Escape from the Land of Snows (6 page)

For hundreds of years after the Fifth’s death in 1682, the curious relationship between Tibet and China waxed and waned according to the strength of the dynasty in Peking, ranging from periods of direct political control (as during the reign of Lha-bzan Khan from 1706 to 1717) to spans when the head Chinese representative in Lhasa was no more than “
a mere puppet whose strings were pulled by the Dalai Lama.” Successive Dalai Lamas sought alliances with the emperors of the Qing dynasty and were allowed
to carry out domestic policy under their protection, watched over by a succession of
ambans
, or representatives of the emperor, who were given varying degrees of control over Tibetan affairs. Peking’s representatives still had the ability to have disobedient Tibetan officials flogged (sometimes to death), but their supposed inferiors often found ways to outwit or outlast them. One
amban
complained that the Tibetans “
very often … left orders unattended to for months on the pretext of waiting for the Dalai Lama’s return or for decisions yet to be made, simply ignoring urgent requests for answers.” Most often, true power lay in the hands of the Dalai Lama and his cabinet.

The Qing dynasty began to dramatically weaken in the mid-nineteenth century when rising imperialist powers such as England and Russia started to impinge on its territories. By 1911, China had descended into a patchwork of warring chieftains and provinces, and after 1913, Tibet began to consider itself a fully independent nation. But it failed to grasp its best chance at autonomy, even declining to petition the United Nations for recognition as a sovereign state. Tibet, the keeper of the Dharma, remained locked behind its wind-whipped summits.

Until a resurgent China, under Mao Zedong, returned.

Despite the company of old men and what could have been a soul-crushing separation from his family, the Dalai Lama was somehow able to retain the sympathies and qualities of a child. While locked up in the Potala, he would watch the prisoners held in the yard below. “
Many of them were sort of my friends,” he recalled. “I watched their lives every day. Many were common criminals, but still I could see their pain as a boy.… So when I first came to power, I released all [of them].” His previous self, the Thirteenth,
would have frowned at the gesture. But it was very much in keeping with the new incarnation.

This is really the Dalai Lama’s first great triumph. He didn’t become a wild and rebellious hedonist, like the Sixth. He didn’t retreat into religious isolation, like the Eighth. He didn’t attempt to mold himself into a political mastermind, like the Fifth, or a sharp-elbowed strongman, like the Thirteenth. The teenaged Dalai Lama somehow found the strength to remain himself, a charismatic and simple-hearted young man in a dangerous time.

n 1950, when the Dalai Lama was fifteen, the twentieth century arrived in Tibet in the form of the People’s Liberation Army. Some 80,000 battle-trained Chinese soldiers crossed the “Ghost River” that separates China from the Tibetan province of Chamdo. The Tibetan army that faced them was badly trained, badly equipped, and, at 8,500 soldiers and officers, almost ludicrously undermanned, a legacy of the monasteries’ distrust of the military. In Tibet, soldiers were thought of as social outcasts because they killed living things, against the Buddha’s strict prohibition.
“[They]
were held to be like butchers,” remembered the Dalai Lama, and, like butchers, they were called “impure bones” by other Tibetans and forbidden to marry outside their group. Centuries after conquering large swaths of Asia, Tibetan soldiers had to import their techniques and their marching songs and even their vocabulary from the British army, as there were no words in Tibetan for things such as “fix arms.” The memory of military aggression had faded so thoroughly, even the words had disappeared.

Warriors from eastern Tibet, the Khampas, put up a spirited resistance to the invasion, but the Tibetan army collapsed and resistance was quickly extinguished. During the onslaught, a frantic Tibetan official telegraphed the
Kashag
, the Tibetan cabinet, for instructions and was told the members could not respond because they were on a picnic. “Shit on the picnic!” (“
Skyag pa’I gling kha!
”), he famously wired back.

Tibet reacted to the threat from China with a kind of spiritual rearmament. Buddhist monks were ordered to read the Tibetan Bible at public ceremonies attended by throngs of praying villagers and farmers. Smoke appeared on the summits of holy mountains as monks took turns stoking fires that burned fragrant incense. New prayer wheels sprang up in remote corners of the country, holy relics were brought out from dusty vaults, and believers implored the spirits to protect the Dharma and the Tibetan people. But nothing stopped Mao’s battalions.

Mao turned his eyes to Tibet after winning his brutal war with Chiang Kai-shek’s army, the Kuomintang. “China has stood up” were the Communist leader’s famous words when he declared the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square. The Communists had come to power as fierce nationalists, and restoring Tibet to the fold was high on their list of priorities. One of Mao’s first objectives after the takeover was the reunification of the motherland,
the recovery of lands that, in the Chinese mind, had been lost to “splittists” or imperialists in the decades and centuries before. On January 7, 1950, a Communist general announced that the People’s Liberation Army had wiped out the last of the Kuomintang resistance in southwest China; he added that the army’s next mission would be to “
liberate our compatriots in Tibet.”

Occupying the country offered Mao a foreign policy victory as well as a domestic one: It would move China’s border from the Yangtze River to the Himalayas, giving Peking an almost impregnable buffer against land armies sweeping across from India eastward or from Pakistan and eastern Turkistan northeastward. And it would eliminate the possibility of a free Tibet becoming a staging ground for imperialists in London, Washington, or Tokyo. “
What is meant by independence here,” wrote one Chinese official from Lhasa, “is in fact to turn Tibet into a colony or protectorate of a foreign country.” Steeped in the powerful tradition of Chinese victimhood, Mao and his followers sincerely believed that Tibet belonged within the new China. Every move toward independence was regarded by the Chinese as the first crack in a dam that would result in national disintegration. Traditionally known as “the treasure house of the west,” Tibet also held vast quantities of copper, lead, gold, and zinc, along with million of acres of forests and—unknown to Mao at the time—reserves of oil, uranium, and borax. It had resources that China could use to grow.

For Mao, it was essential that the Tibetans be reunited with the homeland, along with the Mongolians, the Uighurs, and the rest of China’s far-flung minorities. “
The relationship between Tibet and China would be like brothers,” he said. “The oppression of one nationality by another would be eliminated. All nationalities would work for the benefit of the Motherland.” The Communists acknowledged the deep cultural differences between the two
nations—they were hard to ignore—but they insisted that the two societies had grown together over centuries. The Tibetans, on the other hand, believed that the relationship had been one of equals, and that Tibet had kept control of its own internal affairs, its cultural institutions, and its political independence.

Each side hid uncomfortable truths behind their interpretations of history: The Chinese failed to acknowledge that they’d forced a civilized Tibet to accept their protection at the point of a spear and that their control over their neighbor often slipped into a ceremonial façade as the dynasties in Peking faltered. And when the Tibetans painted the relationship as a primarily spiritual bond, they ignored China’s military and political influence. But the Tibetans carried the deeper point: over centuries of intense contact, their nation had never willingly assimilated into Han society.

In 1950, none of that mattered. China had taken Tibet. After the invasion,
Life
magazine asked the question that was on the minds of Tibet-watchers everywhere: would the Dalai Lama now become “one more in the succession of Moscow-pulled puppets?”

The Dalai Lama, and the world at large, knew little about Mao in 1950. The Chinese leader was unquestionably a political genius, a supremely magnetic personality who was unmatched in his ability to get his followers to do the unthinkable for him. Mao promised the Chinese people deliverance from the chaos that had racked the nation since the breakup of the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century. Mao reversed a century of Chinese history and unified the country. And he promised to end the intrusions by foreign powers that were regarded by the average citizen as a deep and lingering humiliation.

But the Great Leader, as he came to be known, also conducted
one of the most ruthless campaigns in history, not only against the armies of Chiang Kai-shek but against his own cadres. He believed himself to be one of history’s great upsetters, the men who shatter existing societies and remake them through terror. “
When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses,” he wrote, “they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible.” Thousands of his own followers were killed or driven mad in campaigns carefully planned by the Communist leader himself. His cadres used new techniques to get confessions from “rightists,” such as “angel plucking zither,” where a wire was run through a man’s penis and then up around his ears, and his interrogators strummed the line, causing intense anguish. Mao even composed the posters for rallies in which rich peasants were executed after torture sessions in front of baying crowds:

Once in control, Mao remade China with a diabolical completeness, using mass terror and raw intimidation. The campaign was literally dehumanizing: at one point, the Chairman even considered replacing citizens’ names with numbers. In coming to power, Mao had lived up to his childhood nickname,
shisan yazi
, “boy of stone.”

When the Chinese invaded, the Dalai Lama was three years short of the traditional age for ascending the throne. But posters began to appear on Lhasa streets condemning the government and demanding that the Dalai Lama take up the leadership of Tibet. Street songs—one of the only forms of protest that the average Tibetan had access to—carried the same message. The aristocratic ministers were often seen as crooked and self-serving; they eagerly
cooperated with the occupiers in return for vast sums of money. “
The noblemen were getting truckloads of silver,” says Professor Gray Tuttle of Columbia University. Even the young Panchen Lama, the second most powerful figure in Tibet and traditionally a rival to the Dalai Lama for power in the country, came out in favor of the occupation and traveled to China to accept cash payments for his support.

Only the teenaged Dalai Lama, who’d barely begun to make his mark on the society, was seen as incorruptible. Tibetans believed, above all, that he would protect them and the Dharma.

As the nation turned to him, the Dalai Lama felt only a rising panic. He knew he wasn’t ready to lead. “
The challenge filled me with anxiety,” he said. “I knew nothing of the outside world, and had no political experience.” But the decision wasn’t his. After debating the issue, government ministers decided to leave the matter in the hands of the two state oracles, the Nechung and the Gadong. The Nechung Oracle was evasive, saying only, “
If you don’t make good offerings, I cannot protect the welfare of religion and of the people.” The Gadong, too, was unresponsive. Only after a government official chastised the oracle did the Gadong come alive. He spun into a monk’s dance and ended up directly in front of the Dalai Lama. The oracle prostrated himself three times and laid a
kata
, the white offering scarf, at His Holiness’s feet, saying, “His time has come.” The Nechung Oracle was brought back into the room and seconded the decision.