Escape from the Land of Snows (19 page)

In the chaos, Yonten’s beloved father calmly handed out the rifles and asked each fighter to sign a receipt for every bullet.

It was soon clear that the Chinese guns were indeed aimed at the Potala above them, the symbol of the Tibetan state. Yonten looked up the hill at the palace as it disappeared behind a cloud of dust thrown up by the shells. “
I was extremely worried,” he remembered, more concerned for the moment about the palace than about the men around him. Onlookers running from the city would see the smoke and tell the Dalai Lama days later that the Potala had been destroyed, causing him deep distress. But when
the smoke cleared after a barrage of ten shells, Yonten could see the Potala’s distinctive white buildings standing nearly undamaged.

It was a rare victory for the Tibetans.

After a few hours of exchanging gunfire with the Chinese at the transport station, Soepa realized the PLA was winning. “Their bullets were finding their mark and many were killed on our side.” As morning approached and the first rays of the sun lightened the sky, Soepa looked around and counted ten corpses nearby, “blood oozing from everywhere,” with many more injured, crying out for water or moaning as they lost consciousness. He ran back into the interior of the Norbulingka, ravenously hungry now, and found a spot behind the office of the Tibetan cabinet that seemed sheltered from the shells falling across the gardens and government buildings. Another fighter sat and ate with him, but minutes later, a mortar shell dropped a few feet away, sending shrapnel and a huge cloud of dust over the crouching figures. Soepa shook the dust off as his companion staggered off, cup still in hand, then collapsed and died.

The sculptured grounds of the summer palace became a killing zone ruled by randomness. No one was in charge. No Tibetan commander had a battle plan or really an objective other than holding the Chinese off. There was no chain of command to consult. No one, it seemed, had any sense of tactical street warfare or an idea of the PLA’s vulnerabilities. The enemy was not even visible, only his victims. The Tibetans, wholly unprepared for war, were slowly being blown up by the Chinese artillery and picked off by its sharpshooters. Yet few ran away. The rebels felt they had to stay to defend the palace and His Holiness, who many believed was still hidden on the grounds. Soepa and hundreds of other brave and utterly confused men ran back and forth from the gates to the buildings
in the interior, as the smoke drifted from the Chinese artillery batteries and fires broke out in the palaces and chapels. Soepa remembered conversation after conversation with people who emerged out of the darkness and the billowing dust, each reciting his own fragment of the war situation, only to disappear again on an errand or to be scattered by a shell dropping from the sky.

The dead were now “everywhere”:

Another fighter told Soepa they were leaving and he should come with them. As Soepa stood on the Norbulingka lawn asking himself what he should do, a shell exploded yards away and a young Norbulingka servant standing next to him collapsed to the ground, killed by shrapnel. “I thought, ‘All right, if they kill me, that’s it. There is nothing I can do.’ ” The group of fighters left without him, and many would follow the Dalai Lama across the Himalayas to India. But Soepa, nagged by a sense of duty to His Holiness, stayed on.

He headed back toward the north gate. As Soepa approached it, a Tibetan militiaman emerged from the smoke and stuck his rifle muzzle into Soepa’s chest. “I am going to shoot you!” he cried. “You people in the government—we have been pleading for guns, but until now you wouldn’t give us anything.” The man blamed Tibet’s fall on bureaucrats like Soepa. Now he’d make Soepa pay the price.

Soepa quickly reached for his gun. As his hand closed on the butt of his pistol, another shell landed nearby and kicked up a cloud
of dust. Bodies toppled left and right. The militiaman who’d been about to kill him was nowhere to be seen. Half-deafened, Soepa ran. When he’d recovered from the concussive power of the shell, he found he’d suffered only one wound: shrapnel had cut into his left shoulder, sending a steady stream of blood down his arm and causing it to throb painfully. Still, he was alive. His “weapons protector,” the amulet he wore around his neck, with a holy image and a few bits of the remains of a high lama, had saved his life. He said a silent prayer of thanks.

The Chinese were fighting and dying, too. A ferocious battle was under way on Chakpori, located between central Lhasa and the Norbulingka. A PLA company was advancing on dug-in Tibetan rebels above them. As the Chinese forces sent flares up to illuminate the predawn sky, Fu Lo-min, a squad leader with the first PLA platoon up the mountain, charged toward a machine-gun nest that had been installed in a flat-roofed home. “
The hill was very steep but in eight minutes we got on the roof,” he remembered. “I was hit in the leg by a bullet but continued to give command till other units stormed up and covered our advance.” The rebels fled.

Even the eyewitness accounts from PLA soldiers were glazed over with the Chinese insistence that the Tibetans were united
against
the guerrillas. Behind Fu Lo-min’s platoon, a soldier named Chang was sweeping the hill with machine-gun fire to cover the platoon’s advance. “We wiped out strong rebel points,” he said, adding, “the local Tibetan people encouraged us and helped carry our equipment to wipe out the bandits.”

Certainly, there were Lhasans who were furious at the rebels for their uprising. Tibetans were never a monolith, and there were pro-Chinese sprinkled throughout the population, low and high.
There were undoubtedly people who believed the Chinese had brought prosperity and even freedom from the elites and the bureaucrats. But the claim that the rebels made up a tiny minority of the population and were the plotters of an unpopular coup d’état is simply not credible. The photos of the massive protest crowds alone disprove it. No Tibetans in Lhasa for the battle remember any of their neighbors helping the PLA. To do so would have been unimaginable.

The Jokhang Temple, near Barkhor Square, its roof guarded by hideous statues of bird-men with infant heads and vulture wings and ringing wind chimes under their chins, had become a combination rebel headquarters and refugee station. About 200 Tibetan army troops and 100 Tibetan police had taken refuge in the enormous, white-walled temple, with its golden roofs and Buddhist sculptures covered in gold leaf, along with hundreds of women and children fleeing from the fighting. The two-story walls of the holy place concealed large courtyards, where smoke rose from open fires and Lhasans waited nervously for news of what was happening outside.

A tall, thin monk flitted through the courtyards as the sounds of battle echoed outside. He was Narkyid, twenty-eight years old, an official who served on the Council of Lhasa along with three elderly monks and a quartet of lay officials. The quick-minded Narkyid had become the key figure on the council, the man whom the elders turned to when something needed to get done. He even spoke some Mandarin, which made his dealings with the Chinese that much easier.

Days before, members of the Dalai Lama’s cabinet had approached Narkyid and said, “
You must stay in the Jokhang and take responsibility for it,” he remembers. “They said, ‘This is one of
our most important places.’ ” It was an understatement: the Jokhang was the Tibetan St. Peter’s. In the days after March 10, Narkyid had shuttled between the Norbulingka and the temple, organizing defenses and getting the latest palace scuttlebutt. When he’d visited the summer palace on the 18th, though, he’d immediately noticed a difference. “I felt something missing,” he says. “There was no energy in the palace. Truly, it was gone.” The officials kept up a regular schedule of meetings and appointments, but “we knew, we knew” that the Dalai Lama had fled. That morning, Narkyid had been relieved to feel the curious spiritual emptiness of the place. And now that His Holiness was gone, the Jokhang was the spiritual locus of Tibet.

The flagstones in the courtyards were lifted up and wells drilled down to the water table. Hundreds of women flocked through the wooden doors and lit campfires, brewing tea and roasting
tsampa
. Narkyid ordered enormous balls of thick Nepalese wool to be brought in and soaked with water, which made them even denser; when they were saturated, the balls were stuffed into the slits that pocked the Jokhang’s walls, to protect against bullets penetrating into the interior. Supplies were brought in: enormous quantities of barley, butter, and meat—carcasses cured in the mountain air—were stacked along the inner walls. Narkyid saw to the building of two barricades. Soldiers filled sandbags and stacked them across the rear gate, adding wooden beams and packing the holes with mud and clay, while a second barricade went up at another entrance, this one thrown together out of heavy flagstones, furniture, and junk scoured from the Jokhang and nearby homes. The troops set up a machine gun in the center of the rampart and distributed a dozen Lewis guns—light machine guns first used in World War I—and small mortars around the temple grounds.
There was no way to tell from which direction the Chinese would come, and the light arsenal was all the hundreds of Tibetans packed into the chapels and open squares of the sprawling temple complex had to resist them.

When the PLA’s guns opened up in the early hours of March 20, Narkyid was in the Jokhang. He knew the sound was the opening barrage on the Norbulingka and the rebel positions. The Jokhang, for the time being, was left unscathed. At dawn, when the guns died off for the moment, he climbed to a roofed walkway of the temple. From there he could see Lhasa laid out at his feet, smoke rising from fires and the smoldering summer palace in the distance. But it still held an unearthly beauty, framed against the low mountains, everything vivid even at a distance. “It gave you the impression you were looking at a picture.”

Now, with the battle still raging miles away at the summer palace, Narkyid sent soldiers to cut the telegraph and electrical wires leading to the Chinese loudspeakers that ringed the Barkhor, just steps from the Jokhang’s front gate. “Every time they climbed the pole and cut a wire, they would hang there and yell, ‘Ah, we’ve done it.’ ” But the Tibetans could never seem to silence every speaker, and the Mandarin-inflected voice kept up its mantra: “Surrender now.” In other ways, the Jokhang had returned to the days before the occupation. The electricity that the Chinese bureaucrats had brought was off now; as dusk fell, the temple was lit by cooking fires and torches, the shadows licking across the rough stone walls. The Chinese, installed at the cinema across the street from the temple, exchanged barrages of machine-gun fire with the rebels manning the temple barricades. But the PLA’s bullets sent tiny jets of sand up from the bags or sank without a sound into the water-drenched balls of wool.

Late that night, Soepa acquired a machine gun, and as he was hurrying toward a rebel position to begin using it, the Dalai Lama’s secretary ran up to him and said that Chakpori, the main Tibetan artillery position, had been taken by the Chinese. The rebels must assemble some fighters and retake it, the secretary told him. Soepa agreed, changed into fresh clothes, and went to collect ammunition for the coming fight. “I waited with a thousand rounds of ammunition, but he didn’t show,” the secretary remembers. Another man grabbed Soepa and said, for the fifth or sixth time in twenty-four hours, that the fighters must escape the Norbulingka. Finally convinced that the rebels’ position was hopeless, Soepa ran to get horses for the journey. Arriving at the stables, he saw all the stalls were empty. “What happened to all the horses?” he shouted at the stable master. “Others took them,” the man answered. “They were threatening to kill me if I didn’t give them the mounts.” Soepa pulled out his pistol and pointed it at a man leading a horse away. “He gave the horse to me at once,” he said.

More rebels came running to the stables and told Soepa that the Chinese had taken over the only rebel-held positions that might offer them refuge and were at that moment advancing on the walls of the Norbulingka. Again, Soepa’s plans reversed in a moment. He and the other fighters decided to fight until dusk, and then escape via Ramagang, a crossing on the Kyichu River close to Lhasa.

A shell slammed into the stables. Soepa was thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious, the machine gun crashing down on his back as he fell. A young Tibetan aristocrat was standing yards away. Shrapnel ripped open the aristocrat’s right thigh and cut a vein in his face. Blood gushed out and covered his clothes; after a while, he could feel blood squishing inside his shoes as he tried to force his way out of the shattered building. “Many people inside
the stables, as well as horses and mules, were killed or injured,” he said. “Those still alive shouted for others to help pull them out of the wreckage.” As the bombardment, which always seemed to come in waves, dropped away again, the aristocrat emerged into a charred, burning landscape. Buildings were on fire, and gray smoke was drifting through the poplar trees. But what caught his eye was a monkey, one that had for years been a centerpiece of the Dalai Lama’s private zoo. The animal was tied to a post in the stable courtyard, “scampering up and down in terror.” When there was an explosion, the monkey would hide its head in a cotton awning. “It stared around wide-eyed at the dead and wounded people and horses and became more terrified still.” The young man tried in vain to free the monkey, but the animal was too frightened to let him approach. Finally, he left it where it was and staggered away.

The “Tibet Military Committee of the People’s Liberation Army” issued an offer to the rebels: “
No account will be taken of the past misdeeds of those who desert the rebellion bandits and return to us; those who make contributions will be rewarded; all those captured will be well treated, they are not to be killed, insulted, beaten, or searched and deprived of their personal effects.” Men approached the monasteries surrounding Lhasa and told the monks to come out—later, the monks would realize that the men were traitors working for the PLA and trying to lure the Tibetans out so they could be arrested.