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

I released all [of them].” His previous self, the Thirteenth,would have frowned at the gesture. But it was very much in keeping with the new incarnation.
    This is really the Dalai Lama’s first great triumph. He didn’t become a wild and rebellious hedonist, like the Sixth. He didn’t retreat into religious isolation, like the Eighth. He didn’t attempt to mold himself into a political mastermind, like the Fifth, or a sharp-elbowed strongman, like the Thirteenth. The teenaged Dalai Lama somehow found the strength to remain himself, a charismatic and simple-hearted young man in a dangerous time.

Three
ACROSS THE GHOST RIVER
    n 1950, when the Dalai Lama was fifteen, the twentieth century arrived in Tibet in the form of the People’s Liberation Army. Some 80,000 battle-trained Chinese soldiers crossed the “Ghost River” that separates China from the Tibetan province of Chamdo. The Tibetan army that faced them was badly trained, badly equipped, and, at 8,500 soldiers and officers, almost ludicrously undermanned, a legacy of the monasteries’ distrust of the military. In Tibet, soldiers were thought of as social outcasts because they killed living things, against the Buddha’s strict prohibition.“[They]were held to be like butchers,” remembered the Dalai Lama, and, like butchers, they were called “impure bones” by other Tibetans and forbidden to marry outside their group. Centuries after conquering large swaths of Asia, Tibetan soldiers had to import their techniques and their marching songs and even their vocabulary from the British army, as there were no words in Tibetan for things such as “fix arms.” The memory of military aggression had faded so thoroughly, even the words had disappeared.
    Warriors from eastern Tibet, the Khampas, put up a spirited resistance to the invasion, but the Tibetan army collapsed and resistance was quickly extinguished. During the onslaught, a frantic Tibetan official telegraphed the
Kashag
, the Tibetan cabinet, for instructions and was told the members could not respond because they were on a picnic. “Shit on the picnic!” (“
Skyag pa’I gling kha!
”), he famously wired back.
    Tibet reacted to the threat from China with a kind of spiritual rearmament. Buddhist monks were ordered to read the Tibetan Bible at public ceremonies attended by throngs of praying villagers and farmers. Smoke appeared on the summits of holy mountains as monks took turns stoking fires that burned fragrant incense. New prayer wheels sprang up in remote corners of the country, holy relics were brought out from dusty vaults, and believers implored the spirits to protect the Dharma and the Tibetan people. But nothing stopped Mao’s battalions.
    Mao turned his eyes to Tibet after winning his brutal war with Chiang Kai-shek’s army, the Kuomintang. “China has stood up” were the Communist leader’s famous words when he declared the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square. The Communists had come to power as fierce nationalists, and restoring Tibet to the fold was high on their list of priorities. One of Mao’s first objectives after the takeover was the reunification of the motherland,the recovery of lands that, in the Chinese mind, had been lost to “splittists” or imperialists in the decades and centuries before. On January 7, 1950, a Communist general announced that the People’s Liberation Army had wiped out the last of the Kuomintang resistance in southwest China; he added that the army’s next mission would be to “liberate our compatriots in Tibet.”
    Occupying the country offered Mao a foreign policy victory as well as a domestic one: It would move China’s border from the Yangtze River to the Himalayas, giving Peking an almost impregnable buffer against land armies sweeping across from India eastward or from Pakistan and eastern Turkistan northeastward. And it would eliminate the possibility of a free Tibet becoming a staging ground for imperialists in London, Washington, or