Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty Page A

His Holiness didn’t flinch. “I was very moved to hear of such bravery,” he remembered.The CIA agent Ken Knaus would later tell of the Dalai Lama endorsing the Allied cause in World War II. Bloodshed
could
be justified. But what he felt coming, in premonitions and in the scenes he could see in his mind, could not. That is, wholesale slaughter.
    His Holiness listened to the shouting crowd. He’d wanted for so long to talk with his people like an ordinary man. Now he sensed the crowd’s “vehement, unequivocal, unanimous” anger pulsating through the walls of the Norbulingka.“I could feel the tension ofthe people,” he said. “I had been born one of them, and I understood what they were feeling.” At times in the recent past, he’d shared that rage. But the Dalai Lama felt he couldn’t give in to it or Tibet would burn.
    He began to pray.
    The Chinese had been caught off-guard by the protests. Their two top officials in Lhasa had been called home to Peking just days before, leaving the volatile Tan Guansan in charge. But the Chinese now began to react, and their first instinct was to remove themselves from any possible danger. The PLA’s daily patrols vanished from the streets. Barbed wire, some of it electrified, was unrolled along the rooftops of all the Chinese residences and offices. Tibetans reported seeing Chinese technicians perched on top of telegraph poles—either to repair the line or, as the rumor went, to take ranges for PLA artillery gunners. Soldiers could be seen digging infantry trenches on the perimeter of all the military camps that ringed Lhasa. The Chinese had previously built secret tunnels between the office of the commander in chief, the political HQ, and the payroll office, allowing staff to move between their command centers without appearing on Lhasa streets. Now even Chinese civilians carried weapons as they went about their business in town. But the authorities still underestimated the true dimensions of the threat.
    The Chinese, most likely, never intended to snatch the Dalai Lama away to Peking or to harm him in any way that spring. Neither would have served their purposes. For one, he was, even for his occasional refusal to obey their commands, an effective conduit for ruling Tibet. He’d signed, however reluctantly, the Seventeen Point Agreement. He hadn’t publicly supported the rebels, despite their pleas, though there were suspicions he’d given them privateencouragement. He’d even agreed to revoke the citizenship of two of his brothers, Gyalo and Norbu, when they came into disfavor in Peking. The Dalai Lama, like his predecessors, was playing the long game with the occupiers.
    It was only in what he considered core matters that the Dalai Lama defied the Chinese. When they demanded that he send the Tibetan army after the rebels, His Holiness refused again and again, each time ratcheting up the anger from Peking. He did send letters to the guerrillas in various parts of the country, asking them to seek a peaceful solution with the Chinese, but he wouldn’t send Tibetans to fight Tibetans.
    The Chinese diarist Shan Chao toured Lhasa by armored car as both sides prepared for war. He was genuinely perplexed by what he saw: “They are raising such havoc all through the city that it’s as if some imperialist invader had entered our land.” It was a reminder of how genuine the Chinese belief in their own mission was; they couldn’t see the uprising as anything but a bizarre plot against Tibet’s future.
    At the PLA military headquarters, the minutes ticked by, the tension in the air thickening as morning turned to afternoon. Chinese officers emerged to look toward the Norbulingka and then huddled in nervous groups. Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, spotted pro-Chinese monks milling around, guns visible beneath their robes. He could hear the chants of the crowd in the distance, growing louder but still not distinct enough to make out the words. The Chinese