By Stuart Braga
The major biographical reference work of people in Great Britain is the Dictionary of National Biography. In Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there are similar biographical dictionaries. The Hong Kong Dictionary of Biography was published in 2012. To be included in any of these important reference books is a mark of real eminence. Only one person of Macanese descent has appeared in the most important of these, the British DNB, recently up-dated by Oxford University Press as the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. This was Brigadier-General George Edward Pereira, CB, CMG, DSO, affectionately known as ‘Hoppy’. He was in every way a remarkable man, principally remembered as a very capable and well-respected army officer and an intrepid explorer. He wanted to shoot a giant panda for sport, but fortunately could not find one.
George Edward Pereia was born on 26 January 1865 in London. He was the second of four children and eldest son of Eduardo, later Edward Pereira. He was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston, and gained admission to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, the elite officer training academy of the British Army. It was the foundation of a distinguished career. Pereira was commissioned in the 3rd Battalion of the famous Grenadier Guards, but a hunting accident in 1885 left him with a permanent limp which threatened his two great ambitions: to see active military service and to explore unknown lands. Hoping to be selected for a British expeditionary force to the Sudan, he went to Cairo to learn Arabic, but his lameness told against him.
In April 1899, Pereira, now a captain, was sent to serve with a Chinese regiment of infantry at Weihaiwei, a port in northern China recently occupied by Britain. He was soon caught up in quelling the Boxer Rebellion and in the relief of the foreign legations at Peking, now Beijing. He was appointed as a Companion of the Distinguished Ser vice Order (DSO) ‘in recognition of services during the recent operations in China’. It was an honour rarely given to junior officers. After spending much of 1901 touring the provinces of north-east China, Pereira, by now a major, re-joined his battalion in South Africa towards the end of the Boer War. Going back to the Far East, he became British military attaché with the Japanese army in the Russo-Japanese War. After the defeat of Russia by the Japanese, then allies of Britain, he became military attaché at the British Embassy in Peking. He was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1906.
Pereira made a series of long journeys to many parts of China, visiting various units of the Chinese army. His tact and understanding and his conversational ability enabled him to make many personal friends among high officials. The knowledge he gained of the Chinese people from the soldiers of his Weihaiwei regiment to the highest levels of officialdom was of great value for his later travels. He came back to Europe in 1909, but peacetime soldiering held no attractions and he resigned his Army commission. The next year Pereira returned to China and journeyed from Peking through the remote Zhili and Shanxi provinces. During the next three years he travelled nearly 18,000 km on foot in Western China.
Again he returned home to Britain, and on the outbreak of war in 1914 he rejoined the army. Promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General, he commanded several units on the Western Front, where he was wounded. He won the absolute confidence of his troops by his complete disregard for danger. He was one of the great characters of the 16th (Irish) Division. He was regarded as an irascible fire-eater and firm disciplinarian; characteristics he combined with an obvious concern for the welfare of his men. “Every officer and soldier of his brigade swears by him”, one of his battalion commanders wrote.
He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a high military decoration reserved for senior officers who did well. He was also awarded the French Croix de Guerre. Despite these high decorations, he was never knighted, unlike his youngest brother, who became Major-General Sir Cecil Pereira. He retired after the end of the war in 1919. Still keen for action, he then went to Siberia seeking to assist the unsuccessful fight to defeat the Bolshevik Revolution. No challenge was too great for the indomitable ‘Hoppy’.
He returned to China in 1920, aged 55, which in those days was elderly. He was lame and in indifferent health. However, he wanted to get to Lhasa, the almost fabled capital of Tibet. As a schoolboy he had read the account by two French Lazarist missionaries, Fr Evariste Huc and Fr Joseph Gabet, of their journey to Lhasa in 1846, an achievement which had never been repeated by Europeans. He determined to be the next.
He left Peking in January 1921 crossing the famine-stricken provinces of Zhili, Shanxi and Henan. He undertook three most arduous shooting trips in a wild mountainous district of Sichuan, hoping to shoot a giant panda, a rare animal that few Europeans had seen. He failed to get one but did shoot a red panda, or lesser panda, equally rare, which was sent to the Natural History Museum in London. Because of the constant need to ford streams and climb slippery surfaces he discarded his boots and tried native sandals, but these gave his feet little protection and he was laid up in one town for seven weeks with a poisoned foot. In his last camp at 10,000 feet, the cold and wet forced him to return to town, walking 77 km in sandals through deep snow. He was again laid up, suffering from frost-bitten feet.
At last he set out for Lhasa in May 1922, crossing an area with little food or grazing, and waterless in places. He lost most of his transport animals, but obtained assistance from passing caravans. He encountered brigands in this wild, lawless land, but eventually received permission to proceed to Lhasa. For the next six weeks he travelled along valleys and crossed numerous passes, up to 16,800 feet, scrambling over tracks covered with large boulders. The thin air at high altitude made every step an exertion even for a fit young man. Pereira arrived at Lhasa in October, completely exhausted and suffering from a thrombosis in his left leg. There he had an interview with the Dalai Lama. He returned through northern India, to Calcutta, where the thrombosis was treated in hospital.
His travels were still not done. Early in 1923, he left Calcutta for Burma, crossing high country and deep valleys as he went eastwards into Yunnan, travelling down the Yangtze River to Shanghai. He soon struck out again for Tibet through Indo-China and the western Chinese province of Sichuan. He reached Kantze, about 48 km from the Tibetan border where he became seriously ill and died from gastric ulcers on 20 October 1923 aged 58. He was buried near the Great Kantze Lamasery, but his remains were later transferred to consecrated ground in the Roman Catholic mission at Dajianlu, then in the Apostolic Vicariate of Tibet. Nearly up to the last day of his life, he kept detailed diaries of his travels and the people he met. They were edited by his friend Francis Younghusband soon after his death and published by Constable and Company Ltd, London, in 1925: Peking to Lhasa: the narrative of journeys in the Chinese Empire made by the late Brigadier-General George Pereira. Further extracts from his journals were published in 2004 in the Guards’ Magazine, edited by his great-nephew, Edward Pereira.
This amazing man was 175 cm (5 feet 9 inches) tall, walked with difficulty, and was not physically strong. However, he had great energy, a genius for leadership, and an absolute determination to carry out his plans, despite danger, discomfort, and fatigue. He had great personal charm, an innate courtesy and a dry sense of humour. He brushed off encounters with brigands: ‘It is lucky that the brigands are so utterly ignorant of brigandage as a fine art’. He described them as ‘a regular Gilbert and Sullivan opera’. His journeys, mostly on foot, through areas of eastern Tibet and western China rarely if ever crossed by Europeans, covered more than 70,000 km. Despite his injured leg, he became the first European to walk from Peking to Lhasa, when he described the Amne Machin massif in eastern Tibet, sometimes reckoned among the great geographical discoveries of the twentieth century. Had he lived he would have been recommended for the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
George Pereira travelled widely in northern and western China, but never visited Macau or Hong Kong, where his family roots were. He had turned his back on that part of his heritage. Nevertheless, he remained a devout Catholic, but with a broad sympathy for people of all kinds. Army life and his restless spirit made him unsuited to a settled life and he never married. He would not have thought of himself as a man of Macanese descent, but his astounding career is entirely consistent with the gritty determination to rise above adversity that the Macanese people have shown over several centuries.