Escape from the Land of Snows (13 page)

houghts of the outside world flitted through the Dalai Lama’s mind as the crisis escalated. He understood that Tibet had no reliable friends in the world. He and the cabinet had sought foreign allies as a counterweight to China’s massive power, but they’d been bitterly disappointed by the response. His Holiness knew that messages had been sent in secret to Tibetan mutual-aid societies in India and elsewhere, telling them of the uprising and asking them to rally support outside Tibet. And protesters in Lhasa would soon arrive in front of the
missions of India and Nepal, the only two in Lhasa, pleading for those nations to back their cause.

Many Tibetans held out hope that America, a beacon of freedom even in this hermit kingdom, would somehow come to their rescue. But the Dalai Lama knew that Washington was thousands of miles away and already fighting its own war in Indochina. Having dealt with a cautious State Department in the past, he didn’t believe America would send its sons to die in the Himalayas. But his knowledge of the world was fragmentary at best. “
I had an atlas, and I pored over maps of distant countries,” he said later, “and wondered what life was like in them, but I did not know anyone who had ever seen them.”

As Tibetans dreamt of an improbable victory, the world on March 10 knew nothing of what was happening in Lhasa. Tibet in 1959 was a rumor of a nation, a shadow on the world’s collective memory. Off-limits to foreigners for decades, it was the object of a romantic longing that had only intensified during the gray, dreary confrontations of the Cold War. Tibet was removed not only in space, hidden behind the almost inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas, but in time. Prior to the Chinese arrival, there were only three cars in the country, two Austins and a Dodge, all owned by the Dalai Lama (one had been taken apart and carried over the Himalayas on mules before arriving in Lhasa fully assembled). There were no modern hospitals, no railroads, no cinema, no newspapers. After China invaded in 1950, it brought hydroelectric plants, new roads, and a local newspaper that was published every ten days. But the Chinese occupation had also made information on Tibet even harder to come by. Foreign journalists were banned: no footage of the occupation was allowed out, no photos of the uprising spun on the drums of the Associated Press, no radio networks broadcast the latest news to the capitals of the world. The country was practically
invisible to all but a handful of
chi-ling
, or foreigners of European descent.

What was known, or imagined about Tibet was alluring. It was “a place of dizzy extremes and excesses,” according to the Italian explorer Fosco Maraini. Herodotus had believed monstrous ants burrowed up mounds of gold in its hills, perhaps referring to the Tibetan villagers who collected the earth dug up by the native marmot and extracted gold dust from it. Here mastiffs “as huge as donkeys” could bite off your head in a single gulp, according to Marco Polo, and any Tibetan official who let a foreigner enter was arrested, jailed, tortured, and then tossed into the Tsangpo River. (That last part, in fact, was true.)

The first Western explorer to reach Tibet was probably a Jesuit priest, the Portuguese António de Andrade, who reported on his travels in
The New Discoveries of the Great Cathay or of the Tibetan Kingdom
in 1626. Andrade was convinced Tibet had once been connected to the ancient Christian civilizations, a common belief in Europe at the time. One expert called this the “foreign brother” syndrome, a belief among Tibet-lovers that the nation possessed a culture sympathetic to Europe’s own, exiled among brutes and apostates. This distant and mysterious country was believed to retain values and customs cherished by Westerners. A hundred years later, another Jesuit missionary visited Lhasa and found beautiful architecture and an often bizarre justice system. One method of determining whether a suspect was innocent involved “making an iron red hot and commanding him to lick it thrice.” If he burned his tongue, the man was guilty; if not, he was set free.

Not all the world thought of Tibet as a sanctuary. Princess Kula of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim described a nation consumed by “greed, magic spells, passion, revenge, crimes, love, envy and torture.” But the overall tone was one of admiration. The
massive 1763
Alphabetum Tibetanum
declared that “according to the theories of many historians, the human race expanded from Tibet and its neighboring lands.” There was nothing Tibet was not capable of, including becoming the birthplace of
Homo sapiens
.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Tibet craze struck Europe. Sherlock Holmes, after being killed by Professor Moriarty, returned in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House” and told Watson he’d escaped to Florence and then Tibet, where he’d wandered through Lhasa and enjoyed “spending some days with the head lama.” But the greatest popularizer of Tibet was the English writer James Hilton, whose bestselling 1933 novel
Lost Horizon
tells the story of three Brits and an American who crash-land in the Valley of the Blue Moon, also known as Shangri-La, where the people live long, blissful lives without a hint of cruelty. It was turned into a popular Frank Capra movie in 1937 and became perhaps the most influential vision of Tibet as a haven of peace and sublimity. FDR, who wrote ditties about Tibet and its politics (“I never saw a
Kashag
, I never want to see one …”), even named his presidential retreat Shangri-La before it became the more sober “Camp David.”

One of the best-known authorities on Tibet in the mid-1950s was T (for “Tuesday”) Lobsang Rampa, a Tibetan lama living in London who’d written a book called
The Third Eye
, a memoir of life on the Roof of the World that included descriptions of crystal gazing, mummifications of Lobsang’s previous selves, and yetis, or Abominable Snowmen, flying across the Himalayas on the backs of large box kites. The title referred to an operation the lama had had performed to open up the mystical aperture that would allow him to see the “psychical emanations” of people he met. T Lobsang Rampa described the operation:

The book became a worldwide bestseller, selling 300,000 copies in its first few years, but Tibetophiles—including the author Heinrich Harrer—smelled a rat. Harrer hired a Liverpool detective to look into the lama’s background, and the private eye discovered that T Lobsang was actually Cyril Henry Hoskin, a large-nosed former plumber’s assistant from Devonshire who had shaved his head, bought a monk’s robe, and changed his name. Hoskin, cornered in Ireland, defiantly said that he’d formerly been a man named Cyril Henry Hoskin but that he’d been possessed by the spirit of Lobsang when he’d fallen down and hit his head while photographing a rare owl in Surrey.

Hoskin was a fraud, but he was a very evocative one. Far from being a gimmick,
The Third Eye
presented a compelling, fully imagined world—the
Times Literary Supplement
said the book “came close to being a work of art”—that captivated readers so consistently that it remained in print and highly popular even after the author was exposed. Unfortunately, this was a fully
imagined world, a place that Lobsang/Hoskin and many thousands of others had dreamt into existence out of disgust and boredom with modern life.

In short, the world in 1959 knew almost nothing about Tibet.

Despite the trash about Tibet that was readily accepted in the West, there were a few interested parties, pinpricks of light dappled around the globe who represented a desire to know the country as it truly was. As the Dalai Lama considered leaving Lhasa, these isolated individuals and groups would prove vital.

In Kalimpong, a spy-infested town on the border between India and Tibet, the journalist George Patterson was stirring up a hornet’s nest. The lanky Patterson was a Scot by birth, a doctor by training, and an evangelical Christian by the grace of almighty God. The fervently religious expat had been seeking a personal relationship with his Savior for most of his life. “
I wanted to be like Moses and Joshua,” he said. In 1943, at the age of twenty-three, he’d been reading a book on mountaineering when he heard a voice say, “Go to Tibet.” This was the first time his Savior had spoken to him, in a tone so clear it was “like a knock on the door.” He’d gone to Tibet, treated the sick, and become a convert to the cause of Tibetan nationalism. “I wanted a cause for which I might die,” he wrote. “It was in this cause that I went to Tibet.”

Now, in 1959, the pale, rangy ex-missionary was the lead journalistic agitator for the Tibetans. He’d become a stringer for the well-respected British newspaper the
Daily Telegraph
, and he was perfectly placed in Kalimpong to get fresh reports from refugees streaming out of Tibet, whose stories of torture and repression filled his bulletins. The trouble was, very few people in the West believed what he was reporting. The previous year, the London
Times
had
run an extensive article by its Nepal-based correspondent saying that the Tibetans
approved
of the Chinese takeover of their country, were profiting under Peking’s leadership, and had switched their allegiance from the Dalai Lama to Mao. It was a consistent theme in reports on Tibet. Whenever Patterson published his scathing reports of Chinese abuses and Tibetan resistance, they were called “bazaar rumors.”

Many Westerners had taken up the Land of Snows, more as a romantic ideal than anything else. Patterson was different. He was among the first to adopt Tibet as an actual place, to live among the Khampas, to advance their political cause. He’d found Tibetans to be fantastically tough people, excellent horsemen, generous and dangerously playful, men and women possessing a caustic sense of humor. And in the spring of 1959, he spent his days hounding diplomats, heads of state, and editors at the foreign news desks in London to forget about
Lost Horizon
and pay attention to the real Tibet, by which he meant the guerrilla war spreading across the country.

But Patterson’s dream had run afoul of one very important person in India: Jawaharlal Nehru. The country’s first prime minister had inherited Gandhi’s mantle after he’d led India out of the British colonial system, and Nehru was determined to make the country into a new kind of world power, aligned neither with socialist Russian or with the capitalist West. For that, he needed good relations with China—and though he was sympathetic to Tibet’s plight, he was determined that it not drag India into conflict with its massive neighbor to the east. The conflict in Tibet, he said, was “a clash of minds rather than a clash of arms.”

Nehru and his ministers were incensed by Patterson’s often lurid accounts of the Chinese occupation. The journalist was summoned to a government office and threatened with expulsion
from India unless he confined himself to “normal and objective” reports.

“
George,” the British High Commissioner finally broke in, “do you think you know better than Prime Minister Nehru?”

“If what the Prime Minister says is what he knows,” Patterson replied, “then I
do
know better than him.”

Threats were nothing new to Patterson. In 1951, the Scot realized he was being followed around Kalimpong by two people he assumed were Chinese agents. An Indian security official informed him that the Chinese knew of his activities on behalf of Tibet and offered him a pistol for protection. “I was about to be liquidated,” Patterson remembered. He promptly sent back word to the Chinese that “no follower of Karl Marx could intimidate a follower of Jesus Christ” and, relishing the gesture, refused the gun.

In one of Patterson’s drawers at his home in the city, there sat a letter from a Khampa leader. Khampa men were being forced to dig their own graves, the letter said, and Tibetan girls were being forced to stab them to death and push them into the earth. “Everywhere there were scenes of slaughter and promiscuous butchery,” his correspondent wrote. The man then explained, almost apologetically, that the struggle against the Chinese “was known to be a hopeless fight but we could no longer contain ourselves.” The words explained, as well as anything could, the root of Patterson’s near-mania for the Khampas.

The Scotsman was a kind of advance indicator of world opinion: the path he was blazing would soon be trampled by thousands of dedicated Westerners.

Tibet had made Patterson a journalist, or a propagandist, depending on whom you asked. And there were other professional journalists spread out around the globe who would soon converge
near Kalimpong to get the story the Scot had been pushing, sometimes to the point of shrillness, for years.
Among them was the greatest tabloid foreign journalist of his time, the
Daily Mail
’s Noel Barber, who in March 1959 was caught in the African hellhole known as Nyasaland as it threatened to explode into a Mau-Mau–style revolt. The hard-traveling Barber, “The Man Who Made Journalism an Adventure,” had covered dirty little wars from Algiers to Beirut and had filed bulletins from the wastes of Arabia to the dazzling islands of Oceania. He became the first Englishman to reach the South Pole after Scott, married a Florentine countess, befriended the Duke of Windsor, drank ouzo with Maria Callas on the deck of Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, talked women with Clark Gable and the fate of Europe with Churchill. Barber had been stabbed by a Moroccan fanatic in Casablanca, inadvertently eaten human flesh in Singapore, been shot in the head in Budapest, and had a protester die in his arms at the barricades before driving to Vilna to file his story in a bloodied suit, just making his deadline. By 1959 he’d gone beyond Fleet Street legend to become a kind of international symbol of news. “Wherever the action was,” wrote the
Times
of London, “so was Barber.” The
Daily Mail
ran ads taunting their competition on Fleet Street: “
Where is Noel Barber today?
” This was hell for his rivals. During the Hungarian uprising—a rebellion that would soon draw parallels with the situation in Tibet—a
Daily Express
correspondent received a bluntly worded telegram that read: