Many Nations 

Ascents of Mount Everest were considered matters of national importance during imperial, postcolonial, and Cold War eras throughout most of the twentieth century. Access to Everest was transformed by the independence of India in 1947, communist revolution in China and the invasion of Tibet, and by the opening of Nepal to visitors in 1950. A series of Everest ascents by British, Swiss, Chinese, American, and Indian expeditions in the 1950s and 1960s deepened and expanded the heroic, masculine norms associated with earlier imperial models from the 1920s. After the Second World War and the British withdrawal from India, attitudes towards Sherpa high-altitude workers slowly began to change. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sherpas increasingly asserted their agency, assumed more responsibility, and demanded more egalitarian relationships in mountaineering expeditions. In 1952, the Swiss Everest expedition made Tenzing Norgay a full member of the climbing team, a team led by professional alpine guides. Raymond Lambert, a professional guide from Geneva, praised Tenzing's physical and moral strength but was confused by their relationship: 'Quite simply, I must say that I, the guide, have the confused impression, for once, of being the "client".' On Everest's highest slopes, Lambert recalled feeling like a deep-sea diver walking against an underwater current and reflected again on their relationship: 'this curious feeling comes over me: am I the client? Is Tenzing the guide? Or the opposite. I don't know, but the impression is new.' 

The next year, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Everest together on 29 May 1953 in a British expedition led by Col. John Hunt. News of the ascent was published in London on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the climbers were hailed as national heroes in Britain, Nepal, India, and New Zealand. The climbers were frequently asked 'who was first' on the summit. Jonathan Pitches' chapter examines the theatrical staging of their partnership in plays about Everest. In Matt Kambic's The Sherpa and the Beekeeper, the play starts with the controversy over who stood on the summit first. Tenzing and Hillary engage in Socratic dialogues that hew closely to the historical record and amplify their voices. Pitches notes that Kambic and other playwrights create performances that crystallise multiple historical disputes over Everest for theatrical audiences – ownership of a sacred mountain, contested nationalities of the climbers, divisions between Sherpas and climbers, and contrasts between once untrammelled snows and slopes now littered with debris and human remains. 

By the 1970s, flag-waving national expeditions with significant commercial or government sponsorships continued to be prominent, especially for women climbers, something often overlooked in mountaineering histories that emphasise the countercultural and hypermasculine individualism of elite Euro-American men. In 1975, for example, large expeditions from Britain, Japan, and China reached the summit of Everest with sponsorship from Barclays Bank, Japanese media companies, and the Chinese Communist Party. In her chapter, Jenny Hall highlights the importance of women-centred networks of national and transnational scope in leading to successful ascents of Everest by women. As leader of an all-women Japanese team, Junko Tabei became first woman to climb Everest on 16 May 1975, followed eleven days later by Pan Duo from China. On the summit, Tabei posed with Japanese and Nepali flags, and the Chinese team later flew its flag from a tripod. Wanda Rutkiewicz led an all-women Polish expedition that topped two Gasherbrum summits in 1975, which led to an invitation to climb Everest. Agnieszka Irena Kaczmarek's chapter describes Rutkiewicz's driving ambition and challenging experience on a German–French Everest expedition in 1978, when she became the first Polish mountaineer and third woman to climb Mount Everest. 

At the time, Rutkiewicz was criticised for demonstrating the same hypermasculine qualities for which male climbers received kudos. After Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the 'first Britons' to climb Everest via the Southwest Face on 24 September 1975, Scott told reporters they had no flag because they climbed only for themselves: 'Reaching a summit was purely for you. It's the most selfish thing you can do.' In 1978, Reinhold Messner made the first ascent of Everest without bottled oxygen alongside Peter Habeler, demonstrating a similar bravado. Messner paid a large fee to join the 1978 Austrian Everest expedition. Messner rejected the nationalism of his fellow German speakers in the South Tyrol, a formerly Austrian region that had been part of Italy since the First World War: his handkerchief was his flag, Messner announced, and he climbed for himself, not for any nation.

Nationalism remained prominent in some places that came 'late' to Himalayan mountaineering. In their chapter, Peter Mikša and Matija Zorn describe the 1979 Yugoslav ascent of Everest via the West Ridge Direct as the culmination of Yugoslav Alpinist Himalayan Expeditions since the 1960s and the harbinger of Slovenian alpinism's continuing prominence and success. The flag of Yugoslavia that Nejc Zaplotnik tied to Everest's summit tripod represented multiple nationalisms in one banner. Since the early twentieth century, alpinism had been a symbol of Slovene national identity whether in multiethnic empires, monarchies, or states. The 1979 Yugoslav expedition was organised by the Alpine Association of Slovenia, funded by a range of Yugoslav companies (whose names were given to climbing camps), and the summit team and most of the climbers were Slovenes. A second climbing team to reach the summit included a Slovene, a Croatian, and Ang Phu, the sirdar or leader of the climbing Sherpas. Ang Phu slipped on the descent and fell to his death because he was unable to arrest his slide, having dropped his ice axe. The importance of such snow and ice skills, like being able to self-arrest with an ice axe, had been evident to the Slovenian alpinist Aleš Kunaver, who turned down the leadership of the 1979 Everest expedition to start the first climbing school for Nepalis in Manang. 

Unlike mountaineering schools established by India in 1954 or through foreign philanthropy in Nepal in 2003, the Manang Mountaineering School was a hybrid endeavour that combined Kunaver's sense of mission, solidarity funds from Yugoslavia, and the nationalist ambitions of the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA), founded in 1973.

The NMA took over the Manang school in 1980 with Slovene alpinists and doctors volunteering as instructors for several decades. The alpine associations of two small mountain states whose national identities were tied to their climbing prowess collaborated to create this mountaineering school in a geopolitical context that encouraged international co-operation and integrated development of mountain areas.

Other Everests: One mountain, many worlds
Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter Hansen and Jonathan Westaway 
Manchester University Press 2024

This book is also available Open Access for free, due to UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council funding.