In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Nonetheless three prisoners in Dr. Choedrak’s group chose—after receiving thamzing—to support the Chinese. Becoming “activists,” they turned on the others and were rewarded by removal from the cell. If found to be lenient during subsequent struggle sessions, they were pointedly asked: “Are you breathing from the same mouth as this man? Are you wearing the same pants?”: questions sufficient to keep them in the forefront of the attacks. Thus, Dr. Choedrak knew his time for thamzing had come when, after a few more days of interrogation, the PLA commander singled out the activists one morning for praise: “You have been doing very well, it’s commendable.” he said. “But today we must get to the bottom of this reactionary nest. You should question Tenzin Choedrak very closely. You must find the truth.” Shortly after the day’s questioning began, the officer stared at the activists, whereupon one stood up and said, “If you continue to lie like this, it will only lead in one direction, the dark way. So for your own sake, you’d better tell us everything you know.” As he spoke the others grabbed Dr. Choedrak, and tied his arms across a long board in a variation of the method that had previously been used. Trailing the rope off either end they pulled Tenzin Choedrak’s arms tight while his questioner demanded in a shrieking tone that he denounce the Dalai Lama for having committed incest with his sister. When Dr. Choedrak refused, the man took off one of his shoes and started beating him across the face. This was the signal for the other cellmates to join in—which, under the careful scrutiny of the guards, they did—pulling the doctor’s hair and ears, spitting in his face and pummeling his head. The pain in his arms was so great that Dr. Choedrak began to scream but only when his legs gave way and he collapsed did the officer call a halt. After a short rest, the beating began again, repeating the pattern throughout the morning. Finally, completely numb, his face and body bleeding, swollen and covered with black welts, Tenzin Choedrak heard the officer conclude the session. It had lasted four hours. Once he was untied, placed back in handcuffs and leg irons, the Chinese officer spoke directly to Dr. Choedrak. “If you reveal the truth and admit what the Dalai Lama has done, your future will be bright. This need never happen again. You will be released,” he said. “Now remember what your friends have asked you today and think it over well.” With that, Dr. Choedrak was removed from the cell and taken to the prison’s northeast quad where he was thrown into isolation.

  When he recovered, Dr. Choedrak found himself in a dark room, four by eight feet, with a small, barred window, high in one wall, and a six-inch-square hole for receiving food. On the mud floor lay a straw mat, a discarded PLA overcoat and a bucket for relieving himself. He had been in prison for two and a half months. He was to spend the next four in isolation—the remainder of the summer of 1959. Throughout, an inviolable routine governed his existence. In the morning, kitchen workers opened the hatch by the door and as best he could, in irons and cuffs, he got to his feet, stuck his bowl out and received a small steamed bun together with some rice and a vegetable. After eating, he was required to sit on the mat and think over his crimes for the entire day. He could not lie down or rest, as periodically, the door of the food portal would snap back and the eyes of a Chinese guard appear, making sure that he was visibly pondering. His only relief was a brief glimpse of sky and breath of air on the evening walk to the toilet. In reality, Dr. Choedrak’s thoughts were confused and depressed. After the pain of the beating wore off, he fell into a stupor, staring for hours at a time at the stone walls, convinced that he would soon be executed. He imagined the rows upon rows of people on either side of him, all locked in the dark, waiting to die. At night his dreams were a chaotic mix of memories: his childhood, medical studies and practice blended with scenes from his arrest, prison life and the beating. When he woke, he found his only hope in wishing for death. Suicide, though, even if he had devised a method, was ruled out. A monk from Namgyal Monastery had killed himself by jumping into the Kyichu River when the prisoners had been taken out to bathe. But this was an exception. Like most Tibetans Dr. Choedrak dreaded the results of suicide even more than present suffering, no matter how great it became. As he said, “With so many life forms in this world and so few people, it is extremely hard to be born as a human being. So if you destroy this precious human life, we believe it is very sinful. It is like having a sack of gold and without utilizing it, just throwing it into the river. According to Buddhist teachings, if you do commit suicide, you will have no hope of being reborn in a human existence for at least five hundred lives.”

  On the last day of each week, two guards would enter Dr. Choedrak’s cell, yell for him to stand up and then escort him at rifle point to a bell-shaped tent pitched in the center of the prison courtyard. Inside, an officer from the Public Security Bureau sat behind a bare table with a Tibetan interpreter on one side. Pushed onto a mat on the ground, Dr. Choedrak was subjected to interrogation: “Have you decided to tell the truth?” the questioning always began. When Tenzin Choedrak responded that he had told the truth all along, the officer would lose his temper, shout, “What have you been thinking about for these six days?” and, taking his pistol from its holster, bang it on the table. After a few sessions he threatened Dr. Choedrak with “consequences” for his obstinancy. At the end of a month’s time they came.

  Halfway through July, Dr. Choedrak was subjected to a second session of thamzing. Removed one morning from isolation, marched to the southern quad and placed in the center of his old cellmates as before, he was asked by the officer in charge: “Have you recognized reality yet? Do you now have a confession to make?” Despite his fear, Dr. Choedrak refused to comply and, tied to the board once more, was beaten. Struck repeatedly across the face with heavy boots, his vision soon blurred, not so much from blood but from damage to his eyes. By the time he was dragged back to his cell a few hours later, Tenzin Choedrak realized that the retina of his left eye had been detached and the eyeball itself knocked to the upper left side of its socket, so that it could no longer focus straight ahead. During the next few days, he discovered that the entire upper row of his teeth had come loose. At first he was able to push the teeth back in place but within a month all of them, one by one, had fallen out, leaving bruised holes in his still swollen and bloody gums. Although the immediate pain wore off, Dr. Choedrak’s shattered mouth and eye remained as a permanent legacy of his second thamzing. Nevertheless, a third, substantially worse beating occurred the next month.

  In August, after repeatedly “failing” his weekly interrogation, Dr. Choedrak was again returned to his old cell. The same incredulous questions ensued, followed by the board and a virtual storm of beatings ordered by the enraged officer. As his arms were pulled from their sockets, his head and face becoming swollen from repeated blows, Dr. Choedrak gradually lost all sense of pain. He seemed to float in a dull daze; his single sensation that of an intense dryness in the mouth. The dryness increased, and then suddenly he blacked out. He regained consciousness, still imagining blows. In reality he was lying on the floor of the isolation cell; a bucket of cold water had just been thrown over his face. When the guards saw that Dr. Choedrak had revived, they yanked him to his feet, handcuffed him and then let him collapse on the mat.

  Dr. Choedrak’s next impression was of a group of men entering his cell. One of them, clearly a Chinese physician, examined him. Months later, back with his original cellmates, Dr. Choedrak heard what had occurred. Following his collapse, a PLA doctor had been sent for, there being, in fact, a premium on Tenzin Choedrak’s life. After his examination the doctor pronounced Dr. Choedrak on the verge of death and refused to take responsibility for the case. The news was relayed to the prison camp commander who dispatched a senior officer to the cell group. In the presence of the officer in charge, the aide warned that if Tenzin Choedrak died, the prisoners themselves would be held accountable and punished: “Why did you beat this man?” he asked. “It is not the policy of the Chinese Communist Party to beat prisoners. You are meant only to study, not to harm yourselves. Now you will discu
ss why you have done this, and who is to blame.” Soon afterwards, thamzing ceased—not, however, due to a new policy of leniency, but simply because the initial process of determining who were the most dangerous reactionaries was complete.

  On October 15, 1959, the prison’s seven hundred inmates were drawn up in long files surrounded by Chinese troops, in the southern quad. Seated at a small table before them, the camp commander spoke, “Among you there is a very stubborn group who persist in telling lies and refuse to recognize the truth,” he said. “We have decided to send them for further study in China. Conditions are far better there than here. Food is more plentiful, and their needs will be amply provided for.” The results of seven months of interrogation were then read out: 4 prisoners were to be released and 21 would be sent to work at the hydroelectric plant at Nachen Thang. The 76 men bound for China were to leave within two weeks. The prisoners, however, were not told who had been selected for the last contingent until three days before their departure. At that time, on the morning of October 29, Dr. Choedrak was informed that he had been picked. Because neither charge nor sentence had been given him, he didn’t actually believe he was going to China. Instead, he assumed that the selected prisoners were to be taken somewhere nearby and, under one pretense or another, executed, their separation having been for this purpose only.

  The next day Tenzin Choedrak’s handcuffs and leg irons were removed and, along with the seventy-five other men, he was driven to the Norbulingka. Quartered there for two nights and a day, Dr. Choedrak gradually made the acquaintance of his new prison mates—all of whom had held high positions in Tibetan society and government. The men were of one mind: even if China was, in fact, their destination, singled out as they were, there could be little doubt that their remaining time was limited. Their fear increased when, on the morning of their departure, they were permitted to bid farewell to their relatives. As dawn broke the prisoners were brought near a wall, from where two or three at a time were called to a window for a strictly allotted few minutes with their families. Despite Chinese threats to cancel the meeting if a single Tibetan showed emotion, everyone wept. The guards then ordered those who had yet to go forward to console their relatives. They were fortunate. They were going to the motherland itself—to receive education. On the far side of the wall the families—all of whom had brought food, clothing and blankets—were assured that their relatives would be living under the best possible conditions in China. Nonetheless, the prisoners were permitted to accept the gifts.

  When Dr. Choedrak’s name was called, he walked to the window and saw his elder brother Topgyal. In tears and unable to speak, Topgyal took Tenzin Choedrak’s hands in his. Dr. Choedrak then said, “Now it’s best that you forget about me forever. You must go back home and take good care of yourself.” Topgyal offered him tsamba, a woolen sleeping rug, two blankets, some clothes, a food bowl and a washbasin. He bent over and unlaced his tall Tibetan boots, but Tenzin Choedrak refused to take them, insisting, “You’ll need to walk in these boots. I won’t.”

  Their farewells completed, the prisoners were directed into two roofless troop trucks, a soldier mounted on the corners of each. A truck bearing a machine gun aimed at the Tibetans led; another, carrying ten soldiers and a second machine gun, took up the rear. With no room to sit, the thirty-eight prisoners in each truck stood shoulder to shoulder and stared in silence as the engines started and they were driven off, their wives throwing dust and crying after them the traditional phrase for dispelling sorrow, “Let all of Tibet’s suffering be gone with you! And now be done!”

  Dr. Choedrak and his companions were indeed en route to China. November 1 had been earmarked for a massive transfer of prisoners from the capital; numerous convoys had already set out ahead of them and as they passed Drepung, the road behind filled with six more trucks, transporting three hundred young monks from the monastery, all thirteen and fourteen years old. Grown to ten trucks and over four hundred people, the convoy headed north for Damshung, and its first major stop, Nagchuka. For the entire journey, the prisoners, forced to stand, were whipped by the late-autumn wind as they repeatedly crossed 15,000-foot passes. Nighttime provided little respite. Jammed into the largest quarters available in whichever village they stopped in—often, for convenience’ sake, a single room—half the men had to sit on one another’s laps for lack of space. Every night was punctuated by loud yells as arms or legs were trampled. Those who had to relieve themselves could do so only in their bowls, which they then had to hold so that nothing would spill. Irritability was heightened by the drastically reduced rations, now down only to a cup of boiled water and six steamed flour dumplings a day.

  On the eleventh day, the column halted on the north shore of Lake Kokonor. Herded into boxcars on a railroad, the prisoners rode east, toward Langzhou, the capital of Gansu province. Though few had seen a train before, they were too exhausted to care. Together, they sat in silence bunched against the cold, watching the light dance between the slats of the car’s walls. After one day they arrived at Langzhou, and the two groups were separated. While the young monks remained on board to continue farther into China, Dr. Choedrak’s group was placed in trucks and driven north once more. Though Langzhou had been the jumping-off point for the Great Silk Road for centuries, the surrounding countryside was empty, perennially ignored by the Chinese and populated only by the Hui, Moslem people, now a minority themselves. On the city’s northern edge, the silt-filled Yellow River ran west to east. Beyond lay Mongolia, its alien nature attested to by the ruins of the Great Wall and the edge of the Gobi Desert.

  It was toward an outcrop of the Gobi, the Tengger Desert, that the prisoners were driven. A giant tract of flat rocky debris, the Tengger served as a springboard for windstorms and fierce winter gales which rifled the featureless land between it and the Wall. This forlorn expanse was traditionally spoken of as having “three too-many’s”—too much wind, sand and rock—and “three too-few’s”—too little rain, grass and soil. It had always been an area of transit—Mongols passing through, north to south and back on pilgrimage to Tibet, traders moving east or west on the Silk Road. The Communists, however, had found a new, seemingly ideal use for the region—as a vast zone for prisons.

  The number of prison camps dotting the barren landscape of northern Gansu and Amdo (renamed Chinghai by the Chinese) was known only to those in Peking. Nevertheless, the general estimate was that these two provinces contained a vast sea of prison camps housing up to 10 million inmates, a “black hole,” as a 1979 Time magazine article dubbed it, “from which little information ever reached the outside world or even the rest of China.”

  Owing to its 300,000 square miles of inaccessible terrain, Chinghai had been designated, soon after 1949, as the future site of most of China’s prisons. In the early fifties, small camps, holding a few hundred prisoners, had begun as tent compounds surrounded by barbed wire—sometimes electrified. As their first task, the inmates had constructed their own prison walls out of brick or mud. By the middle of the decade, these had given way to colonies of prisons—fortress-like compounds lining dirt roads for miles at a stretch. Containing from 1,000 to 10,000 inmates each, the archipelagos provided the backbone of the system. The strip north of Langzhou, for which Dr. Choedrak’s group was destined, was considered the worst. It was followed in severity by four zones, two north and one south of Chinghai’s capital, Xining, the fourth, four hundred miles due west, on the way to Xinjiang. Prisons and labor camps, though interspersed with nomad flocks, distinguished the entire countryside.

  At sunset, the Tibetans passed through a ragged village of packed-mud houses, by a few stunted trees. Five miles beyond, they caught their first sight of Jiuzhen Prison. Four fortress-like stockades, set a sizable distance from one another, constituted the camp. Approaching one, the trucks passed staff quarters and a group of outbuildings behind which the prison’s twenty-foot-high five-foot-thick brick walls stretched a half-mile long by 1,000 feet wide. Two guard towers rose on either s
ide of the red flag raised over the gate in the eastern wall; one was positioned at the center of the western wall. Within stood seven cellblocks, housing 1,700 prisoners, in either fourteen- or twenty-seven-man rooms, built in files down the central yard. The kitchen ran along the western wall; the toilets were in a block in the southwest corner. A single notice board hung to the left of the gate. In the main, the prisoners were Chinese and Hui of high social standing: ex-officers of the Moslem warlord Ma Bufeng’s army, as well as doctors, professors, judges, civil servants and other members of the intelligentsia now marked as reactionary. It was clear there was no hope for escape: the area was far too barren and remote to live alone in for more than a few days.

  Inside the yard, the men were processed by four Tibetan and Chinese officials who had accompanied them, working together with the Jiuzhen authorities. Each was given a hat, a pair of gloves, a padded cotton blanket and either a black or a navy blue prison suit, the pants of which, held up by a string tie, were so baggy that they were soon nicknamed “clumsy pants.” Their parcels were individually searched and almost everything—including bedding, eating utensils and extra clothing—was taken. Then they were led to their quarters: three of the large twenty-seven-man cells located by the toilets on the south side of the prison behind an internal wall that closed them off from the main courtyard. The cells were identical. The front door of each cell was bordered by windows, their panes blocked by sheets of newspaper, but with enough clear space for guards to look through. A small foyer stood before a central aisle bisecting two mud platforms which ran the length of the room. The platforms were two feet off the floor and covered with straw to sleep on. They were the prison version of kangs, the traditional bed of northwestern China under which a fire was kindled in winter to keep sleepers warm. As there was no fuel for the prisoners, though, there was no heat. Huddled together the first night, the Tibetans discovered that there was barely enough space for thirteen or fourteen people on each kang. Fights broke out, until finally, a few days after their arrival, the men scratched demarcation lines into the brick wall above each person’s head. The divisions revealed that there was no more than a foot and a half of width space available for a single sleeper.