Escape from the Land of Snows (12 page)

In front of the Norbulingka, neighborhood leaders threaded through the crowd, signing up people to guard the summer palace against the PLA. The sixteen-year-old protester Yonten ran up to a man he knew and asked to be put on the list. “
You’re too young,” the man shot back, but the teenager persisted. “I cried and pleaded
with him to accept my name by saying that I would be happy to carry a single bullet.” As fresh chants rumbled through the crowd, the man looked at him and quickly jotted his name on the paper. Yonten was ecstatic. He was now fully one of the crowd, the movement of his legs locked to its every swivel and rush, his voice hoarse with the day’s slogans.

A protester shouted out that the only way the Dalai Lama would leave the Norbulingka was if his vehicle rolled over their bodies. Others roared their approval. Elsewhere in Lhasa, the Tibetan army was actually considering this idea as a tactic.
One Tibetan doctor went to morning assembly and received orders that he and his unit of army troops were to line the route from the Norbulingka to the Chinese military camp with their guns unloaded. If they saw His Holiness’s car approaching, they were to lie down in the road and stop it.

At 3:00 p.m. the crowd stirred as officials emerged from the Norbulingka. A cabinet member picked up a megaphone. “The main fear of the Tibetan people is that His Holiness will go to the Chinese army base to see their performance,” he called, his voice echoing out over the upturned faces under bright sunlight. “But His Holiness is not going to go. You should all go back to your homes.” A murmur of satisfaction rippled through the crowd: they’d saved the Precious Jewel, at least for now.

Voices called from the crowd to allow them to see the Dalai Lama. The officials conferred among themselves and agreed. The massed Tibetans, in a scene out of the French Revolution, chose seventeen “people’s representatives” to meet with His Holiness and plan for the coming days. To the cheers of the crowd, their leaders were escorted through the gates of the summer palace. Tibet now had a kind of democratic assembly for the first time in a thousand years.

• • •

Around 4:00 p.m., Choegyal was finally released from the Chinese HQ. Eager to find out what had happened back home, he hurried toward his mother’s residence. On the way, he passed a pillbox swarming with PLA soldiers carrying black submachine guns. He’d never come across Chinese soldiers so tense before, so clearly ready to shoot.

Soon after, a servant from the Norbulingka found Choegyal and escorted him home. They passed through the gates and into the palace grounds, where his mother was waiting in a small house. Choegyal caught a glimpse of her in a window. Diki Tsering saw him and immediately began clapping. He could hear her voice calling out to him.

“
She was very happy to see me,” Choegyal said.

As dusk fell, the People’s Representatives—along with about seventy members of the Tibetan government itself—convened a meeting inside the grounds of the Norbulingka. They declared Chinese authority in Tibet null and void. The Kusung Regiment, the Dalai Lama’s corps of bodyguards, decided they would no longer take orders from the occupiers. Tibetan army troops began to shed their Chinese-issued uniforms and replace them with their traditional khaki.

Perhaps 5,000 protesters remained at the Norbulingka to ensure that the Dalai Lama was not smuggled out to the occupiers. “
The officials kept saying that they didn’t need more guards, since the army and the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards were enough,” remembers sixteen-year-old Yonten. But the Tibetans, who a day before would have obeyed the cabinet without hesitation, ignored them. “The choice was in the people’s hands.”

Yonten wasn’t about to go home as evening fell. He felt his section of the crowd move toward the Lhasa road, and he let himself be carried with it, chanting “Tibet Is Free!” along the path open to the plains until the words began echoing off alley walls, and he looked up above the shoulders of his fellow marchers and saw they were in central Lhasa. “The whole city was filled with the sound,” he remembered. Soon he found himself standing in front of the Yuthok, the home of the highest-ranking Chinese official in Tibet, an old aristocratic mansion that had been bought by the government but still kept the name of the family that had lived there for generations. Guards quickly pulled the doors shut and soldiers appeared on the rooftop, pointing their rifles down at the swirling masses. Men began pulling open their shirts and asking the Chinese to shoot them in the chest. For ten minutes, they called up to the soldiers before moving off to Barkhor Street, where they “took two turns around” the square and then, as night fell, drifted off to their homes.

Late in the day, the Dalai Lama received a letter from Tan Guansan. “Since you have been put into very great difficulties due to the intrigues and provocations of the reactionaries,” he wrote, “it may be advisable that you do not come for the time being.” It was clearly an attempt to save face: the decision not to attend the show had been made by the Dalai Lama hours earlier, but with the letter Tan Guansan could claim credit for it.

The Dalai Lama’s reply indicates the enormous pressure he was under. He apologized for not attending, saying he was prevented by “reactionary elements.” “This has put me to indescribable shame,” he wrote. “I am greatly upset and worried and at a loss as to what to do.” There was a long tradition of Tibetan leaders writing insincere letters to their Chinese counterparts in order to get their own way; it was seen as a necessary diplomatic device. The Dalai Lama would later dismiss the letter (and two others to follow) as
a delaying tactic, but his tone is striking. The protests had clearly caught him off-balance.

Yonten arrived home. His father, whom he deeply loved, was a teacher who ran his own school for the sons of all classes, from farmers to nobles. He was also a longtime Tibetan nationalist who’d fought against the Chinese occupation. He had been chosen as one of the People’s Representatives and was at that moment at one of the tumultuous meetings being held at the Norbulingka. Yonten, bursting with the news of what he’d done and said that day, told his sister, the one who’d run out with wet hair that morning, that he’d signed up as part of the volunteer guard for the Norbulingka. He ordered her to pack a bag with barley and flour so he’d have something to eat. His sister just laughed at Yonten; he was an excitable boy who wasn’t going anywhere near the summer palace. She told him to wait for their father to get home before he started collecting provisions.

When his father arrived, Yonten begged him for permission to guard the Dalai Lama. His father just smiled. “
You’re too young,” he said. “If war breaks out, what are you going to do?”

Yonten felt that the words he’d chanted all day long—“We shall fight to the last man, even if only women are left to defend the country!”—applied directly to him. He pleaded to be allowed to stand between the PLA and the Dalai Lama.

Finally, moved by his son’s persistence or just exhausted, his father relented. He would let the boy come with him to the meetings of the People’s Representatives. “At last he understood me,” Yonten remembers. “And he said I could follow him. It was Buddha’s way.”

As night fell, a group of young monks left their vigil outside
the Norbulingka and returned to Drepung Monastery. The
choe-ra
, the common area shaded by willows where the lamas would teach the novices, was empty. The entire monastery seemed deserted. Still disturbed by what they had seen in the city, the young monks climbed to the monastery roof and sat there under the moonlight, looking at Lhasa in the distance. As they watched, the sound of a drummer beating a dirge-like rhythm over and over pulsed out from the monastery’s Temple of Wrathful Deities. There, in an airless, black-painted room, smelling strongly of rancid butter, with gaping-mouthed demons and monsters painted on the walls, surrounded by costumes made of bones, monks were chanting out prayers for the safety of Tibet. It was a place of horrors designed to protect against horrors, and its drum beat through the night.

None of the young men could sleep.

Over the next few days, the tension rose almost by the hour.

Swarms of women banging pots and kettles and shouting slogans emerged from the narrow alleys of Lhasa and surged toward the Potala Palace. There were young girls, grandmothers, aristocrats, servants, women who found themselves side by side for the first time in their lives. Many of them taunted the Chinese soldiers, newly installed on the rooftops along Barkhor Square, crying, “Go ahead and shoot us!”

Monks at the three great monasteries ringing the city awoke to find their sleepy bastions militarized. Each of the Great Three had a “master of discipline” who meted out punishments for infractions. Now as the monks gathered in the
choe-ra
, these men called out for volunteers to guard the Norbulingka and protect the Dalai Lama. At Sera, three miles north of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, a young monk awoke to the sound of Chinese voices.
“The
loudspeakers were saying they would kill the three red bugs if we didn’t obey them,” he recalled. The “three red bugs” was a local colloquialism for the three chief monasteries of Tibet—the Chinese had begun using native slang in their warnings.

The 500 monks at Sera rushed to a meeting, and each house within the monastery was asked to produce 10 volunteers. The young monk stood up. “
I was a tough guy,” he says. “Only twenty-five years old.” He was handed an old British rifle, a World War I relic, serviceable but hardly a match for the Chinese machine guns. The monks were told there was one gun for every two men, and only a hundred bullets for the entire house. At another monastery, Ganden, one of the faithful listened to his abbot speak. “
He pleaded with those who were deeply engrossed in their studies not to go, as it was also essential to protect the Dharma.” But those who felt their vocation less intensely could abandon their vows. The abbot made it clear that once a monk volunteered for the resistance, the punishment for backing out was death.

Some of the volunteers formally renounced their vows in an odd ceremony, exchanging their maroon-and-gold robes for a gun, or a sword, or just a pledge to protect His Holiness. The monks now entered a kind of spiritual netherworld. Violence against even an insect was forbidden in Tibetan Buddhism; to kill a man was to cast oneself into the realm of demons. “
My spiritual comrades and I felt very uncomfortable about choosing the path of violence,” remembers one Ganden monk. He was a novice, and he offered back his vows to his mentor, “thinking this would make my sin lesser.” But he couldn’t deny that he was driven by what Buddhism regarded as repugnant desires. “I was a human being and I felt these negative emotions intensely—I kept thinking about revenging myself over and over again on the Chinese for their brutal killings.”

The Lord Chamberlain was leaving nothing to chance. He
issued a command banning the use of electric flashlights, all the rage in Lhasa, which lacked streetlights. The Lord Chamberlain was worried that if His Holiness was forced to escape, a soldier or citizen might flash a torch into the face of a soldier and find it to be the Dalai Lama in disguise. He also sent a messenger galloping to the southeast, to inform Athar and Lhotse—the only connections to the CIA and the Americans—about recent developments and asking them to set off immediately toward Lhasa. “Immediately” in the rugged country of southern Tibet was relative, however—it would take six days for the message to reach the two CIA operatives.

On March 16, Athar was at Lhuntse Dzong, a huge stone fort in the south of Tibet, sixty miles north of the Indian border, that was commanded by the rebels. Having failed to meet with the Dalai Lama, Athar and Lhotse were focused on building up the rebels. On February 22, they’d watched a second load of CIA-bought arms parachuting onto their landing zone, guided by another dung bonfire, and they’d helped hide the munitions in a secret cache for future operations. The pair were in constant contact with the CIA,
but they had essentially given up on the Dalai Lama and his government, having had no contact with Lhasa for a year.

Every day, Athar would laboriously encrypt that day’s information, using his one-time pad and employing the five digits common to the Chinese commercial telegraph system. At the time designated in his signal book, Athar would then crank up the generator of the RS-1 crystal radio and send the report in Morse code. The transmission would be picked up by the CIA’s station at Okinawa, then relayed from station to station all the way to Washington. If it was intercepted, it would appear to be a harmless order for batches of silk or truck parts.

Athar was in far more danger than he realized. A year earlier, just after his first meeting with the Lord Chamberlain, Tan
Guansan had met with the Tibetan cabinet and vented his rage on them. He revealed that the Chinese knew of radio messages being broadcast from a small mountaintop near Lhasa. By decoding the messages—something the CIA didn’t believe they were capable of—the Chinese had discovered that the Tibetans had gone to the Americans for help. It was a revelation that played into Peking’s deep paranoia about foreign interlopers in Tibet. With this discovery of American aid, Tibet had become far more than a troublesome borderland issue for the Peking leadership. It was now a matter of national security. The PLA had even caught one of the CIA-trained Khampa guerrillas and—it was assumed, though nobody knew for sure—forced him to reveal the details of the entire operation.

Back at the Norbulingka, on March 16 the Dalai Lama again went for a walk as the sun set. He marveled at how normal and serene the Jewel Park was. There were his bodyguards, out of uniform, bent over his flower beds, carefully watering the budding plants from a long-nosed can. His beloved peacocks strutted across the manicured lawns. Brahmini ducks floated on the pond, their kicks under the surface sending a slight ripple across the smooth green-black water.

It was, as Buddha taught him, illusion, all illusion. “I must admit,” said the Dalai Lama, “I was very near despair.”