Stephan Talty
Page 1
ALSO BY STEPHAN TALTY
The Illustrious Dead
The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army
Empire of Blue Water
Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign
Mulatto America
At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History
Copyright © 2011 by Stephan Talty
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talty, Stephan.
Escape from the land of snows: the young Dalai Lama’s harrowing flight to freedom and the making of a spiritual hero / Stephan Talty.—1st ed.
1. Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935– —Childhood and youth. 2. Escapes—China—Tibet. I. Title.
BQ7935.B777T36 2010
294.3′923092—dc22 2010019827
[B]
eISBN: 978-0-307-46097-4
Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward
v3.1
For Karen and Suraiya
At the bottom of patience is Heaven.
—Tibetan proverb
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Key Persons
Map
Introduction
One
AN EXAMINATION OF PRIOR MEMORIES
Two
TO LHASA
Three
ACROSS THE GHOST RIVER
Four
EASTERN FIRES
Five
A RUMOR
Six
FOREIGN BROTHERS
Seven
ACROSS THE KYICHU
Eight
FLIGHT
Nine
THE NORBULINGKA
Ten
OPIM
Eleven
“GODLESS REDS VS. A LIVING GOD”
Twelve
THE JOKHANG
Thirteen
LHUNTSE DZONG
Fourteen
IN TIBETAN PRISONS
Fifteen
THE LAST BORDER
Sixteen
MEETING A POET
Epilogue
BONFIRES
Glossary
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgments
KEY PERSONS
Here is a list of the people who are featured in the following pages. A handful of Tibetan words and phrases are also used in the book. If at any time you’re unclear about these terms, please consult the glossary on this page.
Athar: Athar Norbu (also known as Lithang Athar), a Khampa guerrilla trained by the CIA and reinserted into Tibet as a conduit to the resistance.
Noel Barber: The foreign correspondent for London’s Daily Mail in 1959.
Barshi: Barshi Ngawang Tenkyong, a junior official at the Norbulingka who on March 9, 1959, spread rumors of threats to the Dalai Lama.
Choegyal: Tendzin Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, recognized as the high lama Ngari Rimpoche.
Choekyong Tsering: The Dalai Lama’s father.
Diki Tsering: The Dalai Lama’s mother.
Gadong: The second-most important oracle in Tibet, after the Nechung.
John Greaney: The deputy head of the CIA’s Tibetan Task Force in 1959.
Gyalo: Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s second-oldest brother, who escaped from Tibet in 1952 and later acted as a conduit to the American government.
Heinrich Harrer: Austrian SS member and soldier in the German army during World War II who escaped a British colonial prison camp in India and fled to Tibet. Author of Seven Years in Tibet.
Ken Knaus: A member of the CIA’s Tibetan Task Force. Later, author of Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival.
Ketsing Rimpoche: Abbott and leader of the Amdo search party for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Lhamo Thondup: The first given name of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Lhotse: A Khampa guerrilla trained by the CIA. Athar’s partner in their surveillance and reporting on the resistance.
Lobsang Samden: One of the Dalai Lama’s older brothers.
Mao Zedong: The chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and leader of the People’s Republic of China, 1949–76.
Narkyid: Ngawang Thondup Narkyid, monk official on the Council of Lhasa. Later, the Tibetan language biographer of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.
Nechung: The state oracle of Tibet.
Ngabö: Ngawang Jigme, a progressive kalön who served as Tibet’s governor-general during the Chinese invasion of 1950 and later served within the post-1959 government.
Norbu: Thubten Jigme Norbu, the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother.
George Patterson: Scottish doctor, religious seeker, and Tibetan activist who worked as a correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph.
Panchen Lama: The second-highest-ranking lama, or religious authority, in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama. In 1959, the Panchen Lama was the former Lobsang Trinley (1938–89).
Phala: The Dalai Lama’s Lord Chamberlain, who controlled all access to His Holiness.
Reting Rimpoche: The Dalai Lama’s first regent, 1933–41. He died in prison under mysterious circumstances after unsuccessfully attempting to regain power in 1944–45.
Shan Chao: A Chinese diarist in Lhasa in 1959 who kept a record of the uprising.
Soepa: Tenpa Soepa, a junior official at the Norbulingka in 1959.
Yonten: Lobsang Yonten, scion of a prominent nationalist family and a protester during the 1959 rebellion. Later, a member of the security staff of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Zhou Enlai: The first premier of the People’s Republic of China, serving from 1949 to 1976.
INTRODUCTION
Early one morning in March 1959, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama walked slowly along a gravel path that led away from his small home at the Norbulingka, his beloved summer palace. The air just after first light still carried a snap of cold that reached from the Himalayas, and the sun was only now beginning to warm the breeze. This was his favorite time to walk the grounds, after rising for prayers and breakfast at 5:00 a.m., when everything was still. Against a sky beginning to lighten, the leaves of the palace trees—poplar and willow, mostly—fairly pulsed green. It was the Dalai Lama’s lucky color.
He was deep in thought, and then deep in the effort to avoid thinking. When he lifted his head he could spot thrushes and willow warblers and even an English kingfisher as they swung through the branches and then out over the two thick walls that surrounded the palace’s 160 acres. The Norbulingka, three miles outside the capital city, Lhasa, was the place the Dalai Lama felt most at home.
As the Dalai Lama walked, he could hear the calls of his pet monkey, which was tethered to a stick in another part of the Jewel Park. If he was lucky, he would spot the musk deer that roamed the grounds, along with cranes, a Mongolian camel, and high-stepping peacocks. He could also hear the occasional burst of gunfire that echoed outside the walls. Out there, thousands of his fellow Tibetans were camped, guarding against what they thought were conspiracies to kill or abduct him. There were, the Dalai Lama was convinced, no conspiracies, but that didn’t change the power or the direction of the uprising that was gathe
ring in the streets of Lhasa. The crowds would not let him leave, and their very presence was inciting the Chinese, who had occupied the country, or retaken it from a corrupt, intriguing elite, if you asked them, nine years earlier.
The past few days, since the uprising had begun, had run together in a “dizzying, frightening blur.” The Norbulingka couldn’t have appeared more serene as it took on its new greenery, but it seemed that the future of Tibet was spinning out of control just outside its walls. The Dalai Lama felt that he was caught “between two volcanoes.” But there were actually more than two sides; the Tibetans themselves were divided. As was his own mind, particularly on the question of what to do now: stay in Lhasa, or flee to a safe haven in the south, or even on to India itself?
As the thin monk, just twenty-three years old, usually luminous with energy, paced slowly along the path, he was successfully avoiding returning to his small whitewashed palace, especially the Audience Hall, where he held his meetings. (It was even furnished with chairs and tables instead of Tibetan cushions, as an optimistic nod to the foreign diplomats he’d hoped to welcome, but the Chinese allowed few visitors.) Bad news was all that arrived there these days. The Chinese official Tan Guansan, one of the leading officials on the influential Tibet Work Commission, had made a point of coming to see him over the past few months, and the confrontations had become increasingly ugly. And for months the Dalai Lama had been receiving messengers arriving from Lhasa and beyond with stories of Chinese atrocities against his people—beheadings, disembowelments, accounts of monasteries burned with monks inside them—that were so outlandishly brutal that he had to admit he himself didn’t believe them all. “They were almost beyond the capacity of my imagination,” the Dalai Lama remembered. It simply wasn’t possible for human beings to treat one another that way. Now new reports were coming in daily through the gates of the Norbulingka, watched not only by his bodyguards and Tibetan army troops but also by representatives of “the people’s committee,” a bewildering concept in Tibet, which had been ruled for centuries by aristocrats and abbots, under the authority of the Dalai Lama himself. These bulletins told him that the Chinese were bringing artillery and reinforcements into Lhasa and installing snipers on the rooftops of his restive city. He could sometimes feel the rumble of tanks’ diesel engines as the vehicles negotiated the narrow streets.
What he was trying to avoid thinking of as he walked was the dream he’d had last year. He’d seen massacres in his mind, Tibetan men, women, and children being shot and killed by Chinese troops and his lovely Norbulingka turned into a “killing ground.” This he kept to himself. (But some of his subjects would later report they had had the same dream at the very same time.) He knew that such scenes, if they were allowed to unfold in Lhasa, would be the prelude to something much larger. “I feared a massive, violent reprisal which could end up destroying the whole nation,” the Dalai Lama said.
Lhasa (whose name means “place of the gods”) had first appeared to him as a city of wonders. Almost twenty years before, he’d entered the capital on a golden palanquin constructed of a curtained box set on poles carried by teams of young men, with massive crowds cheering his approach and bowing to him with the ceremonial katas, or white scarves, in their hands. “There was an unforgettable scent of wildflowers,” recalled the Dalai Lama. “I could hear [the people] crying, ‘The day of our happiness has come.’ ” But it hadn’t. In fact, during his reign, disaster had followed disaster. Men in the east of the country were now being “driven into barbarism,” forced to fight the Chinese and dying in the battles, ensuring themselves a rebirth as lower animals and demons. And Lhasa too was growing unstable.
The sun was climbing over the small mountains to the east. Soon he would have to return to the palace.
Perhaps what was most shocking about what had happened in the past few days was that the idea of escape wasn’t entirely repugnant to him. It would be devastating to his people, for whom he was Kundun, the Presence, the spirit of Tibet itself. It would be equally devastating for the nation, for the idea of an independent Tibet, and it cut at his heart to contemplate what it would mean for the future. But it wouldn’t necessarily be devastating to him. The notion of escape had always appealed to the Dalai Lama, ever since he was a boy in the Amdo hills, before the search party seeking the next incarnation of Chenrizi—the deity that manifested itself in each successive Dalai Lama—had knocked on his parents’ door. When he was only two, he would pack a small bag, tie it to a stick, and tell his mother he was leaving for Lhasa. He had always been an unusual boy, but those moments astonished her. And twenty years later, the idea of leaving still intrigued him. He knew that freedom of the kind he had tasted only briefly in his life was impossible in Tibet. Even without the occupation, Lhasa for a young Dalai Lama was often a dark and suffocating passageway.
He didn’t wish to leave, nor was it even clear that he could if he wanted to. Some 40,000 Chinese troops were stationed in and around Lhasa, and he’d have to be spirited past their patrols. And if he did flee, Tibet, in a way, vanished from Tibet. He was central to every Tibetan’s sense of his or her own life in a way that no other leader, not even Mao in China—Mao, who was finally revealing himself in these horrible days—could equal. He was the storehouse of the Buddhist Dharma, a subject that had once bored him profoundly but that now quickened his every thought. Was it possible that that too could disappear from his country, from the earth itself?
The Dalai Lama took the path that turned and wound back toward his home on the Norbulingka grounds. He could hear the crowds stirring outside. The chants would begin soon. He didn’t hurry.
One
AN EXAMINATION OF PRIOR MEMORIES
little more than twenty-five years earlier, on the morning of December 12, 1933, hundreds of excited monks had milled around one of the open, stone-floored courtyards of the enormous winter palace, the Potala, their breath visible in the thin air of 12,000 feet. They were there for their annual audience with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Fourteenth’s tough, visionary predecessor.
But when the maroon-robed monks entered the meeting room, instead of the holy person of the Thirteenth, his compact body and steely gaze, they saw propped on the golden throne an empty robe. His Holiness, it turned out, was too ill to attend the audience, and his followers would be granted only a chance to commune with his garments, a ceremony the Tibetans call “inviting the clothes.” One monk began to weep. Rumors about the Thirteenth’s bout with a flu-like illness had been sweeping through Lhasa for days. The monk felt instinctively that His Holiness was not going to live long.
Five days later, his fears came true, and the Dalai Lama passed away from natural causes. The announcement was made by dancers on the roof of the Potala, beating out a somber rhythm on traditional damaru drums, and by the sight of butter lamps being placed outside, which in Tibet is a symbol of death. The population was grief-stricken, openly crying on the streets of Lhasa. Each Dalai Lama creates an impression of what the institution could be, and the Thirteenth, who’d held the throne for fifty-four years, had set a high bar. He had been a handsome man with a shaved head, an intense, transfixing gaze, and the flourish of a thin mustache. Far from emitting a Buddha-like serenity, his official portraits reveal a Tibetan prince, one well versed in the politics of fear and retribution. But he had presided over the nation’s entry into at least a sort of independence, and he was beloved.
An old saying decrees that whenever two Tibetans get together, there will soon be two political parties. Tibetans are notoriously fond of political intrigue, and at the Potala there were competing loyalties, power struggles, and infighting that sometimes turned lethal. But the Thirteenth had expertly negotiated the dark waters of political life. On his ascension to the throne in 1879, the Dalai Lama’s jealous regent had attempted to use occult magic to get rid of him, placing a “black mantra” in a finely crafted pair of shoes that were then given to a powerful lama, boosting the mantra’s killing power. Having escaped the ass
assination attempt, the Thirteenth had ordered the ambitious regent drowned in an enormous copper vat. It was an example of his frequently ruthless nature, but it was also a fact that one often needed to be very tough to survive in the Potala Palace.
The Thirteenth’s great mission in his lifetime had been to modernize the country and usher Tibet into the company of independent nations. He believed that the age-old threat from Tibet’s ancient adversary, China, would return, more powerful than ever, and that his nation, backward and isolationist in the extreme, would prove to be easy prey for its huge neighbor. But by the time of his death, it was clear that he’d utterly failed in this mission. The leaders of Tibet’s great monasteries thought that opening the country to the world would spell the end of their domination and the end of Tibet’s role as the keeper of the Dharma. They equated modernity with atheism. Westerners were seen as Tendra, enemies of the faith, and enemies of the men and institutions that supported the faith. One monk remembered that, growing up, he was taught that India was the holiest place on earth but that “everywhere else is to be feared.” It was even permitted to kill intruders rather than let them contaminate Tibet.
The Thirteenth dreaded what lay ahead for his country. As part of his last will and testament, he left to the Tibetan elite, and to his eventual successor, what some called a divine prophecy. But when one reads it, it turns out to be a hard-nosed political analysis of Tibet’s position in Asia and a stern warning about the future. It reveals what a steel-trap political mind the Fourteenth’s predecessor possessed, and how clearly he saw disaster’s approach:
In particular we must guard ourselves against the barbaric Red communists, who carry terror and destruction with them wherever they go. They are the worst of the worst. Already they have consumed much of Mongolia.… They have robbed and destroyed the monasteries, forcing the monks to join their armies, or else killing them.… It will not be long before we find the Red onslaught at our own front door … and when it happens we must be ready to defend ourselves. Otherwise our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated.… Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased.… The monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away.… We will become like slaves to our conquerors … and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.…