The oldest gompa and the hand that went missing
Sherpa tradition credits Lama Sangwa Dorje with bringing a settled Buddhist practice to Khumbu, perhaps 350 years ago, and with founding the gompa at Pangboche, the oldest in the valley, as well as hermitages around it. Monastery accounts at Tengboche treat him as the spiritual ancestor of their own foundation in 1916. The Pangboche gompa is small, dark and very old, its walls painted, its juniper grove said to be sacred.
From the 1950s the gompa's relics drew Western expeditions hunting the yeti. One was a conical scalp; the other a withered, mummified hand. In 1959 a member of an American-funded expedition secretly took a finger from the hand, and the finger was smuggled out of India, according to the story, in the luggage of the film actor James Stewart. Decades later, in 2011, DNA tests on that finger, kept in a London collection, showed it was human.
In 1991 the hand itself was stolen from the gompa and has not been recovered. Pangboche's people felt the loss deeply; the relic belonged to the monastery's history, whatever its origin. A replica was later given to the gompa. The village meanwhile kept producing climbers: Sungdare Sherpa of Pangboche reached Everest's summit five times by 1989, a record at the time, and the school Hillary's Trust built here in 1963 still teaches its children.
