Stephan Talty

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

  Soldiers guided His Holiness in the darkness to the gate in the inner wall, where he was met by his brother-in-law, the chief of his bodyguards. Almost stumbling in the dark, he walked past the tranquil lawns of the Norbulingka, now still and black-green in the darkness, and came to the south gate. Ahead of him he saw the blurred image of one of his bodyguards brandishing a sword, along with a contingent of Tibetan troops. One twenty-nine-year-old Tibetan soldier had been assigned to accompany the Dalai Lama all the way across the Himalayas. When His Holiness walked up, blinking with nearsightedness and dressed as a common soldier, the soldier felt an odd, nameless feeling. Then he became faint. “I felt like blacking out on seeing His Holiness looking like that,” he said. “I knew bad times were striking Tibet.” As the men waited, he tried to hide his despair, whispering to their friends and checking their gear.

  The soldiers opened the creaking wooden doors, and one of them announced in a loud voice that an army squad was going out on a patrol. The protesters guarding the gate turned and looked briefly at the small party before stepping back to let them pass. In the distance, the loudspeakers droned the same message they’d been broadcasting for days: “You are like ants scratching at the elephant’s feet. China is as mighty as the sun and wherever there is sun, there the Chinese are also.” As he stepped outside, the Dalai Lama felt his fear of capture spike. The thought of being taken, and how awful that would be for Tibet, flashed across his mind. He looked on himself almost coldly, not as Lhamo Thondup, the boy from Amdo, but as Chenrizi, the vessel of the Dharma in Tibet and the world. As he walked over the cobblestones, following the shape of his bodyguard ahead of him, he was anxious about what losing this person, the Dalai Lama, would mean to the people whom he could sense around him, the great mass of protesters whom he could hear and feel more than see. If he was captured, these people whose elbows and flanks pressed against him would simply fall apart.

  The party walked out through the ring of protesters—the Dalai Lama sensing the crowd melting away in front of him—and followed in the footsteps of Choegyal’s party. The lights of the Chinese camp, just two hundred feet away, were clearly visible, and the Dalai Lama was sure that every stumble on the rock-strewn bank would alert the PLA to their escape. “I needed to be very careful,” he said. “We came so near the Chinese that we could hear them. That was dangerous.”

  A thin moon hung in the black dome of the sky. The wind ruffled up from the direction of the Chinese camp, which the escapees hoped would mask the racket they were making. When they reached the Kyichu River, the Dalai Lama was relieved, and the group quickly began to load into coracles, narrow boats made of yak skins stretched over wooden frames. But the noise of the crossing soon had his nerves peaked again. “I was certain that every splash of oars would draw down machine-gun fire on us,” he said.

  On the far bank of the river, Choegyal and the first batch of escapees waited anxiously for the arrival of the Dalai Lama’s party. After milling around on the dark shore, Choegyal began chatting with the Tibetan guards, but they were too nervous to talk. With the lights of the Chinese camp twinkling in the distance, the boy wandered off a way to relieve himself. He found a place shielded from the view of the others, undid his chuba, and looked up. In the distance, he could see the long white line of Drepung Monastery against the bulk of Mount Gephel. As he stood there, Choegyal was filled with a sudden fondness for the place he’d disliked so intensely. He finished up, tied his chuba, and walked forward, but he continued to stare at the monastery in the distance. “I don’t know what made me do it,” he remembers, “but I lay down and prostrated three times to it. And I whispered to myself, ‘May I see you again.’ ”

  As he walked back to the riverbank, he heard the splash of oars. The keel of a coracle glided onto the pebbles, and a Khampa grabbed its nose, pulling it in. Another rebel guard watched as the Dalai Lama climbed out. “This was a very emotional moment for us,” the guard said. “Here was the living symbol of our nation and our religion having to disguise himself in order to escape the Chinese.” Along the route, when the menacing warriors spotted the Dalai Lama, they would immediately fall to the ground and prostrate themselves.

  “All of a sudden I heard a lot of people and horses passing in the dark,” Choegyal remembers. Then there was the voice of the Lord Chamberlain murmuring, “Tasbidelek tasbidelek,” a traditional New Year’s greeting that means “Good luck.” Behind him came His Holiness. The Dalai Lama turned to one of the guards and asked him his name. Startled, the guard gave a hurried reply. “He was young and … very different from anyone else,” the soldier recalled. “Even when you caught a glimpse of him, there’s a special charisma there that you just can’t describe.”

  The third group—with the Dalai Lama’s ministers, two cabinet ministers, and the young Norbulingka official Soepa—arrived on the riverbank soon after. By midnight, the fugitives were all together and mounted on horses brought by the Khampas. They set off into the Vale of Lhasa.

  There were now more than 700 Khampas gathered to escort the Dalai Lama and his entourage on to the next goal, the Tsangpo, the highest major river in the world. But ahead lay their first geological barrier: the 17,000-foot mountain pass known as the Che-La, which separates the fifteen-mile-long Vale of Lhasa from the Tsangpo Valley, forty miles south of Lhasa. They would ride without stopping.

  Eight

  FLIGHT

  he fugitives hurried through the night, with the Dalai Lama’s group sprinting ahead, putting a full two hours between themselves and the other escapees. They were heading for a place called Kyishong (“Happy Valley”), which lay along a far less-traveled trail than the direct Lhasa-Tsangpo route, in hopes of reducing their chances of stumbling into a PLA squadron. The temperature sank with each passing hour. “My feet grew numb,” Choegyal remembers. “And my horse got extremely tired.” The Luger was digging into his side, but he refused to remove it from his belt. He’d also acquired a Mauser rifle, presented to him by the men of the Kusung Regiment, and he’d secreted an extra clip of bullets in the folds of his chuba. To this collection he’d added an eighteen-inch dagger. “I looked the perfect soldier,” he said. “Except I was a bit too short.” Later, he was ordered to give up the Mauser, which was replaced—humiliatingly—by the Dalai Lama’s umbrella.

  His Holiness found that, even on the trail, old habits died hard. As they approached Che-La, he decided to walk for a bit. He slid his right leg over the saddle and dropped to the ground, his soft leather boots kicking up a small cloud of dust as he landed on the dry soil. As he turned to march ahead, he noticed the minister on the horse behind him quickly dismount from his horse and begin walking. Like dominoes, all the tutors and even his family members began to drop off their horses one by one and started trudging forward. One apparently couldn’t be seen riding if the Dalai Lama had decreed it was time to walk. “It’s OK,” the Dalai Lama called back to the other escapees. “Get back on your horses.” But, heads bowed, they kept shuffling ahead, old men for the most part who’d been softened by years of court life. Finally, the Dalai Lama gave up and jumped back in the saddle. Slowly, the line of marchers followed suit, and in a few minutes they were all riding again.

  The incline of the ground began to rise. The fugitives stopped briefly at a farmhouse, where the peasants had been alerted that His Holiness would be arriving for food (he’d had no dinner) and a short rest. An old man, a former groom to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, appeared leading a white horse with a white scarf tied around its neck. The man was worried His Holiness’s pony wouldn’t make it over the high passes ahead. He began to cry as the Dalai Lama accepted the gift. His Holiness comforted the old man and assured him he wasn’t going far, all he could think to say on the spur of the moment. The man accompanied them as far as Che-La, which they reached around 8:00 a.m. The sun was high enough in the sky that it lit the plain behind them, but the mountain ahead threw a shadow over the marchers.

  They began to climb the sandy incline (Che-La mean
s “Sandy Pass”). As they ascended the slope, the ground shifted under the weight of the animals. For every step forward, the horses would slide back four. Riders began to drop behind the leaders as the horses tired, and the rest found the trail “rough and weary.” Choegyal saw his fat uncle ahead nearly topple off his horse. “His saddle was slipping off the horse because he was just too heavy,” Choegyal says. “He was yelling and grabbing on to the mane.” As the Dalai Lama came to the crest of the pass, an aide sidled over to him and mentioned that this would be his last chance to look on Lhasa. His Holiness dismounted and gazed at the cluster of buildings to the north, tiny in the landscape. From this distance, even the Potala lost its imposing mass. “The ancient city looked serene as ever as it spread out below,” he remembered. The Dalai Lama said a prayer and then turned and began running down the sandy slopes, lit by the sun, that led down to the valley of the Tsangpo.

  As the sunlight hit their faces and they placed a mountain range between themselves and the PLA headquarters, the mood of the escapees lightened. “I was laughing uncontrollably,” admits Choegyal, who couldn’t take his eyes off his uncle struggling to stay in his saddle. “But he was such a kind man, he didn’t yell at me.” Having escaped Lhasa, the uncle began to regain his sense of humor. “Whenever I did something naughty,” Choegyal recalls, “he would just shake his head and say, ‘Oh my god, he’s done it again.’ He was a very kind fellow.” The escapees dropped off their mounts and began to follow the Dalai Lama, who was running full speed down the side of the mountain. “We were all very happy,” Choegyal said. “We’d escaped. We were euphoric. Now we could say what was in our hearts.”

  The Dalai Lama took giant steps down the slope. “The day after I escaped from Lhasa, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. Actually, the danger was still very much alive.” But for the first time in years, the constraint he felt in Lhasa was gone. He could curse the Chinese if he felt like it: “ ‘I have the right to say bad things about them,’ I remember thinking. The sense of freedom was very vivid: my strongest reaction following the escape.” When he reached the valley on the other side of the mountain, a dust storm kicked up, blinding the fugitives. The Dalai Lama comforted himself with the thought that the dirt would hide them from any PLA troops sent to capture them.

  The lead party crossed the Che-La and sped ahead to the Tsangpo River, ten miles away. Rebels were waiting at the banks, with coracles to ferry them across. When they reached the other side, they met a group of villagers who had been told the Dalai Lama was approaching. The sight of Tibetans along the trails was almost always the same: humbly dressed men and women, bowing their heads in prayer, sticks of incense or katas in their hands. One villager recalled spreading hay and dung across an expanse of ice that the escape party would be crossing, crying both with joy and with grief at the thought that His Holiness was fleeing to India. Others brought out food and clothing from their meager stocks and offered them to the escapees, “weeping with sorrow at the fate of Tibet.” Knowing that this might be the last time they saw the incarnate, they all asked for his blessing. At the sight of the villagers, the escapees’ giddiness evaporated.

  After twenty straight hours of riding, Choegyal and the second group of fugitives stopped at Rame, one of the earliest Sakyapa monasteries in Tibet, built in the twelfth century. The Dalai Lama’s mother was by now the worst off in the party. “I had no scarf or glasses, and since I had on a man’s short dress, I froze on the way,” she remembered. “I could barely stand, from a mixture of cold, fatigue and cramps in my legs.” Her face was covered with a thick layer of dust, and the skin on her face had begun to peel because of the wind and dust storms. Choegyal was cold and tired but overjoyed to see his older brother, who’d arrived hours earlier. He found the Dalai Lama on the second floor of the monastery, dressed in high leather boots and his soldier’s uniform. “How are you feeling today?” the Dalai Lama asked. The boy replied that everything had gone well, apart from the sandstorm and their mother’s pains.

  His Holiness paused for a moment, looking at his younger brother. “Tendzin,” he said, “do you realize that we’re free now?”

  Choegyal nodded.

  But the fugitives were still hundreds of miles from safety. The route ahead was treacherous, lined with dangers both natural and man-made. They were leaving the Vale of Lhasa, the heart of Tibetan civilization, and venturing into desolate territory. The Himalayas, still encased in their winter ice, awaited; the passes alone measured 19,000 feet and more and were for part of the year totally impassable. The 500-yard-wide Tsangpo River, cold and fast with the winter snowmelt, would have to be forded. The rebels held the territory ahead, but they were battling with large contingents of PLA forces in places such as Lhoka. Traitors among the Dalai Lama’s own people, militants who favored armed rebellion and disdained his pledge of nonviolence, could easily be lurking in the villages ahead, or even among his own party, and might deliver him to the Chinese. There were even wolves and leopards native to South Tibet and the de-mong, a legendary bear with mustard-colored fur. There were landslides, deep cold, and rock falls. Travelers on these routes would often find boulders the size of cars blocking routes that had been passable the year before.

  The escape parties headed due south through a landscape of flint and sand. “It was all new to me, this land,” Choegyal remembers. He had never ventured more than a day’s journey from Lhasa, and now he was seeing the ancient seabed that made up the enormous Tibetan plateau. “It reminded me of Palestine, arid and flat.”

  But the Chinese were the real worry. “We were all thinking they might all of a sudden intercept us,” Choegyal says. “That’s why we traveled very fast and didn’t stop more than was absolutely necessary.” One Khampa leader rated the Chinese intelligence network, even in some rural areas, as “excellent.” “They knew beforehand what to expect,” he said, “and could prepare accordingly.”

  If the Dalai Lama’s party did make it as far as the Indian border, Prime Minister Nehru, who was increasingly anxious about his relationship with the Chinese, might refuse to admit them. The Lord Chamberlain had sent word to Athar and Lhotse, who he knew had radios capable of reaching Washington, but the two guerrillas hadn’t yet reached the escape party, and even if they managed to send a request on their CIA-supplied radios, there was no guarantee that Nehru would grant the fugitives asylum. The Lord Chamberlain had tried to notify the Indians before leaving that asylum might be requested, but the message was never received in New Delhi.

  To counter any possible PLA attack, the guards on the route went around heavily armed even for Khampas, their chubas dripping with swords, jewel-encrusted daggers, pistols, Lee-Enfield rifles, and Buddhist charm boxes that would, they believed, protect them from Chinese bullets. Even the Dalai Lama’s cook wore a bazooka over his back and a bandolier of the enormous shells around his chest. At one point, wanting to impress His Holiness with his “magnificent and terrible-looking weapon,” he unslung it, loaded a shell into the bazooka, lay down on the ground, and fired at an outcropping. The shell exploded with impressive power, but it had taken fifteen minutes to load the thing. A second demonstration took even longer. “If we’re going to use that bazooka during the war,” the Dalai Lama commented dryly, “we might want to ask the enemy not to move.”

  The fugitives rode at a punishing pace, around twenty miles a day at altitudes of 16,000 feet and higher, across rough trails. As they pushed forward, one miscalculation became clear. Some of the horses they’d brought from the Dalai Lama’s stables weren’t fit for the journey. “We only had ‘court’ horses, aristocratic animals if you will,” said one guard. “All they knew was to eat, drink, and sleep.” Even the meager supplies that the guards had loaded on the animals’ backs were proving too heavy, and the horses began to collapse on the road. When the fugitives came across a settlement, they asked the villagers for pack animals. “Why do you need them if you can carry the packs yourselves?” the villagers asked—not realizing, apparently, that th
ese were not hardy farmers and nomads but city-bred tutors and old men. Finally, forty peasants, including women, volunteered to take the loads and carry them across the mountains. “I was surprised to see that women were willing to carry such heavy loads,” said one fugitive. “They replied that when it came to carrying loads and climbing mountains, the women were stronger than the men.”

  His Holiness dashed off a quick letter to his sometime rival the Panchen Lama at his base at Tashilhunpo Monastery, informing him that he’d escaped and encouraging the younger incarnate to join him. It had been months since the two had communicated, kept apart not only by centuries-old jealousies but also by the Panchen Lama’s alliance with Peking. But during the winter, the twenty-one-year-old Panchen had sent him a secret note telling the Dalai Lama that the two needed to work together on a single strategy. “This was the first indication he had given of being no longer in the thrall of our Chinese masters,” the Dalai Lama said. The Tibetan leader also knew that with him out of the picture, the pressure on the Panchen Lama to bow to Chinese pressure would increase exponentially. Peking would want him to become what the Dalai Lama never had: the Tibetan face of a Chinese occupation.