Escape from the Land of Snows (16 page)

But everything else would have to be left behind. For the Dalai Lama, the vaults of the Potala were filled with the remnants of his former selves, not only the colossal burial chambers (one of which contained 3,271 kilos of gold and other precious metals) but jewels and gold dust given to him in tribute, the gifts from the Russian czars and English queens, including the ones for his own installation, an intricately worked clock and a brick of solid gold minted by the Calcutta Mint. A thousand years’ worth of Tibet’s patrimony would be left behind. The Tibetan cabinet had spirited “substantial” amounts of gold and silver out of the treasury during the 1950 invasion, but many millions of dollars’ worth of precious objects remained. And the rooms and chapels were filled with irreplaceable manuscripts and Buddhist art that the Dalai Lama could barely begin to think of being handed to Tan Guansan and the Chinese bureaucrats.

The Dalai Lama felt a jolt of sadness but little physical apprehension of the journey ahead—not because it wasn’t dangerous but because he’d come to believe so deeply in his own reincarnation. “
I have no fear of death,” he said. “I was not afraid of being one of the victims of the Chinese attack.” But he knew the death of another Dalai Lama would convince the people that “the life of Tibet [had] come to an end.” And he feared, intensely, being captured by the Chinese and being forced into the role of a stooge. If they caught him, His Holiness believed, the Chinese would force him to publicly betray everything he cherished.

In his room, His Holiness opened a book of the Buddha’s teachings and let the pages fall randomly. His eye dropped to the open page.
“The passages were about temptation and courage,” he said. The Dalai Lama closed his eyes and began to think about the words “courage” and “altruism.” Then he imagined the escape party winding through the wastes of southern Tibet and someday, in another party with himself leading it, returning to the palace grounds.

As softhearted as he sometimes could be, the Dalai Lama was a decisive man. Once he fixed on a course of action, he rarely regretted it. “No going back,” he thought to himself.

As dusk fell, the Dalai Lama walked to the shrine of his personal protector, the six-armed Mahakala, with the five white skulls around his snarling face, each representing a different transformation of evil into good: ignorance into wisdom, jealousy into accomplishment. The heavy wooden door groaned as he pushed it open, and inside he saw “the glow of a dozen votive butter lamps set in rows of golden and silver dishes.” He paused before presenting the
kata
, or ceremonial scarf, he held in his hand to the statue of the protector. All of these very ordinary things he was seeing possibly for the last time, and so as his eyes rested on each one in turn, the Dalai Lama tried to stamp them on his memory: the smoke-burnished colors of the religious frescoes on the wall, the chanting monks (most likely aware of him now but, out of reverence, averting their eyes), the small lump of
tsampa
left on the altar as an offering to Mahakala, and a servant scooping out ladles of melted butter into the candleholders. A monk lifted a horn and blew out a “long, mournful note,” and raised a pair of golden cymbals and then brought them together. The metallic
passssh
filled the room and then fell away.

His Holiness returned to his rooms to put on his disguise. He took off his monk’s robe and, for the first time in many years, put on a pair of trousers and then a long black coat. He was handed a
thangka
—a painted Buddhist banner—of the Palden Lhamo, the
same blue-faced protectress who had watched over the divination that had directed him to leave India three years before. He placed it in a traveling container and threw that over his left shoulder. An old rifle went over his right. He took off his distinctive black-rimmed glasses, unfamiliar to those Lhasans who’d managed to get a glimpse of their Precious Protector (wearing glasses in public was thought of as a Western affectation, and the Dalai Lama often avoided it), and slipped them into his pocket, then donned a fur cap and a warm scarf that he could pull up over his mouth. He now looked like a lowly, half-blind Tibetan soldier. The disguise was as much for the crowd of protesters—who were checking the identity of everyone leaving the summer palace—as it was for the Chinese.

The Dalai Lama walked to the ground floor, pausing to pat the head of a dog that, he reflected with some satisfaction, had never been very fond of him and so wouldn’t miss him very much. “
As I went out, my mind was drained of all emotion,” he remembered. Years of meditation had given him the ability to remove himself from the moment. As he walked, he could hear the slap of his feet on the floor and the ticking of a hallway clock, as if he were back in his palace cinema watching one of the films he loved. The partings with the sweepers who had practically raised him since the age of four were more wrenching, though his beloved caretaker, Ponpo, was among the men coming with him. Finally, at the front door to his small palace, he turned and paced down the patio, “pausing on the far side to visualize reaching India safely.” As he strode back, he again visualized his eventual return to Tibet. Every high lama in Tibet is believed to be able to see the future “as clearly as you see yourself in a mirror,” but the Dalai Lama wasn’t so much picturing the future as willing it to happen. Watching the young monk walk back and forth, the gray-haired Lord Chamberlain felt this was “
the saddest sight, the most awful moment I have ever known in my life.”

Soldiers guided His Holiness in the darkness to the gate in the inner wall, where he was met by his brother-in-law, the chief of his bodyguards. Almost stumbling in the dark, he walked past the tranquil lawns of the Norbulingka, now still and black-green in the darkness, and came to the south gate. Ahead of him he saw the blurred image of one of his bodyguards brandishing a sword, along with a contingent of Tibetan troops. One twenty-nine-year-old Tibetan soldier had been assigned to accompany the Dalai Lama all the way across the Himalayas. When His Holiness walked up, blinking with nearsightedness and dressed as a common soldier, the soldier felt an odd, nameless feeling. Then he became faint. “
I felt like blacking out on seeing His Holiness looking like that,” he said. “I knew bad times were striking Tibet.” As the men waited, he tried to hide his despair, whispering to their friends and checking their gear.

The soldiers opened the creaking wooden doors, and one of them announced in a loud voice that an army squad was going out on a patrol. The protesters guarding the gate turned and looked briefly at the small party before stepping back to let them pass. In the distance, the loudspeakers droned the same message they’d been broadcasting for days: “
You are like ants scratching at the elephant’s feet. China is as mighty as the sun and wherever there is sun, there the Chinese are also.” As he stepped outside, the Dalai Lama felt his fear of capture spike. The thought of being taken, and how awful that would be for Tibet, flashed across his mind. He looked on himself almost coldly, not as Lhamo Thondup, the boy from Amdo, but as Chenrizi, the vessel of the Dharma in Tibet and the world. As he walked over the cobblestones, following the shape of his bodyguard ahead of him, he was anxious about what losing this person, the Dalai Lama, would mean to the people whom he could sense around him, the great mass of protesters whom he could hear
and feel more than see. If he was captured, these people whose elbows and flanks pressed against him would simply fall apart.

The party walked out through the ring of protesters—the Dalai Lama sensing the crowd melting away in front of him—and followed in the footsteps of Choegyal’s party. The lights of the Chinese camp, just two hundred feet away, were clearly visible, and the Dalai Lama was sure that every stumble on the rock-strewn bank would alert the PLA to their escape. “
I needed to be very careful,” he said. “We came so near the Chinese that we could hear them. That was dangerous.”

A thin moon hung in the black dome of the sky. The wind ruffled up from the direction of the Chinese camp, which the escapees hoped would mask the racket they were making. When they reached the Kyichu River, the Dalai Lama was relieved, and the group quickly began to load into coracles, narrow boats made of yak skins stretched over wooden frames. But the noise of the crossing soon had his nerves peaked again. “
I was certain that every splash of oars would draw down machine-gun fire on us,” he said.

On the far bank of the river, Choegyal and the first batch of escapees waited anxiously for the arrival of the Dalai Lama’s party. After milling around on the dark shore, Choegyal began chatting with the Tibetan guards, but they were too nervous to talk. With the lights of the Chinese camp twinkling in the distance, the boy wandered off a way to relieve himself. He found a place shielded from the view of the others, undid his
chuba
, and looked up. In the distance, he could see the long white line of Drepung Monastery against the bulk of Mount Gephel. As he stood there, Choegyal was filled with a sudden fondness for the place he’d disliked so intensely. He finished up, tied his
chuba
, and walked forward, but he continued to stare at the monastery in the distance. “
I don’t know what made me do it,” he remembers, “but I lay down and
prostrated three times to it. And I whispered to myself, ‘May I see you again.’ ”

As he walked back to the riverbank, he heard the splash of oars. The keel of a coracle glided onto the pebbles, and a Khampa grabbed its nose, pulling it in. Another rebel guard watched as the Dalai Lama climbed out. “This was a very emotional moment for us,” the guard said. “Here was the living symbol of our nation and our religion having to disguise himself in order to escape the Chinese.” Along the route, when the menacing warriors spotted the Dalai Lama, they would immediately fall to the ground and prostrate themselves.

“
All of a sudden I heard a lot of people and horses passing in the dark,” Choegyal remembers. Then there was the voice of the Lord Chamberlain murmuring, “
Tasbidelek tasbidelek,
” a traditional New Year’s greeting that means “Good luck.” Behind him came His Holiness. The Dalai Lama turned to one of the guards and asked him his name. Startled, the guard gave a hurried reply. “
He was young and … very different from anyone else,” the soldier recalled. “Even when you caught a glimpse of him, there’s a special charisma there that you just can’t describe.”

The third group—with the Dalai Lama’s ministers, two cabinet ministers, and the young Norbulingka official Soepa—arrived on the riverbank soon after. By midnight, the fugitives were all together and mounted on horses brought by the Khampas. They set off into the Vale of Lhasa.

There were now more than 700 Khampas gathered to escort the Dalai Lama and his entourage on to the next goal, the Tsangpo, the highest major river in the world. But ahead lay their first geological barrier: the 17,000-foot mountain pass known as the Che-La, which separates the fifteen-mile-long Vale of Lhasa from the Tsangpo Valley, forty miles south of Lhasa. They would ride without stopping.

he fugitives hurried through the night, with the Dalai Lama’s group sprinting ahead, putting a full two hours between themselves and the other escapees. They were heading for a place called Kyishong (“Happy Valley”), which lay along a far less-traveled trail than the direct Lhasa-Tsangpo route, in hopes of reducing their chances of stumbling into a PLA squadron. The temperature sank with each passing hour. “
My feet grew numb,” Choegyal remembers. “And my horse got extremely tired.” The Luger was digging into his side, but he refused to remove it from his belt. He’d also acquired a Mauser rifle, presented to
him by the men of the Kusung Regiment, and he’d secreted an extra clip of bullets in the folds of his
chuba
. To this collection he’d added an eighteen-inch dagger. “I looked the perfect soldier,” he said. “Except I was a bit too short.”
Later, he was ordered to give up the Mauser, which was replaced—humiliatingly—by the Dalai Lama’s umbrella.