In Exile From the Land of Snows (12 page)

Departing Lhasa in late November, the Dalai Lama drove south to Yatung. Leaving their Chinese escorts for the first time in years, the Tibetans rode upward through thick forests of fir and rhododendron to the 15,500-foot Nathu-la Pass. Before a giant cairn surmounted by scores of weather-beaten prayer flags, they paused in a low cloud to throw stones, crying with traditional high spirits,
“Lha Gyal Lo!”
(“The Gods are victorious!”) At the border of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, the Tibetans were greeted by a guard of honor and a small group of dignitaries bearing scarves and garlands, huddled together in the mist. Then, as night fell and a heavy snow descended, they rode down the mountainside, the
bells of their horses tingling in the dark, and halted at a group of tents and bungalows beside a frozen lake. The following day, the Choegyal of Sikkim met his revered guest outside Gangtok, the capital, from where the Dalai Lama proceeded to Bagdogra Airfield inside the Indian border. After flying by special plane to New Delhi, the Dalai Lama was met on the tarmac of Palam Airport by Prime Minister Nehru and much of the capital’s diplomatic corps. Believing that now he could best serve his people by remaining in the free world to promote their cause, Tenzin Gyatso broached the topic to Nehru at their first meeting alone.

The Prime Minister’s response was emphatic: he must return to Tibet and once more seek compromise within the much-despoiled Seventeen-Point Agreement. Before 1950, Nehru pointed out, not a single nation had formally recognized Tibet’s independence; it was out of the question for India to give the appearance of doing so now. Its relations with China were strictly governed by the spirit of Panch Sheel, the five principles of mutual coexistence, articulated in the preamble to a 1954 trade pact between the two new republics. Though strongly criticized by Indian opposition leaders as an act of appeasement, Panch Sheel was, for Nehru, the expression of one of his highest and most cherished ideals: the peace and unity of the world’s two largest emerging nations and therein Asia. As such, it not only evinced Nehru’s admiration for Chinese anticolonialism, but served as a crucial safeguard for the limitations of India’s army, which was already committed against Pakistan. Although Nehru refused to lend the Dalai Lama substantial support, he did agree to represent the Tibetan position to Zhou Enlai, who en route to Europe stopped off in New Delhi on a sudden visit. In a subsequent meeting with the Dalai Lama, Nehru—as he later reported to the Indian Parliament—assured the Tibetan leader that Zhou Enlai had personally told him that it was “absurd for anyone to imagine that China was going to force Communism on Tibet.”

In his own discussions with China’s premier, the Dalai Lama forcefully detailed the PLA’s repressive actions in Kham. In return, he received a pledge—as did two of his brothers at a later meeting—that inequities, if they existed, would be corrected and that Mao himself would be apprised of all the Tibetans’ complaints. Strangely, Zhou Enlai seemed unaware of the Democratic Reforms in eastern Tibet, though well informed about the uprising, which had been their result. The meeting ended on cordial terms. A few weeks later, though, Zhou was back in Delhi, greatly concerned about the Dalai Lama’s plans. At a tense second conference, he made clear the PRC’s willingness to use the utmost force in suppressing the first significant challenge to its seven-year-old rule. He then bluntly asked Tenzin Gyatso if it was true that he was
planning not to return home. “It was a bit dirty,” stated the Dalai Lama. “Zhou Enlai tried to manipulate me but I also manipulated him. We each feigned sincerity, in reality not meaning the words we spoke. When he asked if I was planning to remain in India I indicated that nothing of the sort was going on—that things were absolutely normal. He threatened and warned but in the end, despite this and the indecisiveness among our own people, I decided to go back. Thus my discussions with the Prime Minister turned out true after all.”

In the first week of February 1957, while the Dalai Lama was still in New Delhi, Mao Zedong publicly stated that Tibet was not yet ready for reforms: they were to be postponed for a minimum of six years. Subsequently, cadres in Tibet assured the people that if they themselves did not request them, reforms would not be imposed for a further “fifteen or even fifty years.” It was also announced that a number of Han personnel would be withdrawn, and PCART’s departments reduced by half. Bolstered by the initial of these Chinese concessions, given out of fear of losing him and the veneer of Tibetan compliance, Tenzin Gyatso returned to Lhasa on April 1, seeking once more to stave off the erosion of Tibet’s freedom.

During his absence, the situation had greatly deteriorated. In the aftermath of the Khampas’ first victories, Chushi Gangdruk had been formed: “Four Rivers, Six Ranges”—a traditional epithet for Kham and Amdo, now used by the newly allied Tibetan chieftains as the name of their joint guerrilla organization. Gompo Tashi Angdrugtsang, an important trader from Lithang, took charge in the field, while Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, who lived in Darjeeling, upgraded an intelligence-gathering operation he had established with the CIA in 1951. A small number of guerrillas were smuggled to Guam via India and Thailand, where they were introduced to modern weaponry and commando techniques. Parachuting back into Tibet at night, they took up the task of organizing the resistance on a more efficient course, aided by periodic airdrops of light arms. By then, however, the fighting had escalated, the PLA having counterattacked with a full fourteen divisions—over 150,000 troops.

By mid-1957, a ruthless pattern of attack and reprisal developed, turning much of Kham into a wasteland. The guerrillas, clad in shirts of parachute silk, wearing heavy charm boxes to protect against bullets and living on dried meat and
tsampa
or parched barley, operated on horseback from mountain strongholds, ambushing—with flintlocks, swords and the occasional grenade—small PLA outposts and convoys coursing between the large, heavily garrisoned towns. China responded by attempting to cut off Chushi Gangdruk’s base of popular support. From their fields in Kanzé
and Chengdu waves of Ilyushin-28 bombers flew sorties across Kham, while huge mechanized columns moved overland shelling into rubble scores of villages, inhabited mainly by old men, women and children. Though by some accounts the Chinese lost 40,000 soldiers between 1956 and 1958, their own campaign in Kham, as attested to in two reports (issued in 1959 and 1960) by the International Commission of Jurists, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring group comprised of lawyers and judges from fifty nations, let loose a series of atrocities unparalleled in Tibet’s history. The obliteration of entire villages was compounded by hundreds of public executions, carried out to intimidate the surviving population. The methods employed included crucifixion, dismemberment, vivisection, beheading, burying, burning and scalding alive, dragging the victims to death behind galloping horses and pushing them from airplanes; children were forced to shoot their parents, disciples their religious teachers. Everywhere monasteries were prime targets. Monks were compelled to publicly copulate with nuns and desecrate sacred images before being sent to a growing string of labor camps in Amdo and Gansu. In the face of such acts, the guerrillas found their ranks swollen by thousands of dependents, bringing with them triple or more their number in livestock. So enlarged, they became easy targets for Chinese air strikes. Simultaneously, the PLA threw wide loops around Tibetan-held districts, attempting to bottle them up and annihilate one pocket at a time. The tide of battle turning against them, a mass exodus comprised of hundreds of scattered bands fled westward, seeking respite within the precincts of the Dalai Lama.

Soon after the Tibetan leader’s return to Lhasa, the Holy City was engulfed by the tents of over 10,000 refugees. Aware now that Mao’s promises of respite had been disingenuous, Tenzin Gyatso witnessed the inevitable result when, on June 16, 1958, the revolt finally penetrated to Central Tibet with the founding of the Tensung Tangla Magar or National Volunteer Defense Army. A natural union of Chushi Gangdruk and the original Mimang Tsongdu, Central Tibet’s own resistance group, the NVDA first raised its flag to the cheers of 5,000 cavalry drawn up on an open plain before an incense-shrouded portrait of the Dalai Lama, less than a hundred miles from Lhasa. Establishing a secretariat, a finance department and a twenty-seven-point code of conduct, the new force received support from Tibetan government officials throughout the central district of Lhoka, thus directly compromising the Cabinet. Under Chinese pressure the government sent a five-man delegation to the guerrillas to offer a promise of no reprisals if they laid down their arms. Instead, the mission joined the resistance. Fighting now reached—with an estimated 80,000
Khampa horsemen in U-Tsang alone—to within thirty miles of Lhasa, where, in the autumn of 1958, the 3,000-man PLA garrison at Tsethang was overrun. While hastily reinforcing their central Tibetan troops, the Chinese ordered the Tibetan army itself to put down the uprising. The Dalai Lama’s Cabinet promptly refused, citing the obvious fact that Tibet’s army, though loosely integrated with the PLA, was only waiting for an opportunity to join the guerrillas. Thwarted, the PLA deployed special detachments, disguised in Khampa garb, to pillage local villages, hoping in this way to arouse Central Tibetans’ age-old fear of Khampa banditry and turn them against the freedom fighters. Concurrently, the Dalai Lama found that virtually every effort at mediation had been exhausted. “There was a particular room in the Norbulingka used for meeting the Chinese generals,” he recounted. “It got to the point where I was reluctant even to enter that room. I just became tired and fed up. It was a sad experience. Their attitude, you see, was one full of contradiction. One day they would say, ‘This is white,’ the next, ‘It’s black.’ It was mad, and actually foolish. If you have to lie, you should at least do so in a manner that won’t be exposed too soon. But they didn’t even bother about that. And when you disagreed they resorted immediately to force to impose their argument.”

On March 1, 1959, while the Dalai Lama was residing in the Central Cathedral, two junior officers from the PLA’s headquarters, a brick-walled camp called Silingpu built between the Potala and the Kyichu River, came to call. They conveyed an invitation from General Dan Guansan, then in command, to attend a theatrical show. Somewhat surprised that the request had not been transmitted through the proper channel of the Cabinet, Tenzin Gyatso nonetheless replied that he would be happy to come but could not fix a date until his final examinations, then underway, were completed. The Chinese soon withdrew and the Dalai Lama turned his attention to the task at hand.

By all standards, the tests for the Geshé Lharampa, the highest grade of the Doctor of Divinity degree, were the most rigorous in Tibet’s ancient academic system. They had begun the previous year, when for three months the Dalai Lama had toured Sera, Drepung and Ganden monasteries to stand for preliminary exams. In day-long sessions he had debated fifteen monastic scholars—three for each of the five topics studied—before thousands of onlookers. His performance had been accounted uncanny, given the fact that throughout the eleven most intense years of his preparation, from age thirteen to twenty-four, the requirements of daily debate, memorization and seven levels of courses had been conducted under the great weight of political office. On the day of his final exam, the Dalai Lama
was questioned by a rotating team of eighty scholars before 20,000 monks crammed into every niche of the Central Cathedral’s inner sanctum. With two breaks only, the test proceeded from early in the morning until ten at night, hours of debate seeming “like an instant,” as the Dalai Lama recalled. His performance convinced the assembled abbots and scholars that he was indeed the incarnation of Chenrezi.

On March 7, General Dan Guansan again asked the Dalai Lama to set a date for attending the theatrical show. March 10 was reluctantly agreed on, the event to be held inside Silingpu itself, an unprecedented location for the Dalai Lama’s presence. On the morning of March 9, P. T. Takla, general of the 500-man Kusung Magar, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard, was hurriedly summoned before one Brigadier Fu at Chinese headquarters. The brigadier informed Takla that on the following day Tibet’s ruler was not to be accompanied by his customary contingent of twenty-five soldiers, his route was not to be lined with troops, as was normally the case, nor were the two or three bodyguards permitted to join him inside the Chinese camp to be armed. When Takla requested the reason for such extraordinary conditions, the brigadier mysteriously asked, “Will you be responsible if somebody pulls the trigger?” He further insisted that the occasion be kept secret from the public. It could not be. Within hours of the meeting, Lhasa was swept by the rumor of a Chinese plan to kidnap the Precious Protector. Serving only to reinforce the people’s suspicions, Radio Peking had just announced that the Dalai Lama would attend an upcoming meeting of the Chinese National Assembly, though, in fact, he had not yet agreed to go. Three planes were known to be standing by at Damshung Airport, seventy miles northwest of the capital, giving further credence to the idea. Moreover, similar deceptions had occurred before. In the east, at least four high lamas had been invited to cultural performances without their retinues, whereupon they were imprisoned and all save one executed. No one besides the Dalai Lama’s personal staff had been invited to the performance, not even the Cabinet. Apprised of the people’s feelings, however, the PLA command issued last-minute invitations to prominent Tibetans on the evening of the ninth, an act which appeared so transparent as to confirm the population’s worst fears.

Soon after dawn on March 10, crowds began pouring out of Lhasa. By nine o’clock almost 30,000 people had gathered before the two giant stone lions flanking the Norbulingka’s front gate. Their mood was explosive. Shouting that the Dalai Lama must be protected, they sealed off the Jewel Park. Two longtime Cabinet ministers were belatedly permitted entry, but a third, newly appointed official, driving in the company of a Chinese officer, was attacked. When a known collaborator, named Phakpala Khenchung,
rode up on a bicycle firing two shots from his revolver to warn the crowd back, he was stoned to death, his body tied to a horse and dragged through the city’s streets.