Escape from the Land of Snows (23 page)

s the Dalai Lama struggled to come to terms with the deaths of his subjects, the battle for Lhasa was reaching a crescendo. Narkyid, the twenty-eight-year-old monk who’d inherited responsibility for the Jokhang Temple and the hundreds of Tibetans inside, was so close to the enemy he could almost listen to them talking. The PLA soldiers were fortified behind sandbags at the corner of Shagyari Street, and Narkyid could see individual soldiers sleeping on the roof, while others broke down a machine gun and cleaned and oiled it. The calmness, the bored expression of
the soldiers, the rote chores they were doing, all contrasted with the utterly chaotic and haphazard defense the Tibetans had managed to patch together. Like so many Tibetans, Narkyid had never considered the Chinese brutal until the uprising began. Now he realized how naïve he’d been. “
The Chinese were always ready to kill us,” Narkyid realized. “They were
prepared.
”

Suddenly, a machine gun opened up in the street beneath him. Narkyid ran down from the temple roof to one of the main courtyards and saw soldiers and civilians running pell-mell for the main gates. “The Chinese were coming,” he says. “That is what we believed.” But when the Tibetans peeked between the slits in the barricades, they saw only the sandbags and the flash of a machine gun. The disciplined PLA soldiers were remaining behind their fortifications, attempting to lure the rebels out into the open.

More gunfire erupted from the nearby streets. The Chinese emplacement visible in the gaps in the barricade was coming under sustained fire. But from where? None of his men was shooting off rounds. Narkyid soon learned that, overnight, Tibetan rebels had managed to sneak into one of the nearby homes and set up a mortar and machine-gun nest on the roof. He ran back up to the roof of the Jokhang to watch the battle unfold. Fully exposed to the PLA guns, the rebels began firing at the Shagyari Street outpost, putting round after round into the gap above the sandbags. One rebel dropped a mortar round into the tube and ducked. The
whooomp
of the shell exiting the tube was followed seconds later by an explosion inside the PLA position. A huge cloud of dust billowed out, and Narkyid knew that the men he’d been looking at minutes before were now dead. He and the others waiting with him understood that the rebels on the rooftop were doomed, that the PLA would soon spot them and hunt them down. And, he was convinced, they
would soon finish with the Norbulingka and turn their attention to the Jokhang.

“We never slept,” he says. “There was always danger.”

At the summer palace, the Norbulingka official, Soepa, was still alive on the afternoon of the 21st. He pulled himself to the base of a set of stone steps that led up from the lake. He felt spent by the effort to kill himself. The water had soaked through his clothes, and, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers of bullets, he couldn’t manage to pull himself up the steps. He threw off his
chuba
and as much of the hardware on him as he could. Finally, the young Tibetan was able to drag himself out of the lake.

But he still expected to die, and it occurred to him that the throne of the Audience Hall where the Dalai Lama sat to meet his most important guests would be an auspicious place to do it. He dragged himself along, “leaving a trail of blood and water streaming behind me.”

Bullets were still ricocheting off the trees and buildings around him. In a display of raw courage, the rebels were still forcing back every PLA attempt to enter the summer palace. The diarist Shan Chao, watching the waves of soldiers being beaten back, offered perhaps the only note of admiration in the Chinese accounts of the uprising: “
When the rebel bandits in the Norbulingka were cornered, they put up a desperate fight, knocked out corners of houses, broke down walls, dug holes and put their rifles through.” But they could do nothing against the mortars and artillery shells that continued to loft over the walls into their midst.

Soepa made it to the Audience Hall and crawled toward the throne, then laid his head briefly on the seat. Finally, he lay down
and went to sleep. He slept until the next morning. At sunrise, he awoke to voices. They were coming from outside the Norbulingka’s outer wall. “The Chinese are at the gates! They are going to occupy the Norbulingka! We should fire the place!” And then, “Let’s burn it down!”

He made his way outside, toward one of the palace gates. Suddenly a spent bullet glanced off his forehead and dropped inside his shirt, burning the skin on his chest. He searched frantically for the cartridge until it dropped on the ground. It seemed his amulet was preventing the death he now wished for, as if the spirits were mocking him with near misses.

He found his brother-in-law striding through the palace grounds. Seeing his awful condition, the man took off his
chupa
and wrapped it around Soepa’s shoulders.

“You can’t stay here like this,” his brother-in-law shouted above the gunfire. “Get across the river. If you can’t, you will just get killed.”

But Soepa felt so close to death that he ignored the advice. He didn’t think he could make it to the Kyichu, let alone across. If he was going to die, he wanted it to be in the Norbulingka, the home of His Holiness, the whole reason he’d come back to Lhasa.

“I can’t go,” Soepa said. “Please shoot me.”

But his brother-in-law refused. He walked away, and Soepa turned and staggered back into the Audience Hall. He cadged a cigarette from a teenager, who told him all the ways out of the Norbulingka were being blocked by the PLA. Soepa took a few puffs, then passed out.

At Drepung Monastery, the monks listened to the battle unfold five miles away. “
At dawn you could smell gunpowder in the breeze,”
remembered one. “The noise of gunfire and mortar shells went on relentlessly.” Overnight, squadrons of PLA soldiers had appeared at the foot of the mountain below Drepung. And as the fighting raged, a Tibetan man appeared walking up the path to the monastery gate. The messenger told them that the rebels had overwhelmed a Chinese military camp and that the monks should stay where they were for the time being. That told them that the Tibetans were winning the battle for Lhasa, and the monks brightened at the news. But when other reports of the taking of Chakpori and the deaths of hundreds of Tibetan fighters trickled in, the monks soon realized that the messenger had been a turncoat sent by the Chinese to keep them in their quarters and out of the battle.

The young men of the monasteries threw themselves into the rebellion.
One group of Sera monks braved the gunfire to retrieve guns for the battle. Dressed in their maroon-and-gold robes, they picked their way over the mountain paths they always used to visit the Potala Palace on special days. Once they reached the gates, they took out hand mirrors and signaled their fellow monks that they had made it, using a prearranged code. Then the volunteers quickly made their way to the storeroom where they knew rifles were cached. “While we were removing the guns from the storeroom, the Chinese were bombing the Norbulingka below and Iron Hill, on the other side of the mountain from where we were,” one of them said. As the monks made their way to a storeroom on the top floor of the palace, where there was a supply of bullets waiting, the Chinese gunners turned their sights on the Potala. And it was clear from their aim that as the rumors had suggested, the PLA had sighted the palace many days before, because the shells immediately began hitting their target, sending up plumes of chalky smoke.

Emerging into one of the palace courtyards, gasping for breath, one of the Sera volunteers saw bodies splayed on the cobblestones.
“There were dozens of people dead, and others groaning in pain, covered with blood,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so I am going to die too.’ ”

The PLA now turned its attention to the holdouts at the Jokhang Temple. Machine-gun fire rose in pitch until it was a high whining roar. Narkyid, the monk official in charge, and the others with him decided it was time to leave the Jokhang. If they stayed, it would only encourage the PLA to bomb the temple as it had the Potala and the Norbulingka. Lhasa had fallen, the Dalai Lama was gone, and prison or death was all they could expect if captured. He and a group of Tibetan soldiers searched for a way out. They found a small gate unknown to the PLA in one of the Jokhang’s walls. They gathered themselves, the soldiers clutching their rifles, then opened the gate and emerged out into the street.

As the group hugged the temple wall and turned the first corner, they came under fire. Unarmed, Narkyid began to run. Even as he moved forward, the young monk was fatalistic. “
Once three or four bullets went by, I didn’t worry anymore,” he says. But he did feel oddly worried about the men shooting at him, a Buddhist impulse too deeply ingrained to surrender so quickly. “Those soldiers were so young,” he remembers. “I shouted in Chinese, ‘Please don’t come forward, because we don’t want to kill you! You are so young. Please don’t shoot!’ ” The PLA soldiers came on, and the Tibetan soldiers with Narkyid opened up with their Lewis guns and the soldiers twisted and fell. “They didn’t have a choice,” Narkyid realized, “because behind them were others who would have killed them if they didn’t move forward.”

The randomness of the battle struck Narkyid as he searched for a way out of the city. He would turn a corner and find the
cobblestoned street ahead littered with corpses and freshly wounded civilians, but a couple of blocks away his party would run into a group of women calmly proceeding on their daily errands, or a family sitting down to a meal of
tsampa
and tea, boys running up after having collected spent shells and showing them to their bored fathers, everyone completely oblivious to the mayhem two streets away. Near the Jokhang, shells and bullets were cutting through the air, and each corner brought a new tableau. Chinese tanks spurting fire. Four men lying, legless, in a spreading pool of blood. “One shell had cut off their legs,” says Narkyid. “I went to hold the hand of two of them, but I couldn’t do anything for them.”

Another young monk didn’t make it beyond the Jokhang’s walls. As he fled, a squad of PLA soldiers caught and arrested him. He shuffled ahead with the Chinese soldiers behind him, seeing “the marks of bullets and shell explosions everywhere, and countless bodies.” One corpse stood out. It was a beggar who’d been caught by a bullet as he tried to run from the fighting and was now lying facedown on the cobblestones. He’d been carrying blankets on his back, perhaps to sleep out in the cold nights. But what caught the monk’s eye was a dog that the beggar had been pulling along. It too had been shot, in the back—the monk could see the wound—and was lying next to its master, still attached to the leash.

At the same time, Narkyid was making his way around the eastern wall of the Jokhang, angling toward the Kyichu River. He watched as several women ran up to a Chinese tank, Molotov cocktails in hand, and threw them at the turret. Others poured kerosene in front of the houses and shops where the Chinese were hiding and lit it on fire, only to see the sandbags snuff out the flames. They were cut down by Chinese gunners behind the barricades, some of the women, he swears, with babies in their arms. “We lost so many,” he says. “The women were so brave!”
As Narkyid ran through Barkhor Square and toward the river, wounded Tibetans on the cobblestones called out to him: “ ‘Please kill me,’ they were saying. But we couldn’t stop or we wouldn’t have made it.” Navigating the streets, Narkyid imagined that the scenes he encountered weren’t real, that they were bits of a movie he’d seen long ago.

The escapees crossed the link road in the northeastern corner of Lhasa and ran toward the mountains. They made their way across a barren field, moving one at a time to avoid detection by the PLA. A Chinese spotter must have caught the group in his binoculars, because a shell suddenly landed ahead of Narkyid. “I only heard the sound and I saw the image of my protector in the Potala and I saw her altar and I said, ‘Deity, protect me’ and I immediately lost consciousness.” When Narkyid woke up after about an hour, he began running again.

There were no soldiers around, no more shells dropping from the PLA batteries. The Chinese had apparently forgotten about his group, one of hundreds of escape parties that made their way to the mountains or across the Kyichu that night. The survivors hugged themselves, brushed off the dirt clinging to their clothes, and began walking. The days ahead would be a nightmare. “We lost so many on the road,” remembers Narkyid. The monk found himself part of the exodus following their protector to India.

As Tibetans streamed toward the Kyichu, the river’s banks became a killing ground, the survivors caught in enfilading fire from the new PLA outposts at the summer palace and their stronghold halfway between the Potala Palace and Chakpori. The Kyichu was engorged with spring runoff, and the Tibetans linked arms as they began pushing their way into the currents. Many were ripped away and dragged downstream. Others arrived on the far side, half-naked and shivering from the cold.

• • •

Soepa awoke, lying on the floor inside the summer palace. A furious barrage had roused him. In the darkness, he could see figures of PLA soldiers, their crouching bodies silhouetted against the whitewashed wall, now gray in the night. The wooden gate had been shattered and was hanging crookedly on its hinges. The Chinese had finally breached the Norbulingka gates.