by John Avedon
On March 1, 1959, while the Dalai Lama was residing in the Central Cathedral, two junior officers from the PLA’s headquarters, a brick-walled camp called Silingpu built between the Potala and the Kyichu River, came to call. They conveyed an invitation from General Dan Guansan, then in command, to attend a theatrical show. Somewhat surprised that the request had not been transmitted through the proper channel of the Cabinet, Tenzin Gyatso nonetheless replied that he would be happy to come but could not fix a date until his final examinations, then underway, were completed. The Chinese soon withdrew and the Dalai Lama turned his attention to the task at hand.
By all standards, the tests for the Geshé Lharampa, the highest grade of the Doctor of Divinity degree, were the most rigorous in Tibet’s ancient academic system. They had begun the previous year, when for three months the Dalai Lama had toured Sera, Drepung and Ganden monasteries to stand for preliminary exams. In day-long sessions he had debated fifteen monastic scholars—three for each of the five topics studied—before thousands of onlookers. His performance had been accounted uncanny, given the fact that throughout the eleven most intense years of his preparation, from age thirteen to twenty-four, the requirements of daily debate, memorization and seven levels of courses had been conducted under the great weight of political office. On the day of his final exam, the Dalai Lama was questioned by a rotating team of eighty scholars before 20,000 monks crammed into every niche of the Central Cathedral’s inner sanctum. With two breaks only, the test proceeded from early in the morning until ten at night, hours of debate seeming “like an instant,” as the Dalai Lama recalled. His performance convinced the assembled abbots and scholars that he was indeed the incarnation of Chenrezi.
On March 7, General Dan Guansan again asked the Dalai Lama to set a date for attending the theatrical show. March 10 was reluctantly agreed on, the event to be held inside Silingpu itself, an unprecedented location for the Dalai Lama’s presence. On the morning of March 9, P. T. Takla, general of the 500-man Kusung Magar, the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard, was hurriedly summoned before one Brigadier Fu at Chinese headquarters. The brigadier informed Takla that on the following day Tibet’s ruler was not to be accompanied by his customary contingent of twenty-five soldiers, his route was not to be lined with troops, as was normally the case, nor were the two or three bodyguards permitted to join him inside the Chinese camp to be armed. When Takla requested the reason for such extraordinary conditions, the brigadier mysteriously asked, “Will you be responsible if somebody pulls the trigger?” He further insisted that the occasion be kept secret from the public. It could not be. Within hours of the meeting, Lhasa was swept by the rumor of a Chinese plan to kidnap the Precious Protector. Serving only to reinforce the people’s suspicions, Radio Peking had just announced that the Dalai Lama would attend an upcoming meeting of the Chinese National Assembly, though, in fact, he had not yet agreed to go. Three planes were known to be standing by at Damshung Airport, seventy miles northwest of the capital, giving further credence to the idea. Moreover, similar deceptions had occurred before. In the east, at least four high lamas had been invited to cultural performances without their retinues, whereupon they were imprisoned and all save one executed. No one besides the Dalai Lama’s personal staff had been invited to the performance, not even the Cabinet. Apprised of the people’s feelings, however, the PLA command issued last-minute invitations to prominent Tibetans on the evening of the ninth, an act which appeared so transparent as to confirm the population’s worst fears.
Soon after dawn on March 10, crowds began pouring out of Lhasa. By nine o’clock almost 30,000 people had gathered before the two giant stone lions flanking the Norbulingka’s front gate. Their mood was explosive. Shouting that the Dalai Lama must be protected, they sealed off the Jewel Park. Two longtime Cabinet ministers were belatedly permitted entry, but a third, newly appointed official, driving in the company of a Chinese officer, was attacked. When a known collaborator, named Phakpala Khenchung, rode up on a bicycle firing two shots from his revolver to warn the crowd back, he was stoned to death, his body tied to a horse and dragged through the city’s streets.
As the morning progressed, seventy of Lhasa’s chief citizens were elected to be popular spokesmen. By noon they had obtained the crowd’s initial objective: a Cabinet minister announcing over the gate’s loudspeakers that the Dalai Lama had decided to forgo the performance as well as to decline—as the leaders had requested—future invitations to the PLA headquarters. Encouraged rather than placated, the people mustered a large volunteer force to guard the Norbulingka. Then thousands returned to Lhasa to mount mass demonstrations demanding that the Chinese quit Tibet. Meanwhile, three Cabinet ministers drove to Silingpu hoping to mollify General Dan Guansan. Pacing up and down the room in which he, ten officers and Ngabo Ngawang Jigme—already in the Chinese camp—received the news, the general was outraged. He accused the Tibetan government of acting in complicity with “reactionary rebels” and threatened severe reprisals if their “scheming” continued. Storming out of the meeting, he led the way to the camp’s auditorium to introduce the theatrical show, which, despite the day’s unscheduled events, was to proceed as planned.
At five o’clock, after having seen the show, Ngari Rinpoché, the Dalai Lama’s thirteen-year-old brother, left PLA headquarters and walked east past the Potala toward his family’s residence, Yabshi House. “It was the end of dusk, the sun was big and yellow and the shadows were long,” he recalled. “But the road was completely deserted. Where it branched off to Lhasa there stood a large Chinese pillbox. On top of it soldiers were patrolling back and forth carrying submachine guns. I had never seen anything like that before. Normally, the Chinese kept their troops unarmed. Then, when I reached my mother’s house, I found the outer gate locked. It should have been closed only at night, but now even the gate to the inner courtyard was shut. As I walked through, I looked up at the house and there was my mother anxiously staring out of a window. When she saw me, she clapped, she was so happy.”
As the eleventh of March dawned, the Norbulingka readied itself for battle. The previous night, government officials and members of the bodyguard had joined the popular leaders in declaring an end to the Seventeen-Point Agreement, following which the entire Kusung Magar openly revolted, casting off the Chinese uniforms they had been compelled to wear and donning their own Tibetan ones. Taking up positions alongside the volunteer guard, they surrounded the Jewel Park, while dispatching a force northeast to barricade the Xining road against Chinese reinforcements. As a precaution, the Dalai Lama’s family moved from Yabshi House to a small pavilion in the Norbulingka. Following their arrival, Ngari Rinpoché went on a tour of inspection. By each gate in the outer white wall, and again by those in the inner yellow wall demarcating the Dalai Lama’s private enclosure, contingents of armed men had camped, their ponies left tethered in long lines outside the park. “I remember them sitting around their campfires,” recounted Ngari Rinpoché, “resting against their saddles and taking snuff. There was a chill in the air and during the next few days it was overcast, so you could smell the smoke from a distance. Every so often those guarding the walls would descend to drink tea and rest in the old tents they had pitched. They wore big boots, fur-lined hats and robes and they had stuffed the barrels of their rifles with red, green and blue tassels to keep out the dirt. Everyone was always engaged in very vigorous conversation.”
Outside the Norbulingka, Lhasa continued in a state of turmoil. A series of popular meetings took place inside the large government printing house in the village of Shöl beneath the Potala. Here, formal resolutions were signed by the government, representatives of guild associations and monasteries, calling for rangzen or independence. Concurrently, the city fortified itself. All of the larger houses and even the Central Cathedral were transformed into heavily manned stockades. The Chinese also prepared for what appeared to be an inevitable showdown. Withdrawing personnel into their own houses, they strengthened the exteriors with sandbags, line
d the roofs with barbed wire and, from in between the numerous red flags, mortar and machine-gun nests marking their positions, photographed the constant marches which coursed through the capital’s streets. But their key preparations were considerably more subtle. While the Tibetan people hoped to rout the Communists in the convulsive manner of the 1912 expulsion of Manchu troops, the PLA was busy emplacing heavy artillery around the entire Lhasan Valley, with which, without directly confronting the revolt, they could swiftly suppress it.
“I felt as if I were standing between two volcanoes, each likely to erupt at any moment,” wrote the Dalai Lama, adding that his “most urgent moral duty … was to prevent a totally disastrous clash between my unarmed people and the Chinese army.” The likelihood of such a calamity had long been clear to Tenzin Gyatso. Though reluctant to discuss it, the Dalai Lama had dreamt a year earlier of the Norbulingka becoming “a killing ground.” Other dreams concerned his impending flight to India, an event which the Nechung Oracle had alluded to as well many months before. The crisis itself now confirmed the portents. Once freed from the political constraints which had bound them for nine years, the 40,000 or so PLA troops occupying Lhasa would undoubtedly unleash a devastating reprisal.
In an attempt to avert the confrontation, the Dalai Lama urged the large crowd still before the Norbulingka to disperse. In addition, he sought to buy time, replying encouragingly to three letters sent over the next six days by General Dan Guansan. In them, the general offered protection from what he termed the “reactionary clique” surrounding the palace. He also pressed his request for the Dalai Lama to come to the PLA headquarters. Replying to the first note, Tenzin Gyatso maintained that under the pretext of protecting him, those outside the Norbulingka were actually endangering his safety. In his next response he said that he had ordered the “immediate dissolution” of the “illegal people’s conference”; in the last, that he was attempting to separate the “progressive people” from “those opposing the revolution,” at which point he would, under protection of the former, make his way secretly to Chinese headquarters. Five days were thus gained, yet no appreciable slackening of tension occurred. Early on March 16, after seventeen pieces of artillery had been trained on the major strong points in and outside the city, a final letter from the general arrived, accompanied, in the same envelope, by one from Ngabo. The latter plainly conveyed the PLA’s true intentions. It entreated the Dalai Lama to take up a secure position inside the yellow wall—safe from the “evil reactionaries”—and to notify the general of his location, so that, as the letter ominously promised, “this building will not be damaged.” Whether or not Tenzin Gyatso complied, it was now clear, the PLA intended to shell the Jewel Park.
On March 15, a platoon of Chinese soldiers suddenly appeared within fifty yards of the Norbulingka’s long southern wall. Hundreds of Tibetan troops ran to their positions and took aim. “They were so close we could see their faces,” recollected Ngari Rinpoché, who, against his mother’s orders, manned the defense. “Everyone held their breath waiting for the first shot to be fired, but they just kept marching. It was only a reconnaissance mission to draw out our numbers.” Shortly afterwards, Dr. Tenzin Choedrak, the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, arrived in the Jewel Park with news from Lhasa. On the morning of March 12, he informed the Dalai Lama’s mother, the women of the city—young girls and grandmothers alike—had massed at the foot of the Potala. Following the meeting, they had taken to the streets around the Barkhor or marketplace, daring the Chinese to open fire on them and shouting, “From now on Tibet is independent.” In a more sober step their leaders had requested the Indian consulate—unsuccessfully—to assist in restraining the Chinese. “I knew this year would bring trouble,” commented Dr. Choedrak, concluding his tidings with a nod to Ngari Rinpoché. “On the very morning of New Year’s Day, I remember you set off a firecracker in the house and let out a loud war cry. When children are playing at war, it’s a sure sign the adults will be fighting soon.”
Two days later, at four o’clock in the afternoon of March 17, the first shots were fired. While the Dalai Lama and his Cabinet sat in session inside the Chensel Phodrang, one of his predecessor’s palaces, two mortar shells shattered the tranquillity of the inner garden. One fell in a marsh outside the northern wall, the other in a pond not far from the residence. Inexplicably, none followed. Yet this first bombardment yielded a swift result. One of the Kalons or Cabinet ministers raced to the Norbulingka’s front gate to restrain the volunteer guard from attacking PLA positions at a nearby transport center, the rest, consulting with the Dalai Lama, took the momentous decision to flee Lhasa that very night.
“At around six-thirty in the evening of the seventeenth, my mother called me into her room,” related Ngari Rinpoché. “Her voice was trembling a bit. She said, ‘You’d better change into layperson’s clothes. We might have to leave soon.’ Straightaway I said, ‘For India?’ She said, ‘No. Just to a nunnery across the river. But don’t tell anyone.’ I promised I wouldn’t, but I knew we were going to India. Lhoka was clear of Chinese and once you passed through it you reached the North-East Frontier Agency—NEFA—in India. And of course I could see how frightened my mother was. There was so much tension.”
Ngari Rinpoché, though, felt exultant. Shedding his maroon monk’s robes, he buckled on an old Luger inside a plain chuba and, “bursting to tell someone the news,” ran down the pavilion’s front steps to a small room on its ground floor. “I went to see what my fat uncle was doing,” he continued. “There he was sitting alone stitching bags like mad from a pile of white cotton curtains. When I saw him, I realized that nothing had been planned. It was all an emergency. I poked my nose in and he yelled, ‘Go away! I’m busy!’ So I ran back upstairs to my mother’s maid and said, ‘Acha, you know what? We’re going to India.’ She snapped, ‘Keep quiet!’ very sternly. Then I decided to see my mother. It was just nighttime and when I entered her room the lights were so bright that everything looked exaggerated, like a stage. There were my mother and elder sister in pants, being dressed up like men by their servants. Now I thought, ‘We’re really in business!’ It was too much. I started to laugh and they started laughing. Then my sister gave me a beautiful pink mohair scarf and a wool cap called a monkey cap that you can pull down over your face.”
At eight-thirty, Gyapon Lobsang Tashi, a captain in the bodyguard, arrived, accompanied by a soldier armed with a tommy gun, to inform the Dalai Lama’s mother that it was time to leave. While he was inside, Ngari Rinpoché stood on the front porch saying goodbye to two attendants. “There was a cool breeze blowing, the stars had come out and it was very peaceful,” he remarked. “Then suddenly a burst of Bren-gun fire came from the direction of the river. The soldiers dashed out of the house and we all looked from the porch, but couldn’t see a thing. Later we heard that a hundred of our troops guarding the Ramagan ferry had run into a Chinese patrol. Luckily our fire scared them off, keeping the way to the river clear.”
At nine, the Dalai Lama’s family—his mother, sister, brother and uncle—and the women’s maid departed, the first of three groups to do so. Descending the building’s steps in the dark, they moved silently beneath the trees toward the Jewel Park’s southern wall. Ironically, not only did the Chinese have to be avoided but the Tibetan fighters as well. For days they had checked everyone who passed in or out of the Norbulingka, worried that by some plot the Dalai Lama would fall into Chinese hands. Their vigilance was based, in large part, on a profound distrust of the Cabinet, who, due to its years of compromise, was believed by many Tibetans, and particularly those from the east, to be capable of the worst treachery. Accordingly, disguised as a volunteer guard, Lobsang Tashi ordered the gate to be opened for a “patrol” which, he claimed, had been dispatched to inspect the riverside. “I think I was the misfit because of my height,” said Ngari Rinpoché, laughing, “but they let us through anyway.” Continuing over an open plain dotted with bushes, the party met a lone man and pony waiting for the Da
lai Lama’s mother, who had difficulty walking on account of a weak knee. Once mounted, she was led forward, the rest proceeding on foot, spread out like a genuine patrol, one of the soldiers carrying the uncle’s two bags, which, filled with tsamba, butter and meat, were the only provisions he had been able to bring. On the Kyichu’s stony bank twenty soldiers stood silent vigil by two coracles. Ushered in, the party was rowed to the far shore, where thirty Khampa guerrillas waited with their horses in the night. While the coracles headed back for the next group, that of the Dalai Lama, Ngari Rinpoché took a short walk downstream, gazing across the Kyichu at the electric lights of a massive PLA camp two hundred yards west of the Norbulingka. Beyond it, backed into the mountains on the north end of the valley, stood Drepung, the world’s largest monastery. “When I saw Drepung, I felt a strong urge to prostrate three times, in farewell,” he remembered. “May I see you again,” I prayed, and then went back to the horses to wait for His Holiness.”
