The Superintelligence Horizon: Timelines and the Future of India
The buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer confined to science fiction. With rapid advancements, the prospect of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – AI with human-level cognitive abilities – and even superintelligence, which surpasses human intellect, is becoming a serious topic of discussion. When could these milestones be reached, and what would life be like, particularly in a country as diverse as India?
Predicting the future is never easy, especially when it comes to technology. Experts have varying opinions on when AGI might arrive, with some optimistic leaders in AI companies suggesting it could be within the next few years. Surveys of AI researchers tend to offer more conservative estimates, pointing towards the mid-21st century. The timeline for superintelligence is even more uncertain, with some predicting it could follow AGI relatively quickly.
Here's a snapshot of some predictions:
Source
Predicted Timeline for AGI
Predicted Timeline for Superintelligence
Definition of AGI Used
Leaders of AI Companies
2-5 years
Shortly after AGI
Unclear
AI Researchers (2023 Survey)
~2032
Unclear
'Can do all tasks better than humans'
Metaculus Forecasters (January 2025)
2027
Shortly after AGI
Four-part definition including robotic manipulation
Anthropic CEO (Dario Amodei)
2026
Shortly after AGI
Human-level intelligence
OpenAI CEO (Sam Altman)
2025
A few thousand days
Generally smarter than humans
"AI 2027" Forecast
2027
Shortly after AGI
AI agents becoming junior employees and rapidly advancing
AI Impacts Survey (2023)
2047 (50% probability)
Unclear
High-level machine intelligence: machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers
Superforecasters via XPT (2022)
2047
Unclear
Same as Metaculus
Roman Yampolskiy (AI Safety Expert, 2025)
2-30 years
3-4 years after AGI
Systems that far exceed human capabilities in a wide range of tasks
Geoffrey Hinton ("Godfather of AI," 2025)
5-20 years
Within 5-20 years
AI surpassing human intelligence
The arrival of superintelligence will likely bring significant global changes. Economically, we could see unprecedented growth and productivity , but also a risk of increased inequality and job displacement. Governance will face new challenges in ensuring AI alignment with human values and preventing misuse. Social interactions could also be transformed, potentially impacting relationships and raising ethical dilemmas. Existential risks, though debated, are a serious concern for some experts.
For India, a nation with a large and growing population, superintelligence presents both immense opportunities and unique challenges. In agriculture, AI could revolutionize farming practices, increase yields, and improve resource management. The manufacturing sector could see increased efficiency and automation, potentially boosting India's ambition to become a global manufacturing hub. The technology sector itself could witness rapid innovation and growth, with India potentially becoming a hub for AI research and development. The services sector, a significant part of India's economy, is also expected to be transformed through personalized services and automation.
For ordinary citizens in India, superintelligence could mean significant shifts in employment, requiring upskilling and reskilling. Education could become highly personalized and accessible. Healthcare could see advancements in diagnostics and treatment, reaching even remote areas. Access to resources might be optimized, but equitable distribution will be crucial.
Navigating this future requires careful ethical considerations, ensuring AI aligns with India's cultural and societal values. Bias in algorithms, accountability, privacy, and human autonomy will need to be addressed thoughtfully.
In conclusion, the journey towards superintelligence holds immense potential for India. By proactively addressing the challenges and ethically harnessing the opportunities, India can chart a course towards inclusive growth and global leadership in the age of advanced AI.
It’s also noteworthy to mention that India’s capital city, New Delhi, ranks 13th with a projected Gross State
Domestic Product (GSDP) of INR 11.07 lakh crore for FY 2024-25, contributing approximately 3.6% to the national
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The idea of starting a rental business was beyond my wildest imaginations.
The main challenge would have been getting people to accept the challenges of a rental business and if it were my initiative, the first challenge would have been mom herself.
Mom learnt of a prospective tenant from our neighbour Mrs Poonam and tenant and tenant's family were ready to move in to the room I was staying in. The grandpa's room.
The tenant's three kids were taking tuition from Mrs Poonam and hence the selection of our house as a place to live.
When I had stayed in Tri Nagar in the summers till August, I had cleared a lot of clutter from granny's room and realigned furniture in grandpa's room.
Sham was staying in the room above mom's. The roof in granny's room and hall to mom's room had fallen down long back. There was no way to room above grandpa's room.
In summers of 2019, I got the roof of two rooms fixed in an expense of about 75000 INR. This was supposed to make the place livable.
In the fall of 2019, mom flooded the house with tenants in every room due to which I had to intervene and had to hear from badi buaji.
At that point in time, the house was less of a house and more of a rooster coop.
12 people, 4 rooms and 1 restroom.
Limited water supply.
I had taken a trip to Delhi from Chandigarh on one weekend to assess the situation and it was a bad feeling that I got on seeing the place this crowded.
Later from the help of Manju bua and Kumkum bua, we asked few tenants to vacate from granny's hall and Manju bua's room above. This stabilized the situation for the time being and from there the business goes on.
In 1948, while I was still a student, the government heard there were Chinese Communist spies in the country. They had come to find out how strong our army was, and whether we were receiving military aid from any foreign power.
They cannot have found it very hard to discover the facts they wanted. Far from receiving military aid, we had only six Europeans in Tibet, so far as I am aware. Three of them, one missionary and two radio operators, were British. The other three were two Austrians and one White Russian, all of whom had been refugees from British internment camps in India during the war. None of them had anything to do with military matters.
As for the army, its strength was 8,500 officers and men.
There were more than enough rifles for them, but only about fifty pieces of artillery of various kinds—250 mortars and about 200 machine guns. The purpose of the army, as I have said, was to stop unauthorized travelers and act as a police force. It was quite inadequate to fight a war.
Soon after this first sign of impending trouble, more serious news was heard from the eastern parts of Tibet. The governor of eastern Tibet, whose name was Lhalu, was stationed in the town of Chamdo. close to the frontier, and he had one of the British radio operators with him, the other being in Lhasa.
Soon coded signals began to come in from the governor reporting that the Chinese were moving up strong forces and massing them along our eastern border. It was obvious that they intended either to attack or intimidate us.
As soon as this alarming information reached the Cabinet, they convened a meeting of the National Assembly. Evidently, Tibet was facing a far more serious threat from the east than it had ever faced in all the centuries before. Communism had conquered China, and given the country a military strength it had not had for many generations. So the threat to us was not only more powerful, it was also different in its very nature.
In past centuries, there had always been some religious sympathy between our countries, but now we were threatened not only with military domination, but also with the domination of an alien materialistic creed which, so far as any of us understood it in Tibet, seemed totally abhorrent.
The Assembly agreed unanimously that Tibet had neither the material resources nor the arms or men to defend its integrity against a serious attack, and so they decided to make an urgent appeal to other countries, in the hope of persuading the Chinese to halt before it was too late. Four delegations were appointed to visit Britain, the United States of America, India, and Nepal to ask for help. Before the delegations left Lhasa, telegrams were sent to these four governments, to tell them of the apparent threat to our independence, and of our government’s wish to send the delegations.
The replies to these telegrams were terribly disheartening.
The British government expressed their deepest sympathy for the people of Tibet, and regretted that owing to Tibet’s geographical position, since India had been granted independence, they could not offer help. The government of the United States also replied in the same sense and declined to receive our delegation. The Indian government also made it clear that they would not give us military help, and advised us not to offer any armed resistance, but to open negotiations for a peaceful settlement on the basis of the Simla agreement of 1914. So we learned that in military matters we were alone.
It happened that Lhalu’s term as governor of eastern Tibet was over, and at this crucial moment he had to be replaced by another official, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme. Ngabo left Lhasa for the eastern province, and as the situation was so delicate the Cabinet told Lhalu to stay at his post and help his successor, sharing the responsibility with him. But Ngabo soon said he was ready to take the full responsibility, and so Lhalu was recalled. Very soon afterwards, without any formal warning, the armies of Communist China invaded Tibet.
For a short time, and in a few places, the Tibetan army fought them back with some success, aided by volunteers from the local race of Khampas. But our army was hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched. The change of governor had confused the administration, and Ngabo began to move his headquarters back from Chamdo toward the west. When the Tibetan troops, retreating from the frontier, arrived at Chamdo, they found he had already abandoned the place, and so they had to bum the armory and ammunition store and join him in further retreat.
But retreat was of no avail. Ngabo found his line of communication cut, and himself outflanked by more mobile Chinese forces, and he and many Tibetan troops were forced to surrender.
The Chamdo radio transmitter and its British operator were also captured, and so for a time no news of what was happening reached the government. And then two officials arrived in Lhasa, sent by Ngabo with the Chinese commander’s permission, to tell the Cabinet that he was a prisoner, to ask for authority to negotiate terms of peace, and also to give the Cabinet an assurance from the Chinese commander that China would not extend her rule over more Tibetan territory.
While these disasters were taking place in the distant eastern marches of Tibet, the government in Lhasa was consulting the oracles and the high lamas, and guided by their advice, the Cabinet came to see me with the solemn request that I should take over the responsibility of government.
This filled me with anxiety. I was only sixteen. I was far from having finished my religious education. I knew nothing about the world and had no experience of politics, and yet I was old enough to know how ignorant I was and how much I had still to learn. I protested at first that I was too young, for eighteen was the accepted age for a Dalai Lama to take over active control from his Regent. Yet I understood very well why the oracles and lamas had caused the request to be made. The long years of Regency after the death of each Dalai Lama were an inevitable weakness in our system of government. During my own minority, there had been dissensions between separate factions in our government, and the administration of the country had deteriorated. We had reached a state in which most people were anxious to avoid responsibility, rather than accept it. Yet now, under the threat of invasion, we were more in need of unity than ever before, and I, as Dalai Lama, was the only person whom everybody in the country would unanimously follow.
I hesitated—but then the National Assembly met, and added its plea to the Cabinet’s, and I saw that at such a serious moment in our history, I could not refuse my responsibilities.
I had to shoulder them, put my boyhood behind me, and immediately prepare myself to lead my country, as well as I was able, against the vast power of Communist China.
So I accepted, with trepidation, and full powers were conferred on me with traditional celebration. In my name a general amnesty was proclaimed, and every convict in prison in Tibet was given freedom.
At just about that time, my eldest brother arrived in Lhasa from the east. He had returned, as Abbot, to the monastery of Kumbum, near the village where we had been born. In this Chinese-controlled territory, while he was Abbot, he had been witness to the downfall of the governor under Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and the advance of the armies of the new Communist government. He had seen a year of confusion, oppression and tenor, in which the Chinese Communists had claimed that they had come to protect the people, and had promised them freedom to pursue their own religion, and yet at the same time had begun a systematic undermining and destruction of religious life. He himself had been kept under a strict guard and subjected to an almost continuous course of Communist argument, until finally, the Chinese had explained to him that they intended to reclaim the whole of Tibet, which they still insisted was a part of China, and to convert it all to communism. Then they tried to persuade him to go to Lhasa as their emissary, and to persuade me and my government to agree to their domination. They promised to make him governor of Tibet if he succeeded. Of course, he refused to do anything of the kind. But at last he saw that his life would he in danger if he continued to refuse, and he also saw that he had a duty to warn me of the Chinese plans. So he pretended to agree, and thus managed to escape from Chinese supervision and reached Lhasa with a detailed warning of the dangers we were facing.
By then, the Cabinet had taken steps to put our case before the United Nations. While we were waiting for it to be considered, it seemed to me that the first of my duties must be to follow the advice of the Indian government, and try to reach an agreement with the Chinese before more harm was done. So I wrote to the Chinese government, through the commander of the army which was occupying Chamdo.
I said that during my minority relations had been strained between our countries, but that now I had taken over full responsibility and sincerely wanted to restore the friendship which had existed in the past. I pleaded with them to return the Tibetans who had been captured by their array, and to withdraw from the part of Tibet which they had occupied by force.
At about the same time, my Cabinet convened the National Assembly again, in order to test public opinion about the threat which confronted us. One result of this Assembly was very unwelcome in my eyes. The members pointed out that the Chinese armies might advance to Lhasa and capture it at any moment, and they decided that I should be requested to leave the city and go to the town of Yatung, near the border of India, so that I would be out of any personal danger. I did not want to go at all. I wanted to stay where I was and do what I could to help my people. But the Cabinet also urged me to go, and in the end I had to give in. This conflict was often to occur again, as I shall tell. As a young and able-bodied man, my instinct was to share whatever risks my people were undergoing, but to Tibetans, the person of the Dalai Lama is supremely precious, and whenever the conflict arose I had to allow my people to take far more care of me than I would have thought of taking of myself.
So I prepared to go. Before I left, I appointed two Prime Ministers—a high monk official called Losang Tashi, and a veteran and experienced lay administrator called Lukhangwa.
I gave them full authority and made them jointly responsible, and told them they need only refer to me in matters of the very highest importance.
It was in the minds of my ministers then that if the worst came to the worst I might have to go to India for refuge, as my predecessor had done when the Chinese invaded us forty years before. I was advised to send a small part of my treasure there. So some gold dust and bars of silver were taken from Lhasa and put in a vault across the border in Sikkim, and there they lay for the next nine years. In the end, we needed them badly.
The next grievous blow to us was the news that the General Assembly of the United Nations had decided not to consider the question of Tibet. This filled us with consternation.
We had put our faith in the United Nations as a source of justice, and we were astonished to hear that it was on British initiative that the question had been shelved. We had had very friendly relations with the British for a long time, and had benefited greatly from the wisdom and experience of many distinguished servants of the British Crown; and it was Britain who had implied her recognition of our independence by concluding treaties with us as a sovereign power. Yet now, the British representative said the legal position of Tibet was not very clear, and he seemed to suggest that even now, after thirty-eight years without any Chinese in our country, we might still be legally subject to China’s suzerainty. The attitude of the Indian representative was equally disappointing.
He said he was certain a peaceful settlement could be made and Tibet’s autonomy could be safeguarded, and that the best way to ensure this was to abandon the idea of discussing the matter in the General Assembly.
This was a worse disappointment than the earlier news that nobody would offer us any military help. Now our friends would not even help us to present our plea for justice. We felt abandoned to the hordes of the Chinese army.
Of course, looking back at our history now, it is easy to see how our own policies had helped to put us in this desperate position. When we won our complete independence, in 1912, we were quite content to retire into isolation. It never occurred to us that our independence, so obvious a fact to us, needed any legal proof to the outside world. If only we had applied to join the League of Nations or the United Nations, or even appointed ambassadors to a few of the leading powers, before our crisis came, I am sure these signs of sovereignty would have been accepted without any question, and the plain justice of our cause would not have been clouded, as it was, by subtle legal discussions based on ancient treaties which had been made under quite different circumstances.
Now we had to learn the bitter lesson that the world has grown too small for any people to live in harmless isolation.
The only thing we could do was pursue our negotiations as best we could. We decided to give Ngabo the authority he had requested. One of the two officials he had sent to Lhasa took a message from myself and my Cabinet, in which we told Ngabo he should open negotiations on the firm condition that the Chinese armies would not advance any further into Tibet. We had understood that the negotiations would be held either in Lhasa or in Chamdo, where the Chinese armies were stationed, but the Chinese ambassador in India proposed that our delegation should go to Peking. I appointed four more officials as assistants to Ngabo, and they all arrived in Peking at the beginning of 1951.
It was not until they returned to Lhasa, long afterwards, that we heard exactly what had happened to them. According to the report which they submitted then, the Chinese foreign minister Chou En-lai had invited them all to a party when they arrived, and formally introduced them to the Chinese representatives. But as soon as the first meeting began, the chief Chinese representative produced a draft agreement containing ten articles ready-made. This was discussed for several days. Our delegation argued that Tibet was an independent state, and produced all the evidence to support their argument, but the Chinese would not accept it. Ultimately, the Chinese drafted a revised agreement, with seventeen articles.
This was presented as an ultimatum. Our delegates were not allowed to make any alterations or suggestions. They were insulted and abused and threatened with personal violence, and with further military action against the people of Tibet, and they were not allowed to refer to me or my government for further instructions.
This draft agreement was based on the assumption that Tibet was part of China. That was simply untrue, and it could not possibly have been accepted by our delegation without reference to me and my government, except under duress.
But Ngabo had been a prisoner of the Chinese for a long time, and the other delegates were also virtual prisoners. At last, isolated from any advice, they yielded to compulsion and signed the document. They still refused to affix the seals which were needed to validate it. But the Chinese forged duplicate Tibetan seals in Pelting, and forced our delegation to seal the document with them.
Neither I nor my government were told that an agreement had been signed. We first came to know of it from a broadcast which Ngabo made on Peking Radio. It was a terrible shock when we heard the terms of it. We were appalled at the mixture of Communist cliches, vainglorious assertions which were completely false, and bold statements which were only partly true. And the terms were far worse and more oppressive than anything we had imagined.
The preamble said that “over the last one hundred years or more,” imperialist forces had penetrated into China and Tibet and “ carried out all kinds of deceptions and provocations,” and that “under such conditions, the Tibetan nationality and people were plunged into the depths of enslavement and suffering.”
This was pure nonsense. It admitted that the Chinese government had ordered the “People’s Liberation Army” to march into Tibet. Among the reasons given were that the influence of aggressive imperialist forces in Tibet might be successfully eliminated, and that the Tibetan people might be freed and return to the “ big family” of the People’s Republic of China.
That was also the subject of Clause One of the agreement: “The Tibetan people shall unite and drive out imperialist aggressive forces from Tibet, The Tibetan people shall return to the big family of the Motherland~the People’s Republic of China.” Reading this, we reflected bitterly that there had been no foreign forces whatever in Tibet since we drove out the last of the Chinese forces in 1912. Clause Two provided that “the local government of Tibet shall actively assist the People’s Liberation Army to enter Tibet and consolidate the national defense.” This in itself went beyond the specific limits we had placed on Ngabo’s authority. Clause Eight provided for the absorption of the Tibetan army into the Chinese army. Clause Fourteen deprived Tibet of all authority in external affairs.
In between these clauses which no Tibetan would ever willingly accept were others in which the Chinese made many promises: not to alter the existing political system in Tibet; not to alter the status, functions, and powers of the Dalai Lama; to respect the religious beliefs, customs, and habits of the Tibetan people and protect the monasteries; to develop agriculture and improve the people’s standard of living; and not to compel the people to accept reforms. But these promises were small comfort beside the fact that we were expected to hand ourselves and our country over to China and cease to exist as a nation. Yet we were helpless. Without friends there was nothing we could do but acquiesce, submit to the Chinese dictates in spite of our strong opposition, and swallow our resentment. We could only hope that the Chinese would keep their side of this forced, one-sided bargain.
Soon after the agreement was signed, our delegation sent a telegram to tell me that the Chinese government had appointed a general called Chang Chin-wu as their representative in Lhasa. He was coming via India, instead of the long overland route through eastern Tibet. Yatung, where I was Staying, was just inside the Tibetan border on the main route from India to Lhasa, and so it was clear that I would have to meet him as soon as he set foot in our country.
I was not looking forward to it. I had never seen a Chinese general, and it was a rather forbidding prospect. Nobody could know how he would behave—whether he would be sympathetic, or arrive as a conqueror. Some of my officials, ever since the agreement had been signed, had thought I should go to India for safety before it was too late, and it had only been after some argument that everyone agreed I should wait until the general came, and see what his attitude was before we decided.
Some of my senior officials met him in Yatung. I was staying in a nearby monastery. There was a beautiful pavilion on the roof of the monastery, and we had arranged that I should meet him there. He insisted in Yatung that he and I should meet on equal terms, and we got over any difficulties of protocol by providing chairs of equal merit for everybody, instead of the cushions which were the custom in Tibet.
When the time came, I was peering out of a window to see what he looked like. I do not know exactly what I expected, but what I saw was three men in gray suits and peaked caps who looked extremely drab and insignificant among the splendid figures of my officials in their red and golden robes. Had I but known, the drabness was the state to which China was to reduce us all before the end, and the insignificance was certainly an illusion.
But when the procession had reached the monastery and climbed up to my pavilion, the general turned out to be friendly and informal. The other two gray-coated men were his aide and his interpreter. He gave me a letter from Mao Tse-tung, which more or less repeated the first clause of the agreement by welcoming us back to the great motherland, a phrase I had already come to detest. Then he said the same thing all over again through his interpreter. I gave him tea, and an observer who had not known what was in our hearts might have thought the whole meeting was perfectly cordial.
His arrival in Lhasa was not so successful. I sent instructions to the Cabinet that he would have to be properly received and treated as a guest of the government. So two members of the Cabinet went out beyond the Norbulingka to meet him with suitable ceremony, and on the following day the Prime Ministers and the Cabinet gave a dinner party in his honor.
But that did not satisfy him. He complained that he had not been given the reception due to the representative of a friendly power. So we were made to see that he was not quite as wholeheartedly friendly as he looked.
However, under these circumstances I was compelled to go back to the Norbulingka, and there I witnessed the next extensions of Chinese military rule.
Two months after the arrival of General Chang Chin-wu, three thousand officers and men of the Chinese army marched into Lhasa. Soon after that, another detachment of about the same size arrived there, under two more Generals, Tang Kohwa and Tang Kuan-sen. The people of Lhasa watched them come with the apparent indifference which I believe is usually shown at first by ordinary people in the face of such national humiliation. At first there was no contact between the Chinese commanders and our government except when the Chinese demanded supplies and accommodations. But these demands soon began to cause havoc in the city.
The Chinese requisitioned houses, and bought or rented others; and beyond the Norbulingka, in the pleasant land beside the river which had always been the favorite place for summer picnics, they took possession of an enormous area for a camp. They demanded a loan of 2,000 tons of barley. This huge amount could not be met from the state granaries at that time because of heavy expenditure, and the government had to borrow from monasteries and private owners. Other kinds of food were also demanded, and the humble resources of the city began to be strained, and prices began to rise. And then another general, and another eight to ten thousand men appeared.
They seized a further area for camps, and under the burden of their extra demands for food our simple economy broke down. They had brought nothing with them, and all expected to be fed from our meager sources of supply.
The prices of food-grains suddenly soared up about ten times; of butter, nine times; and of goods in general, two or three times.
For the first time that could be remembered, the people of Lhasa were reduced to the edge of famine.
Their resentment grew against the Chinese army, and children began to go about shouting slogans and throwing stones at the Chinese soldiers—a sign that the adults were barely keeping their own bitterness in check. Complaints began to pour in to the offices of the Cabinet, but nothing could be done. The Chinese armies had come to stay, and they would not accept any suggestions, or help our government in any way at all. On the contrary, their demands went on increasing every day. Soon they demanded another 2,000 tons of barley, and it had to be found.
It was called a loan, and the Generals promised to repay it by investing its value in the development of industries in Tibet, but that promise was never fulfilled.
While conditions were going from bad to worse for the people of Lhasa, high Chinese officials were constantly arriving in the city, and a long series of meetings was convened by General Chang Chin-wu. Members of my Cabinet were requested to attend them, and it fell mostly to Lukhangwa, as my lay Prime Minister, to try to find a balance between the essential needs of the people and the requests of the invaders.
He had the courage to tell the Chinese plainly that Tibetans were a humble religious community, whose production had always been just sufficient for their own needs. There was very little surplus—perhaps enough to support the Chinese armies for another month or two, but no more—and a surplus could not be created suddenly. There was no possible reason, he pointed out, for keeping such enormous forces in Lhasa. If they were needed to defend the country, they should be sent to the frontiers, and only officials, with a reasonable escort, should remain in the city.
The Chinese answers were very polite at first. General Chang Chin-wu said that our government had signed the agreement that Chinese forces should be stationed in Tibet, and we were therefore obliged to provide them with accommodation and supplies. He said that they had only come to help Tibet to develop her resources and to protect her against imperialist domination, and that they would go back to China as soon as Tibet was able to administer her own affairs and protect her own frontiers. “When you can stand on your own feet,” he said, “we will not stay here even if you ask us to.”
Lukhangwa forebore to point out that the only people who had ever threatened our frontiers were the Chinese themselves, and that we had administered our own affairs for centuries.
But at another meeting he told the General that in spite of his assurance that the Chinese had come to help Tibet, they had so far done nothing at all to help. On the contrary, their presence was a serious hardship, and most of their actions were bound to add to the anger and resentment of the people. One action he mentioned, more important to us than it may appear, was the burning of the bones of dead animals within the Holy City of Lhasa: this was very offensive to the religious feelings of Tibetans, and had caused a great deal of hostile comment.
But rather than discuss the causes of the people's obvious hostility, Chang Chin-wu expected our government to put an end to it. Among other complaints, he said that people were going about in the streets of Lhasa singing songs in disparagement of the Chinese. He suggested that our government should issue a declaration calling for friendly relations with the Chinese, and he wrote a draft and handed it to Lukhangwa.
When Lukhangwa read it, he found it was an order putting a ban on singing in the streets; and of course, rather than issue anything so ludicrous, he rewrote it in a somewhat more dignified form. I do not think the Chinese ever forgave him for that.
Throughout the series of meetings, Chinese complaints grew more forceful Although they were trying to make it clear to the people, they said, that they had only come to Tibet to help the Tibetans, the behavior of the people was deteriorating every day. They said that public meetings were being held to criticize the Chinese authorities, which no doubt was true, and they requested the Cabinet to put a ban on meetings. That was done, but the people of Lhasa immediately began to put up posters and circulate pamphlets in the city, saying that they were facing starvation and asking the Chinese to go back to China. And in spite of the ban, a large meeting was held at which a memorandum was written setting forth the people’s grievances, pointing out that conditions in Lhasa were very serious, and asking that the Chinese troops should be withdrawn and only a few officials be left in the city. One copy of this memorandum was sent to the Chinese generals, and one to the Cabinet. The Chinese said the document was due to the incitement of imperialists, and began to hint that there were certain people in Lhasa who were deliberately creating trouble. On one occasion, Chang Chin-wu came to the Cabinet office and angrily accused the two Prime Ministers of being the leaders of a conspiracy to violate the agreement which had been signed in Peking.
The pattern of these events will be distressingly familiar in any country which has been the victim of invasion. The invaders had arrived believing—with how much sincerity one cannot tell—that they had come as benefactors. They seemed to be surprised to find that the invaded people did not want their benefactions in the least. As popular resentment grew against them, they did not try to allay it by withdrawing, or even by making concessions to the people’s wishes. They tried to repress it by ever-increasing force, and rather than blame themselves, they searched for scapegoats. In Tibet, the first scapegoats were purely imaginary “imperialists,” and my Prime Minister, Lukhangwa. But this course of action can never lead to anything but disaster. Popular resentment can never be repressed for more than a short time by force, because forceful repression always makes it stronger. This lesson, which one would have thought so obvious, has yet to be learned by the Chinese.
All through this period of mounting tension, the Chinese insisted from time to time on by-passing my Cabinet and the usual agencies of the government and making direct approaches to me. At the beginning, my two Prime Ministers 94 my land and my people had always been present to advise me when I met the Chinese generals, but at one meeting Chang Chin-wu entirely lost his temper at something my monk Prime Minister Losang Tashi said. It was rather a shock to me at that age. I had never seen a grown man behave like that before. But young though I was, it was I who had to intervene to calm him down; and it was after that that they started demanding to see me alone.
Whenever they came to see me, they brought an escort of guards who were stationed outside my room during the interview. This display of bad manners, if it was nothing more, intensely offended the Tibetans who knew of it.
The final crisis between the Chinese and Lukhangwa arose over a matter which had nothing to do with the sufferings of Lhasa. An especially large meeting was called by Chang Chinwu.
My Prime Ministers and Cabinet were summoned, and all the highest Chinese officials, both civil and military, were present. The General announced that the time had come for Tibetan troops to be absorbed in the “ People’s Liberation Army” under the terms of the Seventeen-Point Agreement, and he proposed that as a first step a number of young Tibetan soldiers should be chosen for training at the Chinese army headquarters in Lhasa. Then, he said, they could go hack to their regiments and train the others.
At this, Lukhangwa spoke out more strongly than he ever had before. He said the suggestion was neither necessary nor acceptable. It was absurd to refer to the terms of the Seventeen-Point Agreement. Our people did not accept the agreement and the Chinese themselves had repeatedly broken the terms of it. Their army was still in occupation of eastern Tibet; the area had not been returned to the government of Tibet, as it should have been. The attack on Tibet was totally unjustifiable: the Chinese army had forcibly entered Tibetan territory while peaceful negotiations were actually going on.
As for absorbing Tibetan troops in the Chinese army, the agreement had said the Chinese government would not compel Tibetans to accept reforms. This was a reform which the people of Tibet would resent very strongly, and he as Prime Minister would not approve it.
The Chinese generals replied softly that the matter, after all, was not of very great importance, and they could not see why the Tibetan government should object to it. Then they slightly changed their ground. They proposed that the Tibetan flag should be hauled down on all Tibetan barracks, and the Chinese flag should be hoisted there instead. Lukhangwa said that if Chinese flags were hoisted on the barracks, the soldiers would certainly pull them down again, which would be embarrassing for the Chinese. In the course of this argument about the flags, Lukhangwa said outright that it was absurd for the Chinese, after violating the integrity of Tibet, to ask Tibetans to have friendly relations with them. “If you hit a man on the head and break his skull,” he said, “you can hardly expect him to be friendly.” This thoroughly angered the Chinese. They closed the meeting, and proposed to hold another one three days later.
When all the representatives met again, another general, Fan Ming, acted as the Chinese spokesman. He asked Lukhangwa whether he had not been mistaken in his statements at the earlier meeting, no doubt expecting an apology. But Lukhangwa, of course, stood by all that he had said. It was his duty, he added, to explain the situation frankly, because rumors had spread throughout Tibet of Chinese oppressions in the eastern provinces, and feelings were running high. If the Chinese proposals about the army were accepted, the reaction would certainly be violent, not only from the army but from the Tibetan people in general.
At this reply, General Fan Ming lost his temper, and accused Lukhangwa of having clandestine relations with foreign imperialist powers, and shouted that he would request me to dismiss Lukhangwa from his office. Lukhangwa told him that of course if I, the Dalai Lama, were satisfied that he had done any wrong, he would not only give up his office but also his life. Then General Chang Chin-wu intervened to say that Fan Ming was mistaken, and to ask our representatives not to take what he had said too seriously. The meeting broke up again without agreement.
Nevertheless, in spite of the soothing intervention of Chang Chin-wu, I received a written report soon after this meeting, in which the Chinese insisted that Lukhangwa did not want to improve relations between Tibet and China, and suggested that he should be removed from office. They made the same demand to the Cabinet, and the Cabinet also expressed the opinion to me that it would be better if both Prime Ministers were asked to resign. So the crisis was brought to a head, and I was faced with a very difficult decision. I greatly admired Lukhangwa’s courage in standing up to the Chinese, but now I had to decide whether to let him continue, or whether to bow yet again to a Chinese demand.
There were two considerations: Lukhangwa’s personal safety, and the future of our country as a whole. On the first, I had no doubt. Lukhangwa had already put his own life in danger. If I refused to relieve him of office, there was every chance that the Chinese would get rid of him in ways of their own.
On the more general question, my views had evolved throughout this long period of tension. I had still had no theoretical training in the intricacies of international politics.
I could only apply my religious training to these problems, aided I trust by common sense. But religious training, I believed and still believe, was a very reliable guide.
I reasoned that if we continued to oppose and anger the Chinese authorities, it could only lead us further along the vicious circle of repression and popular resentment. In the end, it was certain to lead to outbreaks of physical violence.
Yet violence was useless; we could not possibly get rid of the Chinese by any violent means. They would always win if we fought them, and our own unarmed and unorganized people would be the victims. Our only hope was to persuade the Chinese peaceably to fulfill the promises they had made in their agreement. Nonviolence was the only course which might win us back a degree of freedom in the end, perhaps after years of patience. That meant cooperation whenever it was possible, and passive resistance whenever it was not.
And violent opposition was not only unpractical, it was also unethical. Nonviolence was the only moral course. This was not only my own profound belief, it was also clearly in accordance with the teaching of Lord Buddha, and as the religious leader of Tibet I was bound to uphold it. We might be humiliated, and our most cherished inheritances might seem to be lost for a period, but if so, humility must be our portion, I was certain of that.
So I sadly accepted the Cabinet’s recommendation and asked the Prime Ministers to resign. They came to call on me, and I gave them scarves and gifts and my photograph. I felt that they understood my position very well. I did not appoint any successors. It was no use having Prime Ministers if they were merely to he scapegoats for the Chinese. It was better that I should accept the responsibilities myself, because my position was unassailable in the eyes of all Tibetans. Later, Lukhangwa went to India and became my Prime Minister in exile until his advancing age made him retire, and he is still my trusted advisor. But it grieves me to say that in 1959, after I left Tibet myself, Losang Tashi, the monk Prime Minister, was thrown into prison by the Chinese and has not been released.
When that incident came to an end, the attitude of the Chinese became more friendly and conciliatory. They suggested to the Cabinet that a delegation of Tibetan officials, monks, merchants, and other people should be sent to China to see for themselves, as they put it, that the people of China had absolute freedom to practice their religion. We accepted this suggestion, and chose members for a delegation.
They were taken on a conducted tour of China, and when they came back they submitted a report which everybody knew had been written under Chinese orders.
And then I myself was invited by the Chinese government to visit China. Although there had certainly been a slight improvement in relations between my government and the Chinese authorities in Tibet, I was still greatly disappointed at their complete disregard for the interests and welfare of our people. I thought I ought to meet the highest authorities in China, and try to persuade them to carry out the promises they had made in the agreement they had forced on us. So I decided to go.
CH 6: IN COMMUNIST CHINA
The people of Lhasa were very unwilling that I should go to China. They were afraid I might never be allowed to come back. But I had no fear of being kept prisoner, and I had made up my mind that it was my duty to go. Therefore, at a religious ceremony in the Norbulingka, when there were a great many people present, I did my best to reassure them by promising to be home within a year.
At that time, a session of the Chinese People's National Assembly was being prepared in Peking to frame a constitution, and the Chinese had allotted ten seats in the assembly to Tibet. The Chinese representatives were said to have been elected, but I had been asked to nominate the Tibetan members, and the Chinese government had suggested that I should lead the delegation myself. Many of our people thought it was not in keeping with the dignity of the Dalai Lama to be a member of such an assembly, but it seemed to me there was nothing to be gained by refusing. On the contrary, if we refused we might lose whatever chance of autonomy we possessed; whereas, to agree might possibly help in persuading the Chinese to keep their promises.
So I left Lhasa in 1954. A religions ceremony was held on the bank of the river, where the people of Lhasa gathered to bid me good-by. Evidently they were very sad and depressed at my going, and I myself could not look forward with any pleasure to my first journey out of Tibet.
I was able to start the long journey by car. The Chinese had managed to bring many vehicles, mostly military, into Lhasa, and strategic roads were being built from the east and northwest.
The road-building had been another source of oppression and discontent. Tibetan workers had been conscripted, because none would volunteer, and their pay was extremely small. Land had been requisitioned, largely without compensation.
Where arable lands were taken, our government had been told to provide other land for the dispossessed peasant farmers, but usually, no other fertile land could be found in the same neighborhood. If our country had to be developed, no doubt roads were a necessity, but the way the Chinese built them was an injustice and affront to the country people.
We drove for the first ninety miles out of Lhasa. Beyond that, the road was only half completed, and we had to go on horseback again, as Tibetans had always been content to travel. There had been heavy rainfall, and there were several landslides across the foundations of the road. In some places, we could not ride, but had to wade through mud. And where the road ran along the mountainsides, boulders were hurtling down from above, across the road, and falling into the river hundreds of feet below. The half-built road was so dangerous that three people were killed on our journey—also many mules and horses.
Then, for another ten days, we were able to travel by jeep, although the road was still very rough. For the last six of these days, we were passing through an area which was predominantly Tibetan, although, like my own home district, it had been seized by the Chinese long ago and kept under Chinese rule. The people were mostly descendants of the original Tibetan stock, and wherever I stopped for the night I had to give public audiences. They were all insistent that on my way back from China I should stay a few days among them.
At the place called Tachienlu we crossed the hill, famous in Tibetan history, which marked the ancient original border between Tibet and China. On the other side, we could see at once that we were really in a foreign country. The people were Chinese in appearance—their houses, their dress, their attitude and manners were all entirely different. And we began to pass tea houses by the roadside—a certain sign that we were now in China itself. We drove on all the way to the Chinese town of Chengtu. Then we flew to Sian, and from there went by special train to Peking.
Only a few years before, when mechanical things so interested me, flying or traveling by train would have seemed like a glorious dream. But now that I was doing them both for the first time, my mind was much too full of our political misfortunes and my responsibility for me to enjoy these new experiences.
At Sian, the Panchen Lama joined us. He was younger than I was, though people often said he looked older. I was nineteen then, and he was sixteen. He had grown up in an almost impossibly difficult situation.
The Panchen Lamas, like the Dalai Lamas, are high incarnates.
The first incarnation of both took place in the fourteenth Christian century. Ever since, the Panchen Lamas had been among the lamas second only to the Dalai Lamas in religious authority in Tibet, but they had never held any secular authority. Throughout our history, relations between the two had been perfectly cordial, as befitted high religious leaders. In most generations, the younger had become the pupil of the older.
But a rift began between our two immediate predecessors in about 1910, at the time when the Chinese invaded Tibet and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had to flee to India. Some of the attendants of the Panchen Lama of that time took the opportunity of the Dalai Lama's absence to complain about the taxes levied by the government, and about other similar secular matters. The Chinese, seeing the incipient disagreement, did all that they could to widen it, in the hope, no doubt, of dividing Tibet and making it an easier prey to their attack. They failed to divide Tibet, as I have already told, and the Tibetans drove them out of the country. But the rift between the two Lamas persisted, and a few years later the Panchen Lama went to the Chinese-controlled territory on the frontier. There he lived for the rest of his life, and died,
I believe in sorrow, in 1937.
In these circumstances, it was an unusually long time before the search was made for his reincarnation. In 1950, two possible candidates had been discovered in Tibet itself, and the Chinese themselves had put forward a candidate in the territory they ruled. During the negotiations in Peking which ended in the so-called agreement of 1951, I had a telegram from Ngabo, the leader of our delegation, saying that if the Chinese candidate was not accepted it would hinder his negotiations.
Naturally, the government and the monastic leaders wanted to carry out the traditional tests, but that was impossible at the time, and gradually the present Panchen Lama came to be accepted as the true reincarnation. He was then already eleven or twelve.
Of course, the whole of his education and training was subject to Chinese influence, first under the regime of Chiang Kai-shek and then under the Communists. And the Chinese had certainly made use of him for their own political ends, knowing that he was too young to protest. For example, when the Communist government conquered China, a telegram of congratulations to them was sent and published in his name, although he was only ten at the time and had not yet been accepted as the reincarnation; and no doubt many people were deceived into thinking that this telegram came from official Tibetan circles.
I had already met him once before, He came to Lhasa to see me in 1953, when he was fourteen. Of course, he was brought by a retinue of Chinese officials, beside his own monastic followers. He was formally presented to me in the traditional ceremonial way, as my junior not only in age but in position; but I conld see at that very first meeting that the Chinese and some of his own officials were not happy with our ancient customs. They would have liked to see the Panchen Lama seated on a level with myself. So that first meeting was constrained and not very successful. But on the same day we met again informally and had lunch together alone, and I must say that we got on well together. He showed a genuine respect for my position, as the custom of Buddhism requires towards a senior monk. He was correct and pleasant in his manners—as a Tibetan, and I had a firm impression of unforced good will. I felt sure that left to himself he would have whole-heartedly supported Tibet against the inroads of China.
At the end of his visit to Lhasa, his Chinese escort prevented the customary formal leave-taking, but he came to say good-by to me privately at the Norbulingka. I noticed a difference in his attitude, as if he had been warned in the meantime to behave in a superior manner. But I reminded him how important it was for him, as it was for me, to pursue religious studies, and I suggested that as we were both young we should forget the differences of our predecessors and make a fresh start, and he agreed.
I did sincerely regret those old differences, and I still do.
I do not think he was allowed to forget them entirely, because of his continuous Chinese teaching. If he and his followers had done so, Tibet's disaster might have been less complete. The Chinese were trying to do in onr generation exactly what they had failed to do in the last; and this time, it has certainly been an advantage to them to have a Tibetan religious leader in whose name they can make their proclamations.
But the Panchen Lama cannot he personally blamed.
No boy who grew up under such concentrated, constant alien influence could possibly retain his own free will. And in spite of this influence, I do not believe he will ever quite abandon our religion in favor of communism.
After we met at Shingnan we traveled on to Peking in comparty, and there we were received by the Vice-Chairman, Chu Te, the Prime Minister, Chou En-lai, and other officials of the Peking government. There were crowds to welcome us at the railway station. Most of them looked like students or members of youth leagues, and they clapped and cheered us loudly.
But I had a cynical feeling that they would have showed hostility just as readily if that had been what they had been told to do. It reminded me of a conversation which was said to have been heard when a Chinese official was visiting a Tibetan village. The villagers had all assembled to greet him when he arrived, and they clapped enthusiastically. Gratified, he asked one of them whether they were happy under the new regime.
“Yes, quite happy,” the Tibetan said.
“That's excellent.”
“Except that we don’t like this new tax.”
“New tax?”
“Yes. The clapping tax. Every time a Chinese comes here, we all have to turn out and clap.”
And remembering that many Tibetan taxes had always been paid in more or less unpleasant labor, the story has a ring of truth about it.
On the evening we arrived, Chu Te gave a banquet in honor of myself and the Panchen Lama. Covers were laid for 200 people, and everything was on a grand and lavish scale which really surprised me. The table appointments were all of the finest quality, and Chinese wines were served, though of course none of our delegation except a few lay officials tried them. Chu Te made a speech of welcome, saying that the Tibetans had come back to their motherland, and that the government of China would do its best to help them. It was all quite a new experience for me, and I was not quite sure how I should deal with all the members of the Chinese government.
But there was one consolation—everyone was courteous and polite, and seemed to be most cultured and well educated.
Two days later I met Mao Tse-tung for the Erst time. It was a memorable interview. The meeting was arranged at the House of Reception, where distinguished visitors were usually introduced to the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Tse-tung had several people in attendance, including Liu Shao-chi, who is now President of the Republic, and I had four or five officials with me.
Mao Tse-tung began by saying that he was glad Tibet had come bach to the Motherland and that I had agreed to take part in the National Assembly. He said it was the mission of China to bring progress to Tibet by developing its natural resources, and that the generals who were in Lhasa, Chang Chin-wu and Fan Ming, were there as representatives of China to help me and the people of Tibet. They had not gone there to exercise any kind of authority over the Tibetan government or people. And he asked me point blank whether these Chinese representatives had done anything against my wishes.
I felt I was in a very difficult position, I was sure that unless I could maintain a friendly atmosphere, our country would suffer far more than it had already. So I told him that the people of Tibet had great hopes for their future under his leadership, and therefore, whenever there had been differences with the Chinese representatives, we had expressed our opinions frankly.
My next interview with him lasted for about three hours, and there was nobody present except an interpreter. Again, of course, we talked mostly about Tibet and its future. I gave him a personal account of the recent events in Tibet, trying to dispel any doubts he might have had about our situation.
I wanted to create a feeling of confidence in his mind, because I was still convinced that we could not get rid of the Chinese rule simply by uncompromising opposition to it. We could only hope to alleviate it and try patiently to make it evolve into something tolerable.
I had been told by the members of a Tibetan trade delegation which visited China in 1953 that the Chinese Communist leaders had serious doubts about me, mainly because of the treasure I had deposited in India, and because they seemed to think that some members of my family had close connections with other foreign powers. That was quite untrue, as it happened, and I took this opportunity to tell Mao Tse-tung so. As for the treasure, the Chinese had often asked me about it, and I always told them I was thinking of bringing it back to Lhasa. And so I was, but luckily I never did.
Mao seemed very pleased with what I told him, and said that at one stage the Chinese government had decided to set up a committee of political and military members to govern Tibet directly under the Chinese government, but now he did not think that would be necessary. Perhaps, I thought, that was one victory for my policy. Instead of that, he added, they had now decided to set up a Preparatory Committee of the Autonomous Region of Tibet. He asked for my opinion, but it was much too big a subject for a quick judgment, and I told him I would not like to make any comments without consulting other Tibetans, including the Panchen Lama.
That led him to mention the misunderstandings between the Panchen Lama and what he insisted on calling the “local government of Tibet.” He suggested that as we were both in Peking we should take the opportunity to settle our differences.
I told him these differences were a legacy of the past, and that personally I had no differences with the Panchen Lama. If there were any lingering misunderstandings, I would be happy to clear them up.
A few days later I had a message from Mao Tse-tung to say that he was coming to see me in an hour’s time. When he arrived he said he had merely come to call. Then something made him say that Buddhism was quite a good religion, and Lord Buddha, although he was a prince, had given a good deal of thought to the question of improving the conditions of the people. He also observed that the Goddess Tara was a kindhearted woman. After a very few minutes, he left. I was quite bewildered by these remarks and did not know what to make of them.
Once while I was in Peking I had a chance to see him in action as the great leader of Communist China. I was invited to a meeting at his house which was attended by about twenty high officials, and I sat next to him and could feel the impact of his personality. The subject of the meeting was the standard of living of the Chinese peasants. He spoke bluntly and, I thought, with great sincerity, saying that he was not yet satisfied with what was being done in this respect. He quoted letters from his own village saying that Communist officials were not doing all they should to help the people. After a while, he turned to me and said that Tibetans were firm, or stubborn, in their ideas, but that after twenty years Tibet would be strong. Now, China was helping Tibet, but after twenty years Tibet would be helping China. He mentioned the great Chinese military leader Shi Ring-gnow, who had led his armies to many victories but had finally met his match in the Tibetans. Again, I was very surprised by what he said; but this time, at least his remarks were more acceptable.
My final interview with this remarkable man was toward the end of my visit to China. I was at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly when I received a message asking me to go to see him at his house. By then, I had been able to complete a tour of the Chinese provinces, and I was able to tell him truthfully that I had been greatly impressed and interested by all the development projects I had seen. Then he started to give me a long lecture about the true form of democracy, and advised me how to become a leader of the people and how to take heed of their suggestions.
And then he edged closer to me on his chair and whispered: “I understand you very well. But of course, religion is poison.
It has two great defects: It undermines the race, and secondly it retards the progress of the country. Tibet and Mongolia have both been poisoned by it.”
I was thoroughly startled; what did he mean to imply? I tried to compose myself, but I did not know how to take him.
Of course, I knew he must be a bitter enemy of religion. Yet he seemed to be genuinely friendly and affectionate toward me. He came out to the car with me after these extraordinary remarks, and his parting advice was merely that I should take care of my health.
Before I left China I was greatly impressed by Mao Tsetung’s outstanding personality. I met him many times on social occasions, apart from our private meetings. His appearance gave no sign of his intellectual power. He did not look healthy, and was always panting and breathing heavily. His dress was of just the same style as everybody else’s, although it was usually a different color; but he did not pay much attention to his clothes, and once I noticed that the cuffs of his shirt were tom. His shoes looked as though they had never been polished. He was slow in his movements, and slower still in speech. He was sparing of words, and spoke in short sentences, each full of meaning and usually clear and precise; and he smoked incessantly while he talked. Yet his manner of speech certainly captured the minds and imaginations of his listeners, and gave the impression of kindness and sincerity'.
I was sure that he believed what he said, and that he was confident of achieving whatever object he had in view.
I was also convinced that he himself would never use force to convert Tibet into a Communist state. Certainly, I was disillusioned afterwards by the policy of persecution which was adopted by the Chinese authorities in Tibet, but I still find it hard to believe that these oppressions had the approval and support of Mao Tse-tung.
Another important man in the Chinese hierarchy was Chou En-lai, the Prime Minister, and I had quite a different impression of him. I had met him for the first time when he came to the railway station to receive me, and I had several brief talks with him during my stay in China. In one of them, he gave me a great deal of advice about the future of Tibet, saying how important it was to build up and develop the country as quickly as possible. I told him we knew that our country had been backward, and that it would now be possible to improve the material conditions of life and modernize the administration. As I have said, I had already started to do this myself. But I added that if our natural resources were to be developed, we would certainly need economic aid at first.
I always found Chou En-lai friendly, but he was not as frank and open as Mao Tse-tung had seemed to be. He was extremely polite, courteous, and suave, and seemed to have complete control of himself, so that I was very surprised to hear a story quite recently of how he had stormed and thumped the table at a meeting in Nepal. The very first time I met him I realized he was very clever and shrewd. I also had the impression that he would be ruthless in carrying out whatever projects he had in hand. I was not in the least surprised, as I would have been with Mao Tse-tung, to learn later that he approved the policy of oppression in Tibet.
While I was in Peking I also met a few distinguished foreigners, but only briefly. I was introduced to the Russian Ambassador at a dinner party and had a short talk with him. He said he would like a much longer interview, and I gladly agreed. But that interview never took place, and I began to understand that the Chinese did not want me to have a chance of speaking frankly to foreigners. Exactly the same thing happened with a Rumanian minister. I did have an interview with the Indian Ambassador. The Chinese fould not object to my meeting him, since India was such a close neighbor of ours, but they insisted on sending Chinese interpreters instead of my own to the meeting. My own interpreter could translate very well from Tibetan to English, but the Chinese had to put all I said into Chinese first, so that his colleague could put it into English for the Ambassador. So the atmosphere was formal and constrained, and not very much could be said. There were also two other extremely grave and pompous Chinese officials present. During the meeting, a large bowl of fruit was upset, and my main memory of the occasion is seeing those two very dignified gentlemen on their hands and knees under the table looking for oranges and bananas.
I also had the privilege of meeting Mr. Khrushchev and Mr. Bulganin when they came to Peking to attend the celebrations of the Chinese National Day. I went to the airport to meet them and was introduced to them there, and also met them at a reception the same evening; but we had no discussion or exchange of views.
It was also in Peking that I first had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Nehru, though it was perhaps an inauspicious place for us to meet. It was then that I first learned the danger of being misunderstood by reporters. It has been said that I associated Mr. Nehru with a pro-Chinese policy. That is not correct. I had heard and read a great deal about him, and I was very eager to have a talk with him and seek his advice; but while we were in China I did not succeed. I was introduced to him by Chou En-lai at a cocktail party. He seemed to be absorbed in thought, and for a little while he did not say anything. I told him his name and reputation as a leading statesman of the world had reached us in our isolation in Tibet, and that I had been looking forward to meeting him. He smiled, hut only said he was glad to have met me; and though I saw him on other occasions, those were the only words I had with him in China. There were reports that I had private talks with him, hut I did not. Nor did he ask me whether there was anything India could do to help Tibet. I was very disappointed not to be able to talk to him, because I very much wanted his help and advice, but that wish was not fulfilled until I went to India the following year.
It was at a reception during Mr. Nehru's visit that a representative of the Indian press came to interview me with a Chinese interpreter. He asked me what I thought of Mr.
Nehru's visit to China. I said I hoped the two great countries would come closer together, and so set an example to Asia and the world. Then he asked me whether I was prepared to introduce reforms in Tibet; and I told him that ever since I had come to power in Tibet I had been trying my best to introduce reforms in our political and social life, and that I hoped my efforts would be successful and that he would hear the results of them before very long. But at that stage a Chinese official interrupted us and took me away. I was amused to see the Chinese interpreter hastily taking notes of this conversation, and he told me afterwards that he had orders to write down everything I said and report it to the authorities.
I also gave a dinner party in Peking, to celebrate the Tibetan New Year by returning some of the hospitality I had received.
Everything was done according to the traditions and customs of Tibet. On the invitation cards we sent out there were pictures of what are called "The Four United Brothers”—an elephant, a monkey, a rabbit and a bird. The bird, a symbol of auspiciousness, represents Lord Buddha, and the pictures were meant to emphasize, from our own point of view, the "union of the nationalities” which the Chinese were always proclaiming. I had the pleasure of meeting many Chinese officials on this occasion, including Mao Tse-tung, and I was struck again by their charm of manner and courtesy and culture.
We had no religious ceremonies at the party, but we had the usual New Year decorations and a special kind of cake which is made in Tibet for this season. It is our custom to take a small piece of this cake and throw it up to the ceiling as an offering to Buddha. When Mao Tse-tung was told of this custom, he threw up a piece to the ceiling, and then with a mischievous expression, he threw another piece down on the floor.
Between these social occasions, there were long meetings of the National Assembly. These were my first experience of political meetings, and what struck me was that so many members showed so little interest in what was going on. I admit I could not take much interest myself. I was tired after the long journey to China, and the proceedings were in Chinese which I could not follow. I would have expected the Chinese themselves to be more alert, but I was sitting near some elderly representatives, and they seemed to be even more tired and bored that I was. The expressions on their faces showed that they could not follow what the discussions were about. They were always watching the clock for the tea break, and when the break was shorter than usual they complained.
I attended many other conferences in China, and my impression was aways the same. When speeches were made from the floor they were often irrelevant, and usually mere echoes of the glorification of Communist achievements. When members did express views of their own, it made no difference.
A senior member of the party would get up and state the official view, and the Chairman would accept it without allowing more discussion. There were genuine discussions in committees, hut not even these affected the party’s decisions.
In short, the long meetings and conferences were empty formalities, because no mere delegate had the power to bring about changes even if he were interested enough to want to do so.
I found a very different atmosphere when I visited the Indian Parliament the next year. After my Chinese experience of political discussion, it was a very pleasant surprise to hear the ordinary Indian members of parliament speaking frankly and freely, and criticizing the government in the strongest terms. I was so impressed that I spoke to Chou En-Iai about it, since he happened to be in New Delhi at the time, but his only answer was that things had entirely changed since my visit to Peking.
I have one other abiding impression of Chinese political meetings: the formidable length of the leaders’ speeches. All the leaders seemed to be passionately devoted to oratory, and they never missed a chance to express their views. I especially remember the speech which Chou En-lai gave after he returned from the Bandung Conference. It was while I was on my way back to Tibet and was held up at Chengtu because there had been an earthquake on the road ahead. Chou En-lai and Marshal Chen Yi, a vice-chairman of the Party, also stopped there on their way from the Conference back to China. I was told they were coming, and went to the airfield to meet them. Chou En-lai came to the house where I was staying, and we had a few minutes' talk, and then we went on to the local army hall. There were three or four hundred people there, and he started a speech about the success of the Chinese delegation at the Conference. He spoke of the importance of studying foreign affairs, and told the audience that when he was at the Conference he had met representatives of states he had never heard of, so that he had to look them up in an atlas. That speech went on for five solid hours before we came to the usual ending in the glorification of the achievements of the Communist regime. But Chen Yi probably held the record for speeches. When he started, he usually did not stop for seven hours. Listening to this verbosity, I often wondered what was going on in the minds of the audiences. But these were mostly younger Communists, not the few remaining representatives of the older way of life whom I had seen at the National Assembly; and looking around, I hardly ever saw any sign of boredom or weariness. The patience of most of these people seemed to me to show that their minds had already been reformed and reshaped in the pattern of communism.
I had the same strong impression of a uniform mass mind when I went on tours to different parts of China. I traveled for three months through the country and visited monasteries, industrial plants, workers' organizations, cooperative farms, schools, and universities. I must say that the whole country had an air of efficiency. I met many officials, and I still have very happy recollections of some of them. The best were capable and courteous, and well trained in diplomacy. Government departments were well organized and worked promptly.
I must also say that the ignorant workers seemed to be satisfied, and the general conditions of their life seemed, at that time, to be adequate. It was only among the literate people that one ever had a sense of hidden dissatisfaction. Nor could anyone deny the enormous industrial progress which China had made under communism.
But even the merits of efficiency and progress must be balanced against their cost, and it seemed to me that in China the cost was formidable. Progress had cost the people all their individuality. They were becoming a mere homogeneous mass of humanity. Everywhere I went I found them strictly organized, disciplined, and controlled, so that they not only all dressed the same—men and women dressed in drab dungarees—but all spoke and behaved the same, and I believe all thought the same. They could hardly do otherwise, because they only had one source of information—the newspapers and radio published only the government’s version of the news. Foreign papers and radio were prohibited. Once when I was going through a village near Peking with a Chinese officer, I was pleasantly surprised to hear European music, which sounded like the music broadcast by the BBC before its news bulletins. And the startled expression on my escort's face was most revealing. The people even seemed to have lost the habit of laughing spontaneously; they only seemed to laugh when they were supposed to laugh, and to sing when they were told to sing. Certainly some of the young Communists were clever and well educated, in their fashion, but they never expressed original opinions. It was always the same story of the greatness of China and her glorious achievements.
Even in Sining, near the place where I was born on the borders of Tibet, one of the leaders of the local Party gave me a long lecture which was exactly the same thing I had heard so often in Peking. But he did make one original remark:
"Except for Russia,” he said, "China is the greatest country in the world. It is the only country so great that you have to travel all day and night in a train to cross it.”
This was the general impression left upon me by nearly a year in China: efficiency and material progress, and a gray fog of humorless uniformity, through which the traditional charm and courtesy of old China occasionally shone in a surprising and welcome gleam. Such utter uniformity, of course, is the formidable strength of communism. But I could not believe that the Chinese would ever succeed in reducing Tibetans to such a slavish state of mind. Religion, humor, and individuality are the breath of life to Tibetans, and no Tibetan would ever willingly exchange these qualities for mere material progress, even if the exchange did not also involve subjection to an alien race.
As I prepared for my journey bach to Lhasa, I still had hopes of saving my people from the worst consequences of Chinese domination. I thought my visit to China had helped in two ways. It had certainly shown me exactly what we were up against, and, which was more important, it seemed to have persuaded the Chinese not to go ahead with the original plan, which Mao Tse-tung had admitted, of governing us directly from Peking through a military and political committee. Instead, we seemed to have been left with some authority over our own internal affairs, and we seemed to have a firm promise of autonomy.
By then, I had learned the details of the “Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region” which Mao Tsetung had proposed as an alternative. It was to have fifty-one members, of whom all except five would be Tibetans. I was to be chairman, and the Panchen Lama and a Chinese official were to be vice-chairmen. Ngabo was secretary-general.
The Committee’s task was to prepare for regional autonomy in Tibet, by setting up sub-committees for economic and religious affairs, corresponding apparently to our Tse-khang and Yig-tsang, and the usual departments of government.
It was true that members of the Committee were to be chosen in an anomalous way. Only fifteen members, including myself, were to represent the "Tibetan local government”— that is, our own true government. Eleven were to be chosen from among the leading monasteries, religious sects, public bodies, and prominent people. And ten each were to represent two separate bodies created by the Chinese: the “Chamdo Liberation Committee,” which they had set up in the eastern district which had first been invaded and never returned to our government; and the "Panchen Lama's Committee,” which they had created in a western area of Tibet where they were trying to give the Panchen Lama the secular authority his predecessors had never possessed. The remaining five members were to be Chinese officials in Lhasa, and all the appointments were to be subject to the approval of the Chinese government.
To give membership to these separate newly invented regions was an infringement in itself of the Chinese agreement not to alter the political system in Tibet or the status of the Dalai Lama. And the choice of members already had the seeds in it of failure. But people in desperate situations are always ready to cling to the slightest hope, and I hoped—in spite of my gloomy experience of Chinese political committees—that a committee with forty-six Tibetan members and only five Chinese could be made to work.
So I set off for home, very anxious to see what had been happening there, and trusting that we could make good use of this last degree of freedom.
CH 7: REPRESSION AND RESENTMENT
It was on my way home that I had the chance to visit Taktser again, the village where I was bom. That was a moment of happiness in a journey of foreboding. I was proud and thankful to remember that I had been bom in a humble and truly Tibetan family, and I enjoyed reviving my faint memories of the places I had left when I was four. But whenever I spoke to the people, I was brought back abruptly to the present. I asked them if they were happy, and they answered that they were “very happy and prosperous under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mao Tse-tung.”
But even while they said it, I saw tears in their eyes, and I realized with a shock that even to me they were afraid to answer the question except by this Chinese Communist formula.
But in one of the neighboring monasteries, I had some long talks with the lamas, and of course they had the confidence to be more outspoken. I found them very anxious. The Chinese had already started to enforce collective farming, and the peasants bitterly resented it. The lamas foresaw that the Chinese would take more and more drastic action to compel the peasants to accept their schemes. I spoke also to several of the lay leaders of the people, and they told me of other Communist "reforms,” and said that tension was growing and that the Chinese were becoming more oppressive and suspicious.
I made a point of meeting the Chinese officials too, and told them that although reforms were necessary, they should not be the same as the reforms in China, and should not be enforced but only introduced by degrees, with consideration for the local circumstances and the wishes and habits of the people.
But I was distressed to find that the Chinese here, so far from Peking, were rude and completely unsympathetic. They simply meant to ignore the people's feelings. One Chinese general even went so far as to tell me they were bringing extra troops into the district in order to enforce their reforms, no matter what the people wanted. Evidently the future for our Tibetan people in this Chinese territory was very black indeed.
Yet these people remained entirely Tibetan in character. As I passed through, stopping here and there for two or three days, sometimes in Chinese official rest houses and sometimes in monasteries, no less than 100,000 people came in from all over the district to see me and pay their respect.
While I was in Peking, a delegation had come to ask me to visit a great many places in eastern Tibet on my journey home. As I was delayed by the earthquake which damaged the road ahead, I did not have time to go everywhere I would have liked. I went to all the monasteries I could reach by car, and to the others I sent three of the highest lamas in my company to represent me: Trijang Rinpoche (my Junior Tutor), Chung Rinpoch and Karma-pa, the present reincarnation of the same Karma-pa whose fourth reincarnation founded the monastery on the mountain above my village.
All the way through these border areas, I found the same heavy air of foreboding, Among the Tibetans, I saw mounting bitterness and hatred of Chinese; and among the Chinese, I saw the mounting ruthlessness and resolution which is born of fear and lack of understanding. To the Chinese I urged moderation with all the emphasis I could; and to Tibetans I often spoke at meetings, telling them that they should remain united, try to improve things by all peaceful means, and accept whatever was good in Chinese methods. This advice was the only hope, I felt, of averting violence. But now that I had seen how mutual enmity had grown in the year since I passed that way, I had to admit to myself that the hope was slender.
At last I passed the river called Di-chu (the Ghost River), which marked the boundary between Tibet and China, and entered the Chamdo region where the invasion had begun. I spent a few days at the Chinese headquarters in the town of Chamdo, and a few days more at the monastery. This was the district where the Chinese had set up the Chamdo Liberation Committee, with which I was expected to cooperate in future.
It had some Tibetan members, but I soon saw that it was the Chinese officials who had all the authority, and that the district was ruled in practice by the general commanding the army. Here also resentment was boiling, and people told me stories of oppressions and injustices, of peasants dispossessed of land, and of promises which the Tibetans had believed at first but the Chinese had always broken. And here was an added danger of sudden violence: This was the district where the Khampas lived, and the most precious possession of a Khampa, as I have said, was his rifle. Now the Khampas had heard that the Chinese were going to demand that all arms should be surrendered, and I knew, without being told, that a Khampa would never surrender his rifle—he would use it first Here also, people came in by tens of thousands to pay their respect to me, and when I welcomed them I told them I was happy to see their spirit of patriotism. I said there had been defects in the way Tibetan officials of the central Tibetan government had behaved there in the past, and that was at least one reason why they had had to suffer the ordeal of invasion. Now, I said, the duty of all Tibetans was to remain united, and then, when the Preparatory Committee began to function, Cbamdo would again be an integral part of our country.
My journey through the border areas reminded me of two of my observations in China itself, one very sad and the other revealing a remaining ray of hope.
The first was of Chinese monasteries. In all the remoter parts of China, I had found the temples and monasteries neglected and almost empty, even those of great historical importance. The few remaining monks in them were old, and were living under such suspicion that very few people dared to come to the temples to pray or make offerings. I did not find much learning left among the monks, although I was told there were still learned lamas in Inner Mongolia; and indeed, while I was in Peking, several hundred people came from Inner Mongolia to ask for my blessing. But young people were discouraged from joining monastic orders, and religious organizations had been so effectively penetrated by Communists that even they were being used to spread political propaganda.
The Chinese government said their people had religious freedom, but one could see that no future was planned for religious foundations. They were being starved to death and allowed to decay.
This was the fate I could see hanging over the Tibetan monks and monasteries already in Chinese hands. But my other observation gave me some hope that it still might be averted. I had seen splendid evidence that Tibetans, young and old, were too stable in their character and beliefs to be an easy prey for Chinese indoctrination. Tibetan boys had been taken to what was called the School of Nationalities in Peking, together with boys from Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Korea; and the Chinese made every effort there to purge their minds of their own religious and cultural traditions, and to fill them with the new ideas of the dictatorship of the State.
But I was glad to find that the minds of the Tibetan boys had not been imprisoned. They still cherished our own ideals, and their national spirit could not be destroyed. In the end, the Chinese gave up trying to convert them, and later these boys found their way back home. Some of them lost their lives in the revolt against the Chinese rule in Lhasa; and a few, still under the age of twenty, became refugees in India. After that failure, the Chinese opened several other schools in the border country, but there too they had no success at all, Tibetan children simply would not swallow their materialistic creed, but remained Tibetans and Buddhists in all their inmost thoughts. I believe boys from Mongolia and East Turkestan clung equally stubbornly to their faith. No doubt this was the reason why, in later years, the Chinese started to seize Tibetan babies a few weeks old and take them away to China, in the hope that they would grow up into Tibetan Communists.
But in the meantime, I was greatly encouraged by the depth of the faith of these young Tibetans, and I felt that whatever the Chinese did to us they would never destroy us completely.
It was still quite an adventurous journey from China to Tibet on the new Chinese military road. It had been raining heavily, the rivers were in flood, and there were many landslides and falls of rock. I have a very vivid mental image of one dark night in pouring rain when our convoy was halted by a damaged bridge exactly at a spot where boulders were crashing down on the road from the mountainside above. The Chinese rushed about in confusion, shouting; we Tibetans sat in our canvas-covered jeeps and said our prayers. And earlier that same day, we had had a rather narrow escape from a worse disaster. We had come to a bridge which had collapsed at one end. The Chinese had patched it up and thought we could cross it, but they advised us to lighten the load by walking across and waiting for the convoy. So we did, and we stood and watched our jeeps and trucks begin to cross. A few came over safely, and then, just as the wheels of a jeep came onto the bridge, there were loud cracks and sounds of splintering timber and the bridge broke up and fell into the torrent underneath.
Luckily, the driver heard the noise, and reversed very quickly and saved himself. But more than half of our convoy, with all our dry clothes and bedding, was left on the wrong side of the river. We packed ourselves into the vehicles which had crossed, and spent a cold and uncomfortable night at a Chinese rest house.
At last I came home to Lhasa. I cannot say how thankful I was to be in the Norbulingka again. Close outside its walls, the Chinese military camp still menaced us, hut inside, all was still calm and beautiful, and our religious practices continued almost undisturbed.
I found that my Cabinet was still maintaining tolerably friendly relations with the Chinese, and the hostility of the Lhasan people seemed to have died down and given way to a feeling of complacency. The city was quiet and peaceful The people did not know of the drastic changes which were being enforced in the eastern border areas. The bitter resentment I had seen there had not yet spread with its full force into central Tibet So it seemed that there might still he time for the Preparatory Committee to do some useful work and prevent the worst.
The Chinese government was sending Marshal Chen Yi, the deputy Prime Minister distinguished for seven-hour speeches, to preside at the inauguration of the Committee. The Chinese wanted me to go to receive him when he arrived in Lhasa.
My Cabinet refused to approve of that, but I felt it was not a time to stand on dignity. If it would please the Marshal and help to give the Committee a better start, I thought it was worth it. So I went.
The inauguration was in April 1956. 1 attended it with the feeling that here, among these fifty-one members, was the last hope for the peaceful evolution of our country. It did not seem an impossible hope. The constitutional scheme looked sound and attractive. On paper, it had none of the absolutely unacceptable aspects of communism. And, with such a high proportion of Tibetan members in the Committee, it looked as though it could evolve into a more efficient form of government not too unlike our own. It might give an opportunity, I thought, for Tibetan officials to learn from Chinese officials about the methods of their administration, which, communism apart, was undeniably better organized than ours.
It was not long before these hopes were dead. All the worst I had seen in Chinese political meetings was repeated. I had not made enough allowance for one essential fact. Twenty of the members, although they were Tibetans, were representing the Chamdo Liberation Committee and the committee set up in the Panchen Lama's western district. These were both purely Chinese creations. Their representatives owed their positions mainly to Chinese support, and in return they had to support any Chinese proposition; though the Chamdo representatives did behave more reasonably than the Panchen Lama's. With this solid block of controlled votes, in addition to those of the five Chinese members, the Committee was powerless—a mere fagade of Tibetan representation behind which all the effective power was exercised by the Chinese.
In fact, all basic policy was decided by another body called the Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet, which had no Tibetan members. We were allowed to discuss the minor points, but we could never make any major changes. Although I was nominally chairman, there was nothing much I could do. Sometimes it was almost laughable to see how the proceedings were controlled and regulated, so that plans already completed in the other committee received a pointless and empty discussion and then were passed. But often I felt embarrassed at these meetings. I saw that the Chinese had only made me chairman in order to give an added appearance of Tibetan authority to their schemes.
As soon as the Committee began to set up its departments of government, the people began to learn what was happening, and their reaction was not surprising. All their old hostility to eventhing Chinese was reawakened. In Lhasa, a public meeting was held to protest against this new organization, and a resolution was drafted and sent to the Chinese authorities.
It said that Tibet had had its own system of administration for a very long time, and therefore the new organization war unnecessary and ought to be abolished. Of course, the Chinese did not reply to that, although it was a popular demand. They summoned the Cabinet and said that as the Cabinet had not succeeded in banning public meetings, they would now approach me to do so. So the Cabinet unwillingly drafted a new proclamation, which I unwillingly signed, knowing quite well that suppressing public meetings would not suppress public opinion. Inevitably, popular indignation broke out in another way.
It happened during the Monlam Festival at the beginning of 1956. The resentment of the ordinary people against the Chinese had created something totally new in Tibet: political leaders spontaneously chosen by the people. These men were not government officials. They had no official standing at all, but came from all ordinary walks of life. And when I describe them as political leaders, I do not mean that they were political in any Western sense. They were not opposed to the Chinese because they were Communist; they had nothing to do with the political theories which divide the world. They were simply men who shared the misery and rage of our inarticulate people, and happened to have the native ability to put it into words and actions. So they rose to positions of influence.
These were the men who organized and led the Lhasan population. On the whole, the anger they felt and expressed on behalf of the people had its normal human reaction—they wanted to hit back. And inevitably that brought them into conflict sometimes with my Cabinet, who saw as I did the futility of trying to hit back against the Chinese army. The Cabinet had to restrain them from a policy which was patriotic but suicidal. On the other hand, they naturally thought the Cabinet went too far in appeasing the invaders. Sometimes I had to intervene and oppose their violent instincts for the sake of the very people they represented. They might have resented that, but to the bitter end they remained passionately loyal to me. I do not flatter myself that I earned this loyalty by personal qualities of my own. It was the concept of the Dalai Lama which held their loyalty, as it did and does of all Tibetans. I was the symbol of what they were fighting for.
For my part, I admired them even while I had to oppose them. I was glad our misfortune had shown that such qualities of leadership existed among Tibetans. They are qualities we shall always need.
The activities of these leaders during the Monlam Festival were a strange contrast with the time-honored celebrations.
For the first time, the Festival had political overtones, and nobody could help being aware of them. While the processions circulated and the monks thronged in the streets, pamphlets were being stuck up all over the city. As usual, they demanded that the Chinese must go, and leave Tibet to the Tibetans. As usual, this incensed the Chinese generals, and as usual they sent for the Cabinet and put the blame on them.
But this time, among their angry threats, they also named three of the popular leaders. They were among the men who had issued the resolution against the Preparatory Committee; and the Chinese insisted they were also responsible for the pamphlets and posters, and demanded that the Cabinet should give orders for their arrest They had broken no law of ours, but the Chinese threatened that if the Tibetans refused to arrest them, they would arrest them and interrogate them themselves. So, to save them from this much worse fate, the Cabinet had them put in prison. One died there, but the others were soon released when the three great monasteries of Lhasa stood surety for their behavior, and one of these men is with me now in India.
Meanwhile, such news as we had from Chamdo, the eastern district which was still entirely under Chinese military rule, showed that things there were getting worse and worse.
During the Monlam Festival, fighting broke out in Litang beyond the boundary. Soon after the Preparatory Committee was inaugurated, the Chinese general in command in Chamdo called a meeting of about 350 leading Tibetan personalities.
He told them that I had said Tibet was not ready for Communist reforms, and that they should only be introduced gradually, and not before a majority of Tibetans had approved them. But the Panchen Lama, he said, had demanded that they should he introduced at once. The meeting was to discuss these two alternatives and decide which of them should be accepted in Chamdo.
The discussions went on for days. At the end, about a hundred people voted to have the reforms when I and the rest of Tibet accepted them. About forty voted to have them straight away. The rest, roughly 200, voted never to have the reforms at all, although that had not been offered as an alternative.
The general thanked them all, announced that the reforms would be introduced in due course, and presented each of the members with a picture book, a pen, ink and paper, and some toilet articles—which seemed curiously chosen gifts—and dismissed them.
Within a month, the officials of the border provinces were summoned again, this time to a fort called Jomdha Dzong, a district of Chamdo. They were surrounded by Chinese troops and told that “democratic” reforms would begin at once. They protested that they had seen the miseries democratic reforms had caused in the provinces just across the border, and they would have none of them. The Chinese kept them under constant persuasion in the fort for nearly a fortnight.
By then, the officials had all given verbal agreement.
They were told they would all be sent back to their districts to explain the reforms to the people, but first they must be given a course of instruction themselves.
Upon this agreement, the Chinese guards surrounding the fort relaxed, and in the night before the course of indoctrination was due to start, every one of the officials, over two hundred in number, broke out of the fort and took to the mountains.
So, by this senseless action, the Chinese had driven most of the leading men of the district into the life of guerrillas, outlaws who knew they would be arrested if they ever went back to their homes. They formed a nucleus which grew and was bound to go on growing. They had to depend for their defense on such arms and ammunition as they could capture from the Chinese; so they had to fight, whether it was their inclination or not. Those eastern Tibetans, the Khampas in particular, are tough and resolute people. They knew their mountains, and the mountains were ideal for guerrilla warfare.
Already in the first half of 1956, there were stories of their raids on Chinese roads and depots.
This seemed to me to be a desperate situation without any imaginable end. In those impregnable mountains, the guerrillas could hold out for years. The Chinese would never be able to dislodge them. Yet they would never be able to defeat the Chinese army. And however long it went on, it would be the Tibetan people, especially the women and the children, who would suffer.
I was very despondent. The situation now had become even worse than it had been two years before. The vicious circle of dictatorial repression and popular resentment, which I thought I had broken when I allowed Lukhangwa to resign, had enclosed us again. So far, all my attempts at a peaceful solution of our problems had come to nothing, and with the Preparatory Committee a mere mockery of responsible government I could see no better hope of success in the future.
Worst of all, I felt I was losing control of my own people. In the east they were being driven into barbarism. In central Tibet they were growing more determined to resort to violence; and I felt I would not he able to stop them much longer, even though I could not approve of violence and did not believe it could possibly help us.
My dual position as Dalai Lama, by which Tibet had been happily ruled for centuries, was becoming almost insupportable.
In both my capacities as religious and secular leader, I felt bound to oppose any violence by the people. I knew the Chinese were trying to undermine my political authority; and in so far as I opposed the people’s violent instincts, I was helping the Chinese to destroy the people’s trust in me. Yet even if the people lost faith in me as ther secular leader, they must not lose faith in me as religious leader, which was much more important. I could delegate or abdicate my secular leadership, but the Dalai Lama could never abdicate as religious leader, nor would I ever have dreamed of doing so.
Thus I began to think it might he in the best interests of Tibet if I withdrew from all political activities, in order to keep my religious authority intact. Yet while I was in Tibet, I could not escape from politics. To withdraw, I would have to leave the country, bitterly and desperately though I hated that idea.
At that moment of the depth of my despondency, I received an invitation to visit India.
CH 8: A PILGRIMAGE TO INDIA
My friend the Maharaj Kumar of Sikkim had come to Lhasa especially to bring me the invitation, and his visit was like a ray of sympathy and sanity from the outside world. I was invited by the Mahabodhi Society of India, which is an institution founded seventy years ago to spread the teaching of Lord Buddha and to care for pilgrims and shrines in India. They asked me to come to attend the Buddha Jayanti, the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lord Buddha.
For every reason, political and religious, I very much wanted to go. The Buddha Jayanti itself would he an occasion of immense significance to all Buddhists. Besides, every Tibetan hoped to be able to go one day on a pilgrimage to India. For us, it had always been the Holy Land. It was the birthplace of the founder of Buddhist culture and the source of the wisdom brought to our mountains hundreds of years ago by Indian saints and seers. The religions and societies of Tibet and Indian had developed on different lines, but Tibet was still a child of Indian civilization.
And from the secular point of view, a visit to India seemed to offer me the very opportunity I wanted to withdraw from my close contact and fruitless arguments with the Chinese, at least for a time. Not only that—I hoped it would also give me a chance to ask Mr. Nehru and other democratic leaders and followers of Mahatma Gandhi for advice. I cannot exaggerate our feeling of political solitude in Tibet. I knew I was still inexperienced in international politics, but so was everyone else in our country. We knew other countries had faced situations like ours, and that a great fund of political wisdom and experience existed in the democratic world; but so far, none of it had been available for us, and we had had to act by a kind of untrained instinct. We desperately wanted sympathetic wise advice.
There was yet another reason why I wanted to go. For a long time, we had had friendly contacts with the British government of India. In fact, that had been our only contact with the Western world. But since the transfer of power in India to the Indian government, the political contact with India had faded away, and I was sure that we must try to renew it and keep it strong, as a life-line to the world of tolerance and freedom.
It was not only my own wish that I should go. The people of Tibet came to know of the invitation, and through my officials they pressed me to accept it, for all the reasons I have mentioned—except that it had not occurred to them, as it had to me, that I ought to withdraw from the immediate problems of politics.
But merely to want to go was not enough. If the Chinese did not want me to go, they could easily stop me, and so I had to begin by asking for their approval.
I consulted General Fan Ming, who had been in Lhasa from the beginning and was acting at the time as the senior Chinese government representative. He started by saying that he could only offer me suggestions; but he did not really leave me any doubt that they would be the kind of suggestions which have to be accepted, and my heart sank as he spoke.
For reasons of security, he said, a visit to India was undesirable.
He also thought that as the Preparatory Committee still had so much work to do, and as I was its chairman, I ought to stay in Lhasa. And then he added, like a consolation, that after all the invitation had only come from a religious organization, not from the government of India, so that there was no need for me to accept it, and I could easily send a deputy.
I was very disappointed, but I could not bring myself to give up my hope entirely, so I put off naming a deputy, and did not tell the Mahabodhi Society that I could not come.
Four months later, about the middle of October 1956, the General suggested again that I should name a deputy, because the name had to be sent in advance to India; and then I did arrange for a delegation headed by my Junior Tutor to go on my behalf. But on the first or second of November, he came to see me again, and admitted that on the first of October the Chinese government had had a telegram from the Indian government inviting me and the Panchen Lama as its guests for the celebration. And he added that the Chinese government had considered the matter in all its aspects, and it would be all right for me to go if I wanted to. I was delighted, and so were the Lhasan people. And the story went round that the Indian Consul General in Lhasa had told several people about the invitation before General Fan Ming told me; and of course everyone inferred that the Chinese had been trying to keep the invitation secret until it was too late for me to accept it, and had only been forced to make up their minds by this disclosure.
So I prepared to go. But before I left Lhasa, I was given a long lecture, as if I were a schoolboy, by General Chang Chinwu, who had just returned as the permanent representative of China. I found it very interesting, though perhaps not in quite the way that he intended. He said that recently there had been a little trouble in Hungary and Poland. It had been engineered by small groups of people under the influence of foreign imperialists, but Soviet Russia had immediately responded to the Hungarian and Polish people’s call for help, and had put down the reactionaries without any difficulty. Reactionaries were always looking out for chances to create trouble in socialist countries, but the solidarity of the socialist powers was so great that they would always go to the help of any of these countries.
He talked about this so long that I realized it was the hint of a warning that no other country would be allowed to interfere in Tibet.
And then he went on to talk of my visit to India. Although the occasion of the Jayanti, he said, was purely religious, it had something to do with UNESCO. The Chinese government was sending a delegation to it, but there was a possibility the Kuomintang would also try to send one from Formosa.
If they did, the Chinese would leave the meeting, and they had already told the Indian government so; and I was also to refuse to take part if anyone from Formosa was present. The Chinese Ambassador would give me the latest information as soon as I reached India.
Next he warned me that if any of the Indian leaders asked me about the Indo-Tibetan frontier, I was only to say that this was a matter for the Foreign Office in Peking. I might also be asked, he said, about the situation in Tibet. If newspapermen or junior officials asked me, I was to say that there had been a little trouble, but everything was normal now. If it was Mr. Nehru or other high officials of the Indian government who asked, I could tell them a little more—that there had been uprisings in some parts of Tibet.
The final part of this lecture was a suggestion that if I was likely to have to make speeches during the celebration, I had better prepare them in advance in Lhasa. I was in fact expecting to make a speech at the Buddha Jayanti, and before I left Lhasa a draft was written for me by Ngabo, as Secretary-General of the Preparatory Committee, in consultation with the Chinese. I rewrote it entirely after I came to India.
By then, a road had been built as far as Yatung, which was only two days' match from the frontier. It was part of a network of strategic roads which the Chinese were feverishly building so that they could cover our country with their military posts; but it had also shortened the journey from Lhasa to India from a matter of weeks to a matter of only days. We drove to Yatung in two days. On the way, at Shigatse, where the Chinese had put a car ferry across the Brahmaputra River, the Panchen Lama joined us. On the fourth day, we took to ponies, which were still the only means of crossing the Himalayan passes.
A Chinese general called Thin Ming-yi, a deputy divisional commander, came with us as far as Chumbithang, the last settlement in Tibet; and when he left us there he gave me another little lecture. There were many reactionaries in India, he said regretfully, and I must be very careful if I had to talk to them. He reminded me that as a vice-chairman of the Chinese National Assembly I was representing China as well as Tibet. So I must tell everyone of the great progress China had made in developing natural resources and raising the living standards of the people. I must not leave any doubt in the minds of the people I met that there was complete religious freedom, and every other kind of freedom, in China and Tibet. And if anyone did not believe me, I could tell them they were welcome to visit China whenever they liked.
That was the last installment of advice I was given before I crossed the border.
The descent from Tibet to India is a dramatic journey. For fifty miles across the desolate Tibetan plateau, the white peak of Chomolhari leads one on. At Phari, one passes close to the base of the mountain, and sees in full its isolated splendor.
Then the track falls abruptly, down and down into the pine and rhododendron forests of the Chumbi Valley, where delphiniums and aconites and yellow poppies grow profusely; and one has a sense of climbing down to a totally different world, of the vast hot plains of India stretching far below and far ahead, and of the teeming cities and the oceans which few Tibetans have ever seen. But there is still a pass to climb, the Nathu-la, and the track leads up again above the forest line to the frontier at the top, and takes one back again to the familiar barren scenery of Tibet before it finally descends to the valleys of Sikkim.
The route through the Chumbi Valley has always been the main gateway between Tibet and India. It was the route which the British expedition followed in 1903, and the route which traders used after the agreement of 1904, as far as Gyantse—the only route on which any foreigners had rights in Tibet. In the valley is the town of Yatung, to which I had moved when the Chinese invasion had started in 1950. But it had changed since then. Then, I rode down to the valley on a pony; now, I drove down on the Chinese road in a Chinese car. It was certainly ten time faster and more convenient, but like all Tibetans, I preferred it as it had always been before.
And incidentally, on the top of that road, near Phari, there was an example of how ridiculous the Chinese could sometimes look. I suppose they had read of the rarified atmosphere of the high mountains; for there on the road where people had traveled for centuries on foot and on horseback, one could now see Chinese driving comfortably in their cars, wearing oxygen masks.
Beyond Yatung, the scenery was new to me, and after leaving the car I rode up towards the frontier on the Nathu-la, free for the moment from my Chinese supervisors, with a feeling of pleasant anticipation and excitement I had not experienced since I was a boy. When we started the long climb, the weather was bright and clear, hut we soon rode up into cloud, and the last few thousand feet were damp and cold. That only gave added pleasure to the warmth of our welcome at the top.
The first thing I saw at the frontier was a guard of honor; then I was being greeted by the Maharaj Kumar and the Indian political officer in Sikkim, who also brought me the greetings of the President, Vice President, Prime Minister, and government of India. He presented a scarf to me, the symbol of greeting in Tibet, and a garland of flowers, the corresponding traditional symbol in India. We rode down the pass in company, and spent a happy night at Tsongo on the Sikkimese side.
Next day we left for Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, As we went on through Sikkim and northern India, changing our transport stage by stage from the archaic to the modern, the spontaneous happy welcome grew, and I almost felt as if I were not in a foreign country at all; I felt at home. At the tenth mile we left our ponies and took to jeeps, and there the Chinese ambassador joined the party. Then, a little way ont of the town, the Maharajah of Sikkim and his ministers joined us, and I changed from the jeep to his car. There was rather a comic incident with that car. It was flying a Sikkimese flag on one side and a Tibetan flag on the other. But we stopped for a little while on the way into the town. A great crowd of people was throwing scarves and flowers in greeting, when I was surprised to see a solitary Chinese gentleman, who turned out to be the Ambassador’s interpreter, furtively removing the Tibetan flag and tying on a Chinese flag instead. My Indian friends noticed him too, and I was delighted to find that they also saw the funny side of it.
We ended the journey in a special plane, and as we approached New Delhi I had a marvelous view of the capital which the British built and then left as a legacy to the new and free India. At the airport, the Vice President, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and the Prime Minister, Mr. Nehru, were waiting to welcome me. The Chinese Ambassador, who was in the plane with me, insisted on introducing me, first to them and then to the members of the diplomatic corps. He took me along the line, presenting the officials of many countries. We came to the representative of Britain; but what was going to happen, I wondered, when we came to the representative of the United States? It was a delicate exercise in diplomatic manners. At the crucial moment, the Chinese Ambassador A PILGRIMAGE TO INDIA l^tj suddenly vanished like a magician, and I was left face-to-face with the American. Somebody from the Indian Foreign Office tactfully stepped in and introduced us.
I drove into the city with Dr. Radhakrishnan, and he told me how glad he was to meet me and spoke charmingly of the long connections between our countries. Big crowds had gathered on the roadsides to add to my welcome, under the flags and decorations put up for the Buddha Jayanti. We went to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President’s official residence, and there the President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, received me with his gentle smile and voice on the threshold of the Durbar room, I was greatly and happily impressed by both these leaders. I felt they were devout and learned men who symbolized the eternal spirit of the Indian people.
My very first visit on my first morning in New Delhi was to the Rajghat, the place of cremation of Mahatma Gandhi.
I was deeply moved as I prayed there on the green lawns which slope down to the Jamuna River. I felt I was in the presence of a noble soul—the soul of the man who in his life was perhaps the greatest of our age, the man who had contended till death itself to preserve the spirit of India and mankind— a true disciple of Lord Buddha and a tme believer in peace and harmony among all men. As I stood there I wondered what wise counsel the Mahatma would have given me if he had been alive. I felt sure he would have thrown all his strength of will and character into a peaceful campaign for the freedom of the people of Tibet.
I wished most fervently that I had had the privilege of meeting him in this world. But, standing there, I felt I had come in close touch with him, and I felt his advice would always be that I should follow the path of peace. I had and still have unshaken faith in the doctrine of nonviolence which he preached and practiced. Now I made up my mind more firmly to follow his lead whatever difficulties might confront me. I determined more strongly than ever that I could never associate myself with acts of violence.
After that pilgrimage, I was busy for two or three days with the celebrations of the Buddha Jayanti. It gave me just the opportunity I wanted so much to talk to wise men from different parts of the world who were working, free from any immediate oppression, to proclaim the teaching of Lord Buddha for the sake of the peace of the world. Peace between nations was the uppermost thought in my own mind; so when I gave an address at the symposium, I emphasized the peaceful nature of the Buddhist faith. I said I hoped these celebrations would help to spread the knowledge of the path of enlightenment not only in Asia but also among the people of the western world; for the teaching of Lord Buddha could lead not only to contented and peaceful lives for individuals, hut also to an end of hostility between nations. The salvation of humanity could be found in the principles of Buddhism. And I may add now that I would gladly extend this statement. The salvation of humanity lies in the religious instinct latent in all men, whatever their creed. It is the forcible repression of this instinct which is the enemy of peace.
It was after these celebrations that I had my first real talk with Mr. Nehru, and by then my opinions had evolved to a further stage. I have explained already why I had wanted to come to India; now I had reluctantly come to a new conclusion.
I believed I ought not to go home again; I believed I ought to stay in India until there was some positive sign of a change in Chinese policy. Perhaps my feeling of the closeness of Mahatma Gandhi, and my meetings with so many learned sympathetic men, had helped to bring me to this sad decision.
For almost the first time, I had met people who were not Tibetans but felt true sympathy for Tibet. At home, I thought, I could not help my people any more; I could not control their wish to resort to violence; all my peaceful efforts so far had been failures. But from India, I could at least tell people all over the world what was happening in Tibet, and try to mobilize their moral support for us, and so perhaps bring a change in China's ruthless policy.
I had to explain this to Mr, Nehru. We met alone, except for his Tibetan interpreter. I told him first how grateful I was for the chance to visit India and come to the Buddha Javanti.
And then I explained how desperate things had become in eastern Tibet, and how we all feared that worse troubles would spread through the rest of the country. I said I was forced to believe that the Chinese really meant to destroy our religion and customs for ever, and so cut off our historic ties with India. And all Tibetans, I told him, now pinned their remaining hopes on the government and people of India,
And then I explained why I wanted to stay in India until we could win hack our freedom by peaceful means.
He was very kind and listened patiently, but he was firmly convinced that nothing could be done for Tibet at present.
He said that nobody had ever formally recognized our country's independence. He agreed with me that it was useless to try to fight against the Chinese. If we tried, they could easily bring in more forces to crush us completely. And he advised me to go hack to Tibet and work peacefully to try to carry out the Seventeen-Point Agreement.
I said I had done all I possibly could to carry it out, but however hard I tried, the Chinese refused to honor their side of the agreement, and I could not see any sign of a change of heart among them. At that, he promised to speak to Chou En-lai, who was coming to India on the following day, and our interview ended.
I also spoke to Chou En-lai. I went to the airport to meet him, and the same evening I had a long talk with him. I told him that in our eastern provinces the situation was getting worse and worse. The Chinese were enforcing changes without any thought for local conditions or the wishes or interests of the people. Chou En-lai seemed sympathetic, and said the local Chinese officials must have been making mistakes. He said he would report what I had said to Mao Tse-tung, but I could not tie him down to any definite promise of improvement.
But a few days later, Chou En-lai invited mv elder brothers Thubten Norbu and Gyelo Thondup to dinner at the Chinese embassy, and the conversation they had with him was rather more hopeful and specific. Mv brothers had no official position in our government, and so they could afford to speak more frankly without fear of direct repercussions in Tibet; and when they told me of their conversation afterwards, it seemed that they had been thoroughly outspoken in their criticisms. They told Chou En-lai that for centuries Tibet had respected China as an important and friendly neighbor. Yet now the Chinese in Tibet were treating Tibetans as if they were deadly enemies.
They were making deliberate use of the worst types of Tibetans, the misfits in Tibetan society, to stir up discord, and they were ignoring the many patriotic Tibetans who might have been able to improve relations between Tibetans and Chinese. They were supporting the Panchen Lama in secular matters, in order to reopen the old rift between his predecessor and mine, and so undermine the authority of our government. And they were keeping such vast unnecessary armies in Tibet, especially in Lhasa, that our economy was ruined and prices had risen to the point where Tibetans were facing starvation. It was not the ruling classes of Tibet but the mass of the people who were most bitter against the Chinese occupation. It was they who were demanding that the armies should withdraw and a new agreement, as between equal partners, should be signed; but the Chinese in Lhasa would not listen to popular opinion,
Chou En-lai did not seem to enjoy this plain-speaking, hut he remained as polite and suave as ever. He assured my brothers that the Chinese government had no thought of using undesirable Tibetans, or the Panchen Lama, to undermine my authority or cause dissension. They did not want to interfere in Tibet’s affairs, or to he an economic burden. He agreed that perhaps some difficulties had been caused by lack of understanding among local Chinese officials; and he promised to improve the food supplies in Lhasa, and to begin gradual withdrawal of Chinese troops as soon as Tibet could manage her own affairs. And he also said he would report their complaints to Mao Tse-tung, and would see that the causes of them were removed. These promises were not mere words, he said; my brothers could stay in India if they liked, to see whether his promises were fulfilled, and if they were not, they would be perfectly free to criticize the Chinese government.
But at the end of the interview, he told them that he also had a request to make. He had heard that I had been thinking of staying in India, but he wanted them to persuade me to go back to Tibet. It could only harm me and my people, he said, if I did not go.
After those meetings with Chou En-lai, I started on a tour of parts of India. I was taken to several new industrial projects, such as the huge hydroelectric scheme at Nangal, and I saw for myself, for the first time, the great difference between the way that such things are organized under communism and under a free democracy—the whole difference of atmosphere and spirit between conscripted labor and voluntary labor. But my main object, of course, was to follow my pilgrimage to historic religious centers. So I went to Sanchi, Ajanta, Benares, and Budh Gaya. I was lost in admiration of masterpieces of Indian religious art, with their evidence both of creative genius and of fervent faith. I reflected how sectarianism and communal hatred had harmed this heritage in the past, and how hatred had been changed to calm and peace by the assurance of religious freedom in the Indian Constitution.
In Benares and Budh Gaya I found thousands of Tibetan pilgrims who were waiting to see me, and I spoke to them in both places on the doctrines of Lord Buddha, and impressed on them that they should always follow the path of peace which he clearly marked out for us.
My visit to Budh Gaya was a source of deep inspiration for me. Every devout Buddhist will always associate Budh Gaya with all that is noblest and loftiest in his religious and cultural inheritance. From my very early youth I had thought and dreamed about this visit. Now I stood in the presence of the Holy Spirit who had attained Mahaparinirvana, the highest Nirvana, in this sacred place, and had found for all mankind the path to salvation. As I stood there, a feeling of religious fervor filled my heart, and left me bewildered with the knowledge and impact of the divine power which is in all of us.
But while I was still on my pilgrimage, having traveled on to Samath, a messenger came to me from the Chinese embassy in Delhi. He brought a telegram from General Chang Chin-wu, the Chinese representative in Lhasa. It said the situation at home was serious; spies and collaborators were planning a huge revolt; I should return as soon as possible.
And at Budh Gaya itself, one of my Chinese escorts gave me a message that Chou En-lai was coming back to Delhi and was anxious to see me. So after a few more days, I had to drag myself hack to the world of politics, hostility and mistrust.
In Delhi, Chou En-lai told me again that the situation in Tibet was worse, and that I ought to go hack. He left me in no doubt that if there really was a popular uprising he was ready to use force to put it down. I remember him saying that the Tibetans who were living in India were bent on making trouble, and that I must make up my mind what course I would take myself. I told him I was not ready yet to say what I would do, and I repeated all I had told him before of our grievances against the Chinese occupation. And I said we were willing to forget whatever wrongs had been done to us in the past, but the inhuman treatment and oppression must be stopped. He answered that Mao Tse-tung had made it perfectly clear that "reforms” would only be introduced in Tibet in accordance with the wishes of the people. He spoke as though he still could not understand why Tibetans did not welcome the Chinese.
He told me he had heard I had been invited to visit Kalimpong, in the north of India near the border of Tibet, where there was a community of Tibetans, some of whom had already been driven into exile by the Chinese rule. He said I ought not to go, in case the people there created trouble. I only told him I would think that over. And he ended our interview by warning me that some Indian officials were very good, but others were very peculiar, so that I must be careful.
It was an inconclusive talk, and I came away feeling frustrated and dissatisfied.
The next morning another senior member of the Chinese government, Marshal Ho Lung, came to repeat Chou En-lai’s advice that I should go back at once to Lhasa. I remember him quoting a Chinese proverb: “The snow lion looks dignified if he stays in his mountain abode, but if he comes down to the valleys he is treated like a dog.” I was not disposed to argue any more. By then, I had thought over Mr. Nehru’s advice, and the assurances which Chou En-lai had given to me and my brothers. I told the Marshal I had decided to return, and that I trusted the promises made to me and my brothers would be honored.
Before I left Delhi, I had a final interview with Mr. Nehru, and I think I should quote his own account of his meetings with Chou En-lai and with me. He gave the account to the Lower House of the Indian Parliament in 1959.
“When Premier Chou En-lai came here two or three years ago,” he said, “he was good enough to discuss Tibet with me at considerable length. We had a frank and full talk. He told me that while Tibet had long been a part of the Chinese state, they did not consider Tibet as a province of China. The people were different from the people of China proper, just as in other autonomous regions of the Chinese state the people were different, even though they formed part of that state.
Therefore, they considered Tibet an autonomous region which would enjoy autonomy. He told me further that it was absurd for anyone to imagine that China was going to force communism on Tibet. Communism could not be enforced in this way on a very backward country, and they had no wish to do so, even though they would like reforms to come in progressively.
Even these reforms they proposed to postpone for a considerable time.”
And in speaking of his meetings with me, Mr. Nehru said: "About that time the Dalai Lama was also here, and I had long talks with him then. I told him of Premier Chou En-lai’s friendly approach and of his assurance that he would respect the autonomy of Tibet. I suggested to him that he should accept these assurances in good faith and cooperate in maintaining that autonomy and bringing about certain reforms in Tibet. The Dalai Lama agreed that his country, though according to him advanced spiritually, was very backward socially and economically, and reforms were needed.”
I remember telling Mr. Nehru in that final meeting that I had made up my mind to go back to Tibet for two reasons: because he had advised me to do so, and because Chou En-lai had given definite promises to me and my brothers.
Mr. Nehru’s personality had impressed me very much. Although the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi bad fallen on him, I could not catch any glimpse of spiritual fervor in him; but I saw him as a brilliant practical statesman, with a masterly grasp of international politics, and he showed me that he had a profound love for his country and faith in his people. For their welfare and progress, he was firm in the pursuit of peace.
I also remember that in that interview we talked about my wish to go to Kalimpong. Mr. Nehru knew that Chou En-lai had advised me not to go, and he seemed to agree that the people up there might be troublesome and might try to persuade me not to go back to Tibet. India was a free country, he said, and nobody could stop the people of Kalimpong expressing their own opinions. But he added that if I really wanted to go, his government would make all the arrangements and look after me.
I decided I ought to go, in spite of Chou En-lai’s advice. It was not entirely a political matter. I had a spiritual duty to visit my countrymen, on which Chou En-lai could certainly not advise me.
So I went there, and met not only the Tibetans who were living there, but also a deputation which had been sent by my government in Lhasa to escort me home. And in fact, they also suggested that I should stay in India, because the situation in Tibet had become so desperate and dangerous. But I had made up my mind that one more chance must be given to the Chinese to carry out their government's promises, and one more effort must be made for freedom through peaceful means.
I was weary of politics. Political talks had taken up most of my time in Delhi, and cut short my pilgrimage. I had begun to detest them, and would gladly have retired from politics altogether if I had not had a duty to my people in Tibet. So I was happy to find that in Kalimpong and Gangtok I had time for meditation and for religious discourses to the people who had gathered there to hear me.
It was snowing hard in the mountains. I had to wait nearly a month before the way to Tibet, across the Nathu-la, was open.
CH 9: REVOLT
At last the weather improved and the way was open. At the top of the Nathu-la I said good-by to the last of my friends from India and Sikkim. As I walked across the top of the pass, into Tibet, I saw that among the little prayer flags which Tibetans always like to fly in high places, enormous red flags of China had been hoisted, and portraits of Mao Tse-tung.
No doubt this was meant as a welcome, but it was a melancholy welcome to my own country.
A Chinese general was waiting to receive me. But luckily, it was General Chin Rhawo-rhen, a deputy divisional commander, and he was one of the Chinese officers I really liked.
He was a sincere, straightforward man; not the only one by any means—I had met others who were equally honest and sympathetic. I am perfectly certain that many of them would have liked to help us, but they were all subject to strict Communist discipline, and there was very little they could do. One of them, however, felt so strongly that he joined our guerrilla forces in 1958 and fought with them for nine months, and is now a refugee in India.
I had decided that on my way back to Lhasa I would speak freely in the towns we passed through—Yatung, Gyantse, and Shigatse. After the promises my brothers and I had been given in Delhi, I wanted to see what the Chinese reaction would be to a little plain-speaking in Tibet. So in my speeches at all these three places, and in Lhasa too, I repeated emphatically what I had always told my people, and the Chinese and Tibetan officials, since mv return from China in 1955: that the Chinese were not our rulers, and we were not their subjects.
We had been promised autonomous government, and everyone should do his best to make it work. Our duty should always be to right wrongs, whether they were committed by Chinese or by Tibetans. The rulers of China had assured me,
I said, that the Chinese were only in Tibet to help the Tibetans, and therefore any Chinese who failed to be helpful to us was disobeying his own central government.
I put this policy into practice also, by seeing that every action of our government was strictly in accordance with the Seventeen-Point Agreement, and by pressing in every way I could toward autonomy. At first, I could see no reaction from the Chinese, but slowly I began to understand that they simply thought I was acting under foreign influences.
I soon learned that all the time I had been in India, the anger of the people against the Chinese had been rising steadily, both in Lhasa and in the outlying districts. The main reason for this, I think, was that Khampas and other refugees from the eastern provinces had been streaming westward.
There were thousands of them already camped round Lhasa for the protection of the government. Everybody had learned from them of the atrocious methods the Chinese were using in the east to try to enforce their doctrines, and all were afraid that the same methods would soon be used in the rest of Tibet.
But while the temper of the people was steadily building up toward revolt, the attitude of the Chinese authorities varied in the most extraordinary and disconcerting way. Just before I came home, there was a period in which they were as courteous to my ministers as only Chinese can be. In that period, they called a meeting and told the Cabinet that the Chinese government understood that the people were getting anxious about the proposals for reform in Tibet. They did not in the least want to disregard the people’s wishes, and so the reforms would be postponed for six years. I do not know whether this was a result of my protests to Chou En-lai in Delhi; whether it was or not, it came too late to have much effect on the people’s hostility.
In the same period of studied friendliness, however, the Chinese announced at a public meeting—without having warned the Cabinet—that revolt had broken out in the east against their rule, and that they were fully prepared to do whatever was needed to crush it. This was a shock to the ministers. They had known, of course, that the Khampas were fighting, but they had not known that the revolt was serious enough to make the Chinese admit its existence in public.
And then suddenly, without any immediate reason that we could see, the friendly period came to an end, and we were hack again in the old atmosphere of threats, demands, and scarcely veiled abuse.
After my visit to India, I had invited Mr. Nehru to come to Lhasa. I did this not only because I would have liked to entertain him there, to show my gratitude for the hospitality I had received in India, but also, of course, because I wanted him to have a firsthand impression of what was happening in Tibet. He accepted, and the Chinese made no objection at first. But I might have known what would happen. I might have known that they would not dare to allow a statesman from the outside world to see what they were doing. Shortly before the visit was due, they explained that they could not guarantee his safety in Tibet—suggesting that the Tibetans might have harmed him, instead of welcoming him, as they certainly would have, as a savior—so that unfortunately my invitation would have to he withdrawn. So I was to be cut off again from all sympathy and advice.
Slowly, from the reports of refugees, we began to receive a clearer impression of the terrible things that were happening in the east and northeast, though the exact history of them is not known to this day, and possibly never will be. There, in the district which had been entirely under Chinese rule since the invasion began, the number of Khampas who had taken to the mountains as guerrillas had grown from hundreds to tens of thousands. They had already fought some considerable battles with the Chinese army. The Chinese were using artillery and bomber aircraft, not only against the guerrillas when they could find them, but also against the villages and monasteries whose people they suspected, rightly or wrongly, of having helped them. Thus villages and monasteries were being totally destroyed. Lamas and the lay leaders of the people were being humiliated, imprisoned, killed, and even tortured. Land was confiscated. Sacred images, books of scriptures, and other things of holy significance to us, were broken up, derided, or simply stolen. Blasphemous proclamations were made on posters and in newspapers and preached in schools, saying that religion was only a means of exploiting the people, and that Lord Buddha was a “reactionary,” A few copies of these newspapers, which had been published in Chinese territory, reached Lhasa and began to circulate among Tibetan and Chinese officials there; and the Chinese, seeing the strong Tibetan reaction and realizing that they had gone too far, offered five dollars a copy for them, to try to take them out of circulation before everybody in Lhasa had heard of them.
If the Chinese had ever wanted to win over Tibetans as willing citizens of their “motherland,” they had evidently given up the attempt, at least in the eastern provinces. Tibetans could never be awed or terrified into acquiescence, and to attack our religion, our most precious possession, was a lunatic policy. The effect of these actions was simply to spread and intensify the revolt. Within a short time after my return to Lhasa, people were taking to arms throughout the east, northeast, and southeast of Tibet. It was only the western and central parts of the country which were still in comparative peace.
Of course, I protested very strongly to the Chinese general in Lhasa against these shocking tactics. When I protested, for example, against the bombing of villages and monasteries, he would promise to put a stop to it at once, but it continued exactly the same.
In Lhasa, the number of Khampas, Amdo people, and other people from the east grew to at least ten thousand. Some of them were permanent residents, but most were refugees. As it was eastern people who had started the revolt, these people in Lhasa began to worry that the Chinese might take revenge on them, and they sent a petition to the Cabinet, asking for protection. The Chinese commanders told the Cabinet they could assure them that they would not take punitive action against eastern people in general, and the Cabinet sent for the local Khampa leaders and did theii best to overcome their fears. But they only succeeded in calming them for a little while. They came back, and asked the Cabinet to get a formal assurance in writing from the Chinese that the Khampas and Amdo people would not be punished. But the Chinese refused to give that, on the curious ground that if such an assurance became public, it would reach India, and China would lose face.
There was nothing more the Cabinet could do, except repeat the verbal promise the Chinese had given, and put it in writing on their own authority. But there were soon signs that this promise might be as empty as so many others. Within a few weeks, Chinese officers began to go round the tents of the Khampas taking a census, and writing down all kinds of details of the personal history of everyone they found there.
This was something they had never done before, and it aroused fresh fears in the Khampas’ minds. They thought it was the prelude to mass arrests, and they decided they were not safe in Lhasa any longer. So a great exodus began. Group after group of the refugees set off for the mountains by night, some taking their families with them, to find the guerrilla bands and join them, until hardly any were left.
Of course, this made the Chinese angry, and their complaints poured into the Cabinet office. I was very unhappy too at this turn of events. It made my dilemma even more acute.
Part of me greatly admired the guerrilla fighters. They were brave people, men and women, and they were putting their lives and their children’s lives at stake to try to save our religion and country in the only remaining way that they could see. When one heard of the terrible deeds of the Chinese in the east, it was a natural human reaction to seek revenge. And moreover, I knew they regarded themselves as fighting in loyalty to me as Dalai Lama: the Dalai Lama was the core of what they were trying to defend.
Yet I was forced back to my old argument. I often thought again of my visit to the Rajghat, and wondered afresh what advice Mahatma Gandhi would have given me in the changing circumstances. Would he still have advised nonviolence? I could only believe he would. However great the violence used against us, it could never become right to use violence in reply. And on the practical side, I saw the atrocities in the east as a dreadful example of what the Chinese could do so easily all over Tibet if we fought them. I must, I thought, try yet again to persuade my people not to use arms, not to provoke the same or worse reprisals over the rest of our country. I asked the Cabinet to send a message to the Khampa leaders that these were my wishes. They appointed a mission of two lay officials and three monks to find the guerrilla leaders and tell them. The same mission took a promise from the Chinese that if the guerrillas laid down their arms, no action would be taken against them. That promise carried the implication that if they refused, action would be severe. The Chinese had wanted to demand, in return for their promise, that the Khampas should actually surrender their arms, but the Cabinet persuaded them not to make that demand, because they knew that no Khampa would ever accept it.
During this time, I had several talks with the three senior generals, Chang Chin-wu, Tan Kuo-hwa, and Tan Kuan-sen.
What they said hardly seemed to bear any relation to what was happening. Everv time I met them, they repeated the assurances that Chou En-lai had given me in India: no drastic changes would be made in Tibet for at least six years, and even after that they would not be enforced against the wishes of the people. Yet they were already enforcing them, against the very emphatic wishes of the people, in the eastern districts.
Perhaps they were able to persuade themselves that these districts were part of China itself, not of Tibet. But their repeated promise gave me a last straw of hope to cling to, which was perhaps what they intended.
Then they suddenly changed their policy. Hitherto, it was they, the Chinese army, who had taken reprisals against the guerrillas in the east, and threatened them elsewhere. Now they insisted that our government should take action against them. We should send our own Tibetan army to crush the revolt. They would provide us with reinforcements and supplies.
But this the Cabinet absolutely rejected. They pointed out that the Tibetan army was much too small and not well enough trained or equipped, and that it was needed to keep the peace in Lhasa; and above all, they said they could not possibly guarantee that the Tibetan army would not simply join hands with the guerrillas. And I have no doubt that would have happened. It was unthinkable to send out a Tibetan army to fight against Tibetans who were committing no worse crime than to defend Tibet. So at last the Cabinet was forced into firm defiance of a major Chinese order.
The Chinese had an extraordinary way of mixing trivial demands with those of the highest importance. In the midst of all these desperate affairs, they insisted that the word “ reactionaries” should always be used to describe the Khampas who had taken arms against them. The word has a special emotional significance for Communists, but of course it had none for us. Everybody, in the government and out, began to use it as a synonym for guerrillas. To Communists, no doubt, it implied the height of wickedness, but we used it, on the whole, in admiration. It did not seem to matter to us, or to the Khampas, what their fellow-Tibetans called them; but later, when I innocently used the word in writing, it did cause confusion among our friends abroad.
The Chinese showed the same lack of logic and balance in much more serious matters. The revolt had broken out in the district they themselves had controlled for seven years; yet now they furiously blamed our government for it. Their complaints and accusations were endless, day after day: the Cabinet was not trying to suppress the “reactionaries,” it was leaving Tibetan armories unguarded, so that “reactionaries” could steal arms and ammunition. Consequently, hundreds of Chinese were losing their lives, ancUhe Chinese would take vengeance in blood for them. Like all invaders, they had totally lost sight of the sole cause of fhe revolt against them: that our people did not want them in our country, and were ready to give their lives to be rid of them.
Yet while the Chinese blamed our government, they were still haunted by a specter of nonexistent “imperialists.” They must have known by then that there were no “imperialist forces” in Tibet, and never had been, but now they said certain Tibetans in India had joined with the “imperialists,” and it was they who were creating the trouble in Tibet. They named nine of them, including my former Prime Minister Lukhangwa and my brothers Thubten Nofbu and Gyelo Thondup, and demanded that they should be deprived of their Tibetan nationality. This order did not seem to me, or to the Cabinet, to be worth defying. The accusation was nonsense, but these nine people might well have thought it an honor to be singled out in such a way, and the punishment, so far as I have heard, never caused them the slightest inconvenience.
But in Lhasa we had reached the breaking point. The breach between the Chinese and the Cabinet was already open. The Chinese were arming their civilians and reinforcing their barricades in the city. They declared that throughout the country they would only protect their own nationals and their own communications: everything else was our responsibility.
They summoned more meetings in schools and other places, and told the people that the Cabinet was in league with the “ reactionaries” and its members would be dealt with accordingly—not merely shot, they sometimes went on to explain, but executed slowly and publicly. General Tan Kuan-sen, addressing a women’s meeting in Lhasa, said that where there was rotten meat, the flies gathered, but if you got rid of the meat, the flies were no more trouble. The flies, I suppose, were the guerrilla fighters: the rotten meat was either my Cabinet or myself.
And yet, while the Chinese said the Cabinet was in league with the Khampa guerrillas, I have no doubt the Khampas believed the Cabinet was more or less in league with the Chinese. The mission which the Cabinet had sent to the Khampa leaders never came back. Its five members joined the guerrillas themselves, and by then it was very difficult to blame them. The wishes I had expressed through them caused a lull in the fighting, but they had come too late. Most of the guerrillas would not go back to their homes, because they did not trust the assurances that no action would be taken against them; and in fact, by then, a great many of them had no homes to go to.
I must admit I was very near despair. And then, either by accident or design, the Chinese brought the final crisis on us.
CH 10: CRISIS IN LHASA
On the first of March, 1959, I was in the Jokhang, the main temple of Lhasa, for the celebrations of the Monlam Festival.
It was during that festival that I took my final examination as Master of Metaphysics. Of course, through all our political misfortunes, my religious education had been continuing. It was still my greatest interest. All my own inclination would have been to pursue religious studies in peace, if that had been possible. The examination by dialectical debate before a vast audience of monks and lamas, which I have described already, was a tremendously important occasion for me, and indeed for the whole of Tibet, and I was entirely preoccupied at that moment with religious questions.
In the middle of all the ceremonies and preparations for my final test, I was told that two Chinese officers wanted to see me. They were shown in—two junior officers who said they had been sent by General Tan Kuan-sen. They wanted me to tell the general a date on which I could attend a theatrical show he had decided to stage in the Chinese army camp.
I had already heard of this plan and had promised to go, but I really could not concentrate on anything else just then, so I told the officers I would arrange a date as soon as the ceremonies were finished in ten days’ time. They would not be satisfied with that, but kept on pressing me to decide on a date at once. I repeated that I could onlv fix the date when the ceremonies were over, and finally they agreed to take that reply to the general.
This visit was curious. Normally, unless the general called on me himself, messages from him were sent through whichever of my officials were most concerned. Invitations to social functions were normally sent through Donyerchemo Phala, my Senior Chamberlain, or Chikyab Khempo, the Chief Official Abbot, and my representative in the Cabinet.
So the unusual procedure of sending junior officers to see me personally, and of sending them to the temple, immediately aroused suspicion among all my people who came to know of it. Apart from the resentment it understandably created among my officials, everyone felt the general was once again trying to lower the Dalai Lama in the eyes of his people.
It had been our painful experience under the Chinese regime that I did not have the option even to decline a social invitation if it did not suit me, except at the risk of incurring the displeasure of the Chinese and causing unpleasant repercussions.
Their annoyance in such a case always found vent in some other direction, and so we thought it wiser, in the interest of the country, to suffer such minor humiliations in silence, rather than risk a further stiffening of the general Chinese policy of relegating me and my government to a position of subordination.
Nothing more was heard of this strange invitation before I left the temple for the Norbulingka on the fifth of March.
My procession to the Norbulingka had always been a great occasion, and in previous years the Chinese had taken part in it, but this year everybody noticed that no Chinese attended.
It was two days later, on the seventh of March, that I had another message from the general. His interpreter, whose name was Li, telephoned to the Chief Official Abbot and asked for a definite date when I could attend the performance in the Chinese camp. The Abbot consulted me, and at my instance he told Li that the tenth of March would be convenient.
The arrangements to be made for my visit were not discussed until the ninth of March, the day before it was due.
Then, at eight o’clock in the morning, two Chinese officers came to the house of the Commander of my Bodyguard,
Kusung Depon, and told him they had been sent to take him to the Chinese headquarters to see Brigadier Fu, whose title was Military Advisor. Kusung Depon had not had his breakfast, and told them he would come at ten o’clock. They went away, but came back an hour later to tell him he must come at once, as the brigadier was waiting impatiently.
Later that morning, Kusung Depon came back to the Norbulingka in a state of distress. He spoke to my Chief Official Abbot and Senior Chamberlain, and they brought him to see me, and he gave me a verbatim account of what had happened.
The brigadier was looking angry, he told me, when he arrived at his office. “The Dalai Lama is coming here tomorrow,” he said abruptly, “ to see a dramatic show. There are some things to settle. That is why I have sent for you.”
“Has the date been fixed?” Kusung Depon asked him.
“Don’t you know?” snapped the brigadier. “The Dalai Lama has accepted the general’s invitation and he is coming on the tenth. Now I want to make this clear to you: There will he none of the ceremony you usually have. None of your armed men are to come with him, as they do when he goes to the Preparatory Committee. No Tibetan soldier is to come beyond the Stone Bridge. If you insist, you may have two or three Tibetan bodyguards, but it is definitely decided that they must not be armed.”
These unusual orders were a most unpleasant shock to my commander. The Stone Bridge was the limit of the vast army camp which contained the Chinese headquarters. The existence of this camp within two miles of the Norbulingka had always been an eyesore to every patriotic Tibetan. As long as the Chinese kept it to themselves, the people of Lhasa had tolerated it. But the very idea of the Dalai Lama going into it for any purpose was extraordinary, and Kusung Depon knew that the people would dislike it. If I had to go without a bodyguard, it was more extraordinary still. By custom, an escort of twenty-five aimed guards accompanied the Dalai Lama wherever he went, and armed troops were always posted along the route. Kusung Depon knew that if this custom were to he suddenly stopped, an explanation would have to be given to the public. So he asked the brigadier for a reason. It was an innocent inquiry, but it further annoyed the brigadier.
“Will you be responsible if somebody pulls the trigger?” he shouted. “We don’t want trouble. We shall have our own troops unarmed when the Dalai Lama comes. You can post your men on the road as far as the Stone Bridge if you like, but none of them are to come beyond it under any circumstances.
And the whole thing is to be kept strictly secret.”
There was much discussion among my officials when Kusung Depon returned and told us of these orders. There seemed to be no alternative but to comply with them, and plans for my visit were made accordingly.
But no one could help feeling that the whole of the Chinese invitation was suspicious, and their wish to keep the visit secret made the suspicion worse. It would have been quite impossible to keep any journey I made outside the Norbulingka a secret, unless a total curfew had been enforced throughout the town. The moment I prepared to go out, the word always went round and the whole of Lhasa fumed up and lined the route to see me. And at that time, there were many extra people in the city who would also be certain to come. Most of the monks who had been at the Monlam Festival had left, but a few thousand still remained, and there were also several thousand refugees. At a rough estimate, there may have been a hundred thousand people in Lhasa just then,
CRISIS IN LHASA l 6j and perhaps that was the highest population the city had ever had.
So to keep order along the route on the following day, my officials decided to post the usual Tibetan guards as far as the Stone Bridge which led into the Chinese area, and they also made plans to ensure that the crowd would not overflow beyond the bridge. On the afternoon of March ninth, they told the Tibetan police on duty along the road to warn people that on the next day there would be special traffic restrictions and nobody would be allowed beyond the bridge.
They took this precaution in all good faith, because crossing the bridge was not normally forbidden, and they thought there might he tragic consequences if people innocently crossed it to see me pass and the Chinese soldiers tried to force them back. But the result was the reverse of what they intended.
A rumor spread at once throughout the city that the Chinese had made a plan to kidnap me. During the evening and night of the ninth of March excitement and agitation grew, and by the morning most of the people of Lhasa had decided spontaneously to prevent my visit to the Chinese camp at any cost.
There was another fact which made people all the more certain that a trap had been laid to abduct me. A meeting of the Chinese National Assembly was due to be held in Peking in the following month, and the Chinese had been pressing me to go. Knowing the mood of the people, I had been trying to avoid accepting the invitation, and had not given the Chinese government any definite answer. But in spite of that, just over a week before, they had announced in Peking that I was coming. That announcement without my consent had already made people in Lhasa very angry, and naturally they concluded that the strange new invitation was simply a ruse to fly me out against my will to China.
There was also an even more somber suspicion in the people’s minds. It was widely known in Tibet that in four different places in the eastern provinces, high lamas had been invited to parties by the Chinese army commanders and had l68 MY LAND AND MY PEOPLE never been seen again: three had been hilled, and one imprisoned.
It seemed that this method of luring people away from anyone who might try to protect them was a Chinese custom.
The suspicion of the ordinary people of Lhasa also spread among the officials of my government, through yet another unusual act by the Chinese authorities. Normally, when the Chinese invited me to any social function, they also invited all the highest Tibetan officials. But on this occasion, until the evening of the ninth of March, no officials except my own personal staff had been invited. Late that night, two Chinese officers came to the Norbulingka with invitation cards, but only for the six members of my Cabinet; and verbally they made the unusual request that the Cabinet members should not bring more than one servant with them. By custom, my Senior Chamberlain always accompanied me wherever I went, as the Chinese knew very well, but neither he nor any other officials were included in the invitation.
In spite of their suspicion, my officials did not try to persuade me not to go; but my Cabinet decided to accompany me, instead of going separately, which was the normal practice, because they felt that if anything unpleasant happened, they would at least have the satisfaction of not having left me alone.
The following day was destined to be the most momentous Lhasa had ever seen. At noon I was supposed to take the unprecedented step of entering the Chinese camp without an escort. But when I woke up that morning, I had no idea of what the day was really going to bring. I had slept badly because I had been worrying about it. At five I got up, and went as usual to my prayer room. Everything was perfectly orderly, and perfectly peaceful and familiar. The butter lamps were burning before the altars, and the small golden and silver bowls had been replenished with sweet-smelling saffron water, like liquid gold, and the fragrance of incense permeated the air, I offered prayers and meditated, and then I went CRISIS IN LHASA 169 downstairs and out to the garden, where I always liked to walk in the early morning.
At first I was preoccupied with my worries, but I soon forgot them in the beauty of the spring morning. The sky was cloudless. The rays of the sun were just touching the peak of the mountain behind the distant monastery of Drepung, and beginning to shine on the palace and chapels which stood in my Jewel Park. Everything was fresh and gay with spring: the spears of the new green grass, the delicate buds on the poplar and willow trees, the lotus leaves in the lake thrusting up to the surface and unfolding to the sun—all was green. And since I was bom in the Wood Hog Year, and wood is green, astrologers would have said that green was my lucky color. Indeed, for that reason my personal prayer flags were green, and they were flying from the roof of my house and beginning to stir in a gentle morning breeze.
That was the last brief moment of peace of mind I was to know. It was broken by shouts, sudden and discordant, from beyond the wall of the park. I listened, but I could not distinguish the words. I hurried indoors, found some of my officials, and sent them to find out what was happening. They soon came hack to tell me that the people of Lhasa seemed to be streaming out of the city and surrounding the Norbuliogka, and that they were shouting that they had come to protect me, and to stop the Chinese taking me to the camp.
Soon all the palaces were astir with anxious people. Messengers kept coming to me with further news. The crowd was countless—some said there were 30,000 people. They were in a state of turbulent excitement, and the shouts were furious anger against the Chinese. Hour by hour the turmoil grew. I myself went to pray in a small chapel which had been built by the Seventh Dalai Lama and dedicated to Mahakala, the militant aspect of Chenresi, endowed with the power of protection against evil. Eight monks had already been there for several days, offering continuous prayer.
Two members of my Cabinet, Liusbar and Shasur, drove up 1 70 MY LAND AND MY PEOPLE to the palace about nine o'clock in Chinese army jeeps with Chinese drivers, which was their usual practice. The people grew even more excited when they saw the Chinese drivers, but the ministers did not have much difficulty in getting through the crowd and into the palace.
But a little later, another minister, Samdup Phodrang, drove up in his own car escorted by a Chinese officer. Then for a moment the crowd got out of control. Samdup Phodrang had only recently been appointed to the Cabinet, and only a few people in Lhasa knew him by sight. He was wearing a Tibetan robe of yellow silk, and he would probably have been able to come in through the gates without any trouble if he had been alone, but the crowd thought the car was Chinese and jumped to the conclusion that the Chinese officer had come to take me away. Somebody threw a stone at him—the panic reaction spread, and the car was bombarded with stones. One of them hit Samdup Phodrang on the temple and knocked him unconscious.
Even when he was lying unconscious, the people did not recognize him; but thinking they had mistakenly injured one of my officials, some of them picked him up and carried him to the hospital of the Indian Consulate.
A little later still, another member of the Cabinet, Surkhang, approached the palace in his jeep, but he could not drive up to the gate because by then the crowd had completely blocked the road. He got out of the jeep some distance away and walked through the crowd and entered the gate with the help of a Tibetan official who was stationed there.
These three ministers, having been in the crowd themselves, all realized that something must be done very quickly to avert a crisis—they thought the crowd might try to attack the Chinese headquarters. They waited some time for Ngabo, who was also a member of the Cabinet, but he did not come. Later we learned that he had gone to the Chinese camp, apparently in the belief that I would be there, and then thought it would be unsafe for him to come out again—as indeed it might have been, for the Chinese would have sent an escort with him and CRISIS IN LHASA 171 they would have been stoned like Samdup Fhodrang’s escort.
But finally they decided they could not wait any longer, and the three of them held a meeting together with Chikvab Khempo, the Chief Official Abbot, who also had ministerial rank. Then they came to see me. They told me the people had decided I must not be taken to the Chinese camp for fear that I would be abducted and taken away to China. The crowd had already elected a kind of committee of sixty or seventy leaders, and taken an oath that if the Chinese insisted I should go, they would barricade the palace and make it impossible for me to be taken out of it. And the Cabinet told me the crowd was so alarmed and resolute that it really would not be safe for me to go.
By the time the Cabinet members came to see me, I could hear what the people were shouting: “The Chinese must go; leave Tibet to the Tibetans”—all their slogans demanded an end of the Chinese occupation and of Chinese interference with the Dalai Lama’s rule. Hearing the shouts, I could feel the tension of these people. I had been born one of them, and I understood what they were feeling and knew that in their present state of mind they were uncontrollable. And that knowledge was confirmed, later in the morning, when I heard with great pain and sorrow that a monastic official called Phakpala Khenchung had been manhandled and finally stoned to death by the angry mob. This man had become notorious in Lhasa because of his close association with the Chinese occupation forces. Earlier that morning he had attended a daily congregation of monastic officials called the Trungcha Ceremony, and for some unknown reason, about eleven o’clock, he rode towards the Norbulingka on a bicycle, wearing a semi-Chinese dress, dark glasses and a motorcyclist's dust mask, and carrying a pistol unconcealed in his belt. Some of the crowd took him for a Chinese in disguise; others thought he was bringing a message from the Chinese headquarters. Their anger and resentment against everything Chinese suddenly burst into fury, and murder was the tragic result.
This outbreak of violence gave me great distress. I told my Cabinet to tell the Chinese general that I could not attend the performance, and also that it would be unwise for anyone from his headquarters to come to the Norbulingka at present, because that might anger the crowd still further. My Senior Chamberlain telephoned to the general’s interpreter and gave him this message, with my apologies and regret. The interpreter agreed that my decision was correct, and said he would give the message to the general.
At the same time I also told the Cabinet to tell the people who had surrounded the palace that if they did not wish me to go to the Chinese camp, I would not go. Minister Surkhang got in touch with the leaders whom the people had chosen and told them I had canceled my visit, and about noon a loudspeaker was used to make a similar announcement to the crowd. It was greeted with jubilant cheers from outside the gates.
The mental stress of that morning was something I had not experienced before during the brief period of my leadership of the people of Tibet. I felt as if I were standing between two volcanoes, each likely to erupt at any moment. On one side, there was the vehement, unequivocal, unanimous protest of my people against the Chinese regime; on the other, there was the armed might of a powerful and aggressive occupation force. If there was a clash between the two, the result was a foregone conclusion. The Lhasan peoole would be ruthlessly massacred in thousands, and Lhasa and the rest of Tibet would see a fullscale military rule with all its persecution and tyranny. The immediate cause of the explosive situation was the question whether I should go to the Chinese camp or not. But at the same time, I was the only possible peacemaker, and I knew that at all costs, for the sake of my own people,
I must try to calm the anger of the people and pacify the Chinese who would certainly be even angrier.
I had hoped that the announcement that I was not going would end the demonstration, and that the people would go home in peace. But it was not enough. Their leaders said they would not go unless I assured them I had not only canceled the visit for that day, but had also decided not to accept any invitation in the future to go to the Chinese camp. Nothing seemed too high a price to pay to avert a disaster, so I gave the assurance they wanted. Then most of these chosen leaders left; but most of the rest of the people still stayed outside the palace and would not go away.
At about one o'clock I told my three ministers to go to see General Tan Kuan-sen and explain the whole situation to him personally. There was still a vast multitude outside the gates determined to prevent anyone leaving, and the appearance of the ministers at the gates made the people suspect that I might be following them. The ministers explained to the crowd, with some difficulty, that I had instructed them to go to the Chinese headquarters and tell the general that I could not come to his theatrical performance. On this assurance the crowd insisted on searching the ministers’ cars to make sure that I had not been hidden in one of them, but when they had satisfied themselves about that, they let the ministers go.
During that discussion at the gate, the spokesmen of the crowd said they had decided to choose a bodyguard from amongst themselves and post it all around the palace to prevent the Chinese getting in to take me away. The ministers tried to persuade them not to do that, but they would not accept their advice.
When the ministers came back that afternoon, they told me what had happened at the Chinese headquarters. General Tan Kuan-sen was not there when they arrived, but ten other officers were waiting for them, apparently engaged in a serious conversation; and with them was Ngabo, my other Cabinet minister, dressed in Tibetan clothes instead of the Chinese general’s uniform which he had recently had to wear when he was in attendance at the Chinese offices. Ngabo was sitting with the officers, but he did not seem to be taking part in their discussion. He did not leave his seat to join the ministers when they entered.
For some time, not a word was spoken by either side about the events of the day. The Chinese officers seemed to be unconcerned, and they inquired politely about the ministers’ health. But the atmosphere suddenly changed when General Tan Kuan-sen came in and took charge of the proceedings.
The ministers told me the general seemed very angry when he came into the room. His appearance was intimidating, and the ministers rose nervously from their seats to show him respect. For a few minutes, he seemed to be speechless with rage, and he did not greet the ministers. Surkhang opened the conversation by telling him that I had sent them to explain what had happened to prevent me from attending the dramatic performance. He said I had had every intention of coming, but the people's wishes were so strongly against it that I had had to give up the idea. The other two ministers also added their explanations. By the time the interpreter had finished, the general was visibly red in the face. He rose from his seat and started pacing up and down the room, apparently beside himself with anger. After a great appearance of effort, he managed to control himself and sat down again. Then with studied deliberation and slowness of speech, he began a harangue against the ministers and ‘Tibetan reactionaries.”
Although he seemed to be trying to control his temper, his voice often rose sharply and his simmering anger burst out in rude and abusive language. He was using Chinese words which are never spoken in any polite Chinese society. The general point of the harangue was that the government of Tibet had been secretly organizing agitation by the people against the Chinese authorities and helping the Khampas in their rebellion. Tibetan officials had defied the orders of the Chinese and refused to disarm the Khampas in Lhasa—and now, drastic measures would be taken to crush the opposition to Chinese rule.
Two other generals made similar tirades. One of them declared the time had come to "destroy all these reactionaries.... Our government has been tolerant so far,” he said, "but this is rebellion. This is the breaking point. We shall act now, so be prepared!”
My bewildered ministers took these harangues as an ultimatum of military action if the popular agitation did not cease at once. They were convinced the prospect was dangerous and involved the safety of the person of the Dalai Lama; and they felt that if anything happened to me, there would be nothing left of Tibet. They tried to counsel patience, Shasur told the general that the Chinese should try to understand the ordinary Tibetan people and be patient and tolerant. They should not make a serious situation worse by retaliation. And he assured him that the Cabinet would do all that was possible to prevent an outbreak of lawlessness among the Khampas or any other Tibetans who might be foolhaidly enough to try to provoke a clash of arms with the Chinese occupation forces.
But the Chinese generals would not accept this assurance or listen to this advice.
Deeply perturbed, the ministers came back to the Noibulingka about five in the evening. By then a part of the crowd had dispersed, though there was still a large number of people surrounding the main gate. Those who had left, we learned later, had gone into the city to hold public meetings and stage mass demonstrations against the Chinese. At the meetings they denounced the Seventeen-Point Agreement on the ground that the Chinese had broken it, and they demanded once more that the Chinese should withdraw. At six the same evening, about seventy members of the government, mostly junior officials, together with the leaders chosen by the crowd and members of the Kusung Regiment (the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard) held a meeting inside the Norbulingka grounds and endorsed the declaration which had been made at the meetings in the city. They also made a declaration that Tibet no longer recognized Chinese authority; and soon afterwards, the Kusung Regiment declared that they would no longer take orders from Chinese officers, and they discarded the Chinese uniforms which they had been made to wear and appeared again in their Tibetan dress.
As soon as I heard of these decisions, I sent instructions to the leaders stating that their duty was to reduce the existing tension and not aggravate it—-to he patient and meet all events with calm and forbearance. But by then the resentment of the people was so bitter, and their suspicion of the Chinese so great, that my advice seemed to have no effect on them at all.
Late in the evening of the same day, a letter from General Tan Kuan-sen was delivered to me. It was the first of three letters he sent me within the next few days, and I replied to all of them.
These letters were published by the Chinese, after all the events in Lhasa were over, to support their own propaganda.
They used them to try to prove that I wanted to seek shelter in the Chinese headquarters, but was kept under duress in the Norbulingka by what they called a “reactionary clique,” and finally abducted out of the country to India against my will.
This story was repeated in some of the foreign press which was favorably inclined towards Communist China, and I was shocked to hear over a year later that it had been quoted by a member of the British peerage in the House of Lords. As it is the very opposite of the truth, I want to describe the circumstances in which these letters were written, and my reasons for writing them, and to say once and for all that when I left Lhasa I went of my own free will. The decision was mine alone, made under the stress of a desperate situation. I was not abducted by my entourage; I was not under any pressure to go from anybody, except in so far as every Tibetan in Lhasa could see by then that the Chinese were preparing to shell my palace and that my life would be in danger if I stayed there.
The general's letters to me were written in friendly terms which would have seemed more sincere if I had not already been told of his rage by my ministers. He said he was concerned for my safety and invited me to take refuge in his camp.
I replied to all his letters to gain time—time for anger to cool on both sides, and time for me to urge moderation of the Lhasan people. And to this end I thought it would be foolish to argue with the general, or to point out that Chinese protection from my own people was the very last thing I needed. On the contrary, I decided to reply in a way which I hoped would calm him down. And this I could only do by seeming to accept his sympathy and welcome his advice. In my first letter I told him how embarrassed I had been at my people's action in preventing me from coming to his entertainment.
In the second letter, I told him I had given orders that the people surrounding the Norbulingka should disperse, and I concurred with his point of view that these people, under the pretext of protecting me, were only working to undermine the relations between the Chinese and our government.
And in the third letter, I also added that I must separate the people who supported new ideas and those who opposed them before I could visit his headquarters.
Even if I had thought at the time that these letters would be quoted against me later, I would still have written them, because my most urgent moral duty at that moment was to prevent a totally disastrous clash between my unarmed people and the Chinese army.
And perhaps I may repeat once more that I could not approve of violence, and so I could not approve of the violent attitude the people of Lhasa were showing. I could and do appreciate the affection for me, as the symbol of Tibet, an attitude which was the immediate cause of the anger they were showing against the Chinese on that fateful day. I could not blame them for their anxiety for my safety, because the Dalai Lama represented most of what they lived and worked for. But I was certain that what they were doing could only lead to disaster if they continued, and as Head of State I had to try by every means to curb their feelings and stop them bringing CRISIS IN LHASA 187 about their own destruction under the weight of the Chinese army. So the advice I gave them was given in the fullest sincerity, and although my letters to the Chinese general were written to disguise my true intentions, 1 felt and still feel that they were justified.
But by the following day, the eleventh of March, it was clear that the Lhasan people were becoming even more difficult to control. On that day they posted six guards near the Cabinet office inside the Norbulingka and warned the ministers that they would not be allowed to leave. Presumably they suspected that the Cabinet might make some kind of compromise with the Chinese and so defeat the popular demand that the Chinese should leave Tibet. The Cabinet convened an emergency meeting. Only four of the six ministers were present, because Samdup Phodrang was still too ill from his injury to be able to come, and Ngabo refused to come out of the Chinese camp. But these four decided to make another effort to persuade the people to call off their demonstration, and they sent for the leaders of the crowd.
At that meeting, the leaders seemed to be more amenable and they told the Cabinet they would tell the people to disperse.
TTiey also said they were sorry Samdup Phodrang had been hurt, and asked the Cabinet to deliver some presents from them to him by way of apology.
In that somewhat more conciliatory mood, the people probably would have dispersed before long, and the efforts which I and the Cabinet had been making to bring the demonstration to a peaceful end would probably have succeeded; but then two more letters arrived from the general, one to me and one to the Cabinet. The letter to the Cabinet completely defeated our efforts. It said tbat the “ rebels” had put up barricades on the north side of Lhasa, on the road towards China, and told the Cabinet to order them to be removed at once.
It warned the Cabinet that if this was not done, “serious consequences would follow, for which the responsibility would rest with Surkhang, Liushar, Shasur, and Donyeichemo.”
The Cabinef sent for the leaders or the people again and advised them to remove the barricades, so that the Chinese could not find an excuse in them for more repression. But that advice had exactly the wrong effect. The leaders absolutely refused to demolish the barricades. They said they had put them there to protect the Norbulingka by keeping Chinese reinforcements out of the city, and if the Chinese wanted them removed, the obvious conclusion was that they did mean to attack the Palace and capture the Dalai Lama. They also said that the Chinese themselves had put up barricades in front of the temple and taken similar precautions to protect their Tibetan supporters, such as Ngabo. If the Chinese could use barricades to protect Ngabo, they asked, why should they object to the people of Lhasa protecting the Palace? This was unfortunate logic, but the leaders could not be persuaded to see the Chinese orders in any other way; and the unhappy result was that they became more apprehensive about my safety and refused to disperse the crowd. The people became more uncompromising, appointed six commanders from among themselves to strengthen the defense of the Palace, and announced that they would not leave the Palace unguarded whatever happened.
This development distressed me very much, I felt it was one step more toward disaster. So I decided to speak to the people's leaders myself. I sent for them, and all seventy of them came, and in the presence of the Cabinet and other senior officials I did my best to dissuade them from their actions.
I told them the Chinese general had not compelled me to accept his invitation; I had been consulted and given my consent before the invitation was issued. I said I was not in any fear of personal danger from the Chinese, and they must not create a situation which could have such serious consequences for the people. I knew this would offend their feelings, but I had to tell them what I felt in the sincerest hope that the normal peace of Lhasa might be restored to some extent.
The leaders did not question my advice or contradict me.
They quietly left the meeting and held a conference among themselves by the outer gate of the Palace. They agreed that it was impossible for them to disobey my orders, but there was a long argument about what would happen to me if their protection was withdrawn. In the end, they carried out my wishes to the extent of holding no more meetings within the Norbulingka. Instead of that, they met at the village of Shol, at the foot of the Potala, and sent reports of their decisions to me and the Cabinet after each meeting. These reports amounted to a repetition of their earlier declarations: they would continue to protect me, and the Chinese must leave Lhasa and Tibet and allow the Tibetans to manage their own affairs.
So the next two days dragged by. The situation seemed to be static and the problems to be insoluble, but obviously things could not go on as they were. Something must happen soon, for better or worse.
General Tan Kuan-sen’s third and last letter to me arrived on the morning of the sixteenth of March, and I replied to it on the same day. Afterwards, the Chinese published both these letters. But they did not say that in the same envelope with the general’s letter there was another sent to me by Ngabo. He had not attended any Cabinet meetings since the crisis started. Now he wrote to warn me that he did not think there was much chance of peace. He suggested that I should try to "destroy the hostile designs of the reactionaries,” and cut all my connections with the people’s leaders. He said he gathered the people had an "evil plan” to remove me from the Norbulingka. If that was true, it would be very dangerous for me, because the Chinese bad taken the strictest measures to prevent my escape. And even if I did escape, he said, in the present international situation I would never be able to return to Lhasa. And then he said: "If Your Holiness with a few trusted officers of the bodyguard can stay within the inner wall, and hold a position there, and inform General Tan Kuan-sen exactly which building you will occupy, they certainly intend that this building will not be damaged.”
So Ngabo knew what we had only guessed: that the Chinese did intend to destroy the palace and the crowd, but still wanted to do it, if they could, without also killing me.
He wrote to the Cabinet too, more or less repeating what he had written to me, and urging them to get the people away from the Palace, or at least to see that they stayed outside the walls. He said he understood the difficulties, and if they could not make the people go, they should try to take me out of the Palace and into the Chinese camp for my own safety. Meanwhile, they should send a sketch map of the Palace showing the position of the building I was occupying.
I replied to the general’s letter in much the same way that I had written to him before. It still seemed to me that the only chance of persuading him not to attack the crowd and the Palace was to seem to fall in with his wishes. I did not tell him which building I was in. I felt that so long as the Chinese did not know exactly where I was, there was still some chance they would not use artillery; if we told them, it seemed certain that the rest of the Norbulingka would be kid in rains. I told him again that I would come to his camp as soon as possible. I had no intention of going, but I hoped this promise would persuade him to delay his order to attack and enable us to get the people away in time. That was the last of the letters I wrote to him.
The whole atmosphere round the Palace by then was extremely tense. Outside its inner wall was a vast multitude of excited angry people. Most of them had armed themselves with sticks, spades or knives, or whatever other weapons they could muster. Among them were some soldiers and Khampas with rifles, a few machine guns, and even fourteen or fifteen mortars. Hand to hand, with fists or swords, one Tibetan would have been worth a dozen Chinese-recent experiences in the eastern provinces had confirmed this old belief. But it was obvious that their strength was useless against the heavy equipment which the Chinese could bring to wipe them out.
Practically, they had nothing to fight with except their own determination to protect me.
But within the inner wall, in the immediate precincts of the Palace, everything had the appearance of calm and peace.
There were no signs of anything untoward. The garden was quiet as usual. The peacocks strutted about with their plumes held high, unconcerned about the human turmoil; singing birds were flying from tree to tree, mixing their music with that of the fountains near the rock garden; the tame deer, the fish, and the brahmini ducks and white cranes were as placid as ever. A contingent of my bodyguard, out of uniform, was even watering the lawns and flower beds. The atmosphere was still typical of Tibet, where for centuries people have sought for peace of mind and devoted themselves through their religion to finding the path towards freedom from sorrow and suffering.
On the sixteenth of March news began to come in of the Chinese preparations for destroying this peaceful place. People reported to the Cabinet, and thence to me, that all the artillery in the district was being brought in to sites within range of the city, and of the Norbulingka in particular. A man who worked on a hydroelectric plant which was being built about eight miles east of Lhasa reported that four mountain guns and twenty-eight heavy' machine guns, which were usually kept there, had been secretly taken to Lhasa during the night of the fourteenth, escorted by several truck loads of Chinese soldiers. A district official from Bomtue, fifteen miles east of Lhasa, told us of twenty heavy guns which had been sent toward the city. On the evening of the thirteenth, and again on the fifteenth, two giant Chinese military vehicles with three soldiers in each were found near the northern gate of the Palace with mechanical instruments, apparently taking measurements. When they saw that the people were watching them they hurriedly drove away, and the people's guards who saw them jumped to the conclusion that they were taking the measurements for ranging heavy guns on the Palace. In the night a hundred new Chinese trucks were seen moving slowly toward the Potala, and from there to the Chinese camp.
On the following morning, fifteen or twenty Chinese in civilian clothes were seen perched on telegraph poles, apparently mending the wires, but the people concluded they were taking more readings for range finding. Our people did not know much about artillery and they may have been wrong, but that was what they believed.
Besides all these observations, there were rumors of fresh troops arriving from China by air. Bv the night of the sixteenth, the people were certain that the Chinese were about to shell the Palace, and that danger might come without warning at any moment. Their feelings rose to 2 state of panic, but they still would not leave the Palace and abandon it and me. Everyone in authority tried to pacify them, but their fury against the Chinese was uncontrollable. For the crowd and for my ministers and myself, that was a very disturbed night, and nobody could sleep.
When morning came, rumors were still springing up and spreading, and destruction still seemed imminent. It seemed to me and my Cabinet that the situation was completely desperate. We held a meeting. There was only one question to discuss: how could we prevent the destruction of the Palace and the massacre of the thousands of people round it? We could only decide to make another appeal to the Chinese general not to use force to disperse the crowd, but to wait till the Cabinet had tried again to persuade them to leave in peace. So the Cabinet hurriedly wrote a letter to Ngabo to this effect. They said the people were acting foolishly and under the stress of emotion, but there was still hope that they could be persuaded to leave the Palace in the end. And they also suggested that Ngabo should help them to take me to the Chinese camp. They pointed out that this would be very difficult, because the whole area round the Palace was controlled by the people, but they said they would do their best.
They sent a special code with that letter and asked Ngabo to use it in his reply, because the popular guards round the Palace had started to censor any letters which came into their hands. The sole purpose of that letter, of course, was to conciliate the Chinese general. In fact, it would have been quite impossible for me to have gone to the Chinese camp. I would indeed have been willing to go there and throw myself on the mercy of the Chinese if that would have prevented the massacre of my people; but the people would never have let me do it.
It was very difficult to send that letter, because the popular guards were on the alert and would not allow officials to leave the Palace. But one of Minister Shasur’s attendants succeeded in slipping out pretending he was going shopping in the city, and he managed to deliver the letter to Ngabo and come back with his reply. This was a brief polite acknowledgment. He said he was pleased at the Cabinet's proposal that I should be moved to the Chinese camp and promised to send a detailed answer later; but that answer did not come until after all was over.
About four o'clock that afternoon, while I was discussing Ngabo's answer with the ministers, we heard the boom of two heavy mortar shells fired from a nearby Chinese camp. And we also heard the splash of the shells in a marsh outside the northern gate.
At those two isolated shots, consternation and anger reached a final climax in the crowd. No explanation has ever been given of why they were fired, but those who heard them could only think the attack had begun and the Palace was the target.
Within the Palace everyone felt the end had come and that something drastic had to be done without any more delay, but nobody could decide what to do.
It was I who had to find the answer and make the decision; but with my inexperience in the affairs of the world it was not easy. I have no fear of death. I was not afraid of being one of the victims of the Chinese attack. I honestly believe that my strict religious training has given me enough strength to face the prospect of leaving my present body without any apprehension. I felt then, as I always feel, that I am only a mortal being and an instrument of the never dying spirit of my Master, and that the end of one mortal frame is not of any great consequence. But I knew my people and the officials of my government could not share my feelings. To them the person of the Dalai Lama was supremely precious. They believed the Dalai Lama represented Tibet and the Tibetan way of life, something dearer to them than anything else. They were convinced that if my body perished at the hands of the Chinese, the life of Tibet would also come to an end.
So when the Chinese guns sounded that warning of death, the first thought in the mind of every official within the Palace, and every humble member of the vast concourse around it, was that my life must be saved and 1 must leave the Palace and leave the city at once. The decision was not a small matter; the stakes were high; the whole future of Tibet depended on it. There was no certainty that escape was physically possible at all—Ngabo had assured us it was not. If I did escape from Lhasa, where was I to go, and how could I reach asylum? Above all, would the Chinese destroy our holy city and massacre our people if I went—or would the people scatter from the Palace when they heard that I had gone, and so perhaps would some lives be saved? Our minds were overwhelmed by such unanswerable questions. Everything was uncertain, except the compelling anxiety of all my people to get me away before the orgy of Chinese destruction and massacre began. This was the only positive worldly guide I had in making my decision. If I decided to stay, I would add even more to the distress of my people and of my closest friends.
I decided to go. I need hardly say I prayed for guidance and received it.
We could not tell where the journey would lead or how it would end, but all the people closest to me wanted to come with me: the four members of my Cabinet who were present, my tutors, my personal officials, my bodyguard, and, of course, the closest members of my family. My mother had come into the Norbulingka when the trouble started and had brought my youngest brother with her—the brother who had been reborn after he had died when he was two. My elder sister, who was married to Kusung Depon, the commander of my bodyguard, was also there. Two of my brothers were in America, and the other was in India—so was my younger sister who attended school in Darjeeling.
So it was to be a large party, and we would need the help of an even larger number of people. Yet we had to keep it secret, not only from the Chinese, but also from the mass of the crowd outside. Everyone suspected there might be Chinese spies among the crowd. Besides, if the crowd had known I was going, thousands of them would have followed me to offer me their protection, and the Chinese would certainly have seen them, and the massacre would have begun at once.
I and my ministers consulted the popular leaders, and they instantly saw that this had to be done without telling the mass of the people who had elected them. They gave us the best of cooperation. I wrote a letter to them too, and left it in the Norbulingka with instructions that it should be delivered to them the next day. In it I begged them again not to open fire unless they were attacked, and promised them more detailed orders as soon as I was away from the immediate dangers and restrictions of my present situation.
There was no time to take anything which was not essential with us; we had to be well away from Lhasa before the dawn.
The ministers had my Seal of Office, the Seal of the Cabinet, and a few papers which happened to be in the Norbulingka.
Most of the state papers were in the Cabinet office or the Potala, and they had to be abandoned. So did all our personal belongings. All I could take was one or two changes of Lama robes. We could not go to the Treasury for any funds, or to the Potala for any of the immeasurable wealth of jewels and treasures which I had inherited.
We decided to leave in small parties. The Erst essential was to cross the river. The Norbulingka and the Chinese camp were both close to its northern bank, and it was only on the southern side that we had any chance of getting away.
The steward of one of the monasteries was with us and he was sent out to cross the river and arrange for horses and an escort on the other side. Doji Dadul, the commander of the second battalion of the Tibetan army, went out with about a hundred soldiers to guard a point southeast of the Norbulingka, where the river is narrow and comparatively easy to cross. And at that early stage the whole plan nearly ended in disaster. These men had only gone half a mile when they suddenly sighted a Chinese patrol, apparently making for the same spot. They set up their Bren gun at once and fired five shots. That was quick thinking and it saved the situation. The Chinese knew there were armed Khampas near the river, and in the dark they could not see the size or the nature of the Tibetan party; so they reheated to the safety of their camp, which was only a short distance away.
When everything was ready, I went to the chapel of Mahakala.
I had always gone to that chapel to say good-by when I went on long journeys. Monks were still there, offering their constant prayers, and they did not know what was about to happen; but I offered a scarf at the altar as a symbol of farewell.
I knew they would wonder why I did so, but I also knew they would never express their surprise.
As I came out of the chapel I met my Senior Chamberlain and the Chief Official Abbot and Kusung Depon. The Chamberlain and the Abbot were already dressed in ordinary laymen’s clothes. They had been wearing them whenever they went out for several days, but I had never seen them dressed like that before. We had agreed to meet at the gate in the inner wall at ten. We synchronized one watches. Then I went to several other chapels and blessed them, and then to my own rooms; and I waited there alone.
While I waited for the time to come, I knew that my mother and my sister and my small brother would be leaving: we had agreed that they should be the first to go. It was easier for them than for the rest of us to leave the Palace, because they had been living outside its inner yellow wall. My mother and sister were to be dressed as Khampa men. I was to go next, and the Cabinet ministers, my tutors, and a few others were to make the third and final party.
A soldier’s clothes and a fur cap had been left for me, and about half past nine I took off my monk’s habit and put them on. And then, in that unfamiliar dress, I went to my prayer room for the last time. I sat down on my usual throne and opened the book of Lord Buddha’s teachings which lay before it, and I read to myself till I came to a passage in which Lord Buddha told a disciple to be of good courage. Then I closed the book and blessed the room, and turned down the lights. As I went out, my mind was drained of all emotion,
I was aware of my own sharp footfalls on the floor of beaten earth, and the ticking of the clock in the silence.
At the inner door of my house there was a single soldier waiting for me, and another at the outer door. I took a rifle from one of them and slung it on my shoulder to complete my disguise. The soldiers followed me, and I walked down through the dark garden which contained so many of the happiest memories of my life.
At the garden gates and the gate of the inner wall, Kusung Depon had told the guards to disperse. He met me at the first gate, and my other two companions at the second. As we passed the holy library near the Mahakala Temple, we bared our heads in homage and farewell. We crossed the park together, towards the gate in the outer wall, the Abbot and the Chamberlain and the Commander of the Bodyguard in front, and myself and the other two soldiers behind them. I took 198 MY LAND AND MY PEOPLE off my glasses, thinking that people would hardly know my face without them.
The gate was shut. My Chamberlain went on ahead and told the guards he was going on a tour of inspection. They saluted him, and opened the massive lock.
Only once before in my life, when I was taken to Yatung nine years before, had I been out of the gate of the Norbulingka without a ceremonial procession. When we reached it,
I saw dimly in the darkness the groups of my people who were still watching it, but none of them noticed the humble soldier, and I walked out unchallenged towards the dark road beyond.
CH 11: ESCAPE
On our way down to the river, we passed a large crowd of people, and my Chamberlain stopped to talk to their leaders.
A few of them had been warned I was leaving that night, but of course the crowd in general did not know. While they talked, I stood and waited, trying to look like a soldier. It was not pitch dark, but I could not see well without my glasses, and I could not tell whether people were looking at me with curiosity or not. I was glad when the conversation ended.
We came to the river bank above the crossing place and had to walk down it, on white sandbanks interspersed with dark clumps of bushes. The Abbot is a big man, and he had chosen to carry an enormous sword, and I am sure he was ready to do destruction with it—at least, he adopted a very threatening attitude at every bush. But none of them concealed an enemy.
We crossed in coracles. On the other bank we met my family. My ministers and tutors, who had come out of the Norbulingka hidden under a tarpaulin in a truck, also caught up with us there. About thirty Khampa soldiers were waiting for us, with three of their leaders: Kunga Samten, Tempa Thargye, and a very brave boy of only twenty called Wangchug Tsering. A boy called Losang Yishi was also there. He was one of the boys who had been taken to the school in Peking but had resisted Chinese indoctrination for the whole of the five years he was there. He died fighting two days later.
We exchanged scarves with these leaders. They had arranged everything as well as anyone could in the circumstances.
The steward of the monastery had collected ponies for us all, although he had not been able to get any good saddles. After hurried greetings in low voices, we mounted and rode off without delay. The first few miles were likely to be the most dangerous.
There was no road over there, only a narrow stony track which skirted across a hill above the river, To the right we could see the lights of the Chinese camp. We were easily in range, and there was no telling what patrols they had posted along the dark banks of the river bebw us. Even closer we passed an island where the Chinese constantly drove In trucks to collect stone from a quarry—even a: night. If one of them came we would be caught in the headlights. The track was hardly visible as we rode along it. The clink of the horseshoes on the stones seemed very loud. We thought patrols might hear it, but we had to hurry. I lost the track once, and had to turn my pony and go back. Then we saw flickering torches behind us, and it seemed for a while that the Chinese were close on our trail. But it was Tibetan soldiers, trying to guide some others of our party who had taken the wrong track and lost their way completely.
But we all passed that danger spot successfully and met again on the river bank about three miles downstream. Below that point, the river was so shallow that trucks could be driven across it, and if the Chinese had been alerted they might have driven down the other bank and cut us off there.
So one of the officers and a few soldiers were left there as a rearguard. The rest of us rode onward steadily, away from the city, into the quiet empty countryside.
For a long way we saw no sign of life at all. But about three in the morning a dog barked, and we saw a house ahead. I sent my Chamberlain forward to find out where we were, and who the owner of the house was. He discovered that the name of the place was Namgyalgang. The owner was a simple kind man, and two of our escort had already been there to warn him to expect a very important guest. I was tired by then, and I rested there a little while. It was the first of many humble Tibetan houses whose owners sheltered me, without any thought of the risk, some knowing, and some not knowing, who I was.
There Wangchug Tsering, the admirable twenty-year-old Khampa leader, left us to take 400 of his men to guard us against attack from beyond the river. He had already detailed two or three hundred other Khampas to defend our route.
When I left the Norbulingka, and throughout this first hectic part of the journey, I was not thinking of going straight to India. I still hoped to be able to stay somewhere in Tibet.
It was out of the question, in any case, to take either of the usual routes to India, which led southwest from Lhasa, because they were, of course, heavily guarded by Chinese. Instead, we were heading south and southeast from Lhasa. In that direction, there is a vast area of roadless mountains which the Chinese army would have found very difficult to penetrate in any strength. And that almost impregnable area was one of the principal strongholds of the Khampas and the other Tibetans who had joined them as guerrilla fighters. And from the heart of those mountains, across the main range of the Himalayas, several tracks led over the frontier and down to the state of Bhutan and so to India. They had been used for centuries by Tibetan and Bhutanese traders, so that if the worst came to the worst we would always have a line of retreat behind us.
But before we could reach this possible sanctuary in the mountains, we had to cross the wide Brahmaputra River, which is called the Tsang Po in Tibet, and before we could reach the river, we had one high mountain pass to cross: the Che-la. There was a danger that if the Chinese discovered I had gone they would put out patrols along the Tsang Po, so we had to push on, to cross it as quickly as possible.
We reached the foot of the Che-la about eight in the morning, and stopped there to have some tea. The sun was just rising above the peaks and gilding the plain behind us, but we were still in the shadow of the mountains when we began the long steep climb towards the pass. The way was rough and weary, and it took us well above the snow line.
Some of the ponies and mules began to lag behind. But our spirits were raised by an old man called Tashi Norbu who joined us while we were climbing and offered me a graceful pure white horse, I accepted it gratefully, and all my party were happier, because Tibetans look on such a gift as a very propitious sign.
Che-la means Sandy Pass, and beyond the summit we found steep slopes of sand which we could run down, leaving our ponies to follow the winding track—but still it took us three or four hours to cross the pass. When at last we came down to the level ground in the valley of the Tsang Po, a heavy dust storm broke out suddenly and almost blinded us, but it was a comfort to think that if the Chinese were patrolling the valley, it would blind them too.
We found no human habitations near the foot of the pass, but we knew that about ten miles to the east—downstream— there was a ferry. It was the only way to cross, so we had to take the chance that the Chinese might have reached it first.
But all went well. On the far bank of the river by the ferry, there is a little village called Kyeshong, which means Happy Valley. As the ferry boat approached the other shore, we could see a large crowd which had gathered to receive us, and when we approached we could distinguish Khampa soldiers among them, and village yeomen with white and yellow badges on their arms—men of the Volunteer Army who had joined the Khampas. When we landed, we found them deeply distressed by what they had heard of the events in Lhasa. And when we rode on I saw manv of them weeping. Kyeshong was the first village we had passed through on our journey, and perhaps that fact, and perhaps its name, made me even sadder as we rode away. There, I thought, were the people of Tibet who had lived in their Happy Valley for centuries in perfect peace and harmony, and now grim fear stood over them and threatened all they lived for. Yet their morale was high and their courage was indomitable. I knew that whether I asked for their help or not, they would protect me with their lives.
With the river and these stalwart people behind us, we were safe for the moment from pursuit. We rode on to a monastery called Ra-me, where we had decided to rest for the night. We reached it about half past four that afternoon. We had been riding fast for nearly eighteen hours with only the briefest halts, and neither we nor our ponies could have gone much farther. While we rested, we worried more and more about those of the party who were still behind us, but by nine o'clock in the evening the last of them had come in.
My ministers wrote two letters that evening, one to Ngabo and the other to Samdup Phodrang, the two ministers who had been left behind in Lhasa, urging them to do their best to help Tibet, and saying they had no doubt that all of them shared the same hopes about the freedom of our country.
By then our party had increased to 100, and we were escorted by about 350 Tibetan soldiers, and at least fifty guerrillas.
From Ra-me, a detachment of about 100 men was sent to the southwest, to protect us in case the Chinese approached from the direction of the main road into India. The rest of us rode on for the next five days into the heart of the mountains by the narrow stony tracks which are typical of old Tibet. By day we divided into several groups; each night we stopped in a village or a monastery. Sometimes we had no guerrilla leaders with us. They came and went, keeping in touch with all the isolated bands who were living in the mountains, and we knew that we were surrounded by faithful determined men whom we never saw. Not all of them knew whom they were defending. The first night after lodging at Ra-me, we stayed in a big village called Dophu Choekhor, where guerrillas are still keeping up a desperate fight against the Chinese invaders to this dav. The whole village came out to welcome us, but most of them did not recognize me in the unfamiliar clothes I was wearing, nor did most of the monks in the neighboring monastery.
During this five day march, our plans were crystallizing, and we made up our minds to halt for a dav at a place called Chenye, in order to give ourselves time for a thorough discussion about the future, and to send out instructions to officials in Lhasa, to the Khampas, and other guerrillas. Our plan was that we should go on until we reached a place called Lhuntse Dzong. This is not very far from the border. It had one of the biggest forts in the area, and it had good communications with the rest of southern Tibet. There, we thought, I should stav, and try to reopen peaceful negotiations with the Chinese. We hoped that while I remained in Tibet the Chinese might see some advantage in coming to terms and might still be prevented from shelling Lhasa.
We reached Chenye in safety. A day or two before, I had taken my young brother into my party, thinking that my mother and sister would be able to travel faster without him.
And so they did. They were soon a whole stage ahead of the rest of us, with a small escort of Khampas, and we did not see them again until a much later stage of our journey. It was one weight off my mind to know that they were comparatively safe. We had brought a battery radio receiver with us, and we had been listening to all the news bulletins we could pick up, in the hope of hearing news about Lhasa; and I think it was at Chenye that we first heard Lhasa mentioned. It was the Voice of America, but it only reported unrest in the city and added that my whereabouts was unknown.
We stayed for the night in a small monastery at Chenye, but everyone advised us to go on one more stage—to another monastery called Chongay Riudechen—before we made our bait, because that was a bigger place and we would find it easier from there to get in touch with all the guerrilla leaders.
So we set off on another eight-hour ride. But before we ended it, our plans were in the melting pot again, for direct news of what was happening in Lhasa began to catch up with us.
Soon after we left Chenye we saw a group of horsemen coming towards us, and as they approached us we recognized among them Tsepon Namseling, one of the officials who had been sent by the Cabinet seven months before to persuade the Khampas to give up armed resistance, and who had joined the Khampas and never come back to Lhasa. We stopped, and I had a long talk with him. He gave me detailed news of the disposition of the Chinese troops and of the skirmishes the Khampas had already had with them. But the devastating news he brought was that Lhasa had already been bombarded.
He had only heard this indirectly, but soon afterwards a letter from my private secretary, Khenchung Tara, was brought to me. I had last seen him in Lhasa, but the letter was written from the Ra-me Monastery. He had not left Lhasa until after the shelling had started, and he was wounded: he had been hit by a shell splinter while he was still inside the Norbulingka. And from him, and from other eye witnesses in the next few days, we were able to reconstruct the whole story of the disaster I had striven so hard to prevent.
The shelling had begun at two o’clock in the morning of March twentieth, just over forty-eight hours after I left, and before the Chinese had discovered that I had gone. All that day they shelled the Norbulingka, and tben they turned their artillery on the city, the Potala, the temple, and the neighboring monasteries. Nobody knows how many of the people of Lhasa were killed, but thousands of bodies could be seen inside and outside the Norbulingka. Some of the main buildings within the Norbulingka were practically destroyed, and all of the others were damaged in different degrees, except the chapel of Mahakala which had a miraculous escape. Within the city, houses were demolished or set on fire, the golden roofs of the main temple were holed, and many of the chapels around it were rained. In the Potala, the western wing was seriously damaged, part of the rooms I had used there were destroyed, and so were the government school, the main gate, the army headquarters, and other houses in the village of Shol.
One of the shells fell in the room which housed the golden mausoleum of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Chakpori, one of the Tibetan medical colleges, was almost razed to the ground.
In the great monastery of Sera there was the same useless wanton devastation.
By the end of the first day, when the Norbulingka was a deserted smoking ruin full of dead, the Chinese entered it.
The few Tibetans who, like Ngabo, were in the Chinese camp had been desperately anxious about my fate. That evening, the Chinese were seen to be going from corpse to corpse, examining the dead faces, especially of the monks, and during the night the report was brought back to the camp that I had disappeared.
Why did the Chinese do it? They mined the Norbulingka believing that I was still inside it, so dearly they no longer cared whether they killed me or not. After they discovered I was not there, either alive or dead, they continued to shell the city and the monasteries. So they deliberately killed some thousands of our people, who were only armed with sticks and knives and a few short range weapons against artillery, and could not possibly have defended themselves or done any physical harm to the Chinese armies. We knew, as soon as we heard the dreadful news, that there was only one possible reason for it. 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.
I can see now, in calm retrospect, that from that moment it was inevitable that I should leave my country. There was nothing more I could do for my people if I stayed, and the Chinese would certainly capture me in the end. All I could do was go to India and ask the Indian government for asylum, and devote myself there to keeping hope alive for my people everywhere. But that thought was so unwelcome that I still could not bring myself to accept it; and so we marched on toward Lhuntse Dzong, still with the hope, which only slowly died, that we could establish a center of government there.
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