Tenzing Norgay

Tenzing Norgay, born Namgyal Wangdi in about 1914, was a Sherpa mountaineer with Nepalese and Indian ties who became one of the best known climbers of the twentieth century. He first went high on Everest as a porter in the 1930s, joined three British attempts from the Tibetan side, and in 1952 reached about 8,595 metres on the southeast ridge with Raymond Lambert during a Swiss expedition, a climbing altitude record at the time. On 29 May 1953, as part of John Hunt's British expedition, he and Edmund Hillary became the first people confirmed to have stood on the summit of Mount Everest. He received the George Medal, later the Padma Bhushan of India, and became the first Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling. Accounts of his birthplace conflict, and he died in Darjeeling in 1986.