Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Although Ngawang Sangdrol has a higher profile than many Tibetan prisoners of conscience, her story is not exceptional among Tibetan dissidents of that era, and certainly not in the context of the previous fifty years of China’s occupation. Nuns had at times played a notable role in resisting Chinese oppression, and unlike Ngawang Sangdrol’s, that resistance wasn’t always peaceful. In the late 1960s, as the Chinese authorities began to restore some measure of control after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, a young nun called Thrinley Choedron led a ferociously violent rebellion from her home county of Nyemo, west of Lhasa. During this campaign Choedron and her followers stormed into county headquarters armed with swords and spears and slaughtered party cadres who worked there. Some of the Chinese victims were set on fire and Tibetan collaborators had their hands chopped off. The massacre sparked a popular uprising that spread quickly to other counties. This being Tibet, Thrinley Choedron claimed she was an emanation of Labja Gongmo, a holy bird from the Gesar epic, giving her magical powers. No bullet could harm her. Yet when the Chinese finally deployed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to crush the rebellion, she and fifteen of her followers were caught hiding out in the mountains, brought to Lhasa and executed.

  The meaning of what’s euphemistically called the ‘Nyemo incident’ is contested, as you might expect in this drawn-out and one-sided confrontation. At first, authorities in Lhasa assumed Thrinley Choedron’s group was another expression of the brutal factionalism the Cultural Revolution had unleashed, something Mao had relished and Beijing was now trying to contain. Most of rural Tibet followed the line of the Lhasa communist establishment; Nyemo on the other hand was a known radical hotspot. At second glance, they concluded Choedron was not in fact some rogue Red Guard but a self-styled holy warrior targeting the ‘enemies of faith’. When they caught her, she was simply assumed to be a Dalai-clique ‘splittist’ and executed, reasserting the all-embracing control of the party. Her execution was an instinctive reflex, the spasm of a struck nerve; there was no open-minded inquiry into why an ordinary woman should act in this way. And while the party’s tactics have become more sophisticated in the last fifty years, China’s leaders still have little idea or interest in how Tibetans conceive the world, as you would expect from a colonial power. You can see this in how communist authorities sell Tibetan tourism, promoting, without irony, a culture they had once tried to erase, but as a brand rather than a philosophical world view.

  The Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya has called the Nyemo revolt a ‘millenarian movement’, which captures the crazed despair of 1960s Tibet and the desperate rage many Tibetans felt as every aspect of their lives came under attack. China’s occupation wasn’t just spatial, a strategic acquisition of territory, although that was important: Tibet was perceived as China’s back door and it needed shutting before India or the Soviet Union could wander in. The occupation was also psychological. China’s invasion was of minds, an assault on every aspect of Tibetan identity as all the old institutions and traditions that had created those minds were systematically attacked. Not only that: during the Cultural Revolution, Tibetans were required to assist in this destruction. The process created a kind of mental dissonance; people who lived through the Cultural Revolution in Tibet described it as when the sky fell to earth. There are countless stories of people simply losing their minds in the face of this violent attack on their own selves. Twenty years ago, in a village near Everest, I was told how, during the Cultural Revolution, party cadres had instructed local people to destroy the treasures in their monastery, a process then underway right across the plateau. One of the villagers took these treasures and buried them secretly on the mountainside across the valley. Only he knew their location. He was later taken away to a re-education camp and beaten so badly he lost his mind. Villagers spent years digging in likely places but without success. The treasures remain hidden where he left them.

  Maoism believed human nature is a blank slate. Tibetan minds could simply be scraped clean and the party’s wishes written over the past. It didn’t work out like that. Ngawang Sangdrol’s defiance, more than two decades after that of Thrinley Choedron, has been followed by two more decades of protest. This has culminated in the last decade with a horrific campaign of self-immolation, mostly in areas outside central Tibet, in historically Tibetan areas now absorbed into Chinese provinces. Many of those committing suicide have been current or former monks and nuns. One of these was a nun called Palden Choetso, the eleventh of around a hundred and fifty Tibetans who have now sacrificed themselves in this way and the second woman to do so. She was thirty-five years old and had been a nun since the age of twenty. Choetso’s nunnery was Geden Choeling, near Tawu in Sichuan. A number of Geden Choeling’s nuns had been involved in the widespread demonstrations that erupted in March 2008 in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. On 3 November 2011, Choetso walked into the centre of town, poured petrol over her head and set herself on fire. Unlike the first female self-immolation, twenty-year-old Tenzin Wangmo, the death of Palden Choetso was filmed. Witnesses reported hearing her shouting slogans in support of the Dalai Lama but it’s the screams of onlookers that dominate the footage. Choetso stands ramrod straight for more than twenty seconds as she is wholly engulfed in flames. As she finally collapses on the ground, a woman steps forward with a kada, the white silk ceremonial scarf, and throws it towards her.

  In 1975, Han Suyin, the China-born novelist who had put the coronation of Mahendra in her novel The Mountain is Young, was granted permission to tour Tibet. A feminist and admirer of the Chinese Communist Party, she zeroed in on what communism had done for Tibetan women:

  the Tibetan woman appears to me more ‘revolutionary’, ready to revolt, because her exploitation has been so great. Since she was kept out of religious ritual though not free from religious extortion, once she realised that her labour was a strength, her repudiation of that system was all the more forceful.

  So what does the long sequence of women prepared to suffer unimaginable physical agonies tell us? China argues that such protests are orchestrated externally, the culprits being those who wish to split the motherland, the Dalai Lama chief amongst them, and damage China. Yet the perseverance of such visceral and extreme opposition after seventy years suggests powerful misjudgments on the part of Beijing.

  Ordinary Chinese, even when they know about the self-immolations, manage to disconnect the agony of Tibetans from the picture postcard appeal of Tibet. The Tibetan-born poet and essayist Tsering Woeser recalled discussing the issue with Chinese tourists on the train to Lhasa but they soon lost interest.

  I wanted to say more, to tell them about the last words uttered by self-immolators. But at that point most people don’t want to listen anymore. Going to Tibet on holiday is a dream for many Chinese people, and my fellow travelers that day just wanted to carry on with their journeys and make good use of their hard-earned vacation.

  At Lhasa, as the Chinese tourists streamed out of the station excited to visit the city, Woeser and the handful of Tibetan passengers were held behind to have their identity cards scanned and suffer further questioning.

  In recent years, China has made colossal investments in the Tibetan region. In 2011, a few months before Palden Choetso set herself on fire, Beijing announced a package of 226 infrastructure projects – airports, roads, railways and hydropower – worth $21 billion. The consequent rise in living standards among Tibetans is obvious. And yet Tibetan people continue to make their dissatisfaction clear, to the bewilderment and anger of Han Chinese, who are sensitised to react to criticism of China’s policy in Tibet as foreign meddling. Despite the most intrusive and sophisticated state surveillance anywhere in the world, despite myriad layers of informants and subsidies, Tibetans continue to find enough space to maintain their identity: to remain space-dancers. The gap between China’s rhetoric and reality suggests that in some profound way China’s occupation has failed. And the obvious question is why.

  *

  Tibet was no
t wholly and immediately opposed to China’s intervention in 1950. The Chinese behaved with considerable restraint after their brief military campaign, leaving the aristocratic and monastic power structures in place in the short term. Within four years, two roads had been constructed to link Tibet with China, a stunning achievement that employed thirty thousand grateful Tibetans. With Tibet’s Indian border now closed because of China’s occupation, the wool trade suffered, so China simply bought up all the wool, to the delight of rich trading families. Health care improved and opportunities for education in China were welcomed. When the Dalai Lama went to Beijing and met Mao in 1954, he wrote a poem in which he called China’s intervention the ‘timely rain’. The Dalai Lama himself told the writer Patrick French how he

  had enthusiasm that Tibet could transform itself under Communist leadership. Chairman Mao made a lot of promises. . . . The reason I left Tibet was not because I was against reform in principle.

  Indeed, the need for reform in Tibet had been glaringly obvious throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The thirteenth Dalai Lama had wanted in a modest way to usher Tibet towards the modern world but resistance to change was deeply entrenched. Tibet was a theocracy and monasteries controlled much of its economic activity, relying on landholdings and trade to maintain huge numbers of monks, like much of Europe in the fourteenth century. Pull one strand, and the whole tapestry would fall apart. Government was not something ordinary Tibetans did; political consciousness amounted to a visceral trust in the Dalai Lama. Running the country was left to senior lamas and Tibet’s aristocratic families, who would often compete for influence when the Dalai Lama was in his minority. Ordinary Tibetans outside Lhasa had little or no idea of how a modern country was run; that was confined to those wealthier individuals educated in India. It was this class that was agitating most strongly for change.

  Much of that agitation happened outside Tibet. The Indian town of Kalimpong in Sikkim, high above the Tista valley east of Darjeeling, was in the 1930s the focus of the wool trade with eastern Tibet and consequently a centre of intrigue; it was here, in fact, that Gergan Tharchin ran the Mirror, the only Tibetan-language newspaper, with support from the British. In 1939, it was also where a number of dissidents founded the opposition Tibet Improvement Party, although its activities remained piecemeal and clandestine. The new party’s most influential figures were Thubten Kunphela, the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s strongman in the early 1930s but banished after his death, and Pandatsang Rapga, one of the hugely rich Pandatsang clan from Kham, which more or less controlled Kham’s wool trade, much of which was now exported through the town. Rapga was an ardent admirer of the Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen and his ‘three principles’: nationalism, democracy and the people’s welfare. The ninth Panchen Lama, in exile on the western fringes of nationalist China, was another who favoured Sun Yat-sen’s political philosophy. Rapga envisaged a future for Tibet as an autonomous republic within China, and sought the help of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in support of a Kham militia that would defeat the Tibetan army, overthrow the kashag government in Lhasa and liberate the people from the rule of the monastic elite.

  Caught up in this proto-revolutionary movement was the influential Tibetan writer Gendun Chopel, a man whose complicated life reveals far more about pre-invasion Tibet than either Kunphela or Rapga. To what extent he committed himself to the cause of these Tibetan political exiles is, like so much about Chopel’s life, hard to pin down. A maverick former monk, Chopel was the Tibetan intellectual star of the early twentieth century, expelled from his monastery in Amdo for asking all the right wrong questions. In 1927, aged twenty-four, he travelled to Lhasa and studied at Drepung monastery, debating with its best young scholar, Sherab Gyatso, who became so infuriated that he gave up using Chopel’s name and began referring to him simply as ‘madman’. In 1934 Sherab Gyatso introduced Chopel to the Indian Sanskrit scholar Rahul Sankrityayan, a Buddhist and independence campaigner, whom the British had once jailed. (Sankrityayan later became an atheist Marxist teaching Buddhism in Leningrad.) At the time of their meeting, Sankrityayan was on his second trip to Tibet, hunting original Sanskrit versions of the ancient Buddhist scriptures that the lotsawa had translated into Tibetan at the start of the millennium. He had identified two monasteries near Shigatse, Ngor and Shalu, as likely sources but needed an expert translator to help him look. Knowing Sherab Gyatso’s reputation, he asked him; Sherab Gyatso instead put him in touch with his most quarrelsome student, Gendun Chopel. Sankrityayan and Chopel found what they were looking for, written in faded ink on crumbling palm leaves, and continued south to Kathmandu, where they spent five months studying them. They seem to have got on well: Sankrityayan introduced Chopel to the Maha Bodhi society, the most important Buddhist organisation in India, leading the campaign to restore Buddhism’s most sacred sites. When Sankrityayan was done in Kathmandu, he headed to Japan, leaving Chopel to fend for himself, first in Darjeeling, later in Kalimpong, where he became friends with the newspaper editor Gergan Tharchin.

  Chopel was able to help Tharchin with a translation problem, one that would have significant political impact. Tharchin had in his possession some documents from the Dunhuang Caves, left to him by the French scholar Jacques Bacot. Translating them from archaic to modern Tibetan had so far proved too difficult. As Chopel made progress, a new way of seeing his country began to emerge. Chopel had read translations of the Tang annals, which offered a view of Tibet’s early history from the end of the first millennium, albeit from the perspective of an imperial Chinese dynasty. But this was the first time a Tibetan historian had access to Tibetan sources illustrating the scope of Tibet’s old empire. In the flowing tide of Indian nationalism, swollen by the prospect of independence, these fresh perspectives inspired him to write a new history of Tibet, called the White Annals, ‘To measure the dominion and power of the first Tibetan kingdom’. He was still working on it at his death, more than a decade later.

  In all Chopel spent twelve years in India during the late 1930s and 1940s, living the life of a dharma bum, a drifter with a razor mind; he kept himself fed with translation work, spending years working for the wealthy Russian Tibetologist George Roerich on a translation of the fifteenth-century Tibetan history, the Blue Annals. (Chopel wrote that in taking such work ‘the lion is made servant to the dog’ and fretted he wasn’t given due credit.) He drank heavily, smoked opium and drew on his visits to brothels in Calcutta to produce a book of erotica, written entirely in verse: the Treatise on Passion. (He recommends reciting multiplication tables to men wanting to delay ejaculation and hopes, rather generously, his former lovers ‘Continue on the path, from bliss to bliss / To arrive at great bliss, the place of the dharamakaya.’) Chopel remarked acidly how as a young monk he had kept his vows of celibacy when so many monks around him hadn’t – and yet he was the one expelled. The three main monasteries at Lhasa had around five thousand monks each, which must have made them intimidating places for young getsul, or novice monks. The Tibetan historian Tashi Tsering, press-ganged as a boy into joining the Dalai Lama’s dance troupe in 1942, described the dangers of being captured by senior monks on the look-out for a new catamite. Chopel made fun of this in his poetry, which is more accessible and much more fun than his philosopy: sly but warm. ‘Everyone pretends to dislike sex, / But in the mind sex is the only thing everyone likes.’ During this time he also wrote Grains of Gold, an encyclopaedic account of the modern world and how it was made, with a shrewd take on the evils of colonialism, as well as newspaper articles in which he lambasted the Tibetan establishment for its backwardness.

  In 1937, hearing that his old sparring partner Sherab Gyatso was leaving Lhasa to travel by sea to China, Gendun Chopel went to Calcutta to see him off. They had a fiery argument in a hotel room about whether or not the world was flat. Sherab Gyatso thumped the table and said: ‘I will make it flat.’ Chopel, who had studied some Western astronomy in India, warned his friend he wouldn’t be taken seriously in Chin
a if he carried on like that. Sherab Gyatso slapped him round the head, startling those who had gathered in the room to witness the conversation of these great Buddhist scholars. Chopel wrote up the argument for Gergan Tharchin’s Mirror the following year.

  While waiting for the boat, a mutual friend from Lhasa introduced the pair to Francis Younghusband, now in his seventies, who had arrived in India a few days before to meet Charles Lindbergh. America’s famous aviator had written to Younghusband out of the blue with the ambition to explore the mysteries of the universe and ‘squat with a yogi’. They had dinner together with Lindbergh’s wife Anne, as well as David Macdonald, the long-serving ‘political’ and trade agent, and the American Theos Bernard, the self-styled ‘white lama’, just back from Tibet, where Tharchin had been showing him around. Bernard took a shine to Gendun Chopel and would have brought him to America if Chopel had not been refused a visa. Next day, Younghusband gave a short speech on the Calcutta dockside as Sherab Gyatso embarked for China. Gyatso would later work with the Chinese, becoming deputy chairman of the new communist Qinghai provincial government even before China took over central Tibet.

  There is no record of Gendun Chopel’s response to the irony of the imperialist adventurer Younghusband wishing safe travels to a Tibetan scholar. We do know that under the influence of his Indian friend Sankrityayan, Chopel was excoriating on the subject of British colonialism and the British themselves. ‘Beware the race of golden-haired monkeys,’ he wrote in a poem that condemned the British for ‘Lacking the oil of compassion that benefits others’. Chopel’s last years in India were spent in political intrigue back in Kalimpong. While the depth of his commitment to the Tibet Improvement Party is unclear, he did design its logo, which featured its name in Tibetan and Chinese. (The Chinese name was more upfront, translating as Tibet Revolutionary Party.) Pandatsang Rapga commissioned Gendun Chopel to return to Lhasa via a roundabout route and along the way make maps and notes of the border with British India, information that would be passed on to the Kuomintang. That may be what landed Chopel in hot water.