Stephan Talty

by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom

  Even as they chanted out independence slogans, the crowds made it clear they had one immediate demand: the safety of the Dalai Lama. Many were beginning to believe he could never be protected in Chinese-occupied Lhasa. “He was in danger,” remembers Narykid, a young Norbulingka official. “If we lost him, we lost everything.”

  The cabinet had ordered the Lord Chamberlain to make plans for an escape, should one become necessary. His instructions were coded in old Tibetan proverbs: “Snatch the egg,” he was ordered, “without frightening the hen.”

  The Lord Chamberlain had already sent a messenger to Ratuk Ngawang, a Khampa leader in a place called Tsethang, just over one hundred miles southeast of Lhasa. “I received a letter asking for my presence at the Norbulingka,” Ngawang recalls, “but heavy fighting was going on and I was needed to lead our forces.” The rebels had been battling the PLA near Tsethang, suffering heavy casualties, for nearly a year, and now the letter informed Ngawang that His Holiness would need to flee through the region on his way to safety in the south. The commander sent a messenger saying his men would secure the area of Lhoka, which encompassed Tsethang and some of the oldest cultural sites in Tibet, including Samye, the first Buddhist monastery. “I wasn’t worried about the Dalai Lama once he reached Lhoka,” Ngawang says, “I was worried what would happen to him on the way. We had reason to fear that His Holiness might be abducted by the Chinese authorities, and we had been worried about that since 1958.”

  The Lord Chamberlain had summoned his personal tailor and asked the man to make up a Tibetan soldier’s uniform to the Dalai Lama’s measurements. He’d contacted top Khampa leaders who, on March 15, sent a caravan of horses across the Tsangpo River with what appeared to be sacks of manure on their backs. Inside were supplies for an escape attempt: food, blankets, and other necessities. The Khampas also rounded up the river coracles—basketlike boats that had animal skins lashed over a wood skeleton—so that they would be ready in case the Dalai Lama appeared. They also wanted to prevent the pursuing Chinese battalions from getting their hands on any of the slim craft.

  On the morning at March 17, after rising and having his breakfast, the Dalai Lama met with his cabinet. They decided to send Tan Guansan another letter, their third, asking him to be patient. It was another delaying tactic. The guards at the Norbulingka were now forbidding any government official to leave, but a servant was able to convince the soldiers that he was just going to do a bit of shopping in Lhasa. He left, the letter concealed deep in his robes, and made for the Chinese headquarters. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama and the ministers waited back at the summer palace.

  The hours dragged by. At 4:00 p.m. the Dalai Lama stewed, feeling keenly the futility of another letter that would lead only to another delay. He decided to try the Nechung Oracle one last time. With his attendants trailing after him, he walked to the room where the current manifestation of the oracle waited—a young monk named Lobsang Jigme. Like the Dalai Lama himself, the spirit of Dorje Drak-den passed from mortal to mortal in continuous reincarnations, the Buddhist principle of impermanence rendered in the flesh, substance passing into form before departing, endlessly.

  The ceremony began as soon as the Dalai Lama seated himself at his throne. Usually, the oracle would perform a sword dance, something the Dalai Lama, who was by nature drawn to flashing displays of military skill, very much enjoyed. But tonight the oracle came directly before him without any preliminaries, his chest heaving, and stood there “like a magnificent, fierce Tibetan warrior chieftain of old.”

  The Dalai Lama looked into the oracle’s mad-looking eyes and asked his only question: Should he stay in Lhasa or attempt an escape?

  He didn’t know what to expect. Dorje Drak-den might issue another of his noncommittal answers. But the vacillation that had marked the oracle’s behavior for the last week, going back to when the junior official Barshi challenged his useless answers, was now gone. “Go!” the Nechung bellowed. “Go tonight!” He stumbled forward, the mirror on his chest sending glimmers of candlelight into the dark recesses of the room. The oracle grabbed a pen and wrote something out on a paper. When the Dalai Lama leaned over to look, he realized it was precise directions to the Indian border, “down to the last Tibetan town.”

  As the Nechung collapsed to the floor and His Holiness hurried back to his chambers, two mortar shells exploded inside the palace walls.

  The Chinese would always deny firing at the summer palace, with Radio Peking later calling the charge “a blatant, outright fabrication.” But many Tibetans heard it, including His Holiness. He realized the shells had struck near the northern gate (according to eyewitnesses, dropping into a tranquil pond and sending sprays of water and mud into the air). And the sound of a mortar shell slamming into water had the effect of sealing the Dalai Lama’s fate. “Within the palace, everyone felt the end had come,” he said. “I must leave the palace and the city at once.”

  The bombing of the Norbulingka enraged the Tibetans. The shells only confirmed for them that the Chinese were intent on decapitating the Tibetan state and destroying the Dharma by killing the Dalai Lama. A member of the cabinet had to run to the Norbulingka’s front gate and block the guards there from assaulting a PLA position at a nearby transportation hub. Meanwhile, His Holiness performed a last divination. He performed the Mo dice ritual and the message was clear: Leave now. He and his ministers made a quick decision. They would escape that night, although “the odds against making a successful break seemed terrifyingly high.”

  Thirteen-year-old Choegyal had been running wild for days, slipping out of the Norbulingka to sample the mood of the crowd outside. “I roamed all over,” he remembers. “I was very naughty.” He found the summer palace a study in contrasts. “It was so peaceful inside the walls, but outside there was tremendous commotion.” All around him, there was the color and sound of a revolution: the crowd was chanting, waving flags, pleading, eating, marching, drinking, debating. The boy, still dressed in his monk robes, chatted with Khampas, their guns propped against the Norbulingka wall with blue, red, and green tassels stuffed in the barrels to keep out the dust. Choegyal, the reincarnation of a high lama, had inherited a German Luger from his predecessor. “He must have gotten it in Russia,” Choegyal says. “He traveled there and to Mongolia.” Like his brother growing up in the Potala, the young boy had a fascination with soldiers—“my superheroes,” as he called them. Now they were everywhere, perhaps 1,500 regular Tibetan troops and hundreds more Khampas and armed civilians. “The whole scene was astonishing, and I was completely dazed by it,” he recalls. “They looked grim, determined, and fantastic, and I felt a shudder of excitement as I watched them.”

  But on the afternoon of the 17th, Choegyal noticed a change in the already electric air of the summer palace. “Everyone was anxious,” he says. “And I kept asking everyone questions, which got on their nerves.” Choegyal was the favorite of the family, a kind of exasperating mascot, and he was used to laughter and confidences and a feeling of closeness, his fat uncle grabbing him “and tickling me until I couldn’t breathe.” Now Tibetans were terrified of what the Chinese might do but also secretly afraid of confiding in their loved ones and friends, in case they turned out to be either gossips or PLA spies. The boy noticed that when he entered a room, his elders would immediately fall silent.

  At 6:30 p.m. his mother called him into her room.

  “You better go and change into laypeople’s clothes,” she told him. “We’re going to the south.”

  “To India?” he replied.

  “No, to the south. To a nunnery across the river.”

  Choegyal turned to dash to his room. “But …,” his mother called.

  He turned. She was nervous, her voice trembling.

  “You can tell no one.”

  Choegyal nodded. “I knew we were going to India, even though she wouldn’t tell me.”

  The boy’s instincts had outraced the actual plan. The Lord Chamberlain and the Dalai Lama had agreed they would
head southward toward a rebel stronghold in the south and try to set up a dissident government there. Despite the mortar shells, they still held out hope for a negotiated settlement. The Dalai Lama had chosen Lhuntse Dzong, the fort where the CIA-trained Athar was stationed at this moment, for their destination. His Holiness wasn’t yet ready to light out for India. Leaving Lhasa would make his break with the Chinese occupation clear and unmistakable, but leaving Tibet was another matter. It would be a desperate step, His Holiness felt, one that would leave his subjects without a spiritual leader and give the Chinese carte blanche to unleash the PLA.

  Choegyal ran toward his room. He took off the maroon-and-gold monk’s robe and put on an old chuba, the long Tibetan coat. Underneath, he carefully secured his Luger under a belt. He bounced downstairs and ran to his uncle’s room, where he found the fat, good-natured man—one of his favorites in the family—sewing sacks for provisions, “stitching bags like mad.” Choegyal was about to ask if India was their true destination when his uncle barked, “Go away! I’m busy!” Eager for gossip, the boy snuck upstairs and found his mother’s maid, Acha, looking worried. “Acha, guess what? We’re going away to India.” She glared at him and snapped, “Keep quiet!”

  Choegyal slipped away, hoping to find a soldier to lend him some precious ammunition for the Luger, whose pleasant heft he could feel with every step. He imagined being ambushed by a Chinese patrol on the way south and heroically gunning down a score of PLA soldiers. “I had no doubt in my heart that if we had it out with the Chinese, I would be victorious.”

  Choegyal climbed the stairs and approached his mother’s room. Every lamp was turned on, and the room shone with light. Inside he found a previously unimaginable sight: his mother and his aunt being dressed as ordinary Tibetan soldiers by their manservants. His mother had on a short fur dress, borrowed from her brother, worn over a shabby pair of men’s pants and boots that had mud smeared over the leather to make it look as though the wearer had just come off patrol. “Over my shoulder I slung a little toy rifle, which would have looked ridiculous during the day, but was not noticeable at night,” she remembered. The final touch was a commoner’s hat borrowed from one of her servants. In the brightly lit space, which looked to Choegyal not like the room he’d left earlier but a theatrical stage on which his mother was being dressed for some kind of farce, the boy began to splutter.

  “I just couldn’t help it,” he protests. “I started to laugh. They got quite mad at me.”

  Choegyal was soon given a disguise as well. He was handed a wool hat, known as a “monkey cap,” that could be lowered over the face. His sister contributed a pink mohair scarf. Someone handed him a bowl for eating on the journey, and a rifle. Choegyal looked at it with rapt admiration before throwing it over his shoulder.

  To avoid suspicion, the fugitives would leave in three groups: Choegyal and his family would go first, followed by the Dalai Lama’s group, then one composed of tutors and cabinet ministers. A squad of four Tibetan soldiers arrived at Diki Tsering’s house around 8:30 p.m. led by a captain in His Holiness’s bodyguard. “They said, ‘Get ready, we’re leaving,’ ” Choegyal remembers. For the thirteen-year-old boy, the exhilaration building inside him was now tempered by sadness; he felt for the first time not the freedom and excitement of all the upheaval around him but the looming separation from the people pressed against the walls of the rooms, staring at him and the other members of the escape party. “I started saying good-bye to the people who looked after me at the monastery,” he says, “a young chap who must have been around fifteen, and an older servant, about twenty-four, who was kind of a butler, who looked after my food. And the older one said to me, ‘Don’t forget the texts you have memorized so far.’ Looking back, those words are kind of moving to me. Why should he care, actually?” The servants were asked if they wished to come along, but they declined. Many had families in Lhasa, while others perhaps thought they would rather take their chances with the Chinese than on a last-minute break to the south. “There was a sadness leaving those people behind,” Choegyal adds. “And thinking I would never see them again.”

  In another part of the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama was composing a letter to the leaders of the protest movement and to the ministers of his government. Around him, a hundred last-minute tasks were being seen to. His ministers gathered up the Seal of Office and the Seal of the Cabinet that stamped all official orders; whatever food and water was in the Norbulingka kitchen was slipped into the newly sewn bags; and each member of the escape party was hurriedly choosing a minimum of clothing—two full outfits, in the Dalai Lama’s case—for the journey.

  But everything else would have to be left behind. For the Dalai Lama, the vaults of the Potala were filled with the remnants of his former selves, not only the colossal burial chambers (one of which contained 3,271 kilos of gold and other precious metals) but jewels and gold dust given to him in tribute, the gifts from the Russian czars and English queens, including the ones for his own installation, an intricately worked clock and a brick of solid gold minted by the Calcutta Mint. A thousand years’ worth of Tibet’s patrimony would be left behind. The Tibetan cabinet had spirited “substantial” amounts of gold and silver out of the treasury during the 1950 invasion, but many millions of dollars’ worth of precious objects remained. And the rooms and chapels were filled with irreplaceable manuscripts and Buddhist art that the Dalai Lama could barely begin to think of being handed to Tan Guansan and the Chinese bureaucrats.

  The Dalai Lama felt a jolt of sadness but little physical apprehension of the journey ahead—not because it wasn’t dangerous but because he’d come to believe so deeply in his own reincarnation. “I have no fear of death,” he said. “I was not afraid of being one of the victims of the Chinese attack.” But he knew the death of another Dalai Lama would convince the people that “the life of Tibet [had] come to an end.” And he feared, intensely, being captured by the Chinese and being forced into the role of a stooge. If they caught him, His Holiness believed, the Chinese would force him to publicly betray everything he cherished.

  In his room, His Holiness opened a book of the Buddha’s teachings and let the pages fall randomly. His eye dropped to the open page. “The passages were about temptation and courage,” he said. The Dalai Lama closed his eyes and began to think about the words “courage” and “altruism.” Then he imagined the escape party winding through the wastes of southern Tibet and someday, in another party with himself leading it, returning to the palace grounds.

  As softhearted as he sometimes could be, the Dalai Lama was a decisive man. Once he fixed on a course of action, he rarely regretted it. “No going back,” he thought to himself.

  As dusk fell, the Dalai Lama walked to the shrine of his personal protector, the six-armed Mahakala, with the five white skulls around his snarling face, each representing a different transformation of evil into good: ignorance into wisdom, jealousy into accomplishment. The heavy wooden door groaned as he pushed it open, and inside he saw “the glow of a dozen votive butter lamps set in rows of golden and silver dishes.” He paused before presenting the kata, or ceremonial scarf, he held in his hand to the statue of the protector. All of these very ordinary things he was seeing possibly for the last time, and so as his eyes rested on each one in turn, the Dalai Lama tried to stamp them on his memory: the smoke-burnished colors of the religious frescoes on the wall, the chanting monks (most likely aware of him now but, out of reverence, averting their eyes), the small lump of tsampa left on the altar as an offering to Mahakala, and a servant scooping out ladles of melted butter into the candleholders. A monk lifted a horn and blew out a “long, mournful note,” and raised a pair of golden cymbals and then brought them together. The metallic passssh filled the room and then fell away.

  His Holiness returned to his rooms to put on his disguise. He took off his monk’s robe and, for the first time in many years, put on a pair of trousers and then a long black coat. He was handed a thangka—a painted Buddhist banner—
of the Palden Lhamo, the same blue-faced protectress who had watched over the divination that had directed him to leave India three years before. He placed it in a traveling container and threw that over his left shoulder. An old rifle went over his right. He took off his distinctive black-rimmed glasses, unfamiliar to those Lhasans who’d managed to get a glimpse of their Precious Protector (wearing glasses in public was thought of as a Western affectation, and the Dalai Lama often avoided it), and slipped them into his pocket, then donned a fur cap and a warm scarf that he could pull up over his mouth. He now looked like a lowly, half-blind Tibetan soldier. The disguise was as much for the crowd of protesters—who were checking the identity of everyone leaving the summer palace—as it was for the Chinese.

  The Dalai Lama walked to the ground floor, pausing to pat the head of a dog that, he reflected with some satisfaction, had never been very fond of him and so wouldn’t miss him very much. “As I went out, my mind was drained of all emotion,” he remembered. Years of meditation had given him the ability to remove himself from the moment. As he walked, he could hear the slap of his feet on the floor and the ticking of a hallway clock, as if he were back in his palace cinema watching one of the films he loved. The partings with the sweepers who had practically raised him since the age of four were more wrenching, though his beloved caretaker, Ponpo, was among the men coming with him. Finally, at the front door to his small palace, he turned and paced down the patio, “pausing on the far side to visualize reaching India safely.” As he strode back, he again visualized his eventual return to Tibet. Every high lama in Tibet is believed to be able to see the future “as clearly as you see yourself in a mirror,” but the Dalai Lama wasn’t so much picturing the future as willing it to happen. Watching the young monk walk back and forth, the gray-haired Lord Chamberlain felt this was “the saddest sight, the most awful moment I have ever known in my life.”