In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  The National Assembly had insisted that the Dalai Lama’s departure be secret in the belief that, once informed, the public, unaware of the great risk in his remaining, would try to prevent the flight. Less than a day’s ride from the capital, just such an obstacle arose. As the column approached the retreat center of Jang, thousands of monks, convened from Drepung, Sera and Ganden for their winter debate session, streamed onto the road to block its way. A tense standoff ensued, broken only when the Dalai Lama himself interceded to persuade the monks to let him pass. Once through, the procession continued on to Gyantse and then Phari, Tibet’s highest town, from where the route dropped rapidly down into the heavily wooded Chumbi Valley, for centuries the principal trade conduit between India and Tibet. At the valley’s far end, just below the border passes, stood the prosperous town of Yatung. With military checkpoints established throughout the area, the Dalai Lama took up residence in the picturesque Dungkhar Monastery, while in the town below his officials and followers, including Takster Rinpoché and the fleeing Heinrich Harrer, made shift among the houses of local farmers and merchants. In the meantime, the Cabinet empowered Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, along with four other officials dispatched from Lhasa and Yatung, to negotiate directly with China for whatever measure of freedom Tibet could still hope to gain.

  In the last week of April 1951, Tibet’s delegation arrived in Peking. After a courteous reception by China’s Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, they were presented with a ten-point plan specifying terms of capitulation or, as it was phrased, Tibet’s “peaceful liberation.” Because the proposal maintained that Tibet was an “integral” part of China, the delegation refused to sign. A stalemate followed, until a second, Seventeen-Point Agreement was put forth. This time no discussion was allowed. The delegates were cut off from their government and thereafter threatened with both personal violence and large-scale military retaliation against Tibet. On May 23 they yielded—unauthorized by the Dalai Lama and Cabinet. In a formal ceremony enacted in Tun-nen-hai, the living compound of China’s leading officials, and later publicized throughout China and the world, they certified the document with duplicate seals of the Tibetan government already forged for the purpose in Peking.

  On the basis of the Seventeen-Point Agreement, Tibet lost its identity as a nation-state. Ngabo Ngawang Jigme went on Radio Peking and announced the settlement—the very first time the Tibetan government, still based in Yatung, heard of it. “The Tibetan people shall unite and drive out imperialist aggressive forces from Tibet,” stated clause one. “The Tibetan people shall return to the big family of the Motherland—the People’s Republic of China.” Clause two outlined precisely how this was to be accomplished, the now “local government of Tibet” “actively” assisting the PLA to “enter Tibet and consolidate the national defense.” The remaining points mixed stipulations to uphold Tibet’s indigenous government—including the position of the Dalai Lama—with others designed to render it impotent, such as eliminating the authority to conduct foreign affairs and absorbing the army into the PLA. Stunned by the so-called agreement, the Dalai Lama ordered Takster Rinpoché to cross the Indian border and, via private channels, make a final appeal for support—this time from Harry Truman and the United States.

  Surprisingly, America agreed. Through intermediaries in Calcutta, a secret pact was drawn up wherein the Dalai Lama promised to seek asylum in India and publicly repudiate the Seventeen-Point Agreement. For its part, the United States pledged to support him and his government abroad, reintroduce Tibet’s cause to the UN, and finance its struggle against China, including, if it developed, a military option. July 12 was fixed for the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India, Prime Minister Nehru having already agreed to grant sanctuary.

  The plan never ripened. A short time before the scheduled departure, the abbots of Drepung, Sera and Ganden monasteries arrived in Yatung. In repeated meetings with the Dalai Lama, they pleaded for him to return to Lhasa. The State Oracle was consulted and on two occasions instructed Tibet’s ruler to return. Deciding that some scope for a compromise with China still existed, Tenzin Gyatso canceled his flight abroad and on July 16, looking out apprehensively from the upper rooms of Dungkhar monastery, caught his first glimpse of a Communist leader as, accompanied by two aides dressed in gray, high-collared suits, General Zhang Jinwu, chief of the newly coined Military and Administrative Committee of Tibet, was received by the splendid silk-clad figures of the Tibetan Cabinet. In a brief meeting over tea the general delivered a letter from Mao Zedong welcoming Tibet into the People’s Republic. He then proceeded on to Lhasa. The Dalai Lama followed a week later, returning home after an eight-month absence, in August 1951. Just sixteen years old, Tenzin Gyatso set forth on the delicate task of coexisting with Tibet’s new rulers.

  On September 9, 3,000 troops of the 18th Route Army marched into Lhasa, tubas and drums blaring, portraits of Mao and Zhou Enlai held aloft, between phalanxes of China’s red flag, one of whose four small orbs, circling the great yellow star at its center, was now Tibet. Within three months two more contingents arrived, bringing the occupation force to 20,000 troops—almost half of the city’s population—backed by 30,000 camels and horses requisitioned en route. Whereas the Tibetans had watched in dazed silence at first, they now lined the streets spitting and clapping, their age-old practice for driving out evil. Children threw stones and monks tied the ends of their outer robes, to whip, as they passed, the “Tendra Gyamar”—“Red Chinese Enemies of the Faith.” Setting up camp on Lhasa’s cherished picnic grounds by the shores of the Kyichu River, the Chinese took over the nobles’ larger homes, the roofs of which soon sprouted bright red signboards adorned with colossal black slogans proclaiming the “unity” of all races in “the motherland.” Groups of soldiers, dressed in drab khaki uniforms, their sole distinguishing emblem the red star on their caps, moved warily through Lhasa’s busy streets. While the day dawned to the blunt commands of parade-ground maneuvers, breaking the smooth litany of prayers rising from every household, the Holy City now sat under an offending fog of putrid smoke from the burning bones of dead animals.

  Unlike the Chinese incursion forty years before, the present occupation left most Tibetans puzzled. Assurances of religious freedom, mixed with lavish gifts to the nobility, promises of new hospitals, schools, roads, and, as it was later learned, official prohibition of the common Chinese term for Tibetan—man-tze, meaning “barbarian”—all confounded popular expectation. The precedent for such largess, however, had been set a year before in Kham. Tibetan soldiers captured in the wake of the invasion had been called “brothers” by their counterparts, given packets of food and money and then released, Chinese cameras filming their relieved expressions as evidence of the people’s joy on being “liberated.” One Khampa warrior summed up the general reaction by observing, “They are strange people, these Chinese. I cut off eight of their heads with my sword and they just let me go.” Stranger still was the content of propaganda pamphlets. The claim that China wished to help Tibet modernize made some sense, but that of “uniting to drive out imperialist forces”—there having been only six Westerners in Tibet prior to the invasion, all of whom had now left—was incomprehensible. Being “welcomed back” to the “big family of the motherland” amounted to a blatant non sequitur. “In the beginning,” commented Takster Rinpoché, who found a new home in America, “they put their words like honey on a knife. But we could see, if you lick the honey your tongue will be cut.”

  Within nine months of occupation, the first crisis occurred. True to its name, the People’s Liberation Army lived off the land, taking from the civilian population whatever it required. On their arrival in Lhasa, the Chinese had demanded a “loan” of two thousand tons of barley from the Tibetan government. When a second order for an additional two thousand tons was issued, the back of the capital’s delicate economy broke. The price of grain spiraled to a tenfold increase, that of meat, vegetables and household goods close behind. For the first time in history famine hung over Lha
sa and with it the people revolted. Songs and posters denouncing the Chinese filled the streets, public meetings were held and Tibet’s first major resistance group, called the Mimang Tsongdu or People’s Assembly, formed to dispatch a six-point petition to both the Tibetan government and the Chinese military command demanding the PLA’s withdrawal.

  The Chinese reacted swiftly. They insisted that the Tibetan Army be integrated into the PLA without delay. When Lukhwanga, the Dalai Lama’s outspoken lay Prime Minister, defied them, his resignation was called for as well as the imprisonment of five of the Mimang Tsongdu’s leaders. To forestall further confrontation, the Dalai Lama accepted the resignations of both his lay and religious Prime Ministers in the spring of 1952, determining henceforth that he would deal directly with the Chinese generals.

  Tenzin Gyatso now viewed himself as the sole buffer between his people and China’s armies. Recognizing that a future impasse in relations would severely jeopardize Tibet’s remaining freedom, he resolved to pursue a strict course of nonviolent resistance. Though politically expedient, the approach was ultimately rooted in the Dalai Lama’s religious conviction, shared by the entire clergy. As Kyhongla Rato Rinpoché, a lama of Drepung Monastery, explained: “We could not hate the Chinese because it was their own ignorance that motivated them to harm us. A true practitioner of religion considers his enemy to be his greatest friend, because only he can help you develop patience and compassion.” “Basically everyone exists in the very nature of suffering,” the Dalai Lama later wrote of his decision, “so to abuse or mistreat each other is futile.”

  Tibet’s compliance, however, was far less than what China hoped for. By the end of 1953, Peking determined that its attempt to create a puppet government, through which it could both control the country and mute international condemnation of its invasion, had failed. Accordingly, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party decided to supersede the Seventeen-Point Agreement by intervening directly in the administration of Tibet. The Dalai Lama was invited to China, where Mao Zedong planned to impose a new arrangement on him. Against the strong opposition of the Tibetan people, Tenzin Gyatso accepted. Ostensibly, he was merely being invited to attend the first Chinese People’s National Assembly, which was to adopt a constitution for the new republic.

  On the morning of July 11, 1954, all Lhasa gathered around a large tent on the north shore of the Kyichu River to bid the Dalai Lama farewell. Thousands wept as, the ceremonies concluded, the nineteen-year-old leader walked down a white carpet to the river’s shore, boarded a group of skin coracles lashed together and, a yellow silk parasol held above his head, set out across the water. On either side clouds of incense billowed across the Kyichu, revealing in clear spots hundreds of Chinese and Tibetan troops lining the banks to restrain the people, many of whom had threatened to throw themselves in after the Dalai Lama. While Tenzin Gyatso waved farewell, huge mounds of water swelling the river’s summer course appeared to swallow his diminishing figure, leaving Lhasans, as they returned to their city, feeling bereft of all hope.

  Five hundred of Tibet’s chief noble and religious dignitaries and their servants, however, accompanied the Dalai Lama. For twelve days the cavalcade rode east, camping nightly until, penetrating the beautiful juniper and pine forests of Poyul in southern Tibet, they entered one of two roads China was constructing to link Lhasa with the mother country. Here travel became increasingly difficult. The new road ran above shaftlike river gorges and in many places was washed out by rain, forcing the party to walk for hours on end through deep mud, boulders crashing down in their midst from the mountainside above. Many mules and three people died, yet the Chinese refused to divert to the old Tibetan trade route. The Tibetans’ spirits were further depressed by the inauspicious news that Gyantse, Tibet’s fourth-largest city, had been destroyed by flood.

  On the twenty-fourth day the party transferred to a fleet of slope-backed Russian jeeps and trucks which, in two more days, brought them to Chamdo. Here the Dalai Lama got his first look at the harsher face of the Chinese occupation. Under military control since the invasion, Chamdo had been rigged with loudspeakers which, as in cities in China proper, marshaled the population to work and delivered constant propaganda tomes throughout the day. Greeted under a welcome gate decked in fir boughs, by an accordion orchestra, and a line of brightly smiling Chinese women cadres holding flowers, the Dalai Lama gave his customary blessings to the city’s inhabitants backed by a PLA honor guard, an incongruity which was now routinely required as tens of thousands flocked to see him in the remaining towns of Kham. Passing through Dartsedo toward the close of August, the high pass of Arleng Hren was crossed and China entered. “On the Tibetan side the ascent was gradual,” recalled the Dalai Lama, describing his first moments beyond Tibet’s borders. “But going down the route was long and steep. Reaching the plain of China, I thought: Oh, this is something really different. Rice paddies, water buffalo—it made a most vivid impression on my mind.” In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, Tenzin Gyatso boarded an airplane and flew to Xian, where he was joined by the sixteen-year-old Panchen Lama and his party of two hundred. Both men proceeded on by private train, and though it was the Dalai Lama’s first experience of the machines that had fascinated him for so long, he felt little joy. Arriving beneath the tall buildings of China’s capital, the Dalai and Panchen Lamas alighted in gold brocade robes and pith helmets—a legacy of Tibetan ties with the Mongol Khans—and carrying bouquets, strode down the platform to the vigorous applause of hundreds of workers and students marshaled by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Vice-Chairman Zhu De, Chief of the Army. That evening a sumptuous banquet was held in the Purple Light Pavilion in central Peking, officially welcoming the Tibetans “back to the motherland.” Two days later the Dalai Lama met Mao Zedong.

  The Dalai Lama’s reaction to Mao was not unfavorable. He found him forthright, kind and dedicated. Among other details he observed that the leader of the revolution and Chairman of the Party never wore polished shoes, dressed in frayed cuffs, smoked incessantly and panted a lot. He seemed to be in poor health, but when he spoke, his unusual powers of analysis shone through. “Chairman Mao did not look too intelligent,” noted the Dalai Lama. “Something like an old farmer from the countryside. Yet his bearing indicated a real leader. His self-confidence was firm, he had a sincere feeling for the nation and people, and also, I believe, he demonstrated genuine concern for myself.”

  Mao, in fact, was quite taken with the young leader. He spent long hours offering advice on how to govern, going so far as to admit that Buddhism was a good religion—the Buddha having cared considerably for the common people. Invariably, though, political conviction outweighed personal taste. On one occasion, in the middle of an intimate talk, Mao leaned over and whispered in the Dalai Lama’s ear, “I understand you very well, but of course religion is poison.” During a New Year’s celebration given by the Tibetans, he watched his hosts throw small pieces of pastry in the air as an offering to the Buddha, whereupon, taking two pinches himself, he threw one upward and then, with a mischievous smile, dropped the other onto the floor.

  In their first private meeting together, Chairman Mao informed the Dalai Lama that a new committee was to govern Tibet. Known as PCART—Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region of Tibet—it would be comprised of five groups—four Tibetan, one Chinese—whose task it was to prepare the country for assimilation into the administrative framework of the People’s Republic. Ironically, the news came as a blessing. As Mao disclosed, until meeting the Dalai Lama he had intended to govern Tibet directly from Peking. The Tibetan’s conciliatory attitude, he indicated, had softened his stance. This had been Tenzin Gyatso’s prime goal: creating sufficient trust in himself to deflect unconditional Chinese rule. “We had to realize that our country was backward, it needed progress,” related the Dalai Lama. “The Chinese claimed that the very purpose of their coming to Tibet was to develop it. So here, you see, there was no need for argument; we enjoyed a common principle.” />
  During his remaining seven months in China, the Dalai Lama’s optimism was dampened by what he learned of Peking’s deeper intent. Taking copious notes at political meetings, touring factories and schools, he and his Cabinet finally comprehended the full array of motives underlying the invasion of Tibet.

  China’s foremost objective was strategic. Since the days of the Tibetan invasions a millennia and a half before, all Chinese governments had looked warily to their western border. The Communists, fearful of losing their newly acquired hold on the country, saw, in the 1904 British incursion to Lhasa and its resulting ties, the basis of a new threat. Despite New Delhi’s apparent refusal to fulfill the terms of the 1914 Simla Convention, the spirit of which clearly placed it as broker in relations between China and Tibet, Peking was convinced of an “imperialist” menace in the west. Defensively then, China, by annexing Tibet, desired to permanently shut its “back door.” But no less important were offensive considerations. In possession of the Tibetan Plateau the People’s Republic stood at the apex of the Orient. In the event of conflict with either of Asia’s other giants—India and the Soviet Union—Tibet, as the central and highest ground, would prove an invaluable platform from which to launch an assault. Economically, the outlook was no less inviting. Known in Chinese as Xizang or “The Western Treasure House,” Tibet possessed everything China lacked: vast, underpopulated tracts of land, their mineral, forest and animal reserves virtually unexploited. Politically, still in the first ideological flush of victory, the Chinese Communist Party felt mandated to “liberate” all “oppressed” peoples, its historical justification for absorbing not only Tibet but fifty-three other so-called Minority Nationalities occupying 60 percent of its territory but comprising only 6 percent of the Republic’s population. It was the CCP’s ultimate aim, through its long-held Minorities Policy, to meld the disparate groups—despite talk of “regional autonomy”—both politically and culturally into the Han mold. And it was this policy which both the Dalai Lama and the vast entourage accompanying him found most daunting.