In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  The delegates spent four days in Tashikhiel. On the second day Tibetans began to collect by the guest house, asking Chinese guards for permission to speak with the visitors. From them came the first broad sampling of the Tibetan people’s sentiments. “Whenever we asked people what had happened since the revolt,” related Lobsang Samten, “they would just start crying. Then, after composing themselves, they’d reply, ‘Our country has nothing now. Everthing is finished. But we Tibetans who are still alive, our spirit is strong. We’ll never lose it. As long as His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not in the hands of the Chinese we have hope. Please let him know whatever he is doing for our freedom, we are grateful.’ This is all they said, over and over again. Very few wanted to discuss their personal problems.” On one occasion, though, an old friend of Lobsang Samten’s came to visit. Formerly an important tribal leader in Amdo, he had been arrested after the uprising and imprisoned for twenty years at hard labor. He had been released, in a limited amnesty, only a few days before the delegation’s arrival. “He looked unbelievable,” said Samten. “He had been such a strong, heavily built man. Now I could barely recognize him. The fellow was just broken. He said everything he owned, his land, his home and possessions, were taken. His family had been separated. He had never seen them again. He had just heard a few days before that his son had died in prison. ‘Look at me, Lobsang,’ he said. ‘I have nothing left except this one suit of clothes they gave me.’ It was very upsetting. When we finally did get people to talk about themselves,” concluded Lobsang Samten, “there wasn’t a single family without some kind of story like this one.”

  Between visitors, the delegation toured Tashikhiel itself. Here they found two entirely separate worlds: the original city, still inhabited by Tibetans, and a Chinese “new town” surrounding it. The Tibetan section was little better than an open grave. Its buildings were in total disrepair, its streets muddy and impassable. The people lived in dark, decaying rooms with barely any furniture or utensils and no running water and only intermittent electricity. On the other hand, the Chinese quarter, though itself showing signs of neglect, was newly built, its inhabitants far better fed and clothed than the Tibetans. Seeing one impoverished home after another, the delegates began to find themselves overwhelmed.

  “We were so shocked that after a few days none of us could eat or sleep,” related Lobsang Samten. “We remembered life in the old Tibet. We thought of our freedom in India and we compared this to what had occurred in our country. All the while, the Chinese kept shamelessly repeating propaganda about improved conditions and how joyful the people were. We were furious about this, and on top of it all we had this mixed feeling of joy and sadness on seeing our people again. It was too much. When I reached Hong Kong at the end of the tour, I actually slept day and night for a week.”

  The delegation remained in Amdo for three weeks more. Twenty towns and dozens of villages, communes and nomad stations, spanning thousands of square miles, were visited. Drives lasting an entire day were common, always across barren windswept tundra, a network of Chinese military roads and telegraph lines having replaced the old caravan routes. Somehow, word of the delegation’s approach preceded it, and invariably resulted in tumultuous greetings. By mid-September, after only a month in Tibet, the exiles had been mobbed by tens of thousands of Tibetans. The necessity of appearing liberal prevented the Chinese from calling on the PLA to suppress the near-riots, yet it was clear that some action had to be taken. As a result, word was sent by Mr. Kao to the leaders of the Tibet Autonomous Region in Lhasa concerning the difficulties being encountered. Following this, last-minute efforts were made to prevent the flood inundating the countryside from pouring into the capital itself.

  At Lhasa’s nightly meetings Chinese cadres departed from their policy of secrecy, and announced that representatives of the Dalai Lama would soon arrive in the city. The men were logchoepas—“reactionaries”—it was said. Nevertheless, the facades of the buildings lining Lhasa’s major thoroughfares were to be washed and the streets kept free of puddles and rubble. Lhasans were to wear their best clothes and if, by chance, they encountered visitors, were to maintain a cheerful demeanor. They were to talk only if spoken to first, and then in a firm, convincing tone, they should relate how good life was under the new order. Families whom the authorities thought might be visited by the delegation were issued coupons for new worker’s suits as well as gaudy pink and blue ribbons to be braided in the women’s hair. Tea thermoses, blankets and quilts were given to the most important and their rooms were inspected to make sure that portraits of Mao and Party Chairman Hua Guofeng were prominently displayed on the walls. A few days before the delegation’s arrival, Chinese officials conveyed a final set of instructions. It was now revealed that the delegation had already been in Amdo. Tibetans there, unable to suppress their natural hatred for all logchoepas, had, it was claimed, openly attacked the group. Wherever the men appeared, hundreds turned out to throw dirt and stones and denounce and spit on them. Party workers were adamant: similar behavior would not be tolerated in the capital—though it seemed this was precisely what was being sought. As a gesture to the delegation itself, the Revolutionary Committee that had administered Tibet since 1968 was abruptly replaced by a new People’s Government of the Autonomous Region of Tibet, headed by Tien Bao, a Tibetan. Ren Rong, however, retained his position as first party secretary of the regional CCP, the true repository of power in Tibet.

  On the morning of September 26, the delegation left Langzhou on a three-hour flight to Central Tibet. At Gongkar Airport they were met by new minibuses and two hours later, entering the western end of the Lhasan Valley, they caught their first glimpse of the Potala’s golden rooftops shining in the distance. “I always believed that one day I would see my home again,” recalled Lobsang Samten. “When I did, I was overwhelmed by memories. My whole childhood, living with His Holiness in that beautiful building, came into my mind. Then it was full of life; people worked in the offices, prayed in the chapels, walked on the outside stairways and on the rooftops and at night its windows were always lit by hundreds of butter lamps. Now it looked completely dead—empty and cold. All of its dignity was gone.” Before reaching the Potala, the delegation was surprised to find itself routed away from the city and driven to a remote guest house four miles west of Lhasa. “This is the best residence available,” local officials informed the party on their arrival. “Everything here is quiet and clean. Whatever you need we’ll be happy to bring to you.” The group demanded to be taken to Lhasa immediately, where the Tibetan people could see them, but were refused. A standoff ensued, until Lobsang Samten attempted to ease the tension with a joke. “Actually, my home is in Lhasa,” he mentioned wryly. “I don’t need to stay in a military guest house. I am just going over to stay in my mother’s place right now.” “The Chinese all had a good laugh when I said that,” he remarked. “Then they said, ‘Lobsang, your home doesn’t exist anymore. Now it belongs to the public.’ ‘What public?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘Tibetans or Chinese?’ ‘Oh, just the ordinary public,’ they said. After that everyone was quiet.”

  Three days later the delegation was transferred to Guest House No. 2 in the old city itself. By then it was amply clear that a new level of discord had been reached. On September 29, the delegates’ first morning in Lhasa, 17,000 Tibetans stormed the Central Cathedral, where the group had come to worship. Chinese security personnel were trampled, the cathedral’s front gates broken open and the delegates mobbed in a wild frenzy that profoundly shocked Tibet’s highest authorities. That night meetings were convened and a strict warning issued to the city’s population not to engage in demonstrations. Regardless, the very next day Lhasans openly defied the orders, taking to the streets by the thousands whenever the delegates ventured out. Before dawn each morning long lines formed in the courtyard of Guest House No. 2. Many of those waiting were close friends whom the men hadn’t seen since 1959. From them, they learned that despite the general mood of defiance, hun
dreds of people were still too frightened to appear. Thereafter, they took long walks through Lhasa’s narrow streets, where the size of the accompanying crowds made surveillance difficult. In this way they were able to visit many people directly in their homes.

  On October 1, China’s liberation day, officials of the Tibet Autonomous Region insisted they attend a celebration at the Norbulingka or “People’s Park.” The event was a crucial test for Ren Rong, Tien Bao and the TAR’s other chief administrators. Having failed to check an increasingly unstable situation, they hoped under controlled conditions and on the most important holiday of the year to present a convincingly different view of Tibet. Accordingly, scores of Tibetan cadres and their families were instructed to picnic at the Jewel Park, their best clothes, thermoses, radios and mah-jong tiles prominently on display. By 10 a.m., however, almost 8,000 uninvited guests had gathered in the park. Like all the others, the crowd erupted and a phalanx of police was required to clear the way to a building beside the Takten Mingyur, the Dalai Lama’s residence, built, under Lobsang Samten’s own supervision, in 1956. There, greeted by the TAR’s leading officials, the exile group was served tea and biscuits, and requested not to venture into the gathering; as one of their hosts put it, they “might get lost.”

  The delegation had already toured the Norbulingka a few days before. Its gardens, save for the immediate area surrounding the Takten Mingyur, were a jungle. Among the ramshackle shells of old temples and pavilions, the only improvement had been an odd zoo of artificial rocks and monkey cages. Guided by a Chinese man and woman through the Dalai Lama’s modest two-story residence, they had been treated to a description, given to the palace’s few visitors, of the Tibetan leader’s lifestyle. “This is where the Dalai slept. This is where he ate. This is where the Dalai met his mother. This is his record player and his electric fan,” they were told. Finally, Lobsang Samten interjected, “I understand very well what you are saying, but don’t you think I should tell you people where you are? I built this palace and worked here every day.” “Oh yes, Lobsang knows better than we do,” they replied, laughing, before going on with their account. Shortly afterwards the delegation had walked past the Kalsang Phodrang, a large palace in the Norbulingka, once used for state occasions. Finding the front doors locked, they mounted the building by exterior steps and peered through a bay of broken windows into the main hall. Inside, the temple was filled to a height of twenty-five feet with a mass of shattered heads, limbs and pedestals, the mangled remains of centuries-old statuues. “We saved these from the people,” the guides explained. “It was the people themselves who destroyed them, not us, during the Cultural Revolution. They robbed the jewels and gold. In fact, if we hadn’t protected these statues, they would have been stolen as well.”

  Recalling the wreckage in the Kalsang Phodrang, Lobsang Samten left the official reception and contrary to an understanding with the Chinese—never to make a public speech—strode to the palace’s front steps to address the crowd.

  Thousands of Tibetans had jammed into the flagstone yard in front of the building. A single line of police, their arms interlocked, held them back, while plainclothes cadres filmed and took notes. The moment Lobsang Samten appeared, the crowd started to chant, “Long live the Dalai Lama!” A man waving a stick with a white scarf tied to its end pushed forward crying, “This scarf is for you from the people of Tibet.” On accepting it, Samten gestured for silence and then began to speak. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama misses you,” he said. “And he knows how you have suffered. We hope that one day he will come to see you. In the meantime, we are here to view the progress that has been made as well as the mistakes. Whatever we do, when we return to His Holiness we will report the truth.”

  Lobsang Samten walked inside, and as he did, hundreds of Tibetans broke through the police cordon and stormed the building. Seeing them, he ignored the Chinese officials within who, terrified, forbade him to go back out, and immediately rejoined the gathering. Ten young men linked arms to protect him from the commotion. In their midst he spent the next five hours walking back and forth across the Jewel Park. Several times, the whole group was inadvertently pushed over, once waist-deep into a pond. “It was so chaotic that I only managed to sit down and picnic with people in a few spots,” Lobsang Samten remembered. “When I did, after only a few minutes of polite conversation, the people’s real feelings would pour out and they would start to cry uncontrollably. I’d try to get up to move on, and they would beg me to stay. Then they’d insist that we all have just one dance. So, for a little while, everyone, old men, women and children would join arms and try to do a few of our own Tibetan steps, laughing, singing, crying and dancing all at once.”

  Halfway through the afternoon, a voice in the crowd called out, “Lobsang! Dr. Tenzin Choedrak is here. He’s looking for you.” In the next moment Dr. Choedrak appeared and the two men met each other for the first time since the mid-fifties. “You must be very tired” is all Dr. Choedrak said. It was he, though, as Lobsang Samten recalled, who looked “half dead.” Having asked the Chinese to find the doctor, Lobsang Samten now resolved to test their sincerity by requesting that Tenzin Choedrak be permitted to leave Tibet and come to India.

  A few days after October 1, the delegates were informed of something else that had happened that day. Carried away by the excitement, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Tsering Lhamo, the wife of one of the Norbulingka’s gardeners and a mother of seven, had yelled, “Tibet is independent!” Arrested on the spot, she had been taken to a commune hall in southern Lhasa and held for three days. Between interrogation sessions, she was brought before the six hundred people in her neighborhood and given thamzing. Despite the beatings, she persistently said that her words were not an act of defiance but merely a simple mistake. Seeing Lobsang Samten standing on the steps of the Takten Mingyur, she was sure that he would soon be followed by the Dalai Lama and with him would come Tibet’s independence. She had only called out what she believed was obvious to all. Her account failed to satisfy the Chinese. Determined to make an example of Tsering Lhamo, the Public Security Bureau threw her in prison, where, according to many accounts, she was tortured with electric shock. “As soon as we heard this,” related Lobsang Samten, “we decided that there was no point in going on with our trip. We realized that our presence could only bring trouble for these poor people. That day, we did not go out. We canceled all our plans and told Mr. Kao that we wished to return as soon as possible to Peking and from there to India.” Fearful of the consequences of cutting the trip short, Mr. Kao swiftly secured the woman’s release. By way of explanation he stated that hers was a “very serious case”; her arrest had occurred “because the people themselves demanded it.”

  On October 6, the delegation arrived at Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city. Shigatse, however, was empty. The entire city, save for a few frightened and infirm old people, had been sent to the fields before dawn. The same held true for Sakya, the next stop, and then Gyantse as well. It was only as the delegates were making their way out of the country, through the less closely administered mountainous areas of Kham, that they were able to meet people freely once more. Lobsang Samten recalled one incident in particular on this final stage of the journey. “One day we stopped in a small village for lunch,” he related. “A crowd gathered before the guest house, but Chinese guards kept them out. We were waiting to eat when a young Tibetan man somehow got in the door. He was very young, about twenty, and very strongly built. A great robust fellow—a real Khampa—bare-chested, in a sheepskin robe, with long hair. He didn’t give a damn about the Chinese. He walked right past them up to our table, stopped and just stared at me. He was trembling violently all over. Then he burst into tears. Tears, I mean, were just rolling out of his eyes. I tried to console him. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know how you feel.’ He didn’t say a word. He squeezed my hands tightly, stared at me, then just turned around and walked out.”

  Leaving Tibet in the first week of November, the de
legation flew from Chengdu to Peking, where they spent ten days meeting with high-ranking officials in both the Great Hall of the People and the Minority People’s Hall. During the discussions, those in charge of the new relations with the Tibetan exiles candidly asked the delegates what they thought of conditions in Tibet. “We decided beforehand that there was no use in antagonizing the situation by telling the whole truth,” recalled Lobsang Samten. “But we did say that Tibet was much poorer now than it had ever been in the past. ‘Education, health care, decent housing and employment, these things don’t exist,’ we told them. ‘Your people don’t even speak the language—and they treat the Tibetans very badly,’ ‘Yes, yes,’ they replied. ‘It’s all true. We are sorry. In the future we promise to improve conditions.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry. They have done such terrible things in our country. So many atrocities for so many years. What could the Chinese possibly do to compensate for our tragedy? Finally I said, ‘We have been very upset by what we saw but now it’s finished. In the future, these things will be discussed directly between His Holiness and Peking. We will wait and see what happens.’ ”

  Flying to New Delhi via Hong Kong, the delegation returned to Dharamsala on December 21, 1979. They brought with them eleven hours of film, seven thousand letters written to relatives in exile, countless requests for the Dalai Lama to mention personal names in his prayers and a number of rare scriptures and relics secretly preserved during the destruction of the monasteries. They were met, though, by a somewhat confused, if expectant mood. To forestall a potentially divisive debate, their departure five months before had been kept strictly secret. The highest policy-making organ of the exile government, the National Working Committee, had been informed of the journey only a day before the group left Dharamsala. Two days later, on August 3, the Cabinet released a carefully worded circular, stating that, other than assessing “true conditions in Tibet,” the delegation had no “authority to decide any issue.” Despite this, fears of a sellout to China, mixed with indignation at the undisclosed departure, resulted in hundreds of letters pouring into Thekchen Chöling, most begging the Dalai Lama himself not to go to Peking.