Escape from the Land of Snows (26 page)

And then the plane appeared.

Like a mythical beast, everyone remembered it differently. Some remember a “
biplane, flying low over the long line of the struggling caravan.” The military-obsessed Choegyal thought it was a Douglas DC-4 model, the Skymaster, which had become famous for its part in the Berlin airlift. Others thought it was a Chinese military plane. “
If it was Chinese, as it probably was,” the Dalai Lama said, “there was a good chance that they now knew where we were.” But all agreed the unmarked plane appeared out of nowhere, droning down from a blue sky to sweep over the escape party. “We didn’t know whether it was Chinese or from another country,” Choegyal recounted. “But it flew directly overhead and couldn’t have failed to see us, hundreds of men and horses on the pure white snow.”

Guards began to panic, jumping off their horses and struggling to get the machine guns off their backs. Suddenly, the Dalai Lama’s voice floated across the slope.

“
Be quiet,” he called. “Don’t move.”

The fugitives stopped and waited, their breath visible in the frigid air. The Dalai Lama ordered the men to take off the red saddle blankets, which would be an easy mark for any gunners on the plane. In the confusion, his almost preternatural calm had eased the tension. It was a small moment, but the young monk was now ordering Khampa warriors around like he’d been born to it.

The plane was an ominous sign to the fugitives. “We thought it was over,” Choegyal concedes. Certain they had been spotted, the escape party broke up into smaller groups that would give at least some of the Tibetans a chance to make it to India. His Holiness
took the plane’s appearance as a sign that no part of Tibet was safe for him. “Any misgivings I had about going into exile vanished with this realization,” he remembered. “India was our only hope.”

When they made camp, the fugitives took out their wireless radio and tried to pick up any news about Lhasa. Often they could only get Radio Peking. “
The ancient city of Lhasa,” the official news agency reported, “is bustling with life again”:

The reality for those who’d stayed behind in Tibet was, however, far different.

ne pregnant Tibetan remembers the worst moment of the rebellion came in a simple gesture. She was being pulled away to prison by PLA troops when her mother came running out of their house to beg the soldiers not to take her daughter away. Her mother, a high-born aristocrat, prostrated herself at the feet of the peasant Chinese boys in their pea-green uniforms. The soldiers turned and left. “I was so ashamed that things had come to this, that my mother was bowing to the invader of our country,” she says. “But she did it so that we might be safe.”

Tibet was being remade by the Dalai Lama’s escape. The Chinese began arresting Tibetans en masse. Lhasa became a city of women, as the only men on the streets were PLA soldiers and Chinese civilians. “
We used to get so scared when we heard any sounds of men’s footsteps,” explains the pregnant woman, “as most of the Tibetan men were being kept in custody at the Norbulingka, and barely a few were left in Lhasa.” An aristocrat whose husband was one of the government officials in the pay of the Chinese occupiers, she was later arrested despite her mother’s pleas and tossed into a shelter, crowded in with the peasants and the poor. There she sat on the filthy floor thinking about her maid, whom she’d sent to the first protests and who was now imprisoned—for obeying her mistress’s order. “I felt so guilty and uncomfortable about it,” she admits. “Later I met her in exile; I welcomed her at home and showed her my respect and asked for her forgiveness.”

A Tibetan nun describes the conditions at one Lhasa prison in those first days: “
We were kept in a small cell with many people, and later on they brought more and more people so that there was barely any room for standing. They started interrogating each one of us one by one.… According to how you answered, you received a sentence. I was totally petrified and could not feel much either physically or spiritually. I was without sensation.” The nun received five years for helping the rebels.

Others escaped before they could be arrested. One escapee who fled Lhasa remembered feeling as if he were stepping on dried peas as he hurried away, as there were so many empty rifle cartridges littering the streets.
In one Tibetan army division, the original force of 500 men had been reduced to only 37, with most of the missing now dead. The Chinese were piling corpses in front of the Norbulingka and in other places where the Tibetans had put
up the fiercest resistance. At a place called Tsuklak-khang, an army doctor saw the bodies of women and children lying among the rebels: “
The whole city was smoking from burning houses and it stank, especially at the Norbulingka side where the Chinese burned the piled corpses of humans and animals.” PLA officers were going from prisoner to prisoner, questioning them on the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama. “They had no idea where he was.”

The Sera monks who’d ferried guns from the Potala were caught and arrested. Some were wounded in the battle. “
When the bullet hit me, I felt satisfied and had no regrets about dying,” one remembers. “It wasn’t for myself I was wounded but for the cause of the nation.” He was brought back to Sera Monastery, which was now a temporary prison for “counterrevolutionary” monks. “I was held in a dark room,” he says. “The Chinese authorities would come every day and ask me to confess to what I did. They said if I confessed, they would let me go.” The normally placid monk argued fiercely with them. “I told them that I didn’t have anything to confess as we Tibetans didn’t come to their land, instead you Chinese had invaded ours.” The Chinese interrogators shot back that Tibet was part of China. “I responded that if it was so, then where were they when the English invaded?”

The interrogators had no answer for that.

The fall of the Norbulingka made two things clear to Tibetans: the Dalai Lama was fleeing the country and the Chinese would now exert complete control over their lives. In the next few days and weeks, 80,000 refugees flowed south to India or Bhutan in the wake of His Holiness. Almost every family in Tibet had a member leave for the border or knew someone who made the trip. Others
stayed where they were, burning incense and placing lamps with fresh butter in front of their Buddhist shrines, and praying for the Precious Protector, the Dalai Lama, to survive.

Some who lived close to the border made it to exile in a day or two of nothing more than vigorous hiking by moonlight (many of the escapees traveled by night to avoid Chinese patrols). Others suffered horribly—one escapee recalls his wife giving birth prematurely on the road. The baby died of exposure and hunger on the route to Bhutan. Few had prepared for leaving Tibet, setting off without adequate supplies of
tsampa
or clothing. And in regions where there were no telegraphs or telephones, they made their decisions in complete ignorance about what had really happened in Lhasa. Rumors abounded. After airplanes flew over one escape party, the next morning its members were told that the aircraft were the first sign of an American invasion. “
There is no need to escape to India,” a young man told them. “American troops have come to take back our country.’ ” The people were overjoyed.

One refugee who followed the Dalai Lama’s exact route to the south remembered that the PLA was everywhere. “
The Chinese were pursuing us,” he says, shooting at them from planes and dropping bombs on their party. Their food was rapidly running out, and the paths were so clogged and steep that they had to abandon their horses, whose bodies lined the route. “We had to walk over them,” he says. “There was no time for compassion.”

In the stony village of Kongpo Tham-nyen in the rebellious province of Kham, Cho Lhamo marked her life into two sections: before the Chinese and after. Before, she’d been the beautiful daughter of a local farmer and
genpo
, or Khampa leader. She played mah-jongg, wrestled with her brothers and sisters, circled the local temple hand in hand with other children, and rode a horse like a true Khampa child. “I would catch hold of a horse with a rope and
ride it without a saddle,” she remembered. “I rode into the woods clinging on to the mane of the horse with my head bent against it.” She’d been to Lhasa once, in 1956, where as a fifteen-year-old she had gazed upon the young Dalai Lama. “I looked up and thought he was so fair and rosy,” she said. “I thought he was really God.”

When the Dalai Lama fled for India, Cho Lhamo’s family—fearing they would be targeted as prosperous Tibetans—hurried to join him. They walked during the night and hid during daylight, always heading south, meeting hundreds and then thousands of other refugees in the mountain passes. Finally, her father, without telling her or her mother and siblings, dropped behind to join a group of fighters. When Cho Lhamo and her mother found out, they hid in a cave, waiting for her father to rejoin them. Two days later, his dog wandered into the mouth of the cave. “The dog would never leave your father’s side,” her mother told her. “He has been killed by the Chinese.” But they couldn’t leave their patriarch behind without knowing for sure. Holding a long knife in her pocket, Cho Lhamo, her mother, and her brothers and sisters walked north until they came across the site of a recent battle, finding empty bullet casings and ground that had recently been disturbed. They also found her father’s protective amulet, its contents spilled out in the dirt.

The Chinese caught them on the mountainside. A squad of soldiers advanced on Cho Lhamo and shouted, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” But the family members were arrested instead, their hands bound. Interrogators asked them, “Did you listen to the reactionaries and decide to go?” Cho Lhamo responded, yes, nudging her mother to keep quiet in case she gave a different answer. Instead of making it to India, she and her siblings were forced to march along the escape route back home. On the ground they saw bundles of clothes and food tossed away by Tibetans trying to lighten their load. “The
region was entirely deserted,” she remembered. The Chinese kept questioning them, “Will you escape again? Will you think differently?” Cho Lhamo told them, “We will never flee again.”

It seemed like half of Tibet had left for India, and Cho Lhamo was left to see the aftermath. In her home village, the fugitives’ possessions had been given away, their sheep and cattle stolen. And there she learned the fate of her father, who had indeed been killed defending their escape party. “I wept and wept and wept, so that I almost died,” she says.

In southern Tibet, a man named Norbu Dhondup was fleeing with his two wives. A simple nomad, thirty years old, he was leaving a land that had become bitter to him. His father, a wealthy landowner, had been subjected to a series of
thamzins
, or reeducation sessions, after the Chinese charged him with supporting the rebels. In fact, when the rebels had ridden into their village and asked for “guns if we had guns, swords if we had swords, horses if we had horses,” his father had refused. But the rebels had taken them anyway.

The villagers turned on his family. Norbu’s father had lent them grain and money when times were hard, but now they took advantage of the Chinese invasion to erase their accounts. Poor peasants even walked into his father’s home and looted it. Sold out by his neighbors, the elderly man was arrested by the Chinese along with five or six other prominent men (including a monk) on charges of helping the rebels. Norbu’s father was marched to the public square and made to kneel. The Chinese then pulled his father off the ground by his hair and made him bow to the entire village, gathered in a circle around him. The crowd shouted that Norbu’s father had given the horses and guns to the guerrillas.
When prompted by the Chinese guards, they came up close to the elderly man, looked him in the face, and then spit in his mouth. The PLA even demanded Norbu
thamzin
his own father. “It was so bad,” he says. “I said I would not do it.”