Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty

Khampas already nurtured a long-standing hatred of Lhasa bureaucrats; if they were joined by ordinary Tibetans, the country would come apart.
    “Tibetans were angry at senior government officials and aristocrats,” says one Tibetan doctor who had seen corruption firsthand. “There weren’t any of them who didn’t hold large lands and properties. And the Chinese started paying silver coins to them in this curious way, sending officers with a box on their shoulder to knock on their doors.” These public payoffs for cooperation were considered especially brazen.
    Inside the palace, time seemed to blur. It was difficult for many officials to grasp what was happening. The Norbulingka hadn’tbeen besieged in this way in living memory. In fact, Tibet had no history of popular movements at all, unless one counted the militias formed only a few years before to fight the Chinese. The country had always been ruled from above, by kings or chieftains or His Holiness. For years, Tibetans had experienced daily humiliations at the hands of the Chinese, starvation, inflation, and religious persecution. They’d absorbed each insult, but now, at the thought of danger to the Dalai Lama, they’d risen up in a kind of unconscious mass spasm. They were presenting the officials with a new proposition:
We are the conscience of Tibet. Are you with us or against us?
    At 10:00 a.m., with the uprising already several hours old, His Holiness was upstairs in his palace with his Lord Chamberlain, who was trying to explain why Tibetans were converging on the Norbulingka. The Dalai Lama had slept badly the night before, uneasy about the visit to the Chinese camp. He’d risen at 5:00 a.m. and gone to his prayer room, where he’d meditated amid the flickering of butter lamps and the smell of saffron water. After that he had taken his daily walk. But then he’d heard shouts and chants from beyond the two walls that separated him from the streets outside. The thick stone ramparts muffled the sounds so that he couldn’t make out the words. He hurried back to his palace to find out what was happening. His officials told him that it seemed all of Lhasa was emptying onto the large open space in front of the Norbulingka.
    Now the Lord Chamberlain was laying out their possible courses of action. “I remember saying very slowly …,” recalled the Dalai Lama, “that this day, March 10, would be a landmark in Tibetan history.” His Holiness was more agitated than he’d ever been as ruler of Tibet. One scenario ran through his mind again and again: the crowd turning to attack one of the Chinese militarycamps, setting off a full-scale PLA attack. “The Lhasan people would be ruthlessly massacred in thousands,” he thought. Already, rebels were setting up roadblocks in Lhasa and appearing in Lhasa armed with rifles. “From my window with the help of binoculars I had a clear view of the Potala and the Chakpori [Iron Mountain],” wrote one Chinese observer, Shan Chao. “The sills of innumerable windows of the Potala are usually the favorite playground for doves. Now rifle barrels glint from them.” Shan Chao could see Tibetan troops taking up positions on the mountain, which lay between central Lhasa and the Norbulingka three miles away. Others struggled up the slopes carrying the ammunition and supplies needed for a full-scale attack.
    His Holiness didn’t believe in nonviolence unconditionally. Even in studying accounts of past wars as a young boy in the Potala poring over issues of
Life
magazine, he’d recognized certain exceptions to the rule: self-defense, especially.And he secretly admired the patriots who were at that very moment daring the Chinese to shoot them or building barricades in the street. When he later met with a monk who described how, during the uprising, some Amdo horsemen in a remote corner of eastern Tibet had stormed a PLA camp containing hundreds of troops, resulting in the deaths of “large numbers” of Chinese soldiers,