State offers honour to once youngest Sagarmatha summitter Tamang

Kathmandu: The last rites of Shambu Tamang – who had once set a record of being the ‘youngest climber’ of the world’s highest mountain Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) were performed with State Honour on Monday. The funeral rites were held according to the Buddhist tradition at Shyambhu in Kathmandu.

On behalf of the government of Nepal, Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation Jivanram Shrestha offered tributes to the late Tamang by laying the Nepali national flag on the mortal remains of Tamang.

Tamang, who was suffering from cancer for a long time, passed away on July 7 (last Thursday) at the age of 70. Tamang had scaled the then 8,848-metres mountain (now 8,848.86 metres) at the age of 17 years 6 months and 15 days on 5 May 1973, becoming the youngest climber of Sagarmatha of his time.

His record was later broken by Nepal’s 16-years-old Temba Chiri Sherpa in 2001. Among the mountaineers climbing Sagarmatha through Nepal’s route, this has been an unbroken record so far while an American national Jordan Romero became the youngest person ever to summit Sagarmatha at the age of 13 in 2010 through the route on China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region side.

The meeting of the Council of Ministers last Friday had decided to bestow the late Tamang with State Honour. Minister Shrestha, at the funeral of Tamang, remarked that the late Tamang had made ‘incomparable’ contributions to promoting Nepal’s mountaineering in the international arena and promoting Nepal’s mountains abroad