The Annapurna rescue came during Purja’s record-breaking Project Possible expedition and remains one of the most celebrated high-altitude rescue missions in modern mountaineering.

By his own telling, the moment could not have caught him less prepared. “We got back down to base camp probably around 10 pm. Of course, because we had summited we had a few friends waiting for us, and they gave us whiskey and we drank until, like, 3:30 in the morning,” Purja later told National Geographic. “Then the heli comes at 6:00 am and says the doctor was alive. So, I got my team together.”

Sleepless, celebrating, days of rope-fixing behind him, he went back up anyway. “It’s not in my blood to leave someone,” he says in the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible.

Nirmal Purja at the summit of Mount Everest. (Photo: Instagram/@nimsdai)

Chin, a 48-year-old anaesthesiologist based in Singapore, had reached the top of the 8,091-metre Annapurna with more than 30 other climbers but failed to return to the nearest camp, situated one kilometre below the peak, with the rest of his group, AFP had reported. His strength gave out on the descent and he ran out of oxygen. His sherpa, Nima Tshering, handed Chin the last of his own oxygen and staggered down to raise the alarm, frostbitten and injured himself.

What followed first was not a rescue but a wait. For more than a day, Chin’s expedition organisers and his American evacuation company argued over authorisation while he sat alone in the snow at roughly 7,500 metres, with no tent, no oxygen and no water in the sub-zero cold. Purja went public in frustration, posting: “Chin Wui Kin is still alive… LETS SAVE LIFE.” It was ultimately Chin’s wife, calling from Singapore, who paid a helicopter company directly to fly the search. Pilot Bibek Khadka took his machine above its safe operating ceiling and spotted Chin in the snow, waving.

A race against time on Annapurna

Purja and three teammates, Mingma David Sherpa, Gelje Sherpa and Gesman Tamang, were flown to Camp 3 dangling from a longline beneath the helicopter, the only way to reach that altitude. From there, they climbed at extraordinary speed. “We got dropped into Camp 3 via long line. From there, normally the timing to where he was was more than 16 hours. We did that in four hours,” Purja told National Geographic.

THE MISSION SHIFTS. THE COMPASS HOLDS.

This was never the plan. Initially, the plan was to climb just G2. But just before setting off for Pakistan, I ran the numbers on my 8000m summits. That’s when it hit me: if I tick off Broad Peak whilst I’m here , only one remains “Cho… pic.twitter.com/rovJzFcazP

— Nirmal Purja MBE (@nimsdai) July 27, 2026

Purja’s team found Chin severely dehydrated, exhausted, and frostbitten after more than 40 hours in the open, two nights on one of the world’s most treacherous mountains, where roughly one climber dies for every three who summit.

Through the night, the team lowered Chin by sled to a lower camp in a perilous operation. The next morning, battling high winds that forced him back repeatedly, Khadka finally lifted Chin off the mountain and he was airlifted to a hospital in Kathmandu. The pilot later called it “one of the most difficult long line rescues I had conducted ever”.

‘Can I have hot water?’

When the rescuers reached him, Chin was conscious, raising his hand. Moments later he passed out, but not before speaking his only words to Purja and the team: “Can I have hot water?”

Doctors in Kathmandu found his heart rate and body temperature dangerously low, with severe hypothermia and frostbite on his hands and feet. He was flown by air ambulance to Singapore, where his wife waited. Chin succumbed to his injuries a few days later, on May 2, 2019.

Annapurna was not the last time Purja abandoned a summit push to save lives that season. Weeks later on Kanchenjunga, he and his team came across two Indian climbers from West Bengal, Biplab Baidya and Kuntal Karar, stranded out of oxygen high on the mountain. Purja gave Karar his own oxygen cylinder and spent hours trying to bring the men down, radioing repeatedly for backup that never came. Both climbers died, a failure that visibly haunted him.

“The biggest thing for the project so far has been the rescues… Rescuing people from 8,450 meters is way harder than climbing a mountain,” Purja told National Geographic at Everest Base Camp that May, referring to the Kanchenjunga operation.

From Gurkha roots to elite special forces

Purja, 43, who was born into a family of Gurkhas, joined the world-famous group of Nepali soldiers at the age of 18, and thereafter joined the UK Special Forces aged 24, becoming the first Gurkha to pass selection for the elite Special Boat Service. It was during his 16 years in the British military that he developed his affinity for mountaineering.

He gave up his job, his pension and his house to fund Project Possible. The records came, and were eventually broken by others. But as tributes poured in this weekend from Kathmandu to London, it was the rescues that climbers kept returning to: the sleepless dash back up Annapurna, the oxygen handed over on Kanchenjunga.

He never called any of it a sacrifice. Saving a life, he insisted, always came before the record.