A Chinese mountaineer who lost both feet trying to reach the summit of Everest 43 years ago and then had his legs amputated due to cancer has successfully climbed the mountain on his fifth attempt.

Xia Boyu on Monday got to the top of the world’s highest peak with a group of 13 others more than four decades after his first crack at it.

The same day Steve Plain, an Australian, also reached the summit, setting a speed record for climbing the highest mountain on each of the world’s seven continents.



Xia, 69, was part of a 20-man Chinese team that tried to scale the 8,848m peak in 1975. About 200m from the top the climbers were forced to turn back due to high-altitude storms.

They were descending in difficult conditions when Xia, then aged 26, gave up his sleeping bag to an ill climber, according to Chinese media. He discovered the next morning he had frostbite in his feet, requiring both to be amputated.

Speaking from the summit this week, Xia was quoted by the People’s Daily telling a friend he had been preparing for the moment for 43 years. “It’s not been easy for me to reach the peak of Mount Everest which I’ve dreamed of,” he said.

Xia used prosthetic limbs to begin climbing small mountains around Beijing and going on long hikes, but learned in 1996 he had contracted lymphoma and would need both legs amputated beneath the knee.

By 2014, Xia was ready to tackle Everest again, but his attempt was undone by ice avalanches. Another climb the following year was aborted after the Nepal earthquake.

In 2016, he came within 100m of the peak but again had to turn back due to poor weather.

His attempt this year was nearly derailed by the Nepal government, which in December banned double amputees and blind people from climbing Everest, part of a raft of restrictions it claimed would make the mountain safer. The Nepal supreme court said the order was discriminatory and stayed it in March.

A month before his fifth attempt, Xia told Agence France-Presse that climbing Everest was his dream. “I have to realise it,” he said. “It also represents a personal challenge, a challenge of fate.”

About 7.30am on Monday, Xia finally reached the peak. “Boyu finally won his 40-year-long battle for Mount Everest,” Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, the managing director at Imagine Treks, who accompanied the Chinese climber, told the Himalayan Times.

He is the second double amputee to climb the summit after the New Zealander Mark Inglis, who reached the peak from the Tibetan side in 2006. Santiago Quintero, who had half of each foot amputated during a climb in south America, also reached the peak in 2013.

Xia reached the peak on Monday only a few minutes after Plain, from Western Australia, became the fastest person to climb the “seven summits” – the tallest mountains on all seven continents including Antarctica’s Mount Vinson.

Plain, 36, who broke his neck in a bodysurfing accident nearly four years ago, climbed the 4,892m Vinson on 16 January.

In the 117 days that followed he summited Mount Aconcagua in South America (6,961m), Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa (5,895m), Puncak Jaya (4,884m) in Papua province, Indonesia, Mount Elbrus in Europe (5,642m) and Denali in North America (6,190m).



“Three and a half years ago I was lying in hospital with a broken neck and at that time set myself the goal,” he wrote on Facebook after reaching the summit.

He beat the previous speed record by nine days and was presented with an award at the peak.

Xia and Plain are among 500 climbers from 38 teams attempting to reach the summit this season.