Stephan Talty

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

  The authorities were desperately trying to avoid a repeat of 2008’s protests, when 239 people were killed (19 Chinese and 220 Tibetans, according to the Tibetan government-in-exile), 1,300 were injured, and nearly 7,000 were taken into custody or thrown in jail. To the Chinese, the startling thing about the wave of protests was that it was centered in the rural regions, among nomads and farmers who attacked police stations and raised the Tibetan flag. China had poured money into the regional towns that dot the Tibetan plateau and created a new native middle class. The Chinese felt they’d won hearts and minds in those places. But peasants, farmers, and monks had largely missed the influx of new money, and they deplored the laws outlawing Tibetan flags and even the most innocent displays of cultural pride. “Even the high-ranking Tibetan cadres in the Communist Party were furious with Beijing,” says Professor Gray Tuttle. “They’re strong nationalists, even though they’re making Shanghai-level salaries. And the level of respect for the Dalai Lama is incredible.”

  The swell of anger astonished the Chinese. And the recent independence movements in places such as Ukraine and Georgia shocked the Communist Party into a newly paranoid view of nationalist sentiments.

  But Lhasa would always be the focal point during the anniversary of the 1959 uprising. Anniversaries of key political events have always been important in Chinese history. Grievances spill out. In Tibet, March 2009 was the biggest anniversary of all.

  I was in Chengdu when the Chinese issued another edict: no injis (Tibetan for “foreigners”) after February 28. I’d be one of the last to get in.

  The final requirement was to have an English-speaking guide. When I finally arrived in Tibet, I met Sharma, a slim, short, sad-eyed Tibetan who’d been guiding for several years. Sharma was dead silent during the hour’s ride from the airport, avoiding the inane chitchat that most guides engage in to fatten their tip. It was a little unsettling.

  When he dropped me at my hotel, Sharma left me with a warning.

  “You can’t photograph police or army in the city,” he announced.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  His eyes widened, as if to say, What kind of question is that?

  “It is forbidden.”

  I already knew it was unhealthy to talk to Tibetans—for them, not for me. The Chinese bureaucrats who ran Tibet—the United Front Department of the Chinese Communist Party—had been on edge since the 2008 protests. Any Tibetan who ran onto a Lhasa street waving the Tibetan flag would be shot on sight. (One of the tragedies of the aggressive policies coming out of Beijing since the mid-1990s is that every display of pride in Tibet is taken as a sign of dissent, which it may or may not be.) And locals who talked about the political situation with Westerners could end up in jail. I’d heard rumors that there were cameras and microphones secreted everywhere in the main tourist areas of Lhasa. “You have to pretend that you have this contagious disease,” one Tibetan activist told me. “And anyone you talk to will immediately catch it.”

  But as I walked through the streets the first day, where the protesters had swept “two turns around” that first night in March 1959, I noticed that it was easy to fall into conversations with Tibetans. Traders called me over to their carts and tried to sell me jade necklaces at exorbitant prices. One merchant fell off his stool, and when I helped him back up, he grabbed my hands and thanked me in broken English. There were tiny gaps in the surveillance that—if I stayed away from the microphones and kept the conversations brief—could give me a chance to talk to Tibetans.

  The city looked prosperous and clean, if militarized to an almost absurd level—a mashup of Pyongyang and Shanghai. There were shops selling Nikes and flat-screen TVs, an Audi dealership next to the one peddling BMWs. Someone is getting very rich off this occupation, and some of them are Tibetans.

  The Chinese have unquestionably done good things in Tibet. They’ve poured billions into the country, built infrastructure that could sustain growth, especially in mineral extraction and agriculture, for years. They’ve curbed the worst abuses of the monastic system (the monasteries survive now only by private donations). “We are helping Tibet catch up with the West,” writes the Chinese scholar Ma Lihua, who’s lived in Tibet and traveled there extensively. “It is not ‘Hanification’ but globalization. I’m not saying this because I simply accept government propaganda, but because I have seen improvements in Tibet with my own eyes.” The Chinese today simply aren’t the monolithic villains that some in the pro-independence movement paint them as, nor are they intent on wiping out Tibetan culture by diktat. But the policy struggle that was going on in 1950 between those who favor engaging the Tibetans and those who want to violently suppress them, is still being played out in Beijing, and there are competing cliques, each with their own personalities and bureaucrats and career considerations. For more than a decade, the hard-liners have been winning, and it shows in Lhasa. To see the capital on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape was to see the Chinese administration there at its most paranoid and hostile, so over-the-top it almost seemed a parody of a police state. It was the hard-line style in its full dark bloom: the shiny black boots of the PLA everywhere you looked, like weeds.

  The visual landscape kept pulling me toward March 1959. Just as it was fifty years before, the city was filled with pilgrims, nomads, and farmers who’d come to Lhasa for the Buddhist equivalent of doing the hajj to Mecca. The black-eyed nomads looked like they’d arrived from the fourteenth century, with their wild-haired kids strung around their backs and their windburned faces that spoke of Tibet’s vast, rugged interior. But there were also teenagers wearing the latest slim jeans and trucker hats with odd slogans (my favorite being “I HEART STAGE,” apparently worn by a theater lover). Modernity—and modern vice—is here in Lhasa, if cleverly disguised. The city has, for example, an unbelievable number of hair salons, which makes no sense until you realize that many of them are actually whorehouses, staffed mostly by native girls who service the thousands of Chinese soldiers stationed in the Tibetan capital.

  The first afternoon, Sharma and I walked to see the Jokhang Temple, the place from which Narkyid, the young monk in charge of the temple, had gazed down on the innocent-looking Chinese soldiers before the gunfire began. As we strolled through the courtyards, Sharma walked over to talk to another guide and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Most of the guides were Tibetan, I noticed, which was a very smart move on the part of the Chinese. If a Westerner did something stupid, his guide could be penalized or even thrown in jail. On arrival, every inji was given his very own hostage.

  I stood at the place from which Narkyid had watched the Chinese polish their rifles. There were six soldiers within view.

  After seeing the temple’s interior, I walked up to Sharma. The other guide saw me coming and hurried off. Sharma turned to me with a worried look on his face.

  “I have news,” he said. “I must stay at the hotel with you. And you cannot leave it without me.”

  “What,” I said, looking at him in horror, “are you talking about?” The last thing I wanted was Sharma tailing me every minute.

  “It is a new rule,” he answered. “It is getting very strict.”

  I protested, but Sharma assured me that this was the latest order from the Chinese government. It covered all Westerners in Lhasa.

  “Please do not leave the hotel without me,” he repeated. “I will get in trouble.”

  We rushed back to the hotel, where I sent an e-mail to the fixer in Chengdu who’d arranged my trip. “I am very sorry,” she wrote back. “This has never happened before.”

  I was stuck with Sharma full-time.

  I heard chanting from outside my window. I looked out and saw that next door was an army camp, built in an old sports stadium. Recruits were running around the track carrying heavy sacks over their shoulders. They were, presumably, practicing carrying wounded colleagues to safety.

  The next day, security had been notched up in the old town. Soldiers stood on the rooftops
of the two-story buildings with walkie-talkies, and tear-gas guns, and rifles. Some had binoculars—I looked up and noticed one soldier looking directly at me with a bug-eyed pair.

  Figuring it was too dangerous to talk to a Tibetan with Sharma around, I told him to ask one of our Chinese taxi drivers how he liked Lhasa.

  “What? How does he like Lhasa?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Ask the driver that.”

  “Him?” Sharma said. “No, you don’t understand. He isn’t a local. They come here on ten-month contracts and then they leave.”

  That was interesting. I knew that many Lhasans deeply resented the Han migrants who had arrived in the city since Beijing had adopted a rapid economic development policy focused on revving up the Tibetan economy without, many Tibetans felt, investing in things such as the education of locals. But I hadn’t heard that some of these entrepreneurs were here for only ten months. “Please ask him anyway,” I insisted.

  Sharma turned in the front passenger seat to stare at me full in the face. Then he turned around and stared out the front window. He refused to talk to me for the rest of the ride.

  Not only could I not talk to Tibetans, now Chinese were out as well. We were reaching North Korean levels of irrationality. Soon silence became Sharma’s way of dealing with me. If I asked an inconvenient question, he simply tuned me out.

  I began to resent him. Sharma was a stooge, I decided. My guide was enforcing bans that didn’t even exist.

  Still, I had to use him to see Lhasa. The next morning, we trekked out to Drepung Monastery.

  In 1959, the three monasteries that ring the perimeter of Lhasa had played a major role in the uprising. Since then, monks had been the leaders of the sporadic anti-Chinese protests that flare up in Tibet. Three days after I left Tibet, a monk from Kirti Monastery would set himself on fire—and then be shot at by Chinese troops. I wanted to see how the monks were faring as the crackdown intensified.

  We took a taxi to the monastery at the foot of Mount Gephel, one of the low mountains that ring Lhasa. Drepung at one time housed as many as 10,000 monks. It was one of the great centers of Buddhist learning, the Harvard of Tibet. It should have been teeming with earnest young men.

  But the place seemed deserted. A handful of Chinese tourists and Tibetan pilgrims wandered around, poking into the tiny chambers while their guides droned on.

  Sharma cleared up the mystery. “Since 1959,” he told me, “only five hundred monks have been allowed to stay here.” Many others, perhaps hundreds, I later learned, were being kept in military detention camps in neighboring Qinghai province.

  The Chinese had drained the swamp, stripping Drepung and the other monasteries of all but a token number of monks. That action was part of a religious crackdown that included a ban on practicing Buddhism in the towns, in force since the mid-1990s. The ban was decided upon at a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party on Tibet policy in which the hard-liners inside the party, who have always favored an aggressive approach of crackdowns and religious bans, reinvigorated their attacks on the Dalai Lama and on Buddhism itself.

  The monasteries had been turned into sad museums. I noticed that even the chapels had been wired with surveillance cameras.

  In the main chapel, I noticed something peculiar hanging on one of the red pillars.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Sharma looked up. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a suit of armor.”

  It was tiny, made up of square pieces of thin metal. A shield hung next to it, with a quiver filled with arrows on one side and a bow on the other.

  “After killing many enemy, warriors would come here,” Sharma explained, “and ask for forgiveness for their sinfulness.” Fighters came to the monks to repent for the blood they’d spilled. It was called “following the white path of peace.”

  The warriors’ act of renunciation seemed to illustrate Tibet’s dilemma. From a land of warriors, Tibet had over centuries become a huge open-air monastery. The Tibetans just didn’t seem equipped for the viciousness of the world they lived in.

  Sharma, at least, was skilled at psy-ops. He had me studying his every move in excruciating detail. One high point came when we were having dinner and he got a call on his cell phone. Sharma ran into the street to talk out of earshot.

  “What is he doing that for?” I said to the empty seat. “I don’t even speak Chinese.” I began to share, in the tiniest sliver, the paranoia of a Tibetan living under Chinese rule. I wondered what I’d done to tip the military off. Was it taking notes at the Jokhang Temple? Or that e-mail I’d sent to a friend back home?

  We headed back to Barkhor Square. I wanted to try getting some pictures of soldiers with my digital camera. We walked the streets, and I fell behind Sharma. As a patrol passed, I held the camera by my side and clicked off a few shots.

  I looked at the screen. Pictures of legs in green wool. I’d have to find a better way.

  We sat on the railings that ran the edge of the square, and I waited. I noticed a PLA squad patrolling the square. I placed the camera on my thigh and pretended to be looking at the crowd.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the soldiers approach. I got ready to shoot.

  But just then, three young Tibetan boys came tumbling into the square, laughing uproariously. The lead boy stumbled into the middle of the patrol. In an instant, the lead soldier was on him, screaming in Chinese and pulling the terrified child by his sweater until his feet almost left the ground.

  It was ugly, the occupation in miniature. The leader released the boy, and he ran off, his face twisted with fear.

  I was about to turn the camera to catch the patrol reorganizing when three policemen in blue uniforms came up to Sharma and me. The oldest, with a pockmarked face, barked something to Sharma, and he instantly hopped off the railing. “We have to go,” he said quietly.

  Had the PLA spotters on the roofs noticed me? I decided the surveillance in Lhasa was very, very good.

  In town, the army’s presence had become almost claustrophobic. There were patrols on every block. Some troops now wore helmets and bulletproof vests, and I saw two gray vans converted into armored vehicles, with blue and red lights on top and three gun ports on each side. From what I could tell, they were circling the city endlessly.

  As we headed back to our hotel, I slipped my camera out of my pocket and pointed it at the gray vans. One of the Chinese drivers—who I later realized must have been watching me in the rearview mirror—turned violently and nearly drove his vehicle into oncoming traffic. I slipped the camera back into my pocket.

  The next day we headed to the Potala, the stunning winter palace of the Dalai Lama. Opposite it, the authorities had built a beautifully landscaped park with one of those statues one sees everywhere in China where workers and hammers and sheaves of wheat soar toward the heavens. By the park’s reflecting pool, women were cleaning their hands and faces and then prostrating themselves. They clasped their hands together and then dropped to the pavement, facing the empty palace.

  Sharma was distracted, having a smoke. I sidled up to a middle-aged Tibetan man in a brown coat, nodded, and asked what the women were doing.

  “They’re praying to the Dalai Lama,” he said.

  It was strangely thrilling to hear the name of the public enemy uttered in public.

  “So they haven’t forgotten him?” I asked.

  He turned to me. “No, they haven’t forgotten him.” Then he moved off nervously.

  Everything I saw around me confirmed what the man said. In Lhasa, young men did circuits around the Jokhang Temple, throwing themselves to the ground in devotion. Tibetans of every age thronged to the holy places, old nomad women bent double but still climbing to see where the Dalai Lama had slept. There was a palpable devotion here that’s been missing from Western countries for so long that it was almost a physical shock to witness it. Footage smuggled out of Tibet by businessman-turned-documentarian Dhondup Wangchen (later arrested and now serving a six-year prison sentence)
showed nomads crying at a video of His Holiness, with one telling the camera, “For the Dalai Lama to come back is my greatest wish and dream.… I only have to hear his name and I am filled with faith, devotion, and a deep, deep sadness.”

  “There’s no question that his legend is tremendous inside Tibet,” says Paul Jeffrey Hopkins, the Tibetan scholar. “So many of the people there have one wish: to see His Holiness before they die.”

  Lhasa exists around an absence. The Chinese have outlawed anything to do with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama—books, photographs, everything. But everywhere I looked, men and women were bowing and praying to him as if he had never left. The irony is that Tibet had for centuries been kept secret by the Tibetans. Now it is again off-limits, secluded in a new and more menacing way by its occupiers.

  And spending more time with Sharma, I began to see him differently. Walking around Lhasa with him was, in some ways, like walking around Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with a black man in 1954. When he talked with other Tibetans, his voice was normal. He even snapped at our local driver for forgetting his driver’s license—you do not, apparently, want to be a Tibetan caught on the roads without proper ID. But when he spoke to a Chinese, any Chinese person, his voice and his posture underwent a sickening transformation. His face took on a worried, almost pleading look. He seemed to shrink inside himself. His voice became hesitant and soft, question marks floating up at the end of all his sentences. The nerve endings in his face seemed to go dead, as if his unrehearsed self was too dangerous to display.

  And the Chinese often treated him as if he were an unpleasant fact of living in Tibet. Businessmen cut in front of him in lines. Clerks angrily waved him away when he tried to ask a question, only to look up attentively at the next Chinese customer. Sharma took it all as meekly as a lamb. In his own country, I thought.

  I was coming to the end of my trip, but I had to see the Norbulingka. As we drove to the site, I remembered what had happened on this road fifty years ago, sixteen-year-old Yonten and the masses of Tibetans running toward the palace and everything that followed that wild, unscripted moment. That cycle—oppression, protest, crackdown, casualties—had repeated endlessly ever since.