Escape from the Land of Snows (22 page)

On March 22, a
New York Times
editorial blasted Peking: “This is a complete indictment of the Chinese Communist on the charge of genocide.… Complete absorption and extinction of the Tibetan race is being undertaken.” Protests erupted in Asian cities such as Bombay and even reached to New York, where Buddhists who considered His Holiness their leader took to the streets. Guards at the Bhutan border reported “panic-stricken Tibetans” almost unable to speak appearing at their border posts. Expats in India were told to sell all their belongings and to head to Delhi to fight for the Dalai Lama. In Bombay, demonstrators cried out for the world to resist China and pelted a portrait of Mao with eggs and tomatoes.

Outside the United Nations, one of the more remarkable demonstrations took place when a group of Kalmuks, descendants of Genghis Khan, appeared on First Avenue, led by six lamas in “flowing purple, pink and yellow robes.” They carried signs reading “Protect the Dalai Lama from Red Terror” and patiently explained to reporters they were the remnants of a group of Mongolians brought
out of World War II displacement camps after their tiny republic had been liquidated by Stalin. Deeply familiar with the methods of state terror, they feared for His Holiness’s life. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s older brother Gyalo announced in the
Times of India
that the escape of the Dalai Lama was the prelude to genocide. “We are going to be wiped out by the Chinese,” he said. Henry Cabot Lodge, the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, spoke of “
unspeakable brutalizing” and presented Tibet as a warning to the rest of the continent: “Tibet is proof to the people of Asia that there is imperialism in Peking which seeks to enslave other Asian peoples and does not hesitate to use war and treachery in the process.”

The Chinese, stung by what they felt were misleading stories, quickly hit back. “
These rebels represent imperialism and the most reactionary big serf owners,” the New China News Agency reported. “Their rebellion was organized by the imperialists, the Chiang Kai-shek bandits and foreign reactionaries. Many of their arms were brought in from abroad.” They accused the Tibetan rebels of a long list of atrocities: “plunder, rape, arson and murder,” to which the American journalist Anna Louise Strong added the crime of “gouging out eyes.” The line out of China was that the PLA had patiently and humanely put down a coup d’état of Tibetan sellouts who had attacked their own people for not joining their coup. Peking spit poison: “
The spirit of these reactionaries soared to the clouds and they were ready to take over the whole universe.… The reactionary forces of Tibet finally chose the road to their own extinction.”

The Chinese understood what the Tibetans had not yet grasped: The fight for Tibet was reaching its climax in Lhasa. The battle for how Tibet was
perceived
was just beginning.

The story was made for star reporters such as Noel Barber. But the outbreak caught the
Daily Mail
correspondent in Nyasaland,
the British protectorate soon to be known as Malawi, which was being rocked by nationalist violence. When he checked in with his London editors and heard the news from Tibet, he flashed back to his 1950 Tibet expedition. “
I was whisked back in time to the exciting days when I climbed across the Himalayas,” he recalled, “to try and find something of the truth about the hidden war in Tibet.… Now it was as though I had returned to see the last episode in a terrible and true story.” And, he could have added, to shape it—for the Tibet story was being transformed daily, from a war narrative in an obscure part of the world into the search for the man whose fate would soon come to represent the tragedy of Tibet itself.

Barber raced to the scene. He flew to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia to catch a flight to Nairobi. The plane was delayed for two hours, which would cause the reporter to miss his Nairobi-Bombay flight. That, for a man of Barber’s stature, was unacceptable, so he called some well-connected friends in London and asked them to request Air India to delay the plane until he could make it, which they promptly did. (“
Very considerate of them,” Barber said.) The journalist slept all night on the plane, landed in Bombay, showered, and jumped on a twin-engined Dakota to Nagpur and from there to Calcutta at 6:00 a.m. He then flew to Bagdogra, hopped on a bus occupied by chickens and Indian peasants, drove ten miles to Siliguri, and finally jumped in a taxi for the ride to Kalimpong before hiring a single-engine plane for the last leg of the trek. “
It was one of the most wretched journeys I have ever made,” Barber sighed. It was also a trip that dozens of journalists were making from points all over the globe as the story exploded in the world media.

Meanwhile, George Patterson had become a marked man in Kalimpong. Because he was seen as the reporter with the best local sources, some of the freshly arrived Western journalists hired locals
to spy on the Scotsman, standing outside his house in the boiling heat and watching his every arrival, then trailing him through the city when he went to meet with his sources. Desperate to know what had become of the Dalai Lama, Patterson gambled that His Holiness would follow the route his older brother, the tough-as-steel Gyalo, had taken when he fled to India in 1952. Patterson himself staked out the brother’s house, and when Gyalo slipped out of his house and made his way to the airport in Siliguri, the Scottish journalist decided that India was indeed the destination of His Holiness. He calculated that the escapees would “come out” around Tsona Dzong on the Indian-Tibetan border, which would place them in the North East Frontier Agency, a huge borderland between China and India that was off-limits to everyone except the Indian military. And that is exactly where Patterson decided he would go.

The next night, Patterson awoke in the early hours, packed his things, checked the darkened street for the “watchers” hired by his competition, then slipped out into the streets of Kalimpong. He made his way to Darjeeling, where he chartered the private plane of a friend, a plantation owner, taking off from a landing strip in the middle of an enormous tea garden and flying to Tezpur, a sleepy city on the Brahmaputra River in Upper Assam in the northeast of India. Patterson not only wanted to get the story first and to make his name, he also wanted to reach the escape party before Nehru’s bureaucrats grabbed the fugitives and “shut out and shut up the Dalai Lama from making his country’s predicament known while he was on Indian soil.” Patterson knew all too well how ferociously the Indians guarded their relationship with Peking. The Scot wanted the Dalai Lama to express what he’d been hearing for years from the rebels and give the reports of atrocities legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Nehru would, Patterson knew, do everything he could to prevent that happening.

Tibet was going through a remarkable transformation. It was becoming famous just as it ceased to exist. As the PLA asserted control, Tibet was slowly becoming not a physical place with set borders and lakes and mountains but a cause, a place of the mind. And this was due mostly to the figure of the Dalai Lama, to the romance and tragedy that surrounded the story of a young ruler driven from his throne by the hated Communists. It was people like Noel Barber—who with his celebrity, his manic thirst for adventure, and his cutthroat competitiveness in some ways epitomized a certain idea of the West—who were doing the introductions. What he and his ilk wrote, how they presented the Dalai Lama, would have remarkable staying power.

The fugitives were now seven hundred miles from their target, the rebel fort known as Lhuntse Dzong, which lay over some of the toughest terrain they would face. They knew almost nothing about what had happened in the capital; Radio Lhasa was still off the air, and although their radio had briefly been able to tune in the Voice of America, it spoke only of “
unrest in the city,” which could refer to the protests in front of the Norbulingka. But as they set out for the stronghold, with Athar now sending their location to Washington daily, the Dalai Lama received the first of three severe shocks.

Navigating one of the stony trails that led south, the Dalai Lama saw that the escapees were being pursued by a group of horsemen. It was led by a Tibetan official who months earlier had been sent to the rebel leaders to ask them to give up their armed resistance. Instead, the official had joined the rebels. Now he appeared out of the bleak landscape to tell the Dalai Lama that the Chinese had attacked the Norbulingka, Lhasa had been the scene of terrible fighting, and hundreds if not thousands were dead. His early reports
were a mix of wild gossip (including the false assertion that the Potala and the Norbulingka had both been completely destroyed) and accurate secondhand reports of a major battle.

“
My worst fears had come true,” the Dalai Lama said despondently. The news ended any hopes that he could reach an understanding with the Chinese. The bond with Mao that he’d formed during those remarkable days in Peking had been irretrievably broken: “I realized that it would be impossible to negotiate with people who behaved in this cruel and criminal fashion.” The Dalai Lama listened to the gruesome reports and realized that if he’d stayed at the summer palace, he would not have survived. “
The Chinese would have considered me expendable. But even if they kept me alive, Tibet would have been finished.”

The Dalai Lama’s belief in compassion wasn’t formed on the trails to India, but it met its most severe test there. Even the Chinese invasion hadn’t shaken him like the news from Lhasa did, because he’d grown to believe it was a necessary evil for modernizing his country—the occupation, he’d told himself, would lead to progress in the end. For his entire life, the Dalai Lama had been raised in a bell jar. He’d had only the briefest glimpses into people’s real lives, their sufferings, the injustices they faced. Apart from the loneliness he’d felt as a child, he’d known pain only secondhand. Even the realities of something as enormous as World War II he’d had to work out through bad translations of second-rate reference books. He had no personal experience of hatred and ambition. Evil to him was a figure in a book, or a prisoner in the lens of his telescope at the Potala. The whip hanging on his tutor’s wall, never to be used, was an apt image for his early life.

Now His Holiness found it difficult at first to comprehend what he was hearing. “
Why did the Chinese do it?” the Dalai Lama asked himself again and again. He could come up with only one
answer, and it lay in the Chinese desire for power over his subjects. “Our people—not especially our rich or ruling classes but our ordinary people—had finally, eight years after the invasion began, convinced the Chinese that they would never willingly accept their alien rule. So the Chinese were trying now to terrify them, by merciless slaughter, into accepting this rule against their will.”

The first instinct of his boyhood, the violent sympathy for the weak, returned to him, and the Dalai Lama became enraged. Now it was Tibet itself that was being victimized, torn up, bloodied. The old adversary, the wild temper he’d worked so hard to tame, returned to him as he sat in the cold and damp along the trail and contemplated the murder of men and women who had fought to protect him.

He closed his eyes and recited to himself Buddha’s teaching: “One’s enemy can be one’s greatest teacher.” It was horribly difficult. The anger rose like bile in his throat. The savagery of his young self wished to be released.

The bitterness of the moment, indeed the entire trip, was accentuated by the history of the places he and his fellow fugitives were trudging through on their exhausted ponies. In escaping toward India, the Dalai Lama was in a way reversing the history of Buddhism in Tibet, hurrying down the trail on which the faith had entered the country centuries ago. His Holiness was the culmination of the lama-obsessed state, and now he was retreating to the place the religion had begun, but as a refugee, a man without a country. Each step he took along the route, leaving Lhasa in the hands of a power that was vehement in its denial of religion, was an erasure. The Dharma in Tibet had been shattered. The Dalai Lama had been carried to Lhasa on a golden palanquin, but he had left it as a fugitive.

This wasn’t the first time Tibetan Buddhism had come under
siege. In the middle of the ninth century, forty years after the death of the great Buddhist king Trisong Detsen, a clique of believers in the old religion of Bön struck at the throne and installed their favorite, Lang Darma. Followers of Buddhism were persecuted, killed, forced into hiding, or exiled, just as the Dalai Lama was being exiled by a rival ideology. Monasteries were burned and the Bön pantheon of devils and gods reappeared from one end of Tibet to the other. Lang Darma became the dark eminence of the nation’s history, always described as having horns and a black tongue. (The ancient Tibetan custom of sticking one’s tongue out as a greeting was meant to show that it lacked Lang Darma’s nefarious color.) It wasn’t until a monk named Paljor Dorje was told in a vision to kill Lang Darma so that the faith might survive that Buddhism’s fortunes changed. The monk dressed in a special robe, black on the outside and white on the inside, covered his horse in charcoal dust, and then rode to the palace, where he entranced the enemy king with a whirling dance. As he spun, the monk pulled out a bow and arrow and shot Lang Darma through the heart, then escaped by reversing his cape and riding his horse through a river, washing off the black dust. It was no small irony that Buddhism, the faith of pacifism, survived in Tibet through an act of regicide.

But a mythical solution wasn’t available to the Dalai Lama. His people had believed in fables for too long. As had he.