by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom
Moments before, a government official had arrived at the south gate in a jeep, driven by a Chinese chauffeur. A torrent of rocks and stones descended on the jeep, and the bloodied official had barely escaped with his life. Now, as Soepa emerged, he saw a man lying sprawled on the ground. It was Chamdo, a Tibetan government official who was a member of the hated PCART, the puppet committee through which China controlled Tibet. (The acronym stood for Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region of Tibet.) Chamdo was wearing a white shirt, black pants, dark sunglasses, and the Peking-style cap with a white dust mask favored by the Chinese, who weren’t used to Lhasa’s famous dust storms. The protesters had erupted at the sight of a Tibetan official seemingly dressed in the clothes of the occupier, and they’d knocked him off his feet. “That man looks like a Chinese!” a woman had cried out, and now, as Soepa watched, Chamdo lay on the ground, bleeding from his head, a circle of protesters looking at him in a thrilled hush at what they had done. Then the crowd shouted and leapt at him again, and Chamdo was lifted up and his body disappeared under a blur of arms and sticks and downward-swinging knives. “Chamdo had disappeared as though swallowed up,” said one of the young monks from Drepung. The crowd howled his name and cried, “Kill him!” as it beat the man to death. Later, the body would be glimpsed at various spots around Lhasa, tied to a horse by its feet and being dragged at the front of a chanting crowd.
He was the morning’s first casualty.
Bewildered, Soepa stared at the seething masses of his almost unrecognizable countrymen. There were small children with rocks in their hands, monks with old rifles and Molotov cocktails. There were blind men being led along to the protest, and women with butcher knives, and men with sticks torn from trees and sharpened into makeshift spears. Where had these people come from? he thought. Soepa saw the abandoned jeep left by the official who’d barely escaped with his life. “Some in the crowd had thrown knives which stuck in the car,” he remembered.
The Tibetans were in a kind of ecstasy of rage, screaming at the top of their voices. But their wrath wasn’t directed only at the Chinese, who’d already retreated behind the walls of their compounds. The Tibetans were furious at their own government officials, who’d greased the wheels of the Chinese occupation and grown rich off of it. Some in the Norbulingka thought they might be witnessing something else: the beginning of a civil war. The Khampas already nurtured a long-standing hatred of Lhasa bureaucrats; if they were joined by ordinary Tibetans, the country would come apart.
“Tibetans were angry at senior government officials and aristocrats,” says one Tibetan doctor who had seen corruption firsthand. “There weren’t any of them who didn’t hold large lands and properties. And the Chinese started paying silver coins to them in this curious way, sending officers with a box on their shoulder to knock on their doors.” These public payoffs for cooperation were considered especially brazen.
Inside the palace, time seemed to blur. It was difficult for many officials to grasp what was happening. The Norbulingka hadn’t been besieged in this way in living memory. In fact, Tibet had no history of popular movements at all, unless one counted the militias formed only a few years before to fight the Chinese. The country had always been ruled from above, by kings or chieftains or His Holiness. For years, Tibetans had experienced daily humiliations at the hands of the Chinese, starvation, inflation, and religious persecution. They’d absorbed each insult, but now, at the thought of danger to the Dalai Lama, they’d risen up in a kind of unconscious mass spasm. They were presenting the officials with a new proposition: We are the conscience of Tibet. Are you with us or against us?
At 10:00 a.m., with the uprising already several hours old, His Holiness was upstairs in his palace with his Lord Chamberlain, who was trying to explain why Tibetans were converging on the Norbulingka. The Dalai Lama had slept badly the night before, uneasy about the visit to the Chinese camp. He’d risen at 5:00 a.m. and gone to his prayer room, where he’d meditated amid the flickering of butter lamps and the smell of saffron water. After that he had taken his daily walk. But then he’d heard shouts and chants from beyond the two walls that separated him from the streets outside. The thick stone ramparts muffled the sounds so that he couldn’t make out the words. He hurried back to his palace to find out what was happening. His officials told him that it seemed all of Lhasa was emptying onto the large open space in front of the Norbulingka.
Now the Lord Chamberlain was laying out their possible courses of action. “I remember saying very slowly …,” recalled the Dalai Lama, “that this day, March 10, would be a landmark in Tibetan history.” His Holiness was more agitated than he’d ever been as ruler of Tibet. One scenario ran through his mind again and again: the crowd turning to attack one of the Chinese military camps, setting off a full-scale PLA attack. “The Lhasan people would be ruthlessly massacred in thousands,” he thought. Already, rebels were setting up roadblocks in Lhasa and appearing in Lhasa armed with rifles. “From my window with the help of binoculars I had a clear view of the Potala and the Chakpori [Iron Mountain],” wrote one Chinese observer, Shan Chao. “The sills of innumerable windows of the Potala are usually the favorite playground for doves. Now rifle barrels glint from them.” Shan Chao could see Tibetan troops taking up positions on the mountain, which lay between central Lhasa and the Norbulingka three miles away. Others struggled up the slopes carrying the ammunition and supplies needed for a full-scale attack.
His Holiness didn’t believe in nonviolence unconditionally. Even in studying accounts of past wars as a young boy in the Potala poring over issues of Life magazine, he’d recognized certain exceptions to the rule: self-defense, especially. And he secretly admired the patriots who were at that very moment daring the Chinese to shoot them or building barricades in the street. When he later met with a monk who described how, during the uprising, some Amdo horsemen in a remote corner of eastern Tibet had stormed a PLA camp containing hundreds of troops, resulting in the deaths of “large numbers” of Chinese soldiers, His Holiness didn’t flinch. “I was very moved to hear of such bravery,” he remembered. The CIA agent Ken Knaus would later tell of the Dalai Lama endorsing the Allied cause in World War II. Bloodshed could be justified. But what he felt coming, in premonitions and in the scenes he could see in his mind, could not. That is, wholesale slaughter.
His Holiness listened to the shouting crowd. He’d wanted for so long to talk with his people like an ordinary man. Now he sensed the crowd’s “vehement, unequivocal, unanimous” anger pulsating through the walls of the Norbulingka. “I could feel the tension of the people,” he said. “I had been born one of them, and I understood what they were feeling.” At times in the recent past, he’d shared that rage. But the Dalai Lama felt he couldn’t give in to it or Tibet would burn.
He began to pray.
The Chinese had been caught off-guard by the protests. Their two top officials in Lhasa had been called home to Peking just days before, leaving the volatile Tan Guansan in charge. But the Chinese now began to react, and their first instinct was to remove themselves from any possible danger. The PLA’s daily patrols vanished from the streets. Barbed wire, some of it electrified, was unrolled along the rooftops of all the Chinese residences and offices. Tibetans reported seeing Chinese technicians perched on top of telegraph poles—either to repair the line or, as the rumor went, to take ranges for PLA artillery gunners. Soldiers could be seen digging infantry trenches on the perimeter of all the military camps that ringed Lhasa. The Chinese had previously built secret tunnels between the office of the commander in chief, the political HQ, and the payroll office, allowing staff to move between their command centers without appearing on Lhasa streets. Now even Chinese civilians carried weapons as they went about their business in town. But the authorities still underestimated the true dimensions of the threat.
The Chinese, most likely, never intended to snatch the Dalai Lama away to Peking or to harm him in any way that spring. Neither would have served their purposes. Fo
r one, he was, even for his occasional refusal to obey their commands, an effective conduit for ruling Tibet. He’d signed, however reluctantly, the Seventeen Point Agreement. He hadn’t publicly supported the rebels, despite their pleas, though there were suspicions he’d given them private encouragement. He’d even agreed to revoke the citizenship of two of his brothers, Gyalo and Norbu, when they came into disfavor in Peking. The Dalai Lama, like his predecessors, was playing the long game with the occupiers.
It was only in what he considered core matters that the Dalai Lama defied the Chinese. When they demanded that he send the Tibetan army after the rebels, His Holiness refused again and again, each time ratcheting up the anger from Peking. He did send letters to the guerrillas in various parts of the country, asking them to seek a peaceful solution with the Chinese, but he wouldn’t send Tibetans to fight Tibetans.
The Chinese diarist Shan Chao toured Lhasa by armored car as both sides prepared for war. He was genuinely perplexed by what he saw: “They are raising such havoc all through the city that it’s as if some imperialist invader had entered our land.” It was a reminder of how genuine the Chinese belief in their own mission was; they couldn’t see the uprising as anything but a bizarre plot against Tibet’s future.
At the PLA military headquarters, the minutes ticked by, the tension in the air thickening as morning turned to afternoon. Chinese officers emerged to look toward the Norbulingka and then huddled in nervous groups. Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, spotted pro-Chinese monks milling around, guns visible beneath their robes. He could hear the chants of the crowd in the distance, growing louder but still not distinct enough to make out the words. The Chinese officials glared at the Tibetan nobles. “They were getting quite agitated,” Choegyal remembers. “And that’s when we knew His Holiness wasn’t going to come.”
The Tibetan guests were anxious to get back to their families, but the Chinese insisted on carrying on with a strained lunch and a shortened version of the performance. In complete silence the locals watched the dancers swoop and pivot while grim-faced PLA soldiers glared at them.
Choegyal watched it all, enthralled and not a bit afraid.
His mother was growing frantic. A squad of twelve PLA soldiers charged into her house, demanding to see her. Making their way toward her private room, the soldiers were on the verge of finding Diki Tsering when her house manager violently pushed them back, claiming that His Holiness’s mother was ill. “After a look of hatred,” Diki Tsering said, “they left the same way they had come.” She took the visit to mean the PLA was looking for hostages close to the Dalai Lama, and her thoughts turned to the missing Choegyal. Again, she felt she could hear him crying for help.
Diki Tsering’s son-in-law, the Dalai Lama’s chief bodyguard, sent a car for her out of the Norbulingka, but the crowd, seeing the driver’s Chinese uniform, rained stones down on the vehicle, nearly killing him. Finally, her son-in-law came himself and was just able to get through the roadblocks set up by Khampa warriors, part of the popular government that had sprung up within a matter of hours. With the help of a permit signed by army officials, he collected Diki Tsering and barely made it back to the Norbulingka.
But now Choegyal wouldn’t know where to find her. She sent messengers to the Chinese camp. Hours later, they returned empty-handed, unable to locate her son among the Tibetan aristocrats and PLA soldiers. “We thought,” she remembered, “they would take him to China.”
At the summer palace, Norbulingka staff and Tibetan government officials met to discuss what was to be done. “Many officials felt that the Dalai Lama was compelled to advise caution because of his religious position (which required him to oppose violence at all times), and because of the fear of the Chinese,” wrote the Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya. Others believed that if the Dalai Lama were to support the resistance, the Chinese would flatten the Norbulingka and attack Tibetans at will.
Three senior ministers were hurriedly sent to the military headquarters to explain what had happened. The Chinese officials they met with were initially calm and relaxed. But then the acting head of the Chinese government in Lhasa, Tan Guansan, arrived and quickly became apoplectic. He was later described by the British journalist Noel Barber in deeply unflattering terms: “a pair of stooped shoulders, yellow teeth, extremely thin hands, and a habit of reeking with perfume”—an alcoholic and a rock-ribbed party loyalist whom even the kindly Dalai Lama described as looking “like a peasant,” with stained teeth and an army crew cut. Tan slammed his fist onto a wooden table, and his face went beet-red. “Reactionary elements must behave or all will be liquidated!” he yelled. “Up until now, we have been patient, but this time the people have gone too far.” The Dalai Lama’s absence went beyond a social snub: it was, in the minds of the Chinese, a deliberate act of defiance. The Chinese were convinced that the “imperialist rebels” were being secretly backed by members of the Tibetan government. Tan Guansan and the other officials ranted at the Tibetans for several hours, and by the end they were promising “drastic action” to end the revolt.
In front of the Norbulingka, neighborhood leaders threaded through the crowd, signing up people to guard the summer palace against the PLA. The sixteen-year-old protester Yonten ran up to a man he knew and asked to be put on the list. “You’re too young,” the man shot back, but the teenager persisted. “I cried and pleaded with him to accept my name by saying that I would be happy to carry a single bullet.” As fresh chants rumbled through the crowd, the man looked at him and quickly jotted his name on the paper. Yonten was ecstatic. He was now fully one of the crowd, the movement of his legs locked to its every swivel and rush, his voice hoarse with the day’s slogans.
A protester shouted out that the only way the Dalai Lama would leave the Norbulingka was if his vehicle rolled over their bodies. Others roared their approval. Elsewhere in Lhasa, the Tibetan army was actually considering this idea as a tactic. One Tibetan doctor went to morning assembly and received orders that he and his unit of army troops were to line the route from the Norbulingka to the Chinese military camp with their guns unloaded. If they saw His Holiness’s car approaching, they were to lie down in the road and stop it.
At 3:00 p.m. the crowd stirred as officials emerged from the Norbulingka. A cabinet member picked up a megaphone. “The main fear of the Tibetan people is that His Holiness will go to the Chinese army base to see their performance,” he called, his voice echoing out over the upturned faces under bright sunlight. “But His Holiness is not going to go. You should all go back to your homes.” A murmur of satisfaction rippled through the crowd: they’d saved the Precious Jewel, at least for now.
Voices called from the crowd to allow them to see the Dalai Lama. The officials conferred among themselves and agreed. The massed Tibetans, in a scene out of the French Revolution, chose seventeen “people’s representatives” to meet with His Holiness and plan for the coming days. To the cheers of the crowd, their leaders were escorted through the gates of the summer palace. Tibet now had a kind of democratic assembly for the first time in a thousand years.
• • •
Around 4:00 p.m., Choegyal was finally released from the Chinese HQ. Eager to find out what had happened back home, he hurried toward his mother’s residence. On the way, he passed a pillbox swarming with PLA soldiers carrying black submachine guns. He’d never come across Chinese soldiers so tense before, so clearly ready to shoot.
Soon after, a servant from the Norbulingka found Choegyal and escorted him home. They passed through the gates and into the palace grounds, where his mother was waiting in a small house. Choegyal caught a glimpse of her in a window. Diki Tsering saw him and immediately began clapping. He could hear her voice calling out to him.
“She was very happy to see me,” Choegyal said.
As dusk fell, the People’s Representatives—along with about seventy members of the Tibetan government itself—convened a meeting inside the grounds of the Norbulingka. They declared Chinese authority in
Tibet null and void. The Kusung Regiment, the Dalai Lama’s corps of bodyguards, decided they would no longer take orders from the occupiers. Tibetan army troops began to shed their Chinese-issued uniforms and replace them with their traditional khaki.
Perhaps 5,000 protesters remained at the Norbulingka to ensure that the Dalai Lama was not smuggled out to the occupiers. “The officials kept saying that they didn’t need more guards, since the army and the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards were enough,” remembers sixteen-year-old Yonten. But the Tibetans, who a day before would have obeyed the cabinet without hesitation, ignored them. “The choice was in the people’s hands.”
Yonten wasn’t about to go home as evening fell. He felt his section of the crowd move toward the Lhasa road, and he let himself be carried with it, chanting “Tibet Is Free!” along the path open to the plains until the words began echoing off alley walls, and he looked up above the shoulders of his fellow marchers and saw they were in central Lhasa. “The whole city was filled with the sound,” he remembered. Soon he found himself standing in front of the Yuthok, the home of the highest-ranking Chinese official in Tibet, an old aristocratic mansion that had been bought by the government but still kept the name of the family that had lived there for generations. Guards quickly pulled the doors shut and soldiers appeared on the rooftop, pointing their rifles down at the swirling masses. Men began pulling open their shirts and asking the Chinese to shoot them in the chest. For ten minutes, they called up to the soldiers before moving off to Barkhor Street, where they “took two turns around” the square and then, as night fell, drifted off to their homes.