Dr. Carl Ku’an, M.D. (China)

 

It is inevitable that the publication of a biography prompts new material to appear. Just after I published Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography in 2022, two more of the subject’s ex-girlfriends got in touch with me, and I discovered letters from yet another. I know that each friendship was in itself unique, but a trajectory was followed similar to others I had already encountered (Robert swearing undying love but refusing to make any commitment, and then being heartbroken when the relationship languished).

In the case of my new biography of Lobsang Rampa, an interesting letter has just come to light—one which I would certainly have included. (Discovered by Liz Hodgkinson, to whom, thank you!) It was written by Rampa in August 1950 when he was using the name Carl Ku’an. The headed notepaper he used states that he was:

Dr. Carl Ku’an, M.D. (China), D. Sc., M.A.

which fits with the Publisher’s Foreword in The Third Eye in which it is stated that:

Lobsang Rampa has provided documentary evidence that he holds medical degrees of the University of Chungking [in China]

It should be noted that despite the publication of his previous biographies, Rampa only mentioned his previous personas as Dr Carl Ku’an and KuonSuo in his sixteenth (conventional) book, As It Was! (1976). In this he wrote that when he went to China,

I was instructed, I must take a different name, I could not use my own name of Rampa . . . Now, how could a poor Tibetan boy, one just approaching manhood, admittedly, but how could he pick a Chinese name when he didn’t know anything about China? I pondered on that awful question, and then unbidden, unexpectedly, a name appeared in my mind. I would call myself KuonSuo . . . But it was a name which people found difficult to pronounce—Western people, that is—and so it soon became shortened to Ku’an.

In the letter, Dr Ku’an is seeking employment and states in his letter that he has ‘a very large income’ (which would not have been the case for the poor Tibetan), but that his money was in the National Bank of China and had been seized by the Communists.

 

Cyril Henry Hoskin (left) and Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (right)

The letter dates from a period when Cyril Hoskin/Rampa had become interested in ‘the East’ (to use a very general term), but nowhere in the letter is Tibet mentioned. He was obviously yet to refine the persona of ‘Tuesday Lobsang Rampa’ or the story that would be told in The Third Eye in 1956. (Let alone the transmigration explanation required in 1958.)

Rampa’s claim to be a Chinese medical doctor, along with his other dubious distinctions, might be dismissed as harmless make-believe, if the letter were not an application to act in an informal medical capacity. The letter was to Robert Cowell, addressing Cowell’s desire to change sex and live as a woman (Cowell would later become Roberta). Liz Hodgkinson believes that Michael Dillon (whose own sex-change is discussed in the new biography) probably introduced Robert to Ku’an. Ku’an states that he has had ‘experience of similar cases and really know[s] what is entailed’.

Rampa comes over in the letter as sympathetic and non-judgmental (making allowances for the letter being essentially a speculative job application). As Liz Hodgkinson has written to me, ‘It is more than likely that in Dillon and Cowell, Ku’an saw two soulmates, in that they radically changed their appearance, gender and place in the world at a time when this was extremely rare.’

I am sure that this is right.

   To know a great deal more about the Rampa story, you will need a copy of T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith, published by Tartarus Press.

With thanks to Liz Hodgkinson, author of From a Girl to a Man: How Laura Became Michael.