Escape from the Land of Snows (24 page)

A machine gun opened up with a terrifying burst of noise. Soepa peeked out the door and saw that the shots were coming from a large storage room used to keep firewood. It was a Tibetan gunner aiming at the PLA soldiers flooding the palace grounds. The gunner sprayed the garden with bullets, the muzzle of his gun flashing orange. The PLA soldiers seemed to disappear, either dropping to the ground dead or running away. It was the first time Soepa had seen the Chinese soldiers die in numbers, and he felt happy about it.

The Chinese soldiers regrouped and advanced on the gunner, firing as they went. Soon the position went silent, and the PLA troops fanned out over the grounds. Between bursts of gunfire, Soepa heard Chinese voices and Tibetan voices, interpreters surely, calling for the men inside the Norbulingka buildings to give up. The PLA soldiers were afraid to storm the structures and preferred to strafe the windows with bullets and then call for surrender.

Soepa took out his amulet box. He opened it and took out the small precious substance, the
byin rten
, and placed it in his mouth, swallowing it. He then reached around in the darkness, searching for a gun. He thought he would kill one or two soldiers and then be killed himself. But there was nothing there, just the cool stone of the floor, polished by the rags tied to monks’ feet.

He crawled outside. Two Chinese soldiers standing near the
door called out and came over with a flashlight and inspected him. Soepa was covered with blood. They pointed at the main gate, now open, and barked at him to walk toward it. Instead, he waited for them to turn their attention elsewhere, then made his way slowly toward a guardhouse. He found five Tibetans lying inside, and he called to them, “Please give me some water.” But the men didn’t stir. He looked at the figures on the floor more closely and realized they were all dead. A shattered Bren machine gun lay next to one of the bodies, and hundreds of empty bullet shells were scattered across the floor. These men had obviously fought.

Soepa lay down with the dead. A PLA squad came in, flashlights in one hand and rifles in the other. They began kicking the bodies, then bent over to look at the faces, shining their lights and looking for flickering eyelids. They kicked each corpse, but none moved. When they came to Soepa, playing dead, a soldier booted him hard in the hip, but he didn’t even breathe out. He was safe for the moment.

Another trio of soldiers entered the building, and the inspection of the dead started again. This time Soepa was kicked in the stomach so hard that he almost screamed. But the men soon left. He crawled onto a mattress set on a makeshift platform of bricks and, exhausted and thirsty, fell asleep.

Hours later, he was captured by PLA soldiers and imprisoned in the summer palace.

Across Lhasa, it was clear the battle was being lost. “
In order to encourage the people, the rumor was spread that the American Air Force would be coming on the next day to help us,” remembers the sixteen-year-old protester Lobsang Yonten. “Till then we needed to stand steady and defend ourselves.” But early on the 22nd, three
days into the fighting, Tibetans began to hold up white pieces of cloth and prayer scarves tied to sticks. The shelling and the gunfire slackened and finally stopped. The shocking loss of the capital was softened by news that the Dalai Lama had successfully escaped the ruined Norbulingka. “I felt a huge relief,” Yonten says, “as if I’d been set free from an enormous burden.”

By the end of the day, the rebellion was over. The voice of the Chinese official Tan Guansan came across the loudspeakers and echoed off the cobblestones and the stone walls of the city. He told the last of the rebels that if they surrendered, they would not be punished. There were pistol shots across the city and hooting as some of the Tibetan fighters sent a mocking response to the Chinese demand. The general’s voice was followed by that of Ngabö, the Tibetan minister by now widely considered a notorious traitor. “My name is Ngabö, and you know I am a member of the cabinet.” The beautifully modulated aristocratic voice announced that the Dalai Lama was alive, kidnapped by counterrevolutionaries. Ngabö urged the rebels to surrender, by order not of General Tan but of the Tibetan government itself. “Lay down your arms and you will be free,” he told listeners all over the city, who struggled to believe that one of their own could really be saying these things.

More and more white scarves appeared, waved on the ends of sticks or rifles. To these were added Chinese flags, hoisted by Tibetans surrendering at last. The sight was a bitter one for many fighters: “We felt let down by this unexpected submission,” remembers one.

All over Lhasa, the rumors of the Dalai Lama’s escape were finally confirmed by Norbulingka officials and rebel leaders. There was, just as with the news of his imminent kidnapping, a strangely uniform response to the news. “
I was hit by two extreme emotions,” said one Tibetan doctor, “extreme joy that His Holiness escaped
safely and the extreme sorrow that he had to leave his own land.” A Sera monk, injured in the battle, felt his sacrifice had gained meaning. “
I felt fulfilled,” he explains. “We had lost our land but not our king.” Others remember saying that they could die happily now, as death no longer mattered. Those who had fought at the Norbulingka and on Chakpori realized that they’d given the Dalai Lama cover to make good his escape, as well as pinning down forces in Lhasa that might have been used to pursue him.

On the afternoon of the 23rd, the PLA raised the flag of the People’s Republic of China over the Potala Palace. The authorities announced that the new colors, “symbols of light and happiness,” would usher in a rebirth for the capital.

For Yonten, there was no time to mourn his fallen city. His father, a longtime nationalist who’d thrown himself behind the rebellion, met with the commander in chief of the Tibetan army, and together they decided to make their escape along with Yonten and three other men. The teenager and his father went home to say their good-byes and to collect
tsampa
, butter, tea, two bayonets, rifles, and a first-aid box. Yonten’s younger sister, just seven, begged to go with them, but they didn’t feel it would be safe. “
We had to leave her in tears,” Yonten remembers. But when they arrived at the rendezvous, they found that the commander in chief had already fled without telling them. There was an air in Lhasa of every man for himself.

As they slipped through the city with their three companions, the father and son could hear the loudspeakers, now broadcasting the same message over and over: “All Tibetans should surrender and hand over their weapons. Anyone found with arms will be charged as a criminal.” By the eastern side of the Potala, they were spotted by the PLA, and gunfire immediately erupted, the tracers arcing out at them from the Chinese outpost. “We stood still and did not move a step,” Yonten recalls. His father prayed loudly.

The gunfire stopped, and PLA soldiers emerged to arrest the group, taking their names and ranks in the Tibetan government. The Chinese troops led them back to the Norbulingka, and there the captured men joined a long line of prisoners who were throwing their rifles onto a huge stack of rebel arms near a government building. The prisoners were lined up in rows and told to face forward. A jeep crawled by, and a Chinese officer pointed at each man, naming him: “This is Muja, this is Tsarond, this is Sumdho.…” Finally, the men were marched toward the city center in two files, passing piles of dead: horses, monks, rebels. The bloodshed was not quite over. “
As we passed by the Ramoche shrine,” Yonten remembers, “we saw monks from the Tantric College being executed.”

A group of Tibetan women began shouting angrily. As Yonten got closer, he realized they were not yelling at the guards but at the rebels, furious at them for starting the uprising and enticing the Chinese to bomb their city. “Some cruel Tibetan women made fun and spit at us,” he says. “They shouted, ‘You deserve to be arrested for defying the Communist Party.’ ” The prisoners were led to an open field, and the army cordoned off the temporary holding camp. Yonten and a family friend immediately began gathering the dry grass and making a makeshift bed for his father. But when the older man arrived, he ignored the grass and chanted a prayer, then started to remove the turquoise-flecked earrings that he always wore. Yonten watched him, knowing what this meant.

“I have decided to sacrifice my life,” his father finally told Yonten, handing him the earrings. “If you are freed, return home and tell our family not to worry about me.”

Yonten began to cry, holding the earrings in his open palm.

“You should live in harmony,” his father continued. “Do not change your faith. Be steadfast in your stand.” Overcome with grief, Yonten could only nod while tears streamed down his face.

They slept in the frigid night air and woke with dew on their clothes. They were given food, and Yonten watched as a high Tibetan official ate
tsampa
held in his scarf, which was shocking to him, as it was such a common thing for an aristocrat to be doing. “This will be the end of our civilization,” the teenager thought. Then the Chinese ordered the men to take off their hats. They were looking for the traditional haircut, the
pachok
, worn by all government officials. Two men were ordered to stand up and step out of the crowd. His father was the second.

Yonten jumped up and grabbed his father, holding him around the waist. “Please take me too,” he cried to the Chinese officer who was advancing on them. His father turned and pushed his son away. “Do you want to die?” he cried. Yonten refused to let him go. The Chinese officer asked Yonten who he was, and he explained that he was the man’s son. “Our condition is the same,” he said, nearly sobbing. “We share a common fate. Please take me with my father.” The officer came up and began to pull his father away. Other prisoners called to him, “Dear boy, why are you going? Stay with us.”

Yonten’s hands were finally pulled away from his father’s clothes, and the prisoner was marched off. Yonten felt a premonition: he was looking at his father for the last time. Oblivious to the voices, which were calling for him to sit and have some tea, he stood and watched as his father was brought to a jeep, the door was opened, and his father was put in, looking straight ahead.

The defeat of the rebels shattered some Tibetans’ belief in the powers of the Dalai Lama. His Holiness was, after all, supposed to be a superior being with miraculous powers. He and his protectors, it was said, could dispatch demons and ghosts, to say nothing of mere humans. How, then, had the Chinese beaten their protector and
forced him to flee like a peasant? Some Lhasans took down their portraits of His Holiness and replaced them with images of Mao, who became a deity in certain Lhasa homes. “
I remember some of my neighbors … wondering if the Dalai Lama was really the kind of powerful monk they had come to believe in,” said one Tibetan who fled to India, “or was he really just a myth?” But the events of March only strengthened the belief of other followers. Many felt that, even if the Dalai Lama had not by some divine act defeated the PLA and freed Tibet from occupation, his escape proved that he was capable of wondrous things. “
He performed a miracle when he fled without letting the Chinese know,” asserts one monk. “It was impossible for him to leave the Norbulingka any other way.”

Tibetans often comprehend the events of life in a multilayered way. Mahayana Buddhism posits that there is “ordinary perception” (
thun mong pai snang ba
) and “extraordinary perception” (
thun mong ma yin
), which reveals hidden truths about even the most mundane occurrences. The Dalai Lama’s escape, to some believers, was an occurrence that needed to be contemplated with
thun mong ma yin
. They believed, as one monk-artist later said, that the journey across the Himalayas was “part of a larger divine plan” that had not yet unfolded in its entirety, only the first act of a story with many acts. In this interpretation, the occupation and the PLA’s trampling of the rebels could be seen not as a defeat of Chenrizi but as a test of Tibetans’ ability to overcome their attachment to transitory things, a blow that would force them to fully embrace supreme detachment from the material world. Or it could be a way to spread Buddhism all over the world, as the Tibetan exodus sent lamas to every corner of the globe.

For many Tibetans, the defeat was simply the beginning of a time when their lives would be, as one survivor put it, “
broken beyond repair.”

s the Dalai Lama and his compatriots hurried toward Lhuntse Dzong, the trail got more difficult. The fugitives were forced to cross a Himalayan pass every day, the lower ones covered in thick mud from the melting snows and the higher ones frozen in ice and snow. They were riding for ten or more hours a day, and they grew more and more exhausted as they traveled mile after mile across the wind-whipped plains. One stop they made, a village called E-Chhudhogang, was the subject of a Tibetan saying:
“
It is better to be born an animal in a place where there is grass and water than to be born in E-Chhudhogang.” At Sabo-La, they struggled up the pass and found the temperature dropping as they climbed. The soft life of the Norbulingka hadn’t prepared the tutors and the ministers for such a rugged trek. “
I began to be deeply worried about some of my companions,” the Dalai Lama remembered.