, whose correspondent was sitting down at Camp III at the time...
...At this altitude the slightest movement cost him tremendous effort, "his legs trembled and he moved and breathed laboriously...
...Yet they endured all this and kept pressing on...
...And after these eight days of effort it was able to climb down to 27,790 feet on the ninth day and then continue climbing, "with a brief interruption for a snack" on the ninth night...
...Not at all...
...Floundering upwards, according to this second account, Chou the lumberjack "fell many times and Master of Sports Lieu Lien-man dropped back four times when leading the way up the last 10 feet" where the rock became solid and vertical...
...That is not fit even to tell to the Marines...
...One example: The Chinese make a great deal of the fact that one of their acclimatization parties, using a prepared route, climbed from base camp at 16,700 feet to Camp III at 20,887 feet in one day...
...All the evidence I have just completed examining points to the fact that this Communist claim is one of the most impudent fakes of modern times...
...The other three now attacked a 60-degree slope...
...EVEREST HOAX By Quentin Pope Hong Kong The valley floor below majestic Mount Everest echoed with the banging of drums and gongs and the roar of firecrackers...
...Comrades...
...The Chinese claim that their climbing team lasted for 19 hours at the highest altitudes denies physical possibilities...
...Though none of the Chinese accounts mentions bad weather, they had advanced only 220 feet in two hours, something less than one-fourth of the rate at which they needed to go...
...And comes the gallant cry of Gompa and Chou: "Press on...
...And in any event the problems of great heights are not merely a matter of muscles...
...But then, of course, the sentimental capitalists would never have brought themselves to the point where they balanced a life against the summit and threw the life away...
...But can we go back...
...So the three Communists, Wang, Chou and Lieu, held a Party meeting to decide what to do...
...This is one liter a minute less than is desirable but he had to do this to make the oxygen last...
...They carried their oxygen apparatus, ice axes and rucksacks, and Gompa bore the five-starred flag of Bed China and an eight-inch-high plaster bust of Mao Tse-tung which were to be left on the crest...
...And then suddenly they were there...
...Carefully he secured them with stones on a great rock on the northwest of the summit...
...The Chinese say that their success was due to their superior physique...
...Wang pulled out his diary and wrote: "Wang Fou-chou et...
...To the south there was thick accumulated snow and to the north gray rocks...
...They descended to 28,840 feet where they "took a few shots...
...When he had descended another 1,900 feet to the South Col, Hillary confesses he was exhausted...
...And in the whole expedition they had only three minor cases of frostbite...
...There could be only one answer...
...Expedition leader Shih Chan-chun has the answer: It was all due to the leadership of the Communist party...
...Bock edged into snow and they stood on the snow cap of the world's highest mountain...
...It was 1:50 AM, May 25, local time, and they had been climbing for almost 19 hours...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 31
