Stephan Talty

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

  “I can’t go,” Soepa said. “Please shoot me.”

  But his brother-in-law refused. He walked away, and Soepa turned and staggered back into the Audience Hall. He cadged a cigarette from a teenager, who told him all the ways out of the Norbulingka were being blocked by the PLA. Soepa took a few puffs, then passed out.

  At Drepung Monastery, the monks listened to the battle unfold five miles away. “At dawn you could smell gunpowder in the breeze,” remembered one. “The noise of gunfire and mortar shells went on relentlessly.” Overnight, squadrons of PLA soldiers had appeared at the foot of the mountain below Drepung. And as the fighting raged, a Tibetan man appeared walking up the path to the monastery gate. The messenger told them that the rebels had overwhelmed a Chinese military camp and that the monks should stay where they were for the time being. That told them that the Tibetans were winning the battle for Lhasa, and the monks brightened at the news. But when other reports of the taking of Chakpori and the deaths of hundreds of Tibetan fighters trickled in, the monks soon realized that the messenger had been a turncoat sent by the Chinese to keep them in their quarters and out of the battle.

  The young men of the monasteries threw themselves into the rebellion. One group of Sera monks braved the gunfire to retrieve guns for the battle. Dressed in their maroon-and-gold robes, they picked their way over the mountain paths they always used to visit the Potala Palace on special days. Once they reached the gates, they took out hand mirrors and signaled their fellow monks that they had made it, using a prearranged code. Then the volunteers quickly made their way to the storeroom where they knew rifles were cached. “While we were removing the guns from the storeroom, the Chinese were bombing the Norbulingka below and Iron Hill, on the other side of the mountain from where we were,” one of them said. As the monks made their way to a storeroom on the top floor of the palace, where there was a supply of bullets waiting, the Chinese gunners turned their sights on the Potala. And it was clear from their aim that as the rumors had suggested, the PLA had sighted the palace many days before, because the shells immediately began hitting their target, sending up plumes of chalky smoke.

  Emerging into one of the palace courtyards, gasping for breath, one of the Sera volunteers saw bodies splayed on the cobblestones. “There were dozens of people dead, and others groaning in pain, covered with blood,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so I am going to die too.’ ”

  The PLA now turned its attention to the holdouts at the Jokhang Temple. Machine-gun fire rose in pitch until it was a high whining roar. Narkyid, the monk official in charge, and the others with him decided it was time to leave the Jokhang. If they stayed, it would only encourage the PLA to bomb the temple as it had the Potala and the Norbulingka. Lhasa had fallen, the Dalai Lama was gone, and prison or death was all they could expect if captured. He and a group of Tibetan soldiers searched for a way out. They found a small gate unknown to the PLA in one of the Jokhang’s walls. They gathered themselves, the soldiers clutching their rifles, then opened the gate and emerged out into the street.

  As the group hugged the temple wall and turned the first corner, they came under fire. Unarmed, Narkyid began to run. Even as he moved forward, the young monk was fatalistic. “Once three or four bullets went by, I didn’t worry anymore,” he says. But he did feel oddly worried about the men shooting at him, a Buddhist impulse too deeply ingrained to surrender so quickly. “Those soldiers were so young,” he remembers. “I shouted in Chinese, ‘Please don’t come forward, because we don’t want to kill you! You are so young. Please don’t shoot!’ ” The PLA soldiers came on, and the Tibetan soldiers with Narkyid opened up with their Lewis guns and the soldiers twisted and fell. “They didn’t have a choice,” Narkyid realized, “because behind them were others who would have killed them if they didn’t move forward.”

  The randomness of the battle struck Narkyid as he searched for a way out of the city. He would turn a corner and find the cobblestoned street ahead littered with corpses and freshly wounded civilians, but a couple of blocks away his party would run into a group of women calmly proceeding on their daily errands, or a family sitting down to a meal of tsampa and tea, boys running up after having collected spent shells and showing them to their bored fathers, everyone completely oblivious to the mayhem two streets away. Near the Jokhang, shells and bullets were cutting through the air, and each corner brought a new tableau. Chinese tanks spurting fire. Four men lying, legless, in a spreading pool of blood. “One shell had cut off their legs,” says Narkyid. “I went to hold the hand of two of them, but I couldn’t do anything for them.”

  Another young monk didn’t make it beyond the Jokhang’s walls. As he fled, a squad of PLA soldiers caught and arrested him. He shuffled ahead with the Chinese soldiers behind him, seeing “the marks of bullets and shell explosions everywhere, and countless bodies.” One corpse stood out. It was a beggar who’d been caught by a bullet as he tried to run from the fighting and was now lying facedown on the cobblestones. He’d been carrying blankets on his back, perhaps to sleep out in the cold nights. But what caught the monk’s eye was a dog that the beggar had been pulling along. It too had been shot, in the back—the monk could see the wound—and was lying next to its master, still attached to the leash.

  At the same time, Narkyid was making his way around the eastern wall of the Jokhang, angling toward the Kyichu River. He watched as several women ran up to a Chinese tank, Molotov cocktails in hand, and threw them at the turret. Others poured kerosene in front of the houses and shops where the Chinese were hiding and lit it on fire, only to see the sandbags snuff out the flames. They were cut down by Chinese gunners behind the barricades, some of the women, he swears, with babies in their arms. “We lost so many,” he says. “The women were so brave!” As Narkyid ran through Barkhor Square and toward the river, wounded Tibetans on the cobblestones called out to him: “ ‘Please kill me,’ they were saying. But we couldn’t stop or we wouldn’t have made it.” Navigating the streets, Narkyid imagined that the scenes he encountered weren’t real, that they were bits of a movie he’d seen long ago.

  The escapees crossed the link road in the northeastern corner of Lhasa and ran toward the mountains. They made their way across a barren field, moving one at a time to avoid detection by the PLA. A Chinese spotter must have caught the group in his binoculars, because a shell suddenly landed ahead of Narkyid. “I only heard the sound and I saw the image of my protector in the Potala and I saw her altar and I said, ‘Deity, protect me’ and I immediately lost consciousness.” When Narkyid woke up after about an hour, he began running again.

  There were no soldiers around, no more shells dropping from the PLA batteries. The Chinese had apparently forgotten about his group, one of hundreds of escape parties that made their way to the mountains or across the Kyichu that night. The survivors hugged themselves, brushed off the dirt clinging to their clothes, and began walking. The days ahead would be a nightmare. “We lost so many on the road,” remembers Narkyid. The monk found himself part of the exodus following their protector to India.

  As Tibetans streamed toward the Kyichu, the river’s banks became a killing ground, the survivors caught in enfilading fire from the new PLA outposts at the summer palace and their stronghold halfway between the Potala Palace and Chakpori. The Kyichu was engorged with spring runoff, and the Tibetans linked arms as they began pushing their way into the currents. Many were ripped away and dragged downstream. Others arrived on the far side, half-naked and shivering from the cold.

  • • •

  Soepa awoke, lying on the floor inside the summer palace. A furious barrage had roused him. In the darkness, he could see figures of PLA soldiers, their crouching bodies silhouetted against the whitewashed wall, now gray in the night. The wooden gate had been shattered and was hanging crookedly on its hinges. The Chinese had finally breached the Norbulingka gates.

  A machine gun opened up with a terrifying burst of noise. Soepa peeked out the door and saw that the shots we
re coming from a large storage room used to keep firewood. It was a Tibetan gunner aiming at the PLA soldiers flooding the palace grounds. The gunner sprayed the garden with bullets, the muzzle of his gun flashing orange. The PLA soldiers seemed to disappear, either dropping to the ground dead or running away. It was the first time Soepa had seen the Chinese soldiers die in numbers, and he felt happy about it.

  The Chinese soldiers regrouped and advanced on the gunner, firing as they went. Soon the position went silent, and the PLA troops fanned out over the grounds. Between bursts of gunfire, Soepa heard Chinese voices and Tibetan voices, interpreters surely, calling for the men inside the Norbulingka buildings to give up. The PLA soldiers were afraid to storm the structures and preferred to strafe the windows with bullets and then call for surrender.

  Soepa took out his amulet box. He opened it and took out the small precious substance, the byin rten, and placed it in his mouth, swallowing it. He then reached around in the darkness, searching for a gun. He thought he would kill one or two soldiers and then be killed himself. But there was nothing there, just the cool stone of the floor, polished by the rags tied to monks’ feet.

  He crawled outside. Two Chinese soldiers standing near the door called out and came over with a flashlight and inspected him. Soepa was covered with blood. They pointed at the main gate, now open, and barked at him to walk toward it. Instead, he waited for them to turn their attention elsewhere, then made his way slowly toward a guardhouse. He found five Tibetans lying inside, and he called to them, “Please give me some water.” But the men didn’t stir. He looked at the figures on the floor more closely and realized they were all dead. A shattered Bren machine gun lay next to one of the bodies, and hundreds of empty bullet shells were scattered across the floor. These men had obviously fought.

  Soepa lay down with the dead. A PLA squad came in, flashlights in one hand and rifles in the other. They began kicking the bodies, then bent over to look at the faces, shining their lights and looking for flickering eyelids. They kicked each corpse, but none moved. When they came to Soepa, playing dead, a soldier booted him hard in the hip, but he didn’t even breathe out. He was safe for the moment.

  Another trio of soldiers entered the building, and the inspection of the dead started again. This time Soepa was kicked in the stomach so hard that he almost screamed. But the men soon left. He crawled onto a mattress set on a makeshift platform of bricks and, exhausted and thirsty, fell asleep.

  Hours later, he was captured by PLA soldiers and imprisoned in the summer palace.

  Across Lhasa, it was clear the battle was being lost. “In order to encourage the people, the rumor was spread that the American Air Force would be coming on the next day to help us,” remembers the sixteen-year-old protester Lobsang Yonten. “Till then we needed to stand steady and defend ourselves.” But early on the 22nd, three days into the fighting, Tibetans began to hold up white pieces of cloth and prayer scarves tied to sticks. The shelling and the gunfire slackened and finally stopped. The shocking loss of the capital was softened by news that the Dalai Lama had successfully escaped the ruined Norbulingka. “I felt a huge relief,” Yonten says, “as if I’d been set free from an enormous burden.”

  By the end of the day, the rebellion was over. The voice of the Chinese official Tan Guansan came across the loudspeakers and echoed off the cobblestones and the stone walls of the city. He told the last of the rebels that if they surrendered, they would not be punished. There were pistol shots across the city and hooting as some of the Tibetan fighters sent a mocking response to the Chinese demand. The general’s voice was followed by that of Ngabö, the Tibetan minister by now widely considered a notorious traitor. “My name is Ngabö, and you know I am a member of the cabinet.” The beautifully modulated aristocratic voice announced that the Dalai Lama was alive, kidnapped by counterrevolutionaries. Ngabö urged the rebels to surrender, by order not of General Tan but of the Tibetan government itself. “Lay down your arms and you will be free,” he told listeners all over the city, who struggled to believe that one of their own could really be saying these things.

  More and more white scarves appeared, waved on the ends of sticks or rifles. To these were added Chinese flags, hoisted by Tibetans surrendering at last. The sight was a bitter one for many fighters: “We felt let down by this unexpected submission,” remembers one.

  All over Lhasa, the rumors of the Dalai Lama’s escape were finally confirmed by Norbulingka officials and rebel leaders. There was, just as with the news of his imminent kidnapping, a strangely uniform response to the news. “I was hit by two extreme emotions,” said one Tibetan doctor, “extreme joy that His Holiness escaped safely and the extreme sorrow that he had to leave his own land.” A Sera monk, injured in the battle, felt his sacrifice had gained meaning. “I felt fulfilled,” he explains. “We had lost our land but not our king.” Others remember saying that they could die happily now, as death no longer mattered. Those who had fought at the Norbulingka and on Chakpori realized that they’d given the Dalai Lama cover to make good his escape, as well as pinning down forces in Lhasa that might have been used to pursue him.

  On the afternoon of the 23rd, the PLA raised the flag of the People’s Republic of China over the Potala Palace. The authorities announced that the new colors, “symbols of light and happiness,” would usher in a rebirth for the capital.

  For Yonten, there was no time to mourn his fallen city. His father, a longtime nationalist who’d thrown himself behind the rebellion, met with the commander in chief of the Tibetan army, and together they decided to make their escape along with Yonten and three other men. The teenager and his father went home to say their good-byes and to collect tsampa, butter, tea, two bayonets, rifles, and a first-aid box. Yonten’s younger sister, just seven, begged to go with them, but they didn’t feel it would be safe. “We had to leave her in tears,” Yonten remembers. But when they arrived at the rendezvous, they found that the commander in chief had already fled without telling them. There was an air in Lhasa of every man for himself.

  As they slipped through the city with their three companions, the father and son could hear the loudspeakers, now broadcasting the same message over and over: “All Tibetans should surrender and hand over their weapons. Anyone found with arms will be charged as a criminal.” By the eastern side of the Potala, they were spotted by the PLA, and gunfire immediately erupted, the tracers arcing out at them from the Chinese outpost. “We stood still and did not move a step,” Yonten recalls. His father prayed loudly.

  The gunfire stopped, and PLA soldiers emerged to arrest the group, taking their names and ranks in the Tibetan government. The Chinese troops led them back to the Norbulingka, and there the captured men joined a long line of prisoners who were throwing their rifles onto a huge stack of rebel arms near a government building. The prisoners were lined up in rows and told to face forward. A jeep crawled by, and a Chinese officer pointed at each man, naming him: “This is Muja, this is Tsarond, this is Sumdho.…” Finally, the men were marched toward the city center in two files, passing piles of dead: horses, monks, rebels. The bloodshed was not quite over. “As we passed by the Ramoche shrine,” Yonten remembers, “we saw monks from the Tantric College being executed.”

  A group of Tibetan women began shouting angrily. As Yonten got closer, he realized they were not yelling at the guards but at the rebels, furious at them for starting the uprising and enticing the Chinese to bomb their city. “Some cruel Tibetan women made fun and spit at us,” he says. “They shouted, ‘You deserve to be arrested for defying the Communist Party.’ ” The prisoners were led to an open field, and the army cordoned off the temporary holding camp. Yonten and a family friend immediately began gathering the dry grass and making a makeshift bed for his father. But when the older man arrived, he ignored the grass and chanted a prayer, then started to remove the turquoise-flecked earrings that he always wore. Yonten watched him, knowing what this meant.

  “I have decided to sacrifice my life,” his f
ather finally told Yonten, handing him the earrings. “If you are freed, return home and tell our family not to worry about me.”

  Yonten began to cry, holding the earrings in his open palm.

  “You should live in harmony,” his father continued. “Do not change your faith. Be steadfast in your stand.” Overcome with grief, Yonten could only nod while tears streamed down his face.

  They slept in the frigid night air and woke with dew on their clothes. They were given food, and Yonten watched as a high Tibetan official ate tsampa held in his scarf, which was shocking to him, as it was such a common thing for an aristocrat to be doing. “This will be the end of our civilization,” the teenager thought. Then the Chinese ordered the men to take off their hats. They were looking for the traditional haircut, the pachok, worn by all government officials. Two men were ordered to stand up and step out of the crowd. His father was the second.

  Yonten jumped up and grabbed his father, holding him around the waist. “Please take me too,” he cried to the Chinese officer who was advancing on them. His father turned and pushed his son away. “Do you want to die?” he cried. Yonten refused to let him go. The Chinese officer asked Yonten who he was, and he explained that he was the man’s son. “Our condition is the same,” he said, nearly sobbing. “We share a common fate. Please take me with my father.” The officer came up and began to pull his father away. Other prisoners called to him, “Dear boy, why are you going? Stay with us.”

  Yonten’s hands were finally pulled away from his father’s clothes, and the prisoner was marched off. Yonten felt a premonition: he was looking at his father for the last time. Oblivious to the voices, which were calling for him to sit and have some tea, he stood and watched as his father was brought to a jeep, the door was opened, and his father was put in, looking straight ahead.