Listed among Time’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century, Tenzing Norgay was without doubt one of the most famous mountain climbers in history, thanks to being one of the first two people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Listed among Time’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century, Tenzing Norgay was without doubt one of the most famous mountain climbers in history, thanks to being one of the first two people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Tenzing Norgay was born Namgyal Wangdi in Nepal, but the exact year of his birth is unknown (it is supposed to be in late May 1914). An ethnic Sherpa from humble origins, Namgyal was renamed by his parents as Tenzing Norgay, which means ‘lucky’, following the advice of the head lama, the Buddhist equivalent of a high priest.
As he grew up, young Tenzing seemed not so eager to follow the footsteps of his father as a yak herder. When he was a teenager he ran a way from home twice, to Kathmandu and Darjeeling in India, which led to his parents sending him to a monastery to become a monk, but he soon decided that life was not for him.
At the age of 19 he settled in Darjeeling, where a British expedition to Mount Everest was being organised. He got the opportunity to join the expedition as a porter thanks to Eric Shimpton, the expedition’s leader. Tenzing proved to be such a great climber that he was easily hired for the subsequent British attempts to climb Mount Everest, in 1936 and 1938.
Tenzing Norgay took part in various expedition in India, Pakistan and Nepal, but his name will always be associated with Everest, his major interest and the hardest summit to climb, as many failed previous expeditions proved. After joining the British, Tenzing was invited to join the Swiss expedition in 1952, this time not as a Sherpa porter but as a fellow climber. Their two attempts to reach the summit failed, but Tenzing and his companion Raymond Lambert managed to establish a new record for the mountain.
The following year would be a lucky one for Tenzing Norgay, when he took part in John Hunt’s expedition to the summit of Everest. Together with New Zealander Edmund Hillary, he was one of the first two men to set their feet on the summit of the world’s highest mountain. It was a triumph for Asia that an Asian had been one of the first men to climb Everest, even if for a long time people wanted to know exactly who was the first between Tenzing Norgay and Hillary to set foot at the top. However they both played fair and said they reached it together.
Once at the top, Hillary took that iconic picture of Tenzing posing with an ice axe, but sadly since he never used a camera there are no similar images of Hillary at the summit. The pair only spent 15 minutes on the top, but it was a moment neither man, nor the whole world, would ever forget. Indeed, they instantly received worldwide attention and admiration. Hillary and Hunt, the expedition’s leader, were knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, while Tenzing received the British Empire Medal.
Tenzing Norgay became a celebrity and received prizes and awards around the world for his accomplishments, but his passion was always climbing – it was all he ever wanted to do. Though many perceived him as a political symbol, and despite his fame, Tenzing always remained a simple man in the purest sense of the word, and led a modest life until his death in 1986.
– Noemi Lavorato
