Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Hugh Richardson also knew what was happening; an informant told him that Rapga had put in a print order for party membership cards. The Tibetans demanded Ragpa be extradited, but Chiang Kai-shek had given him a Chinese passport and he fled to Shanghai. The unlikely charge the Tibetan authorities made against Gendun Chopel, meanwhile, was distributing counterfeit money; he was interrogated, lashed, given a three-year sentence and thrown in the grim Shol prison at the foot of the Potala. Even then, the lamas still wanted his scholarship, giving him writing materials so he could continue working. While in Lhasa he produced his most famous work, the Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought, a treatise on madhyamaka, or ‘middle way’, philosophy, although only those with a working knowledge of the Geluk school of Buddhism can properly appreciate its brilliance. His sense of humour never left him, though, nor his love of verse. On the wall of the cell he left an impish poem:

  May the wise regard as an object of compassion

  The small truthful child left all alone

  In the wilderness where the frightening roar resounds

  Of the stubborn tiger drunk on the blood of envy.

  When the People’s Liberation Army came he advised Tibet’s youth to go to China for a decent education and then modernise the country. Chopel died of alcoholism in 1951.

  *

  If the Tibet Improvement Party was tinged with the half-bored resentment of the aristocrat in exile, Tibet’s communists proved much more direct. The central figure in the party was Baba Phuntsok Wangyal, his name often abbreviated to Phunwang, born in the eastern Kham town of Batang in 1922, a place beyond the political reach of the kashag government in Lhasa but very much part of the ethnic Tibetan world. He grew up a tall, bearish man, though highly intelligent and cultured, and was educated at a special academy in Nanjing in China, run by the Kuomintang’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission. In 1934, after war broke out between China and Japan, the school moved to the provisional Kuomintang capital at Chongqing and there he came into contact with communism. Chiang Kai-shek personally expelled Phunwang from the academy when his political affiliation was discovered. Aged eighteen and already mobilising Tibetan communists, he met Zhou Enlai, later the first prime minister of communist China under Chairman Mao. Phunwang’s ambition was vast. While Gendun Chopel had been impressed at the scale of old Tibet’s power, Phunwang envisaged recreating it: reuniting all the different parts of the Tibetan world, including Ladakh, and transforming its anachronistic feudal system into a modern socialist state.

  Through much of the 1940s he was living in Lhasa, his house a talking shop for left-wing intellectuals and those aristocrats who wanted modernisation. At the same time he was running a guerrilla campaign against the Sichuan warlord Liu Wenhui, a thorn in the side of Tibetans in Kham since he allied with Ma Bufang in the 1930s to defeat the Tibetan army. (In fact, Liu Wenhui’s alignment with the Kuomintang was nominal: he had given the communists an easy ride during the Long March, when they retreated into the interior from their bases in Jiangxi province, and would prove more than ready to switch sides when the communists took power.) The problem was nobody took Phunwang that seriously. When he went to Kalimpong to drum up British support for the Tibetan army against Liu Wenhui he had little success: the British were too busy planning their exit strategy to pay any attention. When his communist activities eventually got him expelled from Lhasa in 1949, the year that the communist party took control of China, he wrote to the editor of the Mirror, Gergan Tharchin, whom he had befriended while in Kalimpong: ‘If the Tibetan government does not listen, I shall bring the [communist] Chinese Army to Tibet. Then I shall write to you.’ That October, communists in eastern Kham held a public meeting in Phunwang’s hometown of Batang to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China: Mao had triumphed in the civil war and his opponent Chiang Kai-shek was on the verge of fleeing to Taiwan. Phunwang made a speech and had the moment recorded on camera as he allied his small band of communists to the might of the Communist Party of China.

  Early in 1950, a few weeks after his speech, Phunwang got a telegram from Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army, inviting him to Chongqing to discuss the ‘practical questions of peacefully liberating Tibet’. Later that year he met Deng Xiaoping, then the party’s secretary general, later Mao’s successor as leader of the People’s Republic from 1978, who described him as a

  very able man, has connections with upper class Tibetans, united a group of outstanding youths. An open communist in the Kham–Tibet region, fluent in Chinese, can read English books. Has basic knowledge of Marxism–Leninism and great power of understanding. Rare cadre among Tibetan nationalities. . . . [We] have decided to order him to go with the PLA entering Tibet.

  During the night of 6 and 7 October, the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Jinsha river, the upper Yangtze, and moved with dazzling speed to isolate the main strength of the Tibetan army, poorly dug in around the border town of Chamdo. The Tibetan commander, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, a deeply equivocal figure for many Tibetans, did not think his troops had any kind of chance against the Chinese. Some units fought bravely, but this limited engagement, at the cost of a few hundred lives, far from the capital Lhasa, constituted the extent of Tibet’s military opposition. On 19 October Ngabo surrendered and negotiations for the wider surrender began. When the Chinese marched into Lhasa in 1951 Phunwang sent Tharchin a telegram: ‘Safely arrived in Lhasa Phuntsok Wangyal.’

  Not surprisingly, many Tibetans came to regard Phunwang as a traitor but his role and eventual fate would reveal him as a patriot, one who would pay dearly for his commitment to the Tibetan people’s cause. In 1957, during Mao’s short-lived Hundred Flowers Campaign, a neat trick to flush out his enemies by inviting them to express their complaints and suggestions, Phunwang had suggested administrative changes in Kham that would address resentments there that were fuelling the Tibetan guerrilla war against communist rule then underway; it was a way of addressing the discrimination meted out against those who were not ethnically Han Chinese, chauvinism that Mao said he was keen to attack. The following summer Phunwang got a call from his boss ordering him to Beijing. There he was denounced. Han chauvinism, it transpired, had given way to a new evil: local nationalism. Phunwang had been a loyal senior cadre with the ear of the Dalai Lama. He had been the Dalai Lama’s interpreter in Beijing and before that had worked on the Seventeen-Point Agreement that had followed the 1950 invasion. But like any bureaucracy, the communist party was a career path best suited to those who kept their heads down. In 1960, this experienced and capable man was put in solitary confinement in Beijing’s notorious Qincheng prison (where the Tiananmen Square leaders were later incarcerated) for eighteen years. When Phunwang was finally released, several years after Mao’s death, his daughter recalled her father drooling from the side of his mouth. In his mid eighties he wrote a series of powerful essays, including open letters to the Chinese president Hu Jintao, detailing China’s flawed policies in Tibet and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama.

  Phuntsok Wangyal and Gendun Chopel were both punished for their opposition to Tibet’s kashag government: Chopel with imprisonment and Phunwang with banishment. Tibet’s theocratic regime saw itself as synonymous with the state. Reform had been difficult enough before the war, when China was weak; it was impossible to contemplate structural change during a period of existential crisis. During 1949, as the Kuomintang faced defeat, the kashag took steps to distance itself from all brands of Chinese hegemony. A list was drawn up of communist sympathisers, among them Phunwang, who were expelled. At the same time, the Kuomintang’s representatives, who had arrived in 1934 under the pretext of the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, were told to pack their bags and leave. There was justified concern that elements of this group would happily switch sides when the communists won, giving Mao a de facto presence in Lhasa from the start.

  An editorial in China’s Xinhua Daily dismissed the move as ‘a plot undertaken by local Tibetan
authorities at the instigation of the British imperialists and their lackey, the Nehru administration of India’. As the editorial continued, rooting out the Kuomintang was ‘the business of the Chinese people in their revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party’. It was no business of foreign countries. Accusations of foreign interference have remained an unbroken thread in China’s narrative about Tibet, a spectre from the Opium Wars and China’s colonial humiliation, useful in generating a shared sense of national outrage. It was true that Hugh Richardson stayed on in Lhasa as an employee of the Indian government and likely had some influence on the kashag’s action. And it is undeniable that, like the Rana dynasty in Nepal, Tibet turned, with increasing desperation, to the international community as an answer to the new realities of postcolonial Asia. But this was done by force of circumstance, not least the rise of an anti-religious communist party in China, rather than because Tibet had been duped into self-harm by a Western imperial puppet-master.

  *

  In 1949, India’s political officer in Sikkim was Harishwar Dayal, a rising diplomatic talent in his mid thirties married to the former Indian tennis star Leela Row. (He would later serve as India’s ambassador to Nepal but collapsed and died there while trekking in the Everest region.) Dayal was regarded as sympathetic to the Tibetans. His predecessor, the last British political officer of Sikkim Arthur Hopkinson, had written to Eric Bailey, now in retirement at Stiffkey in Norfolk, birdwatching and writing up his life’s adventures: ‘At first the [Indian National] Congress were showing signs of completely selling out the Tibs [sic], but we persistently combated this.’ Dayal promised to supplement arms and ammunition deliveries already made by the government of India to Tibet but stressed the importance of training. Little had changed since Basil Gould’s mission in 1936, when Brigadier Philip Neame, the only man ever to earn a Victoria Cross and an Olympic gold medal, gave a devastating indictment of Tibetan military capability:

  The Tibetan Government has absolutely no idea of military organisation, administration or training. The military authorities, even if they had the knowledge, have no power to apply it. The troops are untrained, unreliable, and unpopular with the country. . . . In fact, it is justifiable to say that, except for the fact that they possess a certain number of modern weapons, which few of them know how to use, the army has advanced but little from its condition in 1904.

  When Neame attended a drill exhibition staged for him in Lhasa, he discovered that none of the soldiers on parade had fired their guns for six years. He drew up a list of proposals to modernise the army. By the summer of 1949, Heinrich Harrer reported, the ‘flat pasture lands around Lhasa were transformed into training grounds’, but it was far too late to be fixing the roof: the storm was upon them.

  With Tibet’s military ill prepared to deal with the battled-hardened People’s Liberation Army, the best hope for an independent Tibet lay with diplomacy and an appeal to the outside world. In 1948 a trade mission was sent to Britain and the United States. (This gave the delegates foreign visa stamps in Tibetan passports, which were held up as naïvely hopeful evidence of Tibet’s independent status.) As we have seen, the sudden rush towards a world that had for so long been kept at arm’s length was startling – and not just for the world’s mountaineers. The Tibetan government asked Heinrich Harrer to monitor foreign news stations for references to Tibet, and in January 1950 Radio Lhasa made its first broadcast, a half-hour news bulletin in Tibetan, Chinese and English, the latter read by Reginald Fox, one of two British radio engineers working for the Tibetan government on equipment donated by the United States. The other British operator was an ex-air force engineer from Burton-on-Trent called Robert Ford. In the summer of 1949 he left Lhasa to establish a radio link with the eastern province of Kham and help train the Tibetan army for the coming invasion. He was still there when the People’s Liberation Army arrived, and spent the next five years in a Chinese prison in fear of his life, an illustration of how Britain’s former influence in the region had crumbled to nothing.

  In the autumn of 1949, an engineer from General Electric called J E Reid spent seven weeks in Lhasa to assess the potential for a new hydroelectric scheme. He reported the Tibetan government ‘had suddenly awoken to the reality of the dangers which threatened it and is now regretting its past policy of keeping aloof’. The Lhasa government now wanted ‘full world publicity’ and to that end had hosted the journalist Lowell Thomas, who seven years later was in Kathmandu for Mahendra’s coronation. He came bearing inappropriate gifts for the Dalai Lama: an ivory cigarette holder and a waste-paper basket made from an elephant’s foot. When Thomas left, he was given a letter to forward to president Harry Truman expressing friendship and seeking recognition.

  Tibet knew of the growing influence of the United States: the thirteenth Dalai Lama had met US ambassador William Rockhill while in exile following the British invasion of 1904. War with Japan had galvanised that relationship. The loss in 1942 of the Burma Road, linking modern Myanmar with south-west China, meant the Allies had to resupply their forces in China by air from India, flying to Kunming in Yunnan over the eastern Himalaya, which pilots dubbed the ‘Hump’. This was dangerous and costly of material, so the Office of Strategic Services mooted the idea of a motor road across Tibet. Despite the State Department’s misgivings, the OSS got permission to send two intelligence officers from India to survey a potential route to Lhasa. They would then continue via Jyekundu in Kham to General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s command in Chongqing.

  In December 1942, the two OSS officers reached Lhasa: Captain Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of the novelist, and Lieutenant Brooke Dolan, who had visited Tibet as a naturalist before the war with the German ornithologist and future SS officer Ernst Schäfer. They carried with them a letter from Franklin D Roosevelt dated 3 July, which explained how ‘the United Nations are fighting today in defense of and for preservation of freedom’. (The United Nations Declaration had been signed on New Year’s Day that year by the ‘four policemen’: the US, the UK, the Soviet Union and nationalist China.) Tolstoy made a good impression on the Tibetan leadership. When he discovered they wanted communications equipment, he arranged for it to be delivered; it was these transmitters that began broadcasting Radio Lhasa in early 1950. Tolstoy also suggested that Tibet might like to attend the peace conference planned for the end of the war. The head of the British mission in Lhasa in late 1942 was the former Gyantse schoolteacher and naturalist Frank Ludlow, through long association a deep Tibetophile: on behalf of the government of India, he promised the Tibetans to ‘do all in my power to help’. Neither man had the authority to make such promises and Tolstoy realised he had overstepped the mark. Roosevelt’s letter had only been written with the express proviso that it didn’t recognise Tibetan independence. With the war far from won, the Americans didn’t want to annoy their Chinese allies.

  However ill founded the promises, the Tibetan Foreign Affairs Bureau leapt at the prospect of attending a post-war peace conference. The foreign minister was an aristocrat called Surkhang Wangchen Gelek, who told his visitors that

  Tibet owed her present independence entirely to Great Britain [and that the] Tibetan Government had always placed implicit trust in Britain’s good faith and had never found this trust misplaced.

  This was disingenuous; many Tibetan aristocrats were Anglophile but they weren’t fools. Even so, they must have been disheartened at how quickly the colonial administration in Delhi disowned the suggestion. Ludlow was instructed to tell the Tibetan government that this idea was his own and not the policy of the government of India. Then he was replaced. An official in London noted: ‘I hope that the Tibetans’ childlike trust in Britain’s good faith will not prove to be misplaced – but I do not feel too much confidence.’

  The British government did consider openly supporting Tibetan independence. Contemplating a postcolonial world, a Foreign Office report written in the spring of 1943 was blunt about how China would spin a future occ
upation of Tibet:

  The Chinese are the least sentimental and altruistic of nations but they are shrewd propagandists and have been clever enough to present their aspirations as an unselfish desire to secure for their neighbours the same freedom from foreign imperialism that they themselves desire.

  Some kind of obligation, the report suggested, could be handed on to a future independent government of India to secure Tibet’s borders against China. In the end, it was deemed prudent not to antagonise China, an ally against Japan. The assumption was made that ‘China is bound to absorb Tibet at the end of the war if not before,’ and in the event of Indian independence, Britain could do little for Tibet. It would be ‘a poor service to the Tibetans to encourage them against the Chinese now’. When the communists announced their intention to invade, Clement Attlee’s government sat on its hands. More than forty years later, in 1987, Robert Barnett, later a noted Tibet activist and academic, watched the anti-China demonstrations that tore through Lhasa that year, the first witnessed by Westerners. He was taken to meet a senior monk and asked the monk if he had a message that Barnett could deliver to his government.

  ‘Which government is that?’ he asked.

  ‘The British,’ I explained.

  He wasn’t crying anymore and he seemed composed. He thought a little and then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. And then he said, ‘The British betrayed us in the past and will betray us in the future.’

  They had and they would. In 2008, with the Beijing Olympics fast approaching, Tibet erupted into violence once again, four days after 10 March, the anniversary of the 1959 uprising. The death toll is disputed, but dozens died, Han and Tibetan. (Chinese media, wanting to highlight innocent Chinese victims, called them the 3/14 riots, an echo of 9/11.) Thousands of Tibetans were detained and by June Amnesty International reported a thousand were still being held, their whereabouts unknown. Four Tibetans were eventually executed for their role in the rioting. That November, as talks between the Dalai Lama’s envoys and Beijing to calm the situation concluded, the British foreign secretary David Miliband announced that Britain was changing its policy towards Tibet. It no longer regarded China as merely having suzerainty over Tibet, a fossil from the Simla Accord of 1914, but instead recognised Tibet as part of China. The word ‘sovereignty’ wasn’t used, but that was the implication. The only weapon of value left from Britain’s colonial war chest was tossed away for no discernible gain.