Minya Konka - most easterly 7000m

The main summit of Mount Gongga, from the west. Photo from Chinese wikipedia: 贡嘎山.

Mount Gongga (Simplified Chinese: 贡嘎山, Traditional Chinese: 貢噶山, Tibetan: མི་ཉག་གངས་དཀར་རི་བོ་) is a mountain in south-western China. 

The main peak is 7,514.96±0.97m (24,652ft) above sea level. The summit of Mount Gongga is located 29°35′42.756″N, 101°52′44.004″E.

Overview

Mount Gongga is known as the easternmost of the 7,000m peaks on our planet.  It lies 660 kilometres to the east from the second easternmost 7,000m peak, Namcha Barwa (7782m, P4106m).  Mount Gongga has an prominence of 3,642 meters, and the key col is the Geda Liangzi pass to the north of the mountain.

Mount Gongga is a massif covered by snow and glaciers.  The massif is of very high altitude and includes many sharp peaks over 6,000 meters.  It is divided from other parts of the Daxue Shan Range by several rivers.

Geography and History

Mount Gongga was first recognized by the local inhabitants and by the Chinese central government about three hundred years ago.  The mountain lies to the south of an important trade route leading from China to the Tibetan plateau, and therefore has long been seen by the travellers, soldiers, porters and businessmen walking on the main east-west road.  Mount Emei (峨眉山), the Cheto pass (折多山口) and even Chengdu city (成都市) under very clear weather conditions, provide good viewpoints of Mount Gongga.

The mountain is a natural boundary in many aspects.  Climate and topography change rapidly when traveling across the Daxue Shan Range, to which Mount Gongga belongs.  The east slope of Mount Gongga has been carved deeply by rivers and glaciers and is misty almost all year round, while the west slope consists mainly of a broad and gentle plateau about 4,000 meters high with mostly sunny but cold weather.  For thousands of years, Chinese farmers have lived on the eastern slopes, while Tibetan nomads and Yi people (also called ‘Lolos’) mainly on the western slopes.  The landscapes, cultures and peoples’ living styles are therefore very different from the east to the west.  The difference in production and consumption makes opportunities for trading.  As a market Kangding (康定, previously named Tatsienlu) is the biggest and the most important city under Mount Gongga; in ancient times Tibetans led yaks and horses down from the Cheto pass (4,298m) to exchange for Chinese tea, salt and grain.

As the most important city on the Chinese-Tibetan cultural border and the capital city of Xikang province (西康省), Kangding or Tatsienlu attracted many western missionaries from the late 19th century to the 1940s, who firstly measured and published articles about Mount Gongga for the western world.  

Among them, James Huston Edgar, a bishop from New Zealand, lived in Kangding from 1902 until his death in 1936.  Edgar played an essential role in introducing Mount Gongga to western people; as the chairman of the West China Border Research Society in Chengdu, Edgar investigated the name, location and altitude of Mount Gongga, and gave much help to the western adventurers to this area.  

This included Joseph F. Rock, who travelled to Mount Gongga in 1929 and made it famous worldwide through his letter home to the USA, claiming that he had found a peak higher than Mount Everest.  Rock’s false estimation was soon denied by the National Geographic Society in America and was then abandoned by Rock himself.  A more accurate measurement was made in the following year by a Chinese-Swiss team from the Sun Yat-sen University in Canton, which was led by two experts in topography, Professor Arnold Heim and Eduard Imhof from ETH Zürich.

Names and Altitude Numbers

Modern topographic techniques were created by western scientists and there are no accurate elevation numbers of the snow peaks in ancient Chinese geographical and topographical books and archives.  The most outstanding feature of these peaks is that they are capped by snow, so both Chinese and Tibetan people call it ‘the Big Snow Mountain’ (大雪山, Da Xue Shan in Chinese and Gong-ga in Tibetan).  ‘Gong-ga’ is a common Tibetan name for all snow peaks.

As an American born in Austria, Joseph Rock wrote down the mountain’s name as Minya Konka, which is widely used today as the standard name for Mount Gongga in books, journals, newspapers and websites.  A German version of the name is Minya Gongkar, or Minya Gangkar, created by Arnold Heim and Eduard Imhof in 1930.  According to Arnold Heim and Eduard Imhof’s team, the height of Mount Gongga is 7,600m.  It seems that Rock felt very uncomfortable when he heard that he had made a mistake (he had said that Mount Gongga was surely over 30,000 feet in 1929), and he refused to talk about Gongga in the last years of his life.[1]

[1] Sutton, S.B., (1974), In China’s Border Provinces: the Turbulent Career of Joseph Rock, Botanist-Explorer, New York.

Rock and Heim’s team are not the only two explorers who visited Gongga in this period.  Herbert Stevens, a British botanist and member of the Royal Geographical Society, made an independent exploration of this region at almost the same time as Rock.  In his articles, he shows some sketches of Mount Gongga, which reminded him of the Alps.  Actually, some adventurers called Gongga’s main peak ‘the oriental Matterhorn’.

In 1932, four graduate students from America, Terris Moore, Richard Burdsall, Arthur B. Emmons and Jack Theodore Young heard from Joseph Rock about the discovery of Mount Gongga. They set off to climb it and collect some ornithological specimens around the mountain.  They came to China at the perilous time of the Japanese invasion, took a ship to Chongqing (重庆) and then reached Kangding.  On 28th October 1932, they made the first ascent of Mount Gongga in good weather.  Their measurement result for the height of the mountain was 24,891ft (7,587m), which was widely accepted as the most accurate number in the following 40 years, even by Eduard Imhof. It is sometimes quoted as approximately 7,590m.  Burdsall’s account of their expedition (Burdsall, R. L., et al., (1935), Men Against the Clouds: the Conquest of Minya Konka, New York & London) has become one of the classics of mountaineering literature.

In the 1960s, the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army started to make new military maps of the Tibetan area.  The large-scale military maps were designed to serve both military use and as a standard source for all published maps.  Aeronautical photos of the Gongga region were taken in 1966, using a plane and camera imported from the USSR.  Five years later in 1971, the altitude was published as 7,556m, which is the standard number on all Chinese maps from the 1970s until the present day.  However, these large-scale topo maps are still confidential.  Only the altitude numbers of some peaks can be collected from published maps.  Meanwhile, all the peak names created by Joseph Rock or other western explorers have not been accepted by the Chinese Government, even though they have been known and used widely by both Chinese, Japanese and western climbers.

In 1980, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) launched a scientific expedition to Mount Gongga.  A scholar in topography, Prof. Jianming Chen, made a study of all the previous measurements and did his own in the name of CAS.  After serious mathematical work, he announced that his team had made a measurement more accurate than any before him, and the published height of Mount Gongga is 7,514m, following the original result: 7,514.96±0.97m.

There were no updates to the name and height of Mount Gongga from the 1980s until last year.  In 2021 the local government suddenly launched a new measurement of the highest peak in Sichuan province.  According to some recent news about this project, they have got the result and will soon publish it with a new topo map.  I think we will see the result and be able to buy the published map in the months to come.

Climbing History

Since Burdsall and Moore’s first ascent in 1932, 25 climbers from 10 teams have made their ascents of the main peak successfully.  Most of them (8/10) climbed the steep north-west ridge of the main peak, among whom were two teams who reached this ridge from the east.  The other two teams (2/10), one from South Korea and one from China, reached the summit by the more dangerous north-east ridge.  In addition, an American team, sponsored by the American Alpine Club, attempted the south-west ridge in 1980.  A British team (Nick Bullock, Paul Ramsden) attempted the southern face in 2018, as they thought that it will be one of the best climbing routes in China (see their report in Alpine Club archives, MEF-18-12).  There have been no other attempted routes to date.

According to my study, over one hundred expeditions have been made to the main peak and its satellite peaks since China started to offer climbing permissions in 1979.  Many outstanding achievements and fantastic routes have been made on these magnificent 6,000m or 5,000m peaks.  The best achievements include, for example, the climbing of the east face of Mount Edgar (6,618m) by Bruce Normand and Kyle Dempster in 2010 (route name: The Rose of No Man’s Land, WI5 M6, see AAJ 2011: 34-42), the climbing of Mount Jiazi’s west face in 2011 by two Chinese climbers, Dongdong Yan and Peng Zhou (route name: Liberal Dance, 1,500m, M6 W13 55°, see AAJ 2012: 334-8) and the climbing of a less well-known peak of 6,134m in 2009 by a Russian team (Mikhail Mikhailov and Alexander Ruchkin, route name: Carte Blanche, see AAJ 2010: 340-1).

To the north of the main massif, there is a minor massif usually called the Lamo-she.  In the local language ‘Lamo-she’ means ‘goddess’, but Chinese maps call it Wuse Haizi Shan (五色海子山), which means ‘peaks above the Five-coloured Lake’.  The massif was firstly identified by Bela-Szechenyi’s expedition in the late 19th century and then sketched by Herbert Stevens, and finally surveyed by Heim’s team in 1929-1930.  The main peak, Lamo-she (6070m, prominence: 2122m), is called Tianhaizi Shan (田海子山) on Chinese maps, named after a lake called Tianhaizi under the peak.  The peak was first ascended by an American team, led by the famous ‘dirtbag’ Fred Becky in 1993.  In 1996 Fred again organized another climbing team for this massif.  Since the last years of the 20th century, the main peak has been climbed many times by climbing guides and their customers by its traditional route on the west slope.  However, in 2019 an Italian climber, Tomas Franchini, successfully made a solo climbing on the steep east face of Lamo-she (route name: Wild Blood, 1,500m, WI5 M5+ V 90°, see AAJ 2020, http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201215262

Although almost all the peaks of high prominence have been climbed in both the Gongga and Lamo-she massifs, there are still some unclimbed peaks and untouched faces.  The four faces of Mount Gongga, as I have mentioned before, are still exceedingly worth climbing, while extremely dangerous; and also several satellite peaks are still lying unclimbed on the south-east ridge of the main peak, after Bruce Normand’s climbing in 2014-2015, and of a Polish team in 2015.  A 5,962m peak in the middle area of the massif called ‘Sequinomba’ by Tom Nakamura, (I am not sure from where he got this name), still remains unclimbed.  Many rock peaks on the northern end of the Gongga massif still seem to be untouched.  Two peaks on the northern end of the Lamo-she massif, Peak 5,880m named ‘Bijia Shan (笔架山)’ and another unnamed peak also remain unclimbed.

Leibo Zhu

Editor's note:  this article is a shortened version of Leibo's longer article 'Peaks and Mountaineers in the Minya Konka Massif: a History' , published in September 2022 at https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/VH_CEtXb2P7HrunTbLgI6g

The article is in Chinese but, if using a google browser, a translation can be made.