In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  In the Dalai Lama’s palace, Tenzin Gyatso prepared for the ten o’clock departure of his group. During his final hours in the Norbulingka he had written a letter formally certifying the people’s leaders. He had then instructed the militia not to make a stand, but in the event of conflict to retreat south of the Kyichu. Alone, he now changed into a layman’s maroon robe and fur hat and, for the last time, walked slowly to his prayer room. Seated on his meditation cushion, the Dalai Lama read through the scripture before it, stopping at a line in which the Buddha advised a disciple to be courageous. Rising, he took hold of the sacred painting of the Protectress Palden Lhamo, kept always by his person, and slinging its special container across his shoulder, departed from his home, completing his disguise by shedding his glasses and borrowing a rifle from one of the guards at a gate in the yellow wall. Joined by the bodyguard’s general, the Master of Religious Ceremonies and the Lord Chamberlain, he proceeded out of the Norbulingka through the same gate his family had used forty-five minutes before. No one recognized him.

  “All of a sudden I heard a lot of people and horses passing in the dark,” said Ngari Rinpoché. “Then I heard Mr. Phala, the Lord Chamberlain, saying in a hushed voice, ‘Tashidelek, tashidelek,’ which means ‘Good luck,’ an expression we use only on auspicious occasions like New Year’s.” Joined by the third contingent, consisting of the Cabinet, the Dalai Lama’s two tutors and the medium of the Gadong Oracle, all of whom had been smuggled from the Norbulingka hidden under a tarpaulin in a truck, the parties rode down on a narrow track clinging to the hillside just above the riverbank. Undetected, they passed the PLA’s sprawling Nordulingka camp, and with some 700 Khampas guarding their rear, headed for the Tsangpo River and the guerrilla-held mountains of Lhoka beyond.

  “We rode all night in small groups,” related Ngari Rinpoché. “Before dawn it got so cold that I thought my legs would freeze, but when the sun came up it was crisp and clear, so we all felt a bit refreshed.” By midmorning Ngari Rinpoché’s group reached the base of the Che-la or Sandy Pass. “The whole way up Che-la,” he continued, “my fat uncle’s saddle kept slipping off and he was desperately clutching his horse’s neck. I couldn’t stop laughing until we dismounted on the other side, where it’s sand, and everyone ran down.” Two hours ahead, the Dalai Lama’s party hurriedly covered the ten miles remaining before the Tsangpo. As they rode, an early-spring sandstorm fortuitously whipped up, concealing their flight from any pursuers. Reaching the river safely, they crossed in coracles to the far shore, where the people of a small village, alerted by the National Volunteer Defense Army, whose territory they had now entered, waited to greet them, many in tears, their hands clasped in prayer around sticks of burning incense. After another half hour of riding the first halt was made at the small monastery of Ramé. By sunset, after more than twenty hours in the saddle, Tenzin Gyatso’s family arrived.

  “Just after we rode up, I was called to see His Holiness,” said Ngari Rinpoché. “I walked into a small room on the monastery’s second floor. There was one window across from the door with a little light filtering through and His Holiness was standing before it in high leather boots and layman’s clothes. I had never seen him dressed like that before but he actually looked quite natural. He just asked me, ‘How are you feeling today?’ I said, ‘Nothing special. Everything went well, except the sandstorm was a little rough and Mother had some problem with her leg from riding.’ Then he looked at me quietly for some time and finally said, ‘Choegyal’—my personal name—‘now we are refugees.’ ”

  “The day after I escaped from Lhasa,” related the Dalai Lama, “I felt a tremendous sense of relief. Actually the danger was still very much alive. But despite this we were moving freely, on our own, and we had finally come to the point of openly criticizing the Chinese. ‘I have the right to say bad things about them,’ I remember thinking. That feeling of freedom was very vivid: my strongest reaction following the escape.”

  “It was very funny,” observed Ngari Rinpoché of the company’s mood. “After our first ride everything was done in such a relaxed, happy manner. Really Tibetan style. As if we were only out for a picnic in the countryside.” The route, however, was tiring. Skirting Yamdrok, the great multi-limbed Turquoise Lake, the party rode south. The treeless landscape on either side was broken only by ancient traders’ tracks resembling shallow wrinkles traced across the vast empty valleys and by the occasional village or monastary. To avoid detection by air they traveled in separate groups, struggling, one after another, up 18,000-foot passes still laden with the bulk of the winter’s snow. Each day small guerrilla bands materialized, seemingly from nowhere, to check the party’s progress. “It was reassuring to see them,” said Ngari Rinpoché, now riding in the Dalai Lama’s contingent. “They were all big men—real Khampas, draped with pistols, rifles, swords, daggers and charm boxes—a very colorful, tough-looking bunch. Every night after we’d stopped large bands rode in. They’d disarm, then come before His Holiness, to prostrate and receive his blessing. His Holiness would talk briefly with them, asking where they came from and which unit they were serving in. Then they would disappear back into the night and resume their positions.”

  During evening halts the Dalai Lama and eight advisers met to discuss plans. At first they decided to establish a temporary base behind the lines of the National Volunteer Defense Army at Lhuntse Dzong, a large district fort commanding a hilltop sixty miles north of the Indian border. From there Tenzin Gyatso intended to negotiate with the Chinese, hoping that so long as he remained in Tibet, and could be of use, the PLA might be prevented from reprisals. But the hope was ill-founded. On March 24, the Dalai Lama received word that little more than two days after he had fled, at two o’clock in the morning on March 20, the Norbulingka had been shelled. Four days later, on March 28, the Dalai Lama listened over a small transistor radio as Zhou Enlai announced China’s dissolution of the Tibetan government. With a dialogue no longer possible, Tenzin Gyatso chose to reestablish his administration, doing so in a brief ceremony in Lhuntze Dzong soon thereafter. But Lhuntze Dzong was not safe. The PLA had already crossed the Tsangpo in force and was advancing on the party. A Chinese radio message had been intercepted ordering troops along the Bhutanese border to move east, blocking all avenues of escape from southern Tibet to India. Realizing that the border would shortly be sealed, the Dalai Lama decided to seek asylum in India. Messengers were sent ahead to request entry permission while the party followed behind, with two of the highest, most difficult passes still to be crossed.

  On the Lagoe-la Pass, leading to the small town of Jhora, a fierce storm descended. Hands and faces frozen, the Tibetans led their ponies through a violent snowfall and emerged exhausted, only to arrive the following day at the Karpo-la or White Pass. Here blinding snow glare forced the 350-troop escort to shield their eyes by letting down their long braids while the Dalai Lama pulled his scarf, like a surgeon’s mask, over his face. “I was riding with Mr. Liushar—the Foreign Minister,” recounted Ngari Rinpoché, “when just on the other side of the pass, we heard a plane. Liushar looked completely bewildered, then a big transport, with no markings, flew right above us, just two hundred yards overhead.” Men and horses scattered across the gleaming snow. The Dalai Lama dismounted and stood alone on a bare patch of windswept ground. Word rapidly passed down the column not to fire, though the transport was an easy target for Bren guns and semiautomatics. “They weren’t blind. They had to see us,” continued Ngari Rinpoché. “After that we were sure the Chinese would be on us in no time.”

  Breaking into smaller groups, the company moved forward for two more days, descending from treeless wastes through alpine terrain into the jungle-covered hills occupied by Monpas, a Tibetan tribal people whose dialect was barely intelligible to those from Lhasa. Here, in Mangmang, the last village in Tibet, the messengers returned with word that preparations for their arrival were underway at Chutangmo, on the Indian side of the border. Further details of the fighting in Lhas
a, reported by eyewitnesses who were now escaping along the same route, were also heard. “When the suppression finally took place, the majority of our people were asleep,” stated the Dalai Lama. “In the dark, surrounded by noise and smoke, they didn’t know where the projectiles were coming from. When dawn broke there wasn’t a single Chinese soldier visible. Therefore, I think the Chinese inflicted a psychological defeat at the very first stage of the fight.”

  On the morning of March 20, hundreds of dead and wounded lay amidst the burning ruins of the Norbulingka’s palaces and temples. Following renewed shelling, the PLA attacked in force. By four o’clock in the afternoon, the Tibetans were thrown into a disorderly retreat to the Kyichu River, shooting their wounded rather than have them captured. Caught in a crossfire from the Nordulingka camp to the west and the PLA’s Shuktri Lingka position to the east, those who did make it to the Kyichu were faced with a torrential spring current so swift that many were swept away and drowned. By linking arms in long chains the survivors emerged on the far side, their clothing ripped from their backs, yet for the time being safe. Meanwhile, as the PLA assumed control of the Jewel Park, a massive search was mounted for the Dalai Lama—whose flight remained unknown—the multitude of corpses being examined one by one.

  In Lhasa, the fight lasted three days. Beginning on the morning of March 20, while artillery pounded the Potala, Sera Monastery and Chokpori Hill, site of the medical college, the city exploded in street-to-street fighting. Lhasans, armed only with light weapons, petrol bombs, axes and knives, impulsively rushed Chinese buildings from behind haphazard barricades of cobblestones, furniture and telephone poles. They were slaughtered by the thousands, the PLA refusing to be lured out. Desperate to confront the enemy, they dug tunnels between the centuries-old stone buildings, many of which, by sunset, were in flames, illuminating the city throughout the night.

  Early on the morning of the twenty-first the conflict resumed in a more beleaguered vein. As thick clouds of incense rose alongside prayers from rooftops across the city, a company of Khampas crept through the still streets to storm the Happy Light cinema. Overwhelming its 100 PLA defenders they achieved the Tibetans’ sole victory. In its wake dozens of pitched battles erupted. The Ramoché Cathedral, Lhasa’s second most hallowed temple and home of the Upper Tantric College, soon fell, its millennia-old walls set aflame by Chinese shells. A half mile to the west the Tibetan artillery post on Chokpori Hill also succumbed, its defenders killed to the man, the entire medical college, in which it had stood, obliterated by incoming rounds. Beneath its rocky slopes, thousands of noncombatants who had camped at the Norbulingka for the full eleven days of the emergency poured into Lhasa, all heading for the Tsuglakhang, convinced that there, in Tibet’s most sacred shrine, they would be safe from Chinese attack. By nightfall more than 10,000 people filled the Cathedral’s courtyards and myriad chapels—a chaotic press of men, women, children, mortar-bearing guerrillas and hundreds of monks fervently praying before the feet of colossal images.

  Just after dawn on Sunday, the twenty-second, the PLA started to shell the Tsuglakhang. While mortars pocked its ornate roofs, thousands of civilians camped in the large square before the southeastern walls came under heavy machine-gun fire from adjacent buildings. Three tanks slowly converged on the square, Chinese soldiers abandoning their defensive bulwarks to attack under their cover. Though the entire Drapchi Regiment had been pinned down in their barracks east of Lhasa, a detachment of Tibetan cavalry managed to gallop in from outside the city to help sustain the battle for three hours. Hundreds of Tibetans and Chinese soon lay in piles around the tanks while flames leapt from the cathedral behind. But by noon the fighting was over. Reinforced by armored cars, the PLA rammed down the Tsuglakhang’s front gates and stormed its interior. Two hours later Ngabo Ngawang Jigme’s voice came over Chinese loudspeakers around the city. Claiming that the Tibetan government had reached a settlement Ngabo ordered the remaining pockets of resistance to surrender. Civilians holding white scarves above their heads filled the streets, while members of the NVDA slipped away to join the resistance in Lhoka. Above the blackened, shell-pierced Potala, five red flags now blew in the warm breeze of an early spring afternoon. On the corpse-littered road below, long lines of prisoners marched toward the Norbulingka. Inside Lhasa tens of thousands more were detained, as the first hours of the unimpeded rule China had for so long sought over Tibet finally dawned.

  In Mangmang, the Dalai Lama lay ill. The snowstorms of the high passes had turned, at a lower altitude, to torrential rain, inundating the frail tent in which he had tried to sleep. On the morning of March 30, Tenzin Gyatso succumbed to dysentery. Moved to a nearby house, he spent a feverish day in bed and a second sleepless night. As the next morning in Mangmang began, word arrived that Chinese troops were closing on Tsona, a village within striking distance of the camp. Despite his condition, the Dalai Lama decided to cross the border immediately, a party of eighty officials, lamas and family members comprising his retinue. Mounted on a black dzo or hybrid yak, Tenzin Gyatso departed Mangmang, as he later described, “in a daze of sickness and weariness and unhappiness deeper than I can express.”

  At four o’clock in the afternoon of March 31, he entered a large clearing. On its far end stood a newly built bamboo welcome gate beside which six Gurkha soldiers, in heavy British ammunition boots, and floppy jungle hats, waited at attention. As the Gurkhas presented arms, their commander stepped forward to offer a scarf in greeting. The Dalai Lama dismounted, accepted the scarf and slowly walked across the border into India and exile.

  II

  3

  In Exile from the Land of Snows

  1959–1960

  FOR EIGHTEEN DAYS the Dalai Lama rode down through the jungle-covered hills of Assam. Led by Gurkhas, the various groups in the entourage camped in the midst of lush rain forest, the sight of tropical birds, insects, monkeys and great flowering trees contrasting vividly with the arid plateau of Tibet just a few miles behind. Reaching Tawang, forward headquarters for the Kameng Division of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), they settled temporarily in bungalows, where the outside world made its first contacts. On the day of their arrival an Indian air force transport flew in low over the large meadow below the town, dropped half-filled sacks of flour, shoes and fedora hats and then circled higher to unload heavier cargo by parachute. For three days the planes came, while below the Tibetans watched glumly, incapacitated by malaria, cholera and typhoid vaccines. Pressing on to Bomdila, a major town up to which roads had been dug and electricity laid, the Dalai Lama received a telegram from Prime Minister Nehru welcoming him and extending all “facilities” for his residence in India. Heartened by the official greeting he halted once more, recuperated from the last traces of his illness and prepared to meet the world press, which was gathered at nearby Tezpur, a tea-planting center on the Brahmaputra River.

  Little more than two weeks before, Nehru had announced the Dalai Lama’s safe arrival to a standing ovation from the Indian Parliament. A week earlier, however, Peking had already issued a detailed communiqué presenting its view of the turmoil in Tibet. In it, the revolt was portrayed as a minor insurrection engineered by an “upper-strata reactionary clique” seeking to reestablish its rule over “the darkest feudal serfdom in the world.” “The spirit of these reactionaries soared to the clouds and they were ready to take over the whole universe,” stated the New China News Agency on March 28. “With the aid of the patriotic Tibetan monks and laymen,” it continued, “the People’s Liberation Army completely crushed the rebellion. Primarily this is because the Tibetan people are patriotic, support the Central People’s Government, ardently love the People’s Liberation Army and oppose the imperialists and traitors.” The communiqué declared that the Dalai Lama had been “blatantly abducted” and “held under duress by the rebels,” who, it implied, were acting under orders not just from Taiwan and the United States but from India as well. The small Himalayan trading town of Kalimpong, populated by Tib
etan expatriates during the 1950s, was identified as “the command center of the rebellion” and the fact that India’s Parliament had recently discussed Tibet was referred to as an “impolite and improper” interference in the “internal affairs of a friendly country.”

  Nehru responded mildly to Peking’s indictments. Conceding in Parliament that Kalimpong was indeed the focus of “a complicated game of chess by various nationalities,” he nonetheless dismissed the notion that India had played a role in Tibet’s revolt. He further sought to reassure China by citing his firm adherence to Panch Sheel, which precluded involvement by either nation in the internal affairs of the other. The Prime Minister’s position, though, as he himself termed it, was “difficult, delicate and embarrassing.” A ground swell of popular sympathy for Tibet had swept India, compelling its government to offer some gesture of support. Nehru accomplished this by granting the Dalai Lama asylum. Yet, as he was acutely aware, such an act left India open not only to accusations of violating Panch Sheel but also to the considerably more damaging charge of having fallen into the anti-Communist camp of the Cold War and thereby lost its nonaligned stance, the cornerstone of the Republic’s foreign policy. To forestall such criticism, Nehru stressed that his support of the Dalai Lama was humanitarian only, based on a “tremendous bond” growing out of centuries of spiritual and cultural exchange between India and Tibet. The Dalai Lama was not to be permitted to use India as a base for a Tibetan independence movement or to engage in politics of any kind. Above all, he was to be isolated from the press and public in an effort to soften Peking’s increasingly inflammatory posture. But the latter was not simply achieved.