Kangshung Face

English

Etymology

Partial calque of Mandarin 康雄壁 (Kāngxióng Bì) using a garbled version of Wade-Giles romanization: Kʻang¹-hsiung².

Proper noun

Kangshung Face

1. a face on the east side of Mount Everest
   • 1953, Edmund Hillary, “The Summit”, in The Ascent of Everest‎^[1], Hodder & Stoughton, →OCLC, page 202:

     On the right, great contorted cornices, overhanging masses of snow and ice, stuck out like twisted fingers over the 10,000-foot drop of the Kangshung Face. Any move on to these cornices could only bring disaster.

   • 1995 March 7, Stuart Elliott, “THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Advertising; In the artificial world of Madison Avenue, a few campaigns dare to embrace reality in their pitches.”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 May 2015, Business‎^[3]:

     For the Vaseline Intensive Care line of lotions, he helped create a campaign centering on a 1994 expedition to climb Mount Everest; a television commercial, a newspaper coupon insert and a direct-mail brochure all hailed Sandy Hill Pittman's efforts to become the first American woman to climb the mountain's Kangshung Face.

   • 2015 February 14, “Kaltenbrunner: “All Everest parties around one table!””, in Deutsche Welle‎^[4], archived from the original on 31 January 2023‎^[5]:

     I don’t know whether someone will go to the North Face this year. There you can find pure loneliness. In the base camp, you are only joined by snow grouses. Otherwise, it is extremely quiet, and you have the view of the North Face. You won’t meet anyone at the Kangshung Face too.

   • 2017, Matt Dickinson, chapter 12, in Killer Storm: A Terror Attack at Everest Base Camp‎^[6], Shrine Bell, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 273:

     We dropped a few steps down the windward side of the ridge as we continued, hyperaware of the overhanging cornices that could so easily lure us too close to the Kangshung Face.

   • 2018 June 21, “Charlotte Fox obituary”, in The Times‎^[7], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 22 June 2018, Obituary‎^[8]:

     Unable to see, they lost their bearings in the dark. The wind edged them to the lip of a 7,000ft drop down the Kangshung Face. “One mis-step here and it was a one-way ticket to Tibet,” Fox said.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Kangshung Face.

Further reading

• Kangshung Face at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.