SIXTY years after humans first conquered Mount Qomolangma, a pioneering Tibetan mountaineer is helping booming numbers of China’s nouveau rich scale Earth’s highest peak.

    Having personally stood at the top of the world in 2003 and 2008, 45-year-old Nyima Tsering now runs a training camp that helps nonprofessional Chinese climbers reach the 8,844-meter-high peak of the mountain also known as Everest.

    “In the past, Mount Qomolangma could only be reached by professional teams, but now more and more ordinary Chinese wish to join us,” Nyima Tsering said.

    Wednesday marked the 60th anniversary of the first successful expedition to the top of Mount Qomolangma, the now-legendary climb by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. The pair reached the summit May 29, 1953.

    For much of the past six decades, scaling the snow-capped mountain on the Sino-Nepalese border has been an athletic feat and a demonstration of national strength due to the great difficulties and dangers involved.

    But for Nyima Tsering and others in the new generation of Chinese summiters, the mountain is also becoming a longed-for destination and a source of enlightenment for ordinary people.

    “Previous Chinese mountaineers challenged the peak with a strong sense of a mission to glorify the nation, but to me, climbing the mountain is just part of my life,” says Nyima Tsering, who is also head of the Tibetan Mountaineering Team.

    Since establishing the camp in 1999, he has trained 40 local farmers into professional guides who have led more than 200 expeditions to the summit.

    Unlike people who regard reaching the summit as a victory of the human spirit over nature, Nyima Tsering says he always holds Mount Qomolangma in awe and veneration, and the feeling has not changed despite advances in equipment that have made the climb easier.

    “We’ve prepared electric drills for digging footholds in our latest attempt to reach the peak this year, but I could not convince myself to use them — Mount Qomolangma never speaks, but we know it has feelings,” he said.

    This reverence is now shared by his clients, many of whom are successful entrepreneurs. After making their fortunes amid China’s transformation into a market economy, some of them arrived at the mountain in search of new life goals, according to Nyima Tsering.

    “The trips to Mount Qomolangma gave them new ideas on life — they became slimmer and thriftier, and they realized they had previously demanded too much from nature,” he said. “To climb the mountain, one only needs a few things, and fame and fortune are not among them.”

    The first Chinese team reached the summit in 1960, when the country was struggling to build a socialist society out of grinding poverty and a legacy of civil war.

    The nation basked in glory May 8, 2008, when a team of Chinese mountaineers took the Olympic flame to Mount Qomolangma in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, which was deemed a demonstration of China’s economic and social achievements over the years.

    But Nyima Tsering and other younger Chinese mountaineers believe the greater significance of the activity is to make modern people reflect on themselves and their relationship with nature.

    “The feeling has been growing within me all these years that mountains have life, and that we should not attempt to overpower nature, but instead we should respect and live in harmony with it,” he explained.

    Xu Huan, who joined the Mountaineering Association of Peking University in 1996, said climbing strips away superficial identities.

    “Mountaineering forces us to face our true self,” Xu said. “The mountain sees us equally as humans, and it makes no difference if you’re a boss or a celebrity.”

    Xu said many of her co-climbers in the association left enviable jobs in their 40s and resumed mountaineering or hiking to rethink their lives.

    “They are asking whether, apart from pursuing wealth, there are any other higher meanings to life,” Xu said.

    (Xinhua)