In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Two other Tibetans were already in the camp. After being placed in with the group it was then learned from them that they were the sole survivors of three hundred monks from Labrang Tashikhiel, Amdo’s second-largest monastery, imprisoned three years before, in 1956. The rest had died from starvation. Two months later, when the first propaganda play was staged before the kitchens in the main yard, those from Central Tibet immediately noticed that the maroon curtain used for a backdrop had been fabricated from the robes of monks. Subsequently, during a work assignment in a storage room, one of their number came across the distinctive boots of Tibetan clerics, the soles worn off by hard labor and only the leather tops remaining, saved for a future use.

  The day following their arrival the men were acquainted with Jiuzhen’s rules. Communication, save for practical necessities, was forbidden. “This is a maximum-security camp for those who have committed the worst crimes,” the guards informed them. “No spreading of reactionary rumors will be tolerated.” On the basis of recommendations by the officials who had accompanied them, a “progressive” leader was appointed from each group of ten to fifteen prisoners. Although the leader lived side by side with his cellmates he was exempt from thamzing. In return, he was required to report the most minute occurrence down to potentially significant looks exchanged between their prisoners. Accordingly, from the first days of their new life in Jiuzhen, a second invisible prison held the men, a virtual moratorium on all human contact. The only statements made were for the informer’s benefit and were stock phrases such as: “The new Communist leadership is so much better than the exploiters of the past.” Or: “The conditions here are truly excellent, we are really enjoying it.”

  Each day, before dawn, the prisoners were mustered. Once in line before their cells, they were led in a rousing propaganda song, the first verse of which began: “Moscow has announced revolution so the imperialists are shivering with fear.” They were then marched to work in the fields, returned briefly for lunch and, after the day’s labor, required to sing again before dinner, which was served, as were all meals, in the cells by the kitchen staff. Following dinner, political “study session” lasted until ten o’clock, after which they slept. Every ten days each prisoner was subjected to a private interrogation session. In addition, prisoners were randomly taken to a small room in the staff quarters outside of Jiuzhen’s walls where, for an entire day, four interrogators would question the man in turn, trying to wear him down by probing for “crimes” in the smallest details of his past life. Otherwise not a moment was spent away from the group, which was marched to and from the toilet as well as the worksite by armed guards.

  It was the middle of the “three lean years,” and Jiuzhen’s produce was not for the prisoners’ own consumption but that of the staff and the army units in the region. Guarded by the PLA, who shot on sight any man crossing his field’s perimeter, each prisoner, equipped only with a shovel, had to break enough barren ground daily, including irrigation ditches, to be suitable for cultivating thirty pounds of wheat. The soil was turned a foot deep, covering an area of roughly 4,000 square feet. The task was so daunting that, even with clear soil, a strong man could barely manage to complete it. More often, the earth was hard and stony. In this case, after they had removed the larger rocks, the prisoners were ordered to fetch sand and clay from a nearby area in pairs; a long bamboo pole from which two baskets were hung suspended between them. The new earth was then mixed in with the old. Speed was of the essence. A point system rewarded those who completed their quota. Those who did not were punished. On returning from collecting sand, the inmate received a blue or a white slip of paper. Tabulated at day’s end, the slips determined the number of baskets he had carried. The next day a red flag would be placed beside the field of the best team, whereas all those groups who had failed to approach its level were given increased labor time and a longer nightly meeting. Stretchers were always on hand for the frequent cases of collapse. If a field was close to the pickup point for sand, sixty trips could be made in a day, running both ways; if far, no more than twenty-five.

  Reeducation proper took place at the nightly study meeting. The subjects generally fell under the heading of either China’s domestic or foreign affairs. The most frequent topics dealt with the dictum that increasing production through hard labor was the key to social harmony and how, in the past, imperialist nations such as the United States, Great Britain and Japan had oppressed China. The prisoners were required to express individual opinions on the subject at hand. In the beginning, though, some of the men had yet to learn the correct terminology. Labeled “stone heads,” they repeatedly suffered thamzing until soon, most knew what to say. The first man would begin: “Tibet was a feudal state run by reactionary serf owners and running dogs of the imperialists. Then, after Comrade Mao Zedong liberated the motherland, we struggled against the earth, fought against the sky and cultivated everything, so that now our people are living in peace, happiness and prosperity.” The second man would improvise: “The imperialist and reactionary cliques worked hand in glove to exploit the masses. But now they have been overcome. This is because the Chinese Communists are the vanguard of all Communists. This is because Mao Zedong is the leader of the whole world. Right now he is the only one worthy of even being called a leader!”

  With the arrival of summer, arid desert heat replaced the dry cold. Prisoners were issued baggy, gauze-like cotton uniforms. On the morning of May 1, 1960, six months after the Tibetans’ arrival, the kitchen staff came to their cells bearing the usual basket of dumplings and a bucket of greens. The dumplings, though, were the size of an egg. When the prisoners asked why they were so small, they were told that rations had been cut from sixteen and a half to eight and a half pounds a month. Henceforth, three dumplings a day were given and they were no longer even made from wheat. To save yet more grain Jiuzhen’s authorities had instituted the mixing of indigestible roots and barks with the food. Three types were most easily identified. The first was rotten bark taken from trees in an area of low-lying hills far from the camps. After it was powdered and mixed with the dough, the dumplings were tinged red; they left a heavy, painful feeling in the stomach. If ingested over too long a time the bark produced bleeding sores inside the stomach and intestines. After eating them for even a few days many of the men found blood in their stools. Chaff was also mixed in and, in the autumn, a further additive which destroyed the semblance of a bun altogether. This consisted of waste material from soybeans. With the kernel of the bean removed to make tofu for the staff, its remaining skin was steamed to form a sort of porridge mixed with flour. The gruel was so loose, though, that the steamer itself had to be brought to each cell, where two spoonfuls per man were dispensed. Over the winter, meals had included the exterior layers of cabbage and other leafy greens, their interiors already taken by the guards. Now a native plant with flat green leaves topped by a yellow flower was used. Collected by periodic details, the plant was boiled in water and one ladle’s worth for each man given out. Altogether, a single meal comprised little more than a mouthful of food.

  Hunger governed the prisoners’ every thought. Order broke down. The strong bullied the weak over who had received a larger ladle of greens. Even when the Chinese took to skimming off each spoonful with a chop-stick to make sure all the portions were of uniform size, the men’s anguish about potentially unequal allotments focused itself as an obsession over the size of their bowls. There had never been a standard issue of containers. Thus, each man used what he had been permitted to retain from his relatives’ gifts or, failing that, from containers he had somehow managed to pick up from guards. The assortment was varied. Dr. Choedrak had brought a mug as well as a washbasin. As the mug proved too small to eat from, he secretly procured a pair of scissors from a brigade of ex-prisoners, kept on as laborers, who lived outside Jiuzhen’s walls. With these, he cut down the high sides of the basin so that it fit fully over his face and could easily be licked clean. Most were not so fortunate. Some had cu
ps, others tin cans, the rest metal ashtrays—given out by the Chinese. Those worst off possessed only pieces of wood in which crude indentations were carved. Eventually, the men devised a system for randomly exchanging containers after the meals were portioned out and just before they ate. In this way, some measure of peace was restored, though as the next month unfolded it mattered little.

  With the beginning of summer, the first symptom of starvation appeared: extreme enervation. While walking, their knees frequently buckled, and a number of the men found themselves unable to stand once they had fallen. Even if they managed to sit, their legs would not carry them until after a few hours of rest. By July one and all resembled living skeletons. Ribs, hips and shin bones protruded, their chests were concave, their eyes bulged, their teeth were loose. Gradually their eyebrows and hair, once shiny and black, turned russet, then beige and then it fell out, the hair coming loose from the skin with just a slight pull. Each morning, those who could rise placed both hands against the wall and inched up, carefully balancing their heads in an effort not to fall. Once erect, they would edge dizzily through the straw down the back of the kang toward the cell door. From there they would go to the toilets by supporting themselves against the window ledges and walls of the buildings en route. From now on no one could walk securely, much less run for baskets of sand. Leg joints felt locked in place; feet were dragged along, too heavy to lift. When the men returned to the prison at night, they lowered their bodies gingerly onto the platform, this time only one hand against the wall, the other used to steady the head; tilted to the side, its weight was sufficient to bring one crashing down, unable to check the fall.

  The first man to die was a lama from Nagchuka. He had fainted many times in the fields, and was repeatedly carried by stretcher to the hospital room, where he was permitted to rest for a few days at a time. One day in September he could no longer lift himself from the sleeping platform. The prison guards arrived and demanded to know why he was not out working. He replied, “How can I work when I can’t lift my legs or my head?” Then he added sarcastically, “Now I finally understand the policy of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s very good. I’m a person who can’t move and might live for just a day or two more—that’s all—but I’m asked to go to work. This is truly a policy for the people.” After this, he was taken to the hospital, where, as he had predicted, he died two days later.

  This first death, which Dr. Choedrak and the others had expected almost daily for a year and a half, was notable only in that it had taken so long to occur. It was greeted indifferently; no mental breakdowns had occurred since arriving at Jiuzhen, no expression of fear or depression, and none appeared now. Save for continued quarreling over food, starvation had stunned all other feelings into abeyance. The Tibetans now recognized, though, that they would not be executed or tortured to death; they were to die through forced labor, so that the authorities—by their own standards at least—could appear blameless.

  Within just a few days, the next man died—a government official named Rongda Jamyang, whose sister later married an American and moved to the United States. From then on, an average of two to three prisoners died every week with the longest interval between deaths lasting no more than a fortnight. The process was always the same. Those who succumbed without complications, from starvation alone, would simply lie immobile on the kang. Their breath became softer and more shallow until, at the last moment, bubbles of saliva slipped over their lips and they died. In some cases, a man would linger for months before passing away. The elder of the two monks from Tashikhiel, who had survived the demise of his 298 fellows, ultimately perished in this manner. For two months he remained prone, sustained by spoonfuls of gruel and water given by his fellow prisoners. After each feeding he regained some strength, looked around and even spoke briefly before relapsing into a semi-conscious state, saliva continually seeping from his mouth. For others, death would come after only a few days of lingering, as with another early victim, the ex-abbot of Gembung Lhakhang temple in Lhasa. Those who had died during the night were removed by the hospital staff, stripped of any useful possessions and placed in a pile in front of the toilets. Before dawn, the corpses were taken out of the camp by a three-man burial detail. The graveyard was a field not far from the prison walls. Its markers were made of hand-sized stones picked at random by the detail, who then wrote the prisoner’s name in red enamel paint before placing the stone over the grave. The earth was so hard—frozen in winer, dry and tensile in summer—that only a shallow hole could be dug, into which, without ceremony, the naked body was thrown. Dr. Choedrak saw Chinese families wandering through this field, searching to retrieve the bones of a deceased relative. Some had come to visit from as far away as Peking or Shanghai, only to be informed of their family member’s death on arrival. Lent a shovel, they were told to find the remains and take them away if they wished—a gruesome and heartbreaking ordeal, due to the sometimes incompletely decayed cadavers unearthed.

  For the prisoners, a death occasionally provided an increase in rations—for a single day at least. If they were lucky, the loss could be hidden from the guards and the deceased’s ration obtained. Dr. Choedrak himself benefited from this. Waking one morning, he noticed that the man lying next to him was unusually still. He nudged him, listened closely and realized that he was dead. By then, the prisoner on the fellow’s far side had realized the same thing. By mutual consent, they managed to partially cover the dead man’s head with his blanket, telling those around—and the Chinese, when they arrived—that he was too sick to move. By this, they obtained an extra portion of food, which they discreetly shared between themselves after the kitchen staff departed.

  As the death rate increased the Tibetans began to consume their own clothes. Leather ropes, used to tie the bundles brought from Tibet, were cut into daily portions with stones and shovels. Each piece was slowly chewed during work, in the hope that some strength could thereby be gained. Small leather bags were put to the same use. Dr. Choedrak owned a fur-lined jacket, which had proved invaluable through the first winter, but in the course of the following summer he was compelled to eat it. He began with the fur. As winter came again, he managed to secure a small quantity of brush with which to make a fire under the kang. Piece by piece, he roasted the rest of his coat. Walking to and from the fields, prisoners picked as many plants—dandelions were a favorite—as they could eat, scavenged leaves from the few trees in the area, hunted for frogs and insects and dug for worms. One worm was particularly sought after as a source of grease, there being no fat of any kind in the diet. White, with a yellow head, the inmates nicknamed it “Mapa,” after the best, most tasty form of tsamba mixed with butter.

  A more constant source of food was the refuse discarded by Chinese guards. Crowds of prisoners would gather around bones or fruit rinds thrown by the roadside. Those lucky enough to have arrived first masticated their finds for hours to make them last. The results of this scavenging, though, could be perilous. One day Dr. Choedrak was assigned—in company with a low-level government official named Lobsang Thonden—to work on a garbage pile outside the prison walls. It was in a large area where the camp’s waste was mixed in with human excrement before being taken to the fields as fertilizer. Together, the two men shoveled the feces into trunk-sized baskets, which were then carried off by their cellmates. As he shoveled, Lobsang Thonden came upon a small baby pig—pigs were kept by the staff—dead and almost completely decomposed. When the guards were not looking Lobsang retrieved it and whispered to Dr. Choedrak, “We should eat this. It might help us.” Wiping the excrement from it, he pulled the pig apart to see if there was any edible flesh to be had. A portion about the length of an index finger remained, still red, between the shoulder blades. He then decided to take it back to the prison to eat more palatably with the evening’s greens. Dr. Choedrak admonished his companion to consume the meat immediately. On one count, Tenzin Choedrak pointed out, he was so weak that it would be of instant benefit; on the other, if it
was discovered during the check at the prison gate, there might be trouble. Lobsang Thonden ignored the advice. Instead, he placed the meat in his back pocket, where, as Dr. Choedrak had warned, it was found a few hours later at the evening check. The Tibetan’s small piece of meat infuriated the prison guards. That night he was threatened and abused; the next day work was delayed and a public thamzing involving the entire camp was convened in the prison yard. Lobsang Thonden was brought forward and tied by the special method used to twist the shoulders in their sockets. The camp commander shouted indignantly: “Taking such unclean food is a grave insult to the Chinese Communist Party and to the nation itself. Eating anything that can be found is a direct attempt to abuse the government. The conditions and rations here are very good. Such an insult cannot be ignored. It must be corrected by thamzing.” “Activist” prisoners jumped up to beat and “struggle” Lobsang Thonden in the usual manner, repeating the charges against him. Soon, however, he collapsed. Afterwards, he could no longer walk or care for himself and was taken to the hospital. There, for the one and a half inch of flesh, he died four days later.