by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom
The dead were now “everywhere”:
There was one man who had his backside ripped off, and he was breathing, I could see blood spewing out. He called me and asked me to shoot him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Shells blew human bodies into pieces. Legs, hands and broken pieces rained down with the dust.
Another fighter told Soepa they were leaving and he should come with them. As Soepa stood on the Norbulingka lawn asking himself what he should do, a shell exploded yards away and a young Norbulingka servant standing next to him collapsed to the ground, killed by shrapnel. “I thought, ‘All right, if they kill me, that’s it. There is nothing I can do.’ ” The group of fighters left without him, and many would follow the Dalai Lama across the Himalayas to India. But Soepa, nagged by a sense of duty to His Holiness, stayed on.
He headed back toward the north gate. As Soepa approached it, a Tibetan militiaman emerged from the smoke and stuck his rifle muzzle into Soepa’s chest. “I am going to shoot you!” he cried. “You people in the government—we have been pleading for guns, but until now you wouldn’t give us anything.” The man blamed Tibet’s fall on bureaucrats like Soepa. Now he’d make Soepa pay the price.
Soepa quickly reached for his gun. As his hand closed on the butt of his pistol, another shell landed nearby and kicked up a cloud of dust. Bodies toppled left and right. The militiaman who’d been about to kill him was nowhere to be seen. Half-deafened, Soepa ran. When he’d recovered from the concussive power of the shell, he found he’d suffered only one wound: shrapnel had cut into his left shoulder, sending a steady stream of blood down his arm and causing it to throb painfully. Still, he was alive. His “weapons protector,” the amulet he wore around his neck, with a holy image and a few bits of the remains of a high lama, had saved his life. He said a silent prayer of thanks.
The Chinese were fighting and dying, too. A ferocious battle was under way on Chakpori, located between central Lhasa and the Norbulingka. A PLA company was advancing on dug-in Tibetan rebels above them. As the Chinese forces sent flares up to illuminate the predawn sky, Fu Lo-min, a squad leader with the first PLA platoon up the mountain, charged toward a machine-gun nest that had been installed in a flat-roofed home. “The hill was very steep but in eight minutes we got on the roof,” he remembered. “I was hit in the leg by a bullet but continued to give command till other units stormed up and covered our advance.” The rebels fled.
Even the eyewitness accounts from PLA soldiers were glazed over with the Chinese insistence that the Tibetans were united against the guerrillas. Behind Fu Lo-min’s platoon, a soldier named Chang was sweeping the hill with machine-gun fire to cover the platoon’s advance. “We wiped out strong rebel points,” he said, adding, “the local Tibetan people encouraged us and helped carry our equipment to wipe out the bandits.”
Certainly, there were Lhasans who were furious at the rebels for their uprising. Tibetans were never a monolith, and there were pro-Chinese sprinkled throughout the population, low and high. There were undoubtedly people who believed the Chinese had brought prosperity and even freedom from the elites and the bureaucrats. But the claim that the rebels made up a tiny minority of the population and were the plotters of an unpopular coup d’état is simply not credible. The photos of the massive protest crowds alone disprove it. No Tibetans in Lhasa for the battle remember any of their neighbors helping the PLA. To do so would have been unimaginable.
The Jokhang Temple, near Barkhor Square, its roof guarded by hideous statues of bird-men with infant heads and vulture wings and ringing wind chimes under their chins, had become a combination rebel headquarters and refugee station. About 200 Tibetan army troops and 100 Tibetan police had taken refuge in the enormous, white-walled temple, with its golden roofs and Buddhist sculptures covered in gold leaf, along with hundreds of women and children fleeing from the fighting. The two-story walls of the holy place concealed large courtyards, where smoke rose from open fires and Lhasans waited nervously for news of what was happening outside.
A tall, thin monk flitted through the courtyards as the sounds of battle echoed outside. He was Narkyid, twenty-eight years old, an official who served on the Council of Lhasa along with three elderly monks and a quartet of lay officials. The quick-minded Narkyid had become the key figure on the council, the man whom the elders turned to when something needed to get done. He even spoke some Mandarin, which made his dealings with the Chinese that much easier.
Days before, members of the Dalai Lama’s cabinet had approached Narkyid and said, “You must stay in the Jokhang and take responsibility for it,” he remembers. “They said, ‘This is one of our most important places.’ ” It was an understatement: the Jokhang was the Tibetan St. Peter’s. In the days after March 10, Narkyid had shuttled between the Norbulingka and the temple, organizing defenses and getting the latest palace scuttlebutt. When he’d visited the summer palace on the 18th, though, he’d immediately noticed a difference. “I felt something missing,” he says. “There was no energy in the palace. Truly, it was gone.” The officials kept up a regular schedule of meetings and appointments, but “we knew, we knew” that the Dalai Lama had fled. That morning, Narkyid had been relieved to feel the curious spiritual emptiness of the place. And now that His Holiness was gone, the Jokhang was the spiritual locus of Tibet.
The flagstones in the courtyards were lifted up and wells drilled down to the water table. Hundreds of women flocked through the wooden doors and lit campfires, brewing tea and roasting tsampa. Narkyid ordered enormous balls of thick Nepalese wool to be brought in and soaked with water, which made them even denser; when they were saturated, the balls were stuffed into the slits that pocked the Jokhang’s walls, to protect against bullets penetrating into the interior. Supplies were brought in: enormous quantities of barley, butter, and meat—carcasses cured in the mountain air—were stacked along the inner walls. Narkyid saw to the building of two barricades. Soldiers filled sandbags and stacked them across the rear gate, adding wooden beams and packing the holes with mud and clay, while a second barricade went up at another entrance, this one thrown together out of heavy flagstones, furniture, and junk scoured from the Jokhang and nearby homes. The troops set up a machine gun in the center of the rampart and distributed a dozen Lewis guns—light machine guns first used in World War I—and small mortars around the temple grounds. There was no way to tell from which direction the Chinese would come, and the light arsenal was all the hundreds of Tibetans packed into the chapels and open squares of the sprawling temple complex had to resist them.
When the PLA’s guns opened up in the early hours of March 20, Narkyid was in the Jokhang. He knew the sound was the opening barrage on the Norbulingka and the rebel positions. The Jokhang, for the time being, was left unscathed. At dawn, when the guns died off for the moment, he climbed to a roofed walkway of the temple. From there he could see Lhasa laid out at his feet, smoke rising from fires and the smoldering summer palace in the distance. But it still held an unearthly beauty, framed against the low mountains, everything vivid even at a distance. “It gave you the impression you were looking at a picture.”
Now, with the battle still raging miles away at the summer palace, Narkyid sent soldiers to cut the telegraph and electrical wires leading to the Chinese loudspeakers that ringed the Barkhor, just steps from the Jokhang’s front gate. “Every time they climbed the pole and cut a wire, they would hang there and yell, ‘Ah, we’ve done it.’ ” But the Tibetans could never seem to silence every speaker, and the Mandarin-inflected voice kept up its mantra: “Surrender now.” In other ways, the Jokhang had returned to the days before the occupation. The electricity that the Chinese bureaucrats had brought was off now; as dusk fell, the temple was lit by cooking fires and torches, the shadows licking across the rough stone walls. The Chinese, installed at the cinema across the street from the temple, exchanged barrages of machine-gun fire with the rebels manning the temple barricades. But the PLA’s bullets sent tiny jets of sand up from the bags or sank wi
thout a sound into the water-drenched balls of wool.
Late that night, Soepa acquired a machine gun, and as he was hurrying toward a rebel position to begin using it, the Dalai Lama’s secretary ran up to him and said that Chakpori, the main Tibetan artillery position, had been taken by the Chinese. The rebels must assemble some fighters and retake it, the secretary told him. Soepa agreed, changed into fresh clothes, and went to collect ammunition for the coming fight. “I waited with a thousand rounds of ammunition, but he didn’t show,” the secretary remembers. Another man grabbed Soepa and said, for the fifth or sixth time in twenty-four hours, that the fighters must escape the Norbulingka. Finally convinced that the rebels’ position was hopeless, Soepa ran to get horses for the journey. Arriving at the stables, he saw all the stalls were empty. “What happened to all the horses?” he shouted at the stable master. “Others took them,” the man answered. “They were threatening to kill me if I didn’t give them the mounts.” Soepa pulled out his pistol and pointed it at a man leading a horse away. “He gave the horse to me at once,” he said.
More rebels came running to the stables and told Soepa that the Chinese had taken over the only rebel-held positions that might offer them refuge and were at that moment advancing on the walls of the Norbulingka. Again, Soepa’s plans reversed in a moment. He and the other fighters decided to fight until dusk, and then escape via Ramagang, a crossing on the Kyichu River close to Lhasa.
A shell slammed into the stables. Soepa was thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious, the machine gun crashing down on his back as he fell. A young Tibetan aristocrat was standing yards away. Shrapnel ripped open the aristocrat’s right thigh and cut a vein in his face. Blood gushed out and covered his clothes; after a while, he could feel blood squishing inside his shoes as he tried to force his way out of the shattered building. “Many people inside the stables, as well as horses and mules, were killed or injured,” he said. “Those still alive shouted for others to help pull them out of the wreckage.” As the bombardment, which always seemed to come in waves, dropped away again, the aristocrat emerged into a charred, burning landscape. Buildings were on fire, and gray smoke was drifting through the poplar trees. But what caught his eye was a monkey, one that had for years been a centerpiece of the Dalai Lama’s private zoo. The animal was tied to a post in the stable courtyard, “scampering up and down in terror.” When there was an explosion, the monkey would hide its head in a cotton awning. “It stared around wide-eyed at the dead and wounded people and horses and became more terrified still.” The young man tried in vain to free the monkey, but the animal was too frightened to let him approach. Finally, he left it where it was and staggered away.
The “Tibet Military Committee of the People’s Liberation Army” issued an offer to the rebels: “No account will be taken of the past misdeeds of those who desert the rebellion bandits and return to us; those who make contributions will be rewarded; all those captured will be well treated, they are not to be killed, insulted, beaten, or searched and deprived of their personal effects.” Men approached the monasteries surrounding Lhasa and told the monks to come out—later, the monks would realize that the men were traitors working for the PLA and trying to lure the Tibetans out so they could be arrested.
As night fell, Soepa found himself trapped in the wrecked stable, unable to get up. There were dead and dying all around. Taking the machine gun slung across his back, he used it as a walking stick and made his way to the room next door, where survivors were trying to recover their wits. Then another round hit. “The roof came down on top of me,” he remembered. “I was pinned down and it was only with great effort that I dug myself out.” His left leg was mangled by the falling timbers, and he couldn’t stand on it. Suddenly thirsty, Soepa began to crawl, looking for water.
There was none to be found. Gasping and bleeding, he lay on the floor of the shattered building and considered his predicament. “I can no longer fight,” he thought, “and now I have no chance to escape. If I am captured they will surely torture me.” He concluded that it was best to die, and so he stopped trying to find shelter from the bullets that came winging in from the Chinese positions and the procession of mortar and artillery shells. But after an hour, he’d been hit by nothing larger than pieces of mud. “Finally, I decided that a Chinese bullet was not going to kill me, so I took out my pistol and decided to shoot myself in the head.” But he changed his mind. In Buddhism, the ideal way of death is in water, which ensures that in one’s next incarnation, one will be granted a “clear and lucid mind.” The Buddhist suicide must consider his next stage in life, and the Norbulingka’s lake, where the Dalai Lama had nearly drowned twice in his life, offered the most advantageous method. Soepa holstered his pistol and began to crawl toward the water. The peaceful gardens of the summer palace were now a torn-up abattoir of dying animals and men, but the pond was still as it always was, its surface calm and coolly inviting. Soepa crawled to the edge and toppled in. He felt himself drift down until his boot touched the silt of the muddy bottom. The young official tried to stay there, suspended in the murky green water, his eyes open, but he felt himself rising up. Breaking the surface, Soepa took a breath and dove back down to the silt that sucked at the soles of his boots, but natural buoyancy kept popping him back to the surface.
His amulets were too powerful. “I just wouldn’t die,” he realized. Finally, Soepa let out a breath, took a large gulp of water, and sank back down. He felt the bottom underneath his feet and grabbed the silt with his hands. But there were no plants to hold him. He began to ascend.
Thirty minutes later, he gave up and decided to live.
Some Tibetans took advantage of the chaos enveloping Lhasa to settle old scores. One of them was Ugyen, a young man in his mid-twenties, a member of the lowest class in Tibetan society, the Ragyabas, men and women who were doomed to perform duties left to outcasts: cleaning sewers, begging at weddings, and butchering dead bodies that were then fed to vultures at ceremonial sites. They were ruled by a hereditary lord, the Dhaye, who collected their earnings and had them lashed mercilessly with a split-end bamboo cane. “I really can’t begin to count the number of times I was beaten,” Ugyen told the writer Patrick French. “You would usually be bleeding … and sometimes bits of flesh would come off on the bamboo.” Unable to escape their fate, the unclean Ragyabas weren’t considered fully human by other Lhasans much the way the Dalit class of India were considered untouchable. If there was one group of people who embodied the Communists’ charges against Tibetan society—that it was oppressive and feudal—it was Ugyen’s people.
When the bombing began, Ugyen watched the puffs of dust erupting from the walls of the Potala and decided this was his chance. “I thought, this is it, Lhasa is in revolt, and I am going to take my revenge on the Dhaye,” he said. Ugyen grabbed a knife and under the cover of night snuck to the lord’s home, where he planned to kill his master. But when he got to the address, Ugyen found the man had fled with his family. Many aristocrats knew that if the Chinese took over complete control of Tibet, they would be the first targets of the PLA. Later Ugyen heard that the Dhaye was killed by a Chinese bomb as he made his way toward the Kyichu River. “I was very happy when I heard that news,” Ugyen remembered.
The young Ragyaba was left at loose ends. The very model of an oppressed proletariat, he should have been cheering the sound of explosions from the seat of Tibetan power, the Potala. But instead he did something the Chinese, had they even been aware of him, wouldn’t have understood: he joined the resistance. Ugyen was loyal to the Dalai Lama and convinced in his heart that the atheist Chinese would destroy the Dharma. And he was willing to lay down his life to prevent it happening. “The Communists wanted to take away our monasteries and temples,” he said. “They wanted to destroy our gods.” It was a sentiment that thousands of Tibetans identified with. What the Chinese failed to understand was that this was an uprising of Buddhists even more than it was one of Tibetans.
The war did change one
fact of Ugyen’s existence. When he escaped Lhasa and joined up with the guerrillas in Nagchu, northern Tibet, he found that his status as a Ragyaba made no difference. “Nobody cared,” he remembered. The battle had erased, if only temporarily, the hereditary bonds of his family. He fought as a free citizen. More important to him, he fought as a man of faith.
Ten
OPIM
s the Tibetan rebels fought and died, the Dalai Lama’s party was following the old trader’s routes south. They were now in some of the most desolate country on earth and saw few people as their horses and ponies clipped along the rock-strewn paths for hour after hour. The route would enable them, if they were intercepted, to veer toward the border of Bhutan. “If worse came to the worst, we would always have a line of retreat behind us,” the Dalai Lama said. Now that they had put a fair bit of distance between themselves and the PLA camps in Lhasa, their most acute fear was of getting caught between Chinese squadrons moving up from their camps at Gyantse and Kongpo.
On March 20, the fugitives arrived in Drachima, where they found waiting a dozen mounted rebels led by the tall, imposing Khampa leader Ratuk Ngawang. His Holiness, “young and energetic” in Ngawang’s words, immediately struck up a conversation. “He told me there was no need to feel upset by the various statements issued against our resistance fighters,” says Ngawang. “He told me that what we were doing was necessary and our hard work would not go as a waste.” The Khampa leader nodded, moved by this assurance. The Dalai Lama was finally revealing his true sentiments about the rebellion.