BY DALYA ALBERGE ARTS CORRESPONDENT

The Times - London, 17 Feb 1997

PHOTOGRAPHS from a 1935 expedition to the remotest area of eastern Tibet are to be exhibited for the first time. They record the adventures of 25-year-old John Hanbury-Tracy, who, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society, went in search of the source of the Salween river.

With his friend, Ronald Kaulback, who died last year, he travelled across an unforgiving, unmapped terrain. The river, he wrote, was "full of whirlpools and rapids where no boat can survive".

The first Europeans to enter the area, for nearly two years they had no contact with the outside world. They had set off in February 1935. By January of the next year, the cold - so intense that it was almost impossible to use their delicate survey instruments with accuracy - and war in China forced them to turn back. However, they had already mapped 25,000 square miles, and they brought back numerous specimens of plant and insect life. Local people had thought they were hunting for gold.

They also brought back photographs, which are to be lent by Hanbury-Tracy's daughter to this year's Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia, London, from February 25 to March 2. Hanbury-Tracy, who died in 1971, published the story of his trip in Black River of Tibet in 1938. His first expedition after Cambridge was to Lapland. After Tibet his appetite for exploration took him to the Andes.

He saw the Salween as a mysterious river. In an unpublished account, unearthed by his daughter for the fair, he wrote about the first stages of the journey through the hill jungles of northern Burma, and 18 days on foot through the Kachin Hills before Putao became their "last contact with newspapers, telegraphs and telephones, or any form of wheeled vehicle for nearly two years". One route, he noted, was "only 100 miles as the crow flies, but it takes over three weeks of strenuous travel".

Describing his first sighting of the Salween, he reported: "We had been riding all day in a tearing wind, huddled in our Tibetan sheep-skin clothes, experiencing the first dead dry cold of a Tibetan winter, the cold of the loftiest plateau on Earth. The words of Coleridge sprang to mind. 'Where, Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea'."

The photographs bring to life his impressions of the local villages, "tiny clusters of flat-roofed houses built of mud and stone". "Occasionally, the valley opens out a little and one can then go down to the river to cross it, either in a precarious form of coracle made of yak hides or on a still more precarious rope-bridge."

He wrote of how one of the expedition's yaks was rescued from the river. "It took an hour's desperate work to pull him out, for though his head was free, the broken ice refroze rapidly round him. For an hour afterwards he could scarcely walk. I never thought a yak could be so numb with cold, used as they are to sleeping in the snow."

He spoke of his affection and respect for the people of the upper Salween valley: "They are big, cheerful, swaggering men, often 6ft tall and more." He noted: "In the rarefied air of their country, they have few germs to contend with, but they do suffer from stomach troubles, worms and venereal disease. The climate tends to produce this virile race."

He wrote ruefully of the expedition's privations. "I have seen hares, partridges and silver pheasants feeding quite tamely a few feet from the path; they are never molested, for no life is allowed to be taken ... We took no guns of any sort with us on our journey, but I must confess that after many months on a monotonous diet consisting mainly of yak meat and turnips, I dearly longed to shoot something for the pot."

Angus Stewart, curator of the Olympia fair, spoke of the honesty of the photographs: "They give you an idea of a country you can't find today. The way of life has vanished."