In Exile From the Land of Snows (54 page)

For all of its fury, the political contest of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet was limited, in the main, to the Chinese themselves. The bulk of the suffering it produced was endured by the Tibetan people. While a few thousand Chinese died or were arrested and tortured, Tibetan casualties—including fatalities and those imprisoned—ran into the tens of thousands, with millions experiencing extreme abuse. Worse, for the legacy of subsequent generations, Tibetan culture suffered what would have been—were it not for the refugees in India—nothing less than a fatal blow. Everything Tibetan was destroyed; everything Chinese and Communist adopted. The practice of religion was officially outlawed. Folk festivals and fairs were banned, traditional dances and songs, incense burning and all Tibetan art forms and customs prohibited. A large outdoor exhibit was erected at Tromsikhang, near the Barkhor in Lhasa, in which all forbidden religious and ornamental items were displayed under a banner ordering their immediate remission to work committees and the “Offices to Suppress the Uprising,” which had been reinstituted for the duration of the upheaval. All over Tibet people with bad class designations, who had not as yet been imprisoned, were dragged into the street and paraded in paper dunce caps—beaten and spat upon as they passed, tags listing their crimes pinned to their naked chest—in processions led by Red Guards beating drums, cymbals and gongs. Lashed to heavy religious statues lamas were bent double while ex-aristocrats and merchants had large empty vessels, once used for storing grain, roped to their backs. Loudspeakers, which had previously broadcast for only three to six hours daily, now emitted a nonstop stream of propaganda songs and paeans to Mao, their shrill whine permeating the streets and penetrating to within every household.

Between parades Red Guard factions vied for preeminence in the work of demolishing every vestige of Tibetan culture. The few remaining prayer flags were ripped down and replaced with red banners. The religious landscape of Tibet—lines of
chortens
gracing valleys and ridges, piles of
mani
stones before towns and mantras fashioned across hillsides out of whitewashed rocks were demolished and replaced by colossal slogans of Mao. The distinctive black borders framing Tibetan windows, as well as the bands of bright color decorating the interiors of most rooms, were chiseled out or painted over. In Kham and Amdo, the second floors of homes were decreed to be “bourgeois excesses”; their inhabitants were forced to raze them and live in the damp, windowless stables on the first floor. Long plaits of hair worn by both men and women were labeled “the dirty black tails of serfdom” and, if not cut by the individual, were slashed off by roving gangs of Red Guards. Others had their heads half shaved, to mark them as backward. By March 1967, tens of thousands of copies of Mao’s Little Red Book—issued with a red purse, inscribed with the slogan “Long Live Chairman Mao”—were given out. Tibetans were required to memorize passages from the book. They were tested both in nightly meetings and on the street—randomly waylaid by Red Guards who demanded flawless recitation on pain of violence. Boiler suits had to be worn, bracelets, earrings and rings discarded; even the traditional Tibetan greeting—equivalent to shaking hands—of sticking out one’s tongue, while sucking in the breath, was forbidden. Private pets were exterminated by Red Guards moving from home to home, where they forced the inhabitants to hang portraits of Mao in every room and wrote slogans on the walls. Tibetan youths—members of the Communist Youth League and schoolchildren—were also marshaled into pet and insect extermination campaigns in an effort to counter the Tibetans’ abhorrence of taking life. Tibetan writing and even the language itself were targeted for destruction, replaced by a bizarre, mainly Chinese patois called “the Tibetan-Chinese Friendship language”—the grammar and vocabulary of which were incomprehensible to most Tibetans. Great numbers of Tibetans—particularly cadres and others employed directly by the Chinese—were forced to change their names to Chinese equivalents, each with one syllable of Mao’s name included. When parents resisted naming their offspring for Mao, the children were officially called by either their date of or weight at birth—so that, as far as Chinese administrators were concerned, many of Tibet’s upcoming generation were literally no more than numbers. As a new expression describing the dementia that had gripped the Chinese stated, “First they make us laugh, and then they make us cry.”

As preposterous as the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution seemed
to most Tibetans, they had reason to fear it far more than the Democratic Reforms and their attendant campaigns of class cleansing. During these there had been a strict adherence to authority in the administration of various punishments; the Cultural Revolution was pure mob violence. The early parades through Lhasa soon gave way to branding with hot irons, executions and impromptu
thamzing
on the street—so much so that for years Tibetans feared to leave their homes, venturing out only to and from work and even then refusing to acknowledge friends, as it was the duty of watchers on every corner to report suspicious behavior. Then, as early as August 1966, gang rapes began. The female children of four hundred Tibetan families engaged in lumbering at Po Tramo were marched naked in public by Red Guards, submitted to
thamzing
and then raped. Appeals were made to the authorities in Lhasa, but they refused to intervene out of fear for their positions. In the winter of 1966-67, Revolutionary Rebels traveled to Nagchuka, north of Lhasa. Here they subjected vast numbers of nomads, gathered at the town during the cold months, to similar atrocities. Women were stripped, bound and made to stand on frozen lakes under guard. A man and his daughter, Karma Sherab and Tsering Tsomo, were compelled to copulate in public. Throughout Lhoka similar wanton acts took place, as classed Tibetans were left tied in gunnysacks for days at a time. At the Ngyang-chu River (a tributary of the Tsangpo) outside Gyantse, families, including the women and children of classed men, were made to stand in freezing water for five hours, wearing dunce caps, heavy stones strapped to their legs. More rapes and public beatings occurred in Shigatse. A wave of suicides swept over the country as many Tibetans, sometimes in family groups, chose to kill themselves by leaping from cliffs or drowning rather than die at the hands of Chinese gangs. In Lhasa, suicide attempts became so common that PLA guards patrolled the shores of the Kyichu River night and day.

As the fighting between the Red Guard factions intensified, so did the atrocities—committed not only by civilian bands, but by the PLA as well. Rapes and beatings turned into executions in which victims were forced to dig their own graves before being shot. The bloodletting re-created the worst of the crimes that followed the suppression of the 1959 revolt. According to a new influx of refugees escaping, in the confusion, to India, Tibetans were routinely mutilated, their ears, tongues, noses, fingers and arms cut off, genitals and eyes burned. Boiling water was poured on victims hung by the thumbs to extract information they were thought to possess concerning rival factions. Crucifixion was also employed: on June 9, 1968, the bodies of two men were dumped in the street in front of Ngyentseshar—the old Lhasan jail—riddled with nail marks, not just
through the hands, but hammered into the head and the major joints of the torso. As late as 1970 a group of ex-monks near the Nepal border were required to stand on pedestals in public and read Mao’s Little Red Book aloud for three consecutive days. Those who refused were shot on the spot by the PLA. Their corpses were dragged through the streets, where the people were forced to spit and throw dust on them. Two who would not were also summarily executed. Finally the bodies were prominently displayed beneath signs proclaiming their lot to be the natural end of all reactionaries.

The fate of the Tibetan people was duplicated in the country’s 6,254 monasteries. But while so much Red Guard behavior was uncontrolled, the destruction of the monasteries was the result of a carefully planned campaign inaugurated prior to the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1959, it had been the ongoing task of the Cultural Articles Preservation Commission to catalogue, according to specified grades of value, every item in every monastery in Tibet for eventual shipment to China. Metallurgy teams were sent from Peking. Nevertheless, it was a massive task, and the work had progressed slowly. The large monasteries around Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse and the main cities of Kham and Amdo alone contained so much that few in the countryside had been thoroughly examined prior to 1966. By September 1967, however, a year after the first Revolutionary Rebel group had formed in Lhasa, widespread destruction began in earnest. Older Red Guards supervised the operation equipped with booklets in which each article’s designation, either to be saved or destroyed, was noted. Images of gold, silver and bronze, expensive brocades and ancient
thankas
were packed and sealed. Intricately carved pillars and beams were dismantled for use in the construction of Chinese compounds. Then, under red flags—with drums, trumpets and cymbals providing a fanfare—local Tibetans were forced to demolish each monastery. Giant bonfires were lit to burn thousands of scriptures, while those not incinerated were desecrated—used as wrapping in Chinese shops, as toilet paper or as padding in shoes. The wooden blocks in which they were bound were made into floorboards, chairs and handles for farm tools. Clay images were ground to dust, thrown into the street for people to walk on and mixed with fertilizer. Others were remade into bricks for the specific purpose of building public lavatories.
Mani
stones, once among the most common expressions of prayer, were turned into pavement. Frescoes were defaced, the eyes of their images gouged out in a manner reminiscent of the twelfth-century Moslem destruction of Buddhist monasteries in India. Bronze and gold pinnacles crowning every temple’s roof were pulled down and—along with other metals—resmelted.

When the pillaging was done, dynamite was placed in the gutted buildings and their walls blown up. Field artillery was also used, so that within a three-year period the entire landscape of Tibet stood scarred by ruins resembling bombed cities. Because the buildings’ walls were so thick, virtually none, not even Ganden—slated for total obliteration as the Gelugpa sect’s most sacred monastery—could be completely razed, but stood as ghostly ever-present reminders of what had been. The destruction of Tibet’s monasteries came as a collective shock that all but the youngest Tibetans found incomprehensible. Whatever personal tragedy Tibetans had experienced paled in the face of what now seemed to be the end of civilization as they knew it.

An essential corollary to the attack on Tibetan culture took the form of a reinvigorated propaganda campaign vilifying the old Tibet. The chief scapegoats were the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. In December 1968, Radio Peking delivered its most scathing attack yet on the Dalai Lama, portraying him as a “political corpse, bandit and traitor.” In Tibet itself he was condemned as a “red-handed butcher who subsisted on people’s flesh with a red mark on his hand to prove it.” It was alleged that whenever the Dalai Lama recited scripture, a human heart, liver or arm was sacrificed. He was said to be too frightened to return home, lest these facts be proved to the Tibetan people, who would then take retribution for his having lived on their “flesh and blood.” The stock questions of the nightly meeting were now: “Tell us who masterminded the revolt?” The answer: “The Dalai Lama.” The next question: “What type of life did he lead?” Answer: “He was a pleasure-loving lama who loved women, gold and silver and sold our country to imperialists.”

China’s ultimate portrait of the old Tibet was constructed, toward the close of the Cultural Revolution, in the Tibetan Revolutionary Museum, situated in the village of Shöl below the Potala. It was a mandatory stop for all foreign visitors allowed into Lhasa in carefully screened groups, from the mid-seventies on. In the museum’s first room documents were displayed purporting to prove that Tibet had been an inalienable part of China since the thirteenth century. These were followed by what a reporter for the Washington
Post
, accompanying George Bush (then U.S. liaison to China), on a three-day visit in 1977, termed a “revolting depiction of the alleged atrocities of the old regime.” The exhibit featured hands, arms and legs severed as punishment for minor crimes, the skins of two children said to have been flayed alive during a religious ceremony and an assortment of whips, knives and manacles used by the “feudal lords” to torture their “slaves.” “Pushing aside the black curtains at the exhibition room door, one enters the living hell which was old Tibet,” recounted
China Reconstructs
in a 1976 piece regaling the museum’s dramatically lit dioramas of 106 figures. Orchestrated by tape-recorded music and explanations, the dioramas were arranged in four groups entitled: The Feudal Manor—Hell on Earth; The Lamasery—Wicked Den for Devouring Serfs; The Kashag—Reactionary Local Government; and the Serfs Struggle for Liberation. The scenes included a “serf” forced to carry his “master” up a steep cliff in a snowstorm, “hatred flashing from his eyes”; a boy bartered by a feudal lord for a donkey; a leering monk standing over a debtor about to be dragged to death by a horse; another monk, enclosing a screaming child in a box as a sacrifice; and a woman, said to have led a people’s uprising, tied to a stake and sentenced to have her heart gouged out. In the final scene the “slaves” rise up and slaughter their masters, and a dying girl, scrawling a red star in her own blood on a boulder, expresses “her longing for the serfs’ delivery, Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.”

The chaos and destruction of the Cultural Revolution lasted for three years. Its political aftermath lasted another seven—until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. In Tibet’s case, though, there was a more durable legacy—communes. Central Tibet was the sole region in China to have thus far avoided communization, a fact Maoists viewed as the most flagrant example of the local party’s “revisionist” policies. No matter how pressing other duties were, all Red Guards considered it their sacred task to communize Tibet. But it was not so easy, as their predecessors could have testified.