by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom
One of the Dalai Lama’s ministers went in search of Tenpa Soepa, an enterprising young Norbulingka official who’d helped arrange the escape. When he found the young man, the minister asked him if he would do His Holiness a service. The Dalai Lama was still carrying the letter he’d written to his ministers back at the Norbulingka—he’d either forgotten to hand it over in the rush to escape or been worried that leaving it would reveal the fugitives’ plan. Now someone needed to hand-deliver the letter to the Dalai Lama’s personal secretary back in Lhasa. The minister asked Soepa to accept the mission.
Soepa didn’t want to leave His Holiness in the wastes of southern Tibet. “A great feeling of sadness and depression came over me,” he said. “In my whole life I have never been sadder than at that moment.” When the emotion passed, he began to consider what was waiting for him in Lhasa. It was bound to be a dangerous place, especially for someone who’d helped the Dalai Lama flee. “The Chinese are there,” he thought to himself, “ready to start the killing.… If I go back …”
Soepa gathered his things, alerted his servant, and set off for the summer palace.
Nine
THE NORBULINGKA
oepa retraced the escapees’ route back north. He arrived back at the Kyichu River, which he’d crossed only hours before. On the riverbank, he found a few poor villagers waiting for a boat to Lhasa, where they would sell some sticks and branches they’d collected for firewood. He advised against it: “I told them that instead of selling their firewood, they were likely to lose their lives.” He was melancholy as he stared at the far shore: “I felt that once I crossed the river, I might never make it back again.”
Self-preservation told him to stay out of the capital. Soepa considered another way of getting the letter to the Norbulingka—asking his servant to take it. “He could go across and deliver the letter while I waited here,” Soepa thought. Unable to decide, he took out the unsealed envelope, slipped the letter out, and began reading. If it was important enough, he would risk his life.
The letter informed the leaders of the escape and appointed two acting prime ministers and a new commander in chief of the army, since the acting one was riding along with the figitives. It instructed the men to negotiate with the Chinese, to avoid violence, and to keep the Dalai Lama updated on all developments. At the bottom was His Holiness’s signature.
The letter was obviously crucial. Soepa decided he couldn’t just hand it to his servant. “It is my moral duty to go to the Norbulingka and hand this letter over with my own hands,” he thought. “Even if I die, then I have to die, but there will be no regrets.” He remembered a curious clause that was written into the General Rules and Regulations that all Tibetan civil servants agreed to when they joined up. “For duty and responsibility,” it read, “one must jump into hell and leave one’s father behind.”
Soepa persuaded a soldier guarding the bank to fetch a boat, and thirty minutes later, he was gliding across the river. The coracle touched the sandy bank, and a nervous Soepa headed for the Norbulingka. “The situation seemed delicate and vulnerable,” he says. “I felt that the whole place could break into chaos once the Chinese discovered the Dalai Lama had fled.” Inside the palace, Soepa knew, only a few people suspected that His Holiness’s rooms were empty that morning. The normal chores would be under way. The enormous Tibetan mastiffs inside the palace grounds had to be fed at dawn. The horses in the stable had to be walked, brushed, and combed. The pet monkey had to be given water. Life at the summer palace went on as if it were just another spring day in the Land of Snows.
When Soepa reached the palace, he saw that the crowd around it hadn’t changed. The protesters were still clearly unaware that their Precious Protector was gone. Women were cooking tsampa over smoky fires, and guards were gossiping or oiling their rifles. As the sun burned off the cold morning mist, men took out homemade kites and ran with their sons, trying to lift the paper craft into the air. At Barkhor Square several miles away, Chinese traders in their stalls blew on their hands as they rearranged their stocks of spicy snacks, loose wool, gorgeous Indian silks, and LPs from the West. The only thing merchants noticed was that the bullets they were hawking at 2 shillings apiece were flying off the shelves.
There was an air of nervous enjoyment, of doing a few last things before the inevitable arrived. “You don’t have to ask what’s going to happen,” wrote the Chinese diarist Shan Chao. “Those who have their eyes and ears open are polishing their rifles and bullets. I have taken out my hand grenades and will put them by the side of my pillow.” There were signs in the city that the Chinese leadership suspected that the Dalai Lama had escaped. Chinese officers appeared at the Indian and Nepalese missions and requested permission to search the buildings for His Holiness. Both consuls refused. The Chinese official Tan Guansan later sent a second messenger to the Indian mission, suggesting that the personnel evacuate the building, an ominous sign.
Soepa made his way toward the Norbulingka. He was still sworn to secrecy. Rumors that the Dalai Lama had slipped away from the Norbulingka were rife, he knew, but there were a thousand rumors floating through Lhasa at the time and he tried to treat the questions about His Holiness as just another piece of gossip. When protesters called out and asked what he’d heard, Soepa shrugged. “His Holiness?” he said. “He must still be here. We have all been here together. Where else could he go?”
As Soepa approached the outer wall of the Norbulingka, a gun barked. He paid it no mind. The city was filled with nervous gunmen, and for the past few days “misfirings,” as he put it, had been common. But then there was another gunshot, and a bullet buzzed past his ear. He dropped flat to the ground. He had no idea who’d fired the shot. Soepa slowly raised himself up and approached the gate. Just then, a Chinese tank swung into view, rumbling down the road. There was a fixed machine gun on top, and a young PLA gunner pointed the barrel at the protesters. The people around him ducked down, but Soepa reached underneath his chuba for his gun. The tank advanced toward the Tibetans for a few seconds more, then swerved away.
Soepa greeted the guards at the gate, and they let him through. He delivered the letter to the Dalai Lama’s personal secretary and reported that His Holiness was safe. He had a cup of butter tea, then began the second mission he’d been given by the Dalai Lama’s ministers: collect as much ammunition and as many guns as he could and bring them to his house for safekeeping. That night, he had the first decent sleep he’d had since the uprising began.
As the 19th dawned, the streets of Lhasa pulsed to the sounds of another rally. The women’s association had planned a huge march, and now thousands of women surged through the narrow streets, shouting anti-PLA slogans, waving prayer banners, and expressing their undying support for the Dalai Lama. It was a matter of honor for many families in Lhasa—from peasants to aristocrats—that at least one member of their clan was there to represent them, the married women in their fine-spun colorful aprons, the single women without. The Chinese soldiers watched from the roofs of the buildings, some snapping pictures of the protesters, others with their rifles pointed down at the march. “I wasn’t afraid that the Chinese would fire on us,” said one twenty-eight-year-old nun who marched that day. “The situation was very tense, but we couldn’t imagine what was to come.” The diarist Shan Chao, however, reported something that the Chinese insisted on throughout the protests: that the “spontaneous” marches were actually held at the point of a gun. “The rebels ordered it!” he recalled hearing two Tibetan turncoats shouting as the women marched past. “They said anyone who does not attend the meeting at the Norbulingka will be fined; if he still fails to go, then they will have his head cut off!” The observer even told Shan Chao that Tibetans were being beaten to death for refusing to protest and that “not a single one of the scores of young nuns” staying at the Jokhang Temple had escaped being raped by the bandits.
The reports were almost certainly false. None of the Tibetans who were in Lhasa that day reported being forced into p
rotesting. But the rebels did ask the local merchants and schools to close for the day in solidarity, and many agreed.
Soepa decided to spend the night at the summer palace. At 1:00 a.m., he was asleep in the guard post near the northern gate of the Norbulingka when a huge explosion snapped him awake. Artillery guns opened up in the darkness, accompanied by concussions and the sound of breaking glass. Soepa ran out into the grounds and saw that a shell had hit the Dalai Lama’s private residence and left a gaping hole in the roof. He could see chunks of wood and mortar sprayed across the lawn. The Chinese assault on the summer palace had begun.
Soepa grabbed a rifle—a brand-new model that had never been fired—and hurried to the nearest barricade, near the northern wall of the Norbulingka. Already he could hear waves of gunfire hitting a crescendo. He reached the Tibetan position. Machine-gun fire was being directed at the earthen palisade that the rebels had thrown up, and the Tibetans were shooting back with rifles. Soepa unslung his rifle from his shoulder, crouched down, and took aim at the muzzle flashes that were all he could see of the Chinese. But the gun froze up. It still had too much oil and grease from the packing crates. He pulled out his handgun and began shooting. The snap of the pistol was lost in the terrifying drumming of the machine-gun fire blasting at him from across the road, and Soepa thought of a Tibetan saying, “You know who has won and who has lost a battle by the sound of their guns.” It really is true, he thought.
The thing he’d dreaded when contemplating a return to Lhasa had finally happened. Soepa found himself in the middle of a firefight in which the Tibetans were outnumbered and outgunned. The lights of the Norbulingka had gone out as soon as the PLA barrage started, so he saw only moving figures and shadows around him, lit by muzzle flashes and weak moonlight. But he could see men—Khampas and Tibetan soldiers—fall to the ground when shot and he could hear their rough grunts as they did. Some of them cried out in pain, but there was no medical service, no planning of any kind to help the injured. As he reloaded his pistol, Soepa was terrified he was going to be killed at any moment. But after five minutes, he found his mind clear of any anxiety, almost cold as he continued to shoot at the flashes across the way. “You forget your fear,” he said. It helped that he saw more and more Tibetans arrive and pick up the guns of the fallen soldiers and begin firing.
The Norbulingka was the first battleground in the battle for Lhasa, but skirmishes were being fought across the city. The Tibetans largely held the heights. They were dug in on Chakpori, the mountain overlooking Lhasa, and at the Medical College near its summit, with light artillery guns, mortars, and a few ancient cannons that had sat there for decades. Days before, during a protest, sixteen-year-old Lobsang Yonten had witnessed a disturbing spectacle on the mountain. “A thick bunch of prayer flags caught fire, lighting the whole sky,” Yonten remembers. “It looked as if the air was engulfed in flames. I was terrified when I caught sight of them.” People in the crowd argued whether the burning flags were a good or bad omen, but Yonten felt a churning anxiety in the pit of his stomach.
The rebels also held the Potala and the monasteries that ringed the capital, where hundreds if not thousands of monks had joined the resistance and were now ferrying guns to the rebels or attacking the PLA. The Chinese were at a strategic disadvantage: they held the low ground, always the worst position to begin a battle. But in every other way, they held the upper hand: in manpower, training, equipment, and planning, the PLA outmatched the Tibetans by a degree of magnitude.
The Chinese artillery pounded the Norbulingka grounds. But when the Tibetan rebels at the Norbulingka tried to call the PLA positions in to the mountain gunners, they found that the cables to the army positions at Tez and Chakpori had been cut. The Tibetans had no wireless radios, either, so the only way to communicate with the artillery was to send messengers up the mountain. In the middle of the firefight, a commander arrived from Chakpori in search of fresh ammunition. He told the fighters at the Norbulingka to come with him. “Staying inside the Norbulingka, you have no way to fight back,” he told one young government official. “You will just be slaughtered.”
Soepa was told the same thing by a rebel: the battle was hopeless and they should abandon the palace and run to higher ground. “My mouth said, ‘Yes, you are right, we should run,’ ” he remembered. “But in my mind, I really didn’t want to flee at that moment. ‘His Holiness has sent me back,’ I thought.” Soepa imagined escaping the battle, fleeing to the south, and there running into the Dalai Lama. “He will ask me, ‘What is the situation in Lhasa, at the Norbulingka?’ If I had to say, ‘Well, they were shooting and when I heard the sound of the guns I ran away,’ that would be shameful.”
As unprepared as the Chinese were for the uprising, it became clear in the early hours of the battle for Lhasa that they’d at least had a plan for the military endgame. These were supremely disciplined soldiers who’d fought the Nationalists and endured the agonies of the Long March. Many Tibetan fighters recalled that they never saw a single PLA soldier in the hours and days to come, as the troops had dug trenches and constructed barricades that far outstripped the amateurish ramparts that the Tibetans, with little or no military training, threw together.
But the Tibetans were adrenalized with hope. They’d wanted this war ever since the rumor of a threat on His Holiness’s life had swept through the market stalls.
Yonten was in a home ten minutes away from the Norbulingka when the bombing began. He fell to the floor. “We lay there as the sky filled with gunfire and bombings,” he says. As he pressed his body to the ground, a silver coin fell out of his pocket and slowly rolled away. He watched it swivel and turn on the stone floor. “Being a boy, I was more worried about my silver coin than anything else.”
He soon turned from protester to gunrunner. Now that open battle had broken out, he and his father hurried to the Tibetan army headquarters to retrieve guns and ammunition for the fighters. They managed to load eleven heavy English rifles and 1,200 bullets into their arms. Returning to the city center, Yonten was running along the cobblestoned streets when a huge artillery gun opened up nearby. The pressure wave knocked him to the ground. His companions picked him up, and they went searching through the alleys and barricades for the fighters who were expecting the guns. But the streets were locked in cross fires between gunners and had become impossible to navigate without getting shot. The air above the city turned “dark and horrible,” with acrid smoke from fires lit by shells. “The situation was so chaotic and frightening as the battle was erupting all around us,” remembered Yonten. “The people of Lhasa were frantic, saying, ‘The war has started.’ ”
Finally, Yonten and his father made it to the Shöl, the small village below the Potala, and began handing over the rifles, with the din and concussion of the bombing all around and the loud prayers of old women gathered with the soldiers. Loudspeakers around them sounded the Chinese line: “Unless the Tibetans surrender and give up their arms, the Chinese will fire with more powerful weapons and raze the Potala to dust.” The announcement alternated with the voice of Ngabö, an adviser to the Dalai Lama who was fast becoming an arch-traitor in the minds of the rebels. The voice told them to lay down their guns. If they didn’t, he said, Lhasa would be blown to bits.
In the chaos, Yonten’s beloved father calmly handed out the rifles and asked each fighter to sign a receipt for every bullet.
It was soon clear that the Chinese guns were indeed aimed at the Potala above them, the symbol of the Tibetan state. Yonten looked up the hill at the palace as it disappeared behind a cloud of dust thrown up by the shells. “I was extremely worried,” he remembered, more concerned for the moment about the palace than about the men around him. Onlookers running from the city would see the smoke and tell the Dalai Lama days later that the Potala had been destroyed, causing him deep distress. But when the smoke cleared after a barrage of ten shells, Yonten could see the Potala’s distinctive white buildings standing nearly undamaged.
It was a
rare victory for the Tibetans.
After a few hours of exchanging gunfire with the Chinese at the transport station, Soepa realized the PLA was winning. “Their bullets were finding their mark and many were killed on our side.” As morning approached and the first rays of the sun lightened the sky, Soepa looked around and counted ten corpses nearby, “blood oozing from everywhere,” with many more injured, crying out for water or moaning as they lost consciousness. He ran back into the interior of the Norbulingka, ravenously hungry now, and found a spot behind the office of the Tibetan cabinet that seemed sheltered from the shells falling across the gardens and government buildings. Another fighter sat and ate with him, but minutes later, a mortar shell dropped a few feet away, sending shrapnel and a huge cloud of dust over the crouching figures. Soepa shook the dust off as his companion staggered off, cup still in hand, then collapsed and died.
The sculptured grounds of the summer palace became a killing zone ruled by randomness. No one was in charge. No Tibetan commander had a battle plan or really an objective other than holding the Chinese off. There was no chain of command to consult. No one, it seemed, had any sense of tactical street warfare or an idea of the PLA’s vulnerabilities. The enemy was not even visible, only his victims. The Tibetans, wholly unprepared for war, were slowly being blown up by the Chinese artillery and picked off by its sharpshooters. Yet few ran away. The rebels felt they had to stay to defend the palace and His Holiness, who many believed was still hidden on the grounds. Soepa and hundreds of other brave and utterly confused men ran back and forth from the gates to the buildings in the interior, as the smoke drifted from the Chinese artillery batteries and fires broke out in the palaces and chapels. Soepa remembered conversation after conversation with people who emerged out of the darkness and the billowing dust, each reciting his own fragment of the war situation, only to disappear again on an errand or to be scattered by a shell dropping from the sky.