Tenzing Norgay Stood on Everest at 11:30 am on 29 May 1953, Then Spent 22 Years Training India's Mountaineers at the Institute in Darjeeling

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand reached the summit of Everest at 11:30 am on 29 May 1953, the first recorded ascent of the world’s highest mountain. Tenzing, a Sherpa who grew up in the Khumbu region of Nepal and lived in Darjeeling, was both a full member of the British climbing party and the sirdar, the head of the Sherpa porters, according to the Himalayan Club’s obituary of him. In his 1955 autobiography he wrote that he was an Indian citizen and also Nepalese by birth.

He then spent 22 years, from June 1954 to May 1976, as Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI) in Darjeeling, and stayed on as its adviser until his death. The Gazette of India of 26 January 1959 lists “Shri Tenzing Norkay, Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling” among the Padma Bhushan awards.

A porter with no certificate

In 1935 Eric Shipton’s reconnaissance party needed two more porters in Darjeeling, and Tenzing, who in his own account had no certificate of previous service, was picked from more than twenty candidates. The Himalayan Club’s obituary says he had come to Darjeeling, the hill town served by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, from the land of his birth in 1932.

The obituary, written by the mountaineer Dorjee Lhatoo, then lists his progress year by year. Tenzing carried loads to the North Col in 1936 and reached about 27,200 feet with Tilman’s 1938 expedition. In 1947 he made first ascents in Garhwal, including Kedarnath at 22,770 feet, with a Swiss expedition on which he rose to sirdar after the original sirdar was injured. In 1951 he climbed the east peak of Nanda Devi in an attempt to rescue two missing French climbers.

In spring 1952 he went to Everest with a Swiss team and climbed with Raymond Lambert along the South-East Ridge. National Geographic and the Himalayan Club both put their high point at 28,210 feet (8,598 m); Tenzing himself estimated about 28,250 feet. They turned back because, he wrote, going on meant they could not have got down alive. Tenzing dated the attempt to 28 May 1952, a year and a day before the summit. By his count 1953 was his seventh trip to the mountain.

The last two days, from a tent at 27,900 feet

The 1953 expedition was organised by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society and led by Colonel John Hunt. National Geographic describes it as 350 porters, 20 Sherpas and ten climbers, and says the party reached the South Col, the high saddle below the summit, on 21 May. Hunt’s plan sent Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans up first. On 26 May they reached the South Summit at 28,700 feet, about 330 feet short of the top, and turned back when their oxygen would not allow more.

Hillary’s own account is a letter he wrote at Base Camp on 2 June 1953, published unedited by the Alpine Journal in 1993. It records two things Tenzing did. On 22 May the two of them broke trail so that 14 Sherpas and all their loads reached the South Col, a day Hillary called “the turning point in the expedition”. On 28 May, hunting for a place to pitch the top camp, the party “followed Tenzing’s advice” and traversed left onto the face, where they found a ledge under a rock bluff that Hillary estimated at 27,900 feet. He and Tenzing spent three hours, from 2:30 to 5:30 pm, building a platform for the tent.

They left the tent at 6:30 am on 29 May and reached the South Summit at 9 am. The final obstacle was a rock step of about 40 feet that Hillary climbed by wedging himself between the rock and the snow beside it; it was later named the Hillary Step. Tenzing recalled that the ridge beyond it was “only a row of snowy humps” and that near the end he and Hillary stopped and looked up, about thirty feet from the top, before going on. He gave the time on top as eleven-thirty in the morning.

Fifteen minutes on top

They stayed almost fifteen minutes, by Tenzing’s account and National Geographic’s. Tenzing unwound four flags from his ice axe, in the order United Nations, British, Nepalese, Indian, and Hillary photographed him. Tenzing wrote that he motioned to photograph Hillary in return and Hillary shook his head. The Associated Press reported in 2003 that Hillary said Tenzing had never used a camera and there was no time to teach him. The two accounts give different reasons for the same result: no photograph of Hillary on the summit.

Tenzing scraped a hollow in the snow and left sweets, a red-and-blue pencil his daughter Nima had given him and a small black cloth cat that Hunt had given Hillary as a mascot. Hillary’s story says he left a crucifix from Hunt; Tenzing wrote that if so, he did not see it. Both men looked for any sign that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, lost on the mountain in 1924, had got there first, and found none.

News of the ascent reached London on 2 June, the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, according to the AP.

Honours, and a knighthood Tenzing explained

Nepal’s King Tribhuvana gave Tenzing the Nepal Tara (Star of Nepal), which Tenzing described as the country’s highest decoration. Hunt and Hillary were knighted. Tenzing was awarded the George Medal. Charles Wylie, a member of the 1953 team, wrote in the Alpine Journal that Tenzing received it personally from the Queen at Buckingham Palace and described it as the highest civilian award for courage after the George Cross. The Royal Geographical Society adds that the Queen also awarded Coronation medals to 12 leading Sherpas, presented by Charles Evans at Thyangboche monastery in June 1954.

In Tiger of the Snows Tenzing wrote that since independence India has not permitted its citizens to accept foreign titles, so a knighthood would only have embarrassed him, and he felt no slight. In Delhi, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru received him at a reception, advised him to go to London, and, Tenzing wrote, gave him clothes for the trip. He was given two passports, one Indian and one Nepalese. When Nepal’s prime minister and ministers offered him a house if he stayed in Nepal, he declined and told the press, as he recalled it, “I was born in the womb of Nepal and raised in the lap of India.”

Wylie records that a large house in Darjeeling was bought for him with money raised by public subscription, organised by an Indian newspaper. In 1959 the Government of India named him a Padma Bhushan.

The school in Darjeeling

Tenzing’s account of the Institute starts with a letter. His friend Robi Mitra wrote to West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Dr B. C. Roy, proposing an Indian mountaineering school with Tenzing at its head. Roy and Tenzing agreed, Major N. D. Jayal took on administration, and Arnold Glatthard of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research came out to advise. In October 1953 the three travelled into Sikkim, which became an Indian state in 1975, to choose a training base in the region of Koktan and Kang Peak. Tenzing and six other Sherpas then trained with Glatthard’s climbing school at Rosenlaui in Switzerland before the Institute opened.

The Institute’s own history credits Nehru and Roy with planning it and says Tenzing’s Everest climb gave the impetus. It was founded on 4 November 1954; Tenzing wrote that Nehru opened it that day. It began at Roy Villa on Lebong Cart Road and moved to Birch Hill in 1958. Wylie quotes Nehru as saying the Institute was meant to “produce more Tenzings”.

It did produce instructors. Tenzing’s nephew Nawang Gombu was in the first batch, reached the Everest summit with an American expedition in 1963 and again in 1965 with the Indian expedition, and became the first man to climb it twice, according to Wylie and the Institute. Gombu succeeded Tenzing as Director of Field Training in 1976. The Institute’s history page says that in 62 years it trained more than 45,000 students, 2,500 of them from abroad.

Who stepped first, and other open points

The question the world asked in 1953 was who reached the top first. The Royal Geographical Society’s fact sheet says the climbers stayed quiet at the time and that Britain, New Zealand, Nepal and India each pressed their own claim. Hillary told National Geographic that he, Hunt and Tenzing agreed not to say. On 22 June 1953, in the office of Nepal’s prime minister, the two men signed matching statements that said they “reached the summit almost together”.

Tenzing ended the silence in Tiger of the Snows, published in 1955 and written with the American author James Ramsey Ullman. He wrote: “Hillary stepped on top first. And I stepped up after him.” He said he was answering for the sake of Everest and not for either man, and that many of his own people would be disappointed. Hillary’s 1953 letter says he “hauled Tenzing up” the rock step; Tenzing wrote that they helped each other all the way and “were partners”. The AP reported in 2003 that Hillary said it was of no significance.

Tenzing’s birth is also undocumented. He wrote that he was born at Tsa-chu, near Makalu, in the year of the Hare, which by his own arithmetic was 1914, in late May; Sherpas kept no birthdays, he wrote, and the end of May would serve as his anniversary. The Royal Geographical Society’s fact sheet names the village of Moyey in Tibet as his birthplace. Both Wylie and the Himalayan Club give his age at death as 72.

1976 to 1986

Tenzing retired as Director of Field Training in May 1976 and was appointed adviser. He died at home in Darjeeling on 9 May 1986, after more than a year of a lung ailment, the Himalayan Club recorded. Hillary and his wife June were the only foreigners at the funeral, the AP reported, and the procession behind the bier was more than a kilometre long, according to Wylie and Lhatoo.

The Government of India’s Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Awards carry his name. On 2 September 2026 the government announced the 2024 awards: Baljeet Kaur and Skalzang Rigzin for land adventure, Rimo Saha for water adventure and Shiv Prasad Chamoli for lifetime achievement, each with a statuette, a certificate and 15 lakh rupees.