Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

line of religious kings was terminated, and Tibet spun off into regional fiefdoms ruled by warlords and local chieftains. By the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan marched on Tibet, he found waiting for him not a formidable opponent arrayed in battle formation but a few chieftains waiting with gifts.The skirmishes between China and Tibet would continue for centuries, but China was now the dominant power. And for the Han, nomads such as the Tibetans were more than outsiders or enemies. They were alien, a people “not yet human, because they pursued a lifestyle similar to wandering beasts.” Tibetans were destined to be seen by the Han as primitive hunter-gatherers who’d never joined the human fold. Barbarians.
    The murals the Dalai Lama gazed at were also a family tree. In the mid-seventeenth century, the line of politically dominant Dalai Lamas began with the political genius of the Great Fifth. Before him, the Dalai Lamas were simple monks and abbots who were recognized as reincarnations of Chenrizi, the
bodhisattva
of Infinite Compassion. But the Great Fifth, as the leader of a relatively new sect of Tibetan Buddhism still seeking its place among competing schools, cannily reached out to Gusri Khan, founder of China’s great Qing dynasty. Gusri Khan sent his soldiers to Tibet and, in a series of withering battles, defeated the Fifth’s rivals and installed the Dalai Lama as ruler of a newly unified Tibet. Tibet’s Buddhist rulers had struck a grand bargain with Peking, allying themselves with a more powerful neighbor. Having traded the sword for the prayer wheel, they would now depend on foreign protectors for their security. It was a compromise that would come to haunt the Fourteenth.
    For hundreds of years after the Fifth’s death in 1682, the curious relationship between Tibet and China waxed and waned according to the strength of the dynasty in Peking, ranging from periods of direct political control (as during the reign of Lha-bzan Khan from 1706 to 1717) to spans when the head Chinese representative in Lhasa was no more than “a mere puppet whose strings were pulled by the Dalai Lama.” Successive Dalai Lamas sought alliances with the emperors of the Qing dynasty and were allowedto carry out domestic policy under their protection, watched over by a succession of
ambans
, or representatives of the emperor, who were given varying degrees of control over Tibetan affairs. Peking’s representatives still had the ability to have disobedient Tibetan officials flogged (sometimes to death), but their supposed inferiors often found ways to outwit or outlast them. One
amban
complained that the Tibetans “very often … left orders unattended to for months on the pretext of waiting for the Dalai Lama’s return or for decisions yet to be made, simply ignoring urgent requests for answers.” Most often, true power lay in the hands of the Dalai Lama and his cabinet.
    The Qing dynasty began to dramatically weaken in the mid-nineteenth century when rising imperialist powers such as England and Russia started to impinge on its territories. By 1911, China had descended into a patchwork of warring chieftains and provinces, and after 1913, Tibet began to consider itself a fully independent nation. But it failed to grasp its best chance at autonomy, even declining to petition the United Nations for recognition as a sovereign state. Tibet, the keeper of the Dharma, remained locked behind its wind-whipped summits.
    Until a resurgent China, under Mao Zedong, returned.
    Despite the company of old men and what could have been a soul-crushing separation from his family, the Dalai Lama was somehow able to retain the sympathies and qualities of a child. While locked up in the Potala, he would watch the prisoners held in the yard below. “Many of them were sort of my friends,” he recalled. “I watched their lives every day. Many were common criminals, but still I could see their pain as a boy.… So when I first came to power,