Sherpa Tenzing shared Everest’s first confirmed summit
Tenzing Norgay, who began life as Namgyal Wangdi in May 1914 and died in 1986, stood on Mount Everest’s summit with Edmund Hillary on 29 May 1953. He had been to the mountain six times before, never learned to read or write, and ended years of newspaper squabbling over who stepped up first.
Accounts of his childhood disagree. His autobiography says he was a Sherpa raised at Tengboche in Nepal’s Khumbu; in a 1985 radio interview he described Tibetan parents but a Nepalese birth; several later books place his birth in Tibet. He knew only that he was born in late May, judging by weather and harvest, and the Tibetan Year of the Rabbit suggests 1914. After the climb he adopted 29 May as his birthday. The head lama of Rongbuk Monastery renamed him as a boy; the new name means roughly ‘wealthy, fortunate follower of religion’. His father was a Tibetan yak herder.
As a teenager he ran away twice, first to Kathmandu and then to Darjeeling, the usual launch point for eastern Himalayan expeditions, and he later became an Indian citizen. A spell at Tengboche Monastery convinced him he was not meant to be a monk. At 20 he joined Eric Shipton’s 1935 Everest reconnaissance after his friend Ang Tharkay vouched for him, and he carried loads high on three British attempts from the Tibetan side. In 1947 he slipped illegally into Tibet with Earl Denman until a storm at about 6,700 metres turned them back.
The two Swiss expeditions of 1952 were the first serious tries from Nepal, and on 28 May he and Raymond Lambert climbed higher than anyone before. On Hunt’s 1953 expedition he saved Hillary from a crevasse fall by quickly anchoring the rope with his ice axe. The pair camped at about 8,500 metres and reached the top at 11:30 am, lingering some fifteen minutes; the only summit photographs show Tenzing, since he had never used a camera.
Hillary and Hunt were knighted, while Tenzing, not a British subject, received the George Medal, a gap many later found unfair. His ghost-written 1955 autobiography confirmed Hillary stepped up first. In 1954 he became the first field-training director of Darjeeling’s Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, and in 1975 he guided the first American tourist party into Bhutan.
Source: Tenzing Norgay
