Escape from the Land of Snows
Read Escape from the Land of Snows Online
Authors: Stephan Talty
Tags: #Tibet Autonomous Region (China), #Escapes, #Bstan-Dzin-Rgya-Mtsho - Childhood and Youth, #Tibetan, #Tibet, #Dalai Lamas, #Asia, #General, #Escapes - China - Tibet, #Religion, #Buddhism, #China, #Biography & Autobiography, #Religious, #History
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Copyright © 2011 by Stephan Talty
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN
and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talty, Stephan.
Escape from the land of snows: the young Dalai Lama’s harrowing flight to freedom and the making of a spiritual hero / Stephan Talty.—1st ed.
1. Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935– —Childhood and youth. 2. Escapes—China—Tibet. I. Title.
BQ7935.B777T36 2010
294.3′923092—dc22 2010019827
[B]
eISBN: 978-0-307-46097-4
Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward
v3.1
For Karen and Suraiya
At the bottom of patience is Heaven.
—Tibetan proverb
Here is a list of the people who are featured in the following pages. A handful of Tibetan words and phrases are also used in the book. If at any time you’re unclear about these terms, please consult the glossary on
this page
.
Athar:
Athar Norbu (also known as Lithang Athar), a Khampa guerrilla trained by the CIA and reinserted into Tibet as a conduit to the resistance.
Noel Barber:
The foreign correspondent for London’s
Daily Mail
in 1959.
Barshi:
Barshi Ngawang Tenkyong, a junior official at the Norbulingka who on March 9, 1959, spread rumors of threats to the Dalai Lama.
Choegyal:
Tendzin Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, recognized as the high lama Ngari Rimpoche.
Choekyong Tsering:
The Dalai Lama’s father.
Diki Tsering:
The Dalai Lama’s mother.
Gadong:
The second-most important oracle in Tibet, after the Nechung.
John Greaney:
The deputy head of the CIA’s Tibetan Task Force in 1959.
Gyalo:
Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s second-oldest brother, who escaped from Tibet in 1952 and later acted as a conduit to the American government.
Heinrich Harrer:
Austrian SS member and soldier in the German army during World War II who escaped a British colonial prison camp in India and fled to Tibet. Author of
Seven Years in Tibet
.
Ken Knaus:
A member of the CIA’s Tibetan Task Force. Later, author of
Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival
.
Ketsing Rimpoche:
Abbott and leader of the Amdo search party for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Lhamo Thondup:
The first given name of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Lhotse:
A Khampa guerrilla trained by the CIA. Athar’s partner in their surveillance and reporting on the resistance.
Lobsang Samden:
One of the Dalai Lama’s older brothers.
Mao Zedong:
The chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and leader of the People’s Republic of China, 1949–76.
Narkyid:
Ngawang Thondup Narkyid, monk official on the Council of Lhasa. Later, the Tibetan language biographer of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.
Nechung:
The state oracle of Tibet.
Ngabö:
Ngawang Jigme, a progressive
kalön
who served as Tibet’s governor-general during the Chinese invasion of 1950 and later served within the post-1959 government.
Norbu:
Thubten Jigme Norbu, the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother.
George Patterson:
Scottish doctor, religious seeker, and Tibetan activist who worked as a correspondent for London’s
Daily Telegraph
.
Panchen Lama:
The second-highest-ranking lama, or religious authority, in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama. In 1959, the Panchen Lama was the former Lobsang Trinley (1938–89).
Phala:
The Dalai Lama’s Lord Chamberlain, who controlled all access to His Holiness.
Reting Rimpoche:
The Dalai Lama’s first regent, 1933–41. He died in prison under mysterious circumstances after unsuccessfully attempting to regain power in 1944–45.
Shan Chao:
A Chinese diarist in Lhasa in 1959 who kept a record of the uprising.
Soepa:
Tenpa Soepa, a junior official at the Norbulingka in 1959.
Yonten:
Lobsang Yonten, scion of a prominent nationalist family and a protester during the 1959 rebellion. Later, a member of the security staff of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Zhou Enlai:
The first premier of the People’s Republic of China, serving from 1949 to 1976.
Early one morning in March 1959, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama walked slowly along a gravel path that led away from his small home at the Norbulingka, his beloved summer palace. The air just after first light still carried a snap of cold that reached from the Himalayas, and the sun was only now beginning to warm the breeze. This was his favorite time to walk the grounds, after rising for prayers and breakfast at 5:00 a.m., when everything was still. Against a sky beginning to lighten, the leaves of the palace trees—poplar and willow, mostly—fairly pulsed green. It was the Dalai Lama’s lucky color.
He was deep in thought, and then deep in the effort to avoid thinking. When he lifted his head he could spot thrushes and willow warblers and even an English kingfisher as they swung through the branches and then out over the two thick walls that surrounded the palace’s 160 acres. The Norbulingka, three miles outside the capital city, Lhasa, was the place the Dalai Lama felt most at home.
As the Dalai Lama walked, he could hear the calls of his pet monkey, which was tethered to a stick in another part of the Jewel Park. If he was lucky, he would spot the musk deer that roamed the grounds, along with cranes, a Mongolian camel, and high-stepping peacocks. He could also hear the occasional burst of gunfire that
echoed outside the walls. Out there, thousands of his fellow Tibetans were camped, guarding against what they thought were conspiracies to kill or abduct him. There were, the Dalai Lama was convinced, no conspiracies, but that didn’t change the power or the direction of the uprising that was gathering in the streets of Lhasa. The crowds would not let him leave, and their very presence was inciting the Chinese, who had occupied the country, or retaken it from a corrupt, intriguing elite, if you asked them, nine years earlier.
The past few days, since the uprising had begun, had run together in a “
dizzying, frightening blur.” The Norbulingka couldn’t have appeared more serene as it took on its new greenery, but it seemed that the future of Tibet was spinning out of control just outside its walls. The Dalai Lama felt that he was caught “
between two volcanoes.” But there were actually more than two sides; the Tibetans themselves were divided. As was his own mind, particularly on the question of what to do now: stay in Lhasa, or flee to a safe haven in the south, or even on to India itself?
As the thin monk, just twenty-three years old, usually luminous with energy, paced slowly along the path, he was successfully avoiding returning to his small whitewashed palace, especially the Audience Hall, where he held his meetings. (It was even furnished with chairs and tables instead of Tibetan cushions, as an optimistic nod to the foreign diplomats he’d hoped to welcome, but the Chinese allowed few visitors.) Bad news was all that arrived there these days. The Chinese official Tan Guansan, one of the leading officials on the influential Tibet Work Commission, had made a point of coming to see him over the past few months, and the confrontations had become increasingly ugly. And for months the Dalai Lama had been receiving messengers arriving from Lhasa and beyond with stories of Chinese atrocities against his people—beheadings,
disembowelments, accounts of monasteries burned with monks inside them—that were so outlandishly brutal that he had to admit he himself didn’t believe them all. “
They were almost beyond the capacity of my imagination,” the Dalai Lama remembered. It simply wasn’t possible for human beings to treat one another that way. Now new reports were coming in daily through the gates of the Norbulingka, watched not only by his bodyguards and Tibetan army troops but also by representatives of “the people’s committee,” a bewildering concept in Tibet, which had been ruled for centuries by aristocrats and abbots, under the authority of the Dalai Lama himself. These bulletins told him that the Chinese were bringing artillery and reinforcements into Lhasa and installing snipers on the rooftops of his restive city. He could sometimes feel the rumble of tanks’ diesel engines as the vehicles negotiated the narrow streets.
What he was trying to avoid thinking of as he walked was the dream he’d had last year. He’d seen massacres in his mind, Tibetan men, women, and children being shot and killed by Chinese troops and his lovely Norbulingka turned into a “killing ground.” This he kept to himself. (But some of his subjects would later report they had had the same dream at the very same time.) He knew that such scenes, if they were allowed to unfold in Lhasa, would be the prelude to something much larger. “
I feared a massive, violent reprisal which could end up destroying the whole nation,” the Dalai Lama said.