In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  Dr. Choedrak was placed in a fourteen-man cell on the east side of the prison’s outer courtyard. Only sixteen by twelve feet, it was so small that when the men slept head to head in two rows, their feet hit the walls, forcing them to bend their knees. The diet at Drapchi consisted mainly of tsampa gruel and boiled greens with hot water. Fifteen days after their arrival, however, Dr. Choedrak’s group were given their first taste of butter tea in years, which they continued to receive once every other day. Over the next two weeks, relatives were allowed to visit, bringing gifts of meat, roasted beans and barley. Dr. Choedrak’s brother Topgyal came, bearing with him the head of a yak—all he could obtain. The gifts, though, were a mixed blessing. As the prisoners devoured the new food, divided carefully into daily portions, they experienced excruciating stomach pain followed by diarrhea. Long before the day’s three toilet runs began, the small wooden box kept in the cell as a night toilet would overflow, feces and urine spreading onto the floor. The foul odor made the already claustrophobic conditions unbearable. During this period, the first signs of flesh began to appear around Dr. Choedrak’s emaciated torso. Miraculously, it seemed, hair and eyebrows returned, giving him and his comrades a more human look. Still, they remained creatures of such fragility that, with their senses reviving, the slightest stimulation brought sharp pain. When the kitchen staff, almost two dozen yards away, began boiling tea and cooking food, the odor produced devastating hunger pangs. Hunger itself, which long ago had disappeared beneath a haze of enervation, now returned with such force that no matter how much they ate, the men continually felt famished. Between a ravenous appetite and its resulting diarrhea, the return to life was made, and the legacy of Jiuzhen slowly faded.

  Led by a group leader chosen amongst themselves, “reeducation” got underway. Supplied with a current issue of the Tibet Daily, which served as a starting point for discussion, the leader was required to take copious notes of the proceedings. Thamzing also continued, the less intelligent men still falling victim, unable to shade their answers with the required nuances. Then, for reasons never explained to them, it was announced by the Chinese that Dr. Choedrak’s group required more severe punishment. In the autumn of 1963, a year after their arrival in Drapchi, the men were transferred into the maximum-security block. The walls of their new cell, just as small as the old, contained only a few holes, each the size of two bricks, to let in light and air. Belts and bootlaces were confiscated by the guards to prevent suicide. As the Tibetans later learned, prisoners throughout the camp were hanging themselves from planks beneath the smoke hole in each cell’s roof. Few could cope with the confinement, inactivity and continual prying into the core of their thoughts.

  One day Dr. Choedrak and his cellmates heard shouts followed by gunfire in the yard outside their room. Brought out on a toilet break sometime later, they saw the bullet-torn body of a peasant farmer from Phenbo, left in the dirt where it had fallen. The man had been confined in the cell behind theirs and on being taken to the toilet had run amok. In a later incident Dr. Choedrak heard a prisoner outside his cell defiantly shout, “I don’t want Marxism, I want religion!” After returning to his cell, the man was overcome by rage and tying a piece of cloth to a twig from a broomstick—all he could find—started yelling at the top of his voice, “Tibet is independent!” Taken away, he was never seen again. Dr. Choedrak himself remained extremely depressed through this third stage of his confinement.

  In May 1965, a guard came to Tenzin Choedrak’s cell and told him to pack his few belongings. Once more without explanation, he was moved. This time a jeep waited in the prison’s outer yard. Dr. Choedrak was driven northeast up the Lhasan Valley. Here, built into a canyon between two spurs of a mountain, stood the prison of Sangyip. Two compounds, Sangyip proper and its slightly less severe branch, Yidutu, lay at the front of the gap inside three walls crowned by periodic guard towers, the rear wall being formed by the cliff itself. The prison’s third and least severe branch, Utitu, lay surrounded by its own wall five hundred feet south of the canyon near a compound for the Chinese staff, also separately enclosed. It had been six years since Dr. Choedrak’s imprisonment. He had yet to be formally charged with a specific crime, brought to trial or even given a sentence. Deposited in a maximum-security cell for thirteen men, bisected by a concrete path, on either side of which sand was scattered for sleeping, he once more took up the endless task of placement “reeducation.”

  With his removal from the dungeon of Drapchi and among new men, Dr. Choedrak’s perspective began to shift. He now found that somehow the worst of prison life had been overcome. From his first series of thamzing in the maximum-security prison at Silingpu, Lhasa’s PLA headquarters, when he had lost his teeth and suffered damage to his eye, through subsequent ordeals in Jiuzhen and Drapchi, he had learned to enact a pretense of “self-improvement” while remaining inwardly beyond the reach of indoctrination. Above all, faith in religion had preserved his equanimity. Each night he continued his Tum-mo exercises, augmented, since his last year in China, by silent recitation of mantras. Now, in Sangyip, he took a major risk. Tying 108 knots into a piece of string, he fashioned a rosary with which to say prayers. Before going to sleep, he recited four to five hundred mantras: half those of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, the other half of Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Wisdom. The same idea, in fact, had occurred to a number of inmates, all of whom, as they grew to trust the new man, revealed their practices to him. Whereas Dr. Choedrak managed to recite three million mantras in Sangyip, he knew others who recited almost double that number.

  One morning a little more than a year after Tenzin Choedrak’s arrival in Sangyip, the men placed their mugs, as usual, outside the cell window to receive tea. When the kitchen workers came by, however, they learnt that its rationing had been discontinued. Drinking butter tea was henceforth labeled a habit of the “old, rotten system, indulged in only by reactionaries.” From now on, only “proletarian” boiled water would be served. Vegetable gruel was discontinued as well, so that the entire diet now consisted of small portions of tsampa given three times a day. When a few weeks later copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were handed out, the prisoners surmised that great changes were occurring beyond the prison walls. For the next ten years, the book’s contents were to be the principal topic of study, the Cultural Revolution having penetrated the prison as well. But though the return to conditions of near famine was distressful, the political shift which accompanied them came, ironically, as a blessing. The book, it turned out, provided a perfect vehicle for further recitation of prayers. By saying a mantra for every letter in a line and calculating the number of mantras at day’s end, the entire cell was infused with a new spirit of hope. No matter how often they looked in, the unwary guards beheld all thirteen men poring over their books, apparently deeply engrossed. Even the slight movement of the lips—enough to have earned many prisoners thamzing in the past—now appeared to be a sign of concentration on Mao’s aphorisms.

  In 1972, Dr. Choedrak finally received his sentence, based on a penal code adopted four years earlier. The code specified four categories of prisoners who would never be released: those from border regions; major “reactionaries,” such as guerrillas and members of the underground; prisoners without families; and the worst group—to which Tenzin Choedrak belonged—upper-class intelligentsia associated with the former Tibetan government. Along with the other grades of prisoners, they received one of six types of sentences, ranging in length from twelve to thirty years. Some were eligible for review, others not. There were also death sentences, delayed for one to two years, after which they could be commuted to life imprisonment if the culprit was deemed sufficiently reformed. Dr. Choedrak was given a seventeen-year sentence, thirteen years of which he had already served. He could not, though, look forward to release in four years’ time. Even if no new charges were placed against him, at best his status would be upgraded to that of a lemirukha, or “free laborer.” As in Jiuzhen, such wor
kers lived in unguarded cellblocks outside the prison, from which they reported to work on their own recognizance. Once every two weeks, in groups of three, they were permitted to visit their families in Lhasa. Receiving work points like the rest of the population, they purchased their rations and were given nothing by the prison. Because of this institution, inmates had little hope of ever becoming free. The need for labor brigades was made evident each year in the annual winter accounting. At this time, Sangyip’s profit—how many hundreds of thousands of yuan each work section had brought in—was posted. This figure determined the production targets for the coming year. Without the army of “free laborers,” topping the previous year’s work would have been impossible. Thus the prison depended on a steady, if not increasing, population of workers. On the other hand, the moment either a prisoner or a laborer became too ill or old to work, he was discharged and told to return home. Dr. Choedrak witnessed numerous examples of aged prison mates who, though they requested not to be sent home, where there was no one to support them, were turned down and forcibly evicted, left to beg or die on their own.

  Following sentencing, Dr. Choedrak was transferred from Sangyip to Yidutu, the milder branch located next to it. Here his decade of inactive confinement finally came to an end. His “reeducation” deemed complete, he was assigned to hard labor in the prison’s quarry, a job, along with brickmaking, reserved for Tibetans. While Chinese prisoners repaired automobile parts or held other factory jobs, he now had to chisel ninety twelve-by-eight-inch stone blocks a day from boulders blasted out of the mountainside behind the camp. Working with five other inmates, he could barely perform his share of labor, his muscles having atrophied from lack of use. While two men hammered boulders to produce smaller rocks, the remaining four hurriedly fashioned blocks from these, having to fill their own quotas as well as those of the first two. It was dangerous work. The prisoners were often struck in the eyes and face by flying chips of rock. Wedges and sledgehammers were used and the man holding the wedge was frequently hit, due to the accelerated pace of the labor. A blackboard, hung under a tin canopy on one of the prison walls, kept the daily tally of each group. And as with all work in Chinese prisons, anyone falling below his assigned number was subjected to struggle session to improve his performance.

  As Tenzin Choedrak adjusted to his new life, the fresh air and exercise combined to gradually improve his health. In the following year, he experienced a relative sense of contentment, above and beyond the mere detachment he had already learned to cultivate. Then one day he was summoned away from his work. Brought into the presence of a Chinese prison physician named Dr. Li, Dr. Choedrak listened in astonishment as the man spoke to him in a pleasant, even ingratiating tone. The doctor explained that he had discovered Tenzin Choedrak’s name among Sangyip’s records and had thought it advisable to consult him about an ailment he had been suffering from for many years. He then asked Dr. Choedrak to diagnose his case. The request was particularly surprising because, though Mendzekhang had remained open after 1959, Tibetan medicine had never been given credence by the Chinese. Dr. Choedrak read the physician’s pulse. His hands were rough, the skin so thick and bruised that it was difficult to make a clear diagnosis. Nonetheless, he detected—correctly—a liver ailment. Impressed, the doctor explained that his illness was severe enough to have warranted two trips to the mainland. He had tried both Western and traditional Chinese medicine, but both had failed. Dr. Choedrak prescribed Tibetan medicines, and predicted that a cure would not be difficult to effect. Soon after he obtained the pills from Mendzekhang, the physician became well and with his recovery came a remarkable improvement for Dr. Choedrak as well. Holding a high rank in the Public Security Bureau, the doctor took it upon himself to discuss Tenzin Choedrak’s case with its chief officers at their headquarters in Lhasa. There he pointed out that Dr. Choedrak’s skills might be of value to the state, which had just announced a brief liberalization called “the Four Freedoms,” designed to rehabilitate “local culture.” Three security officers, all suffering from chronic ailments, went to Yidutu, where Dr. Choedrak was called upon to diagnose and treat them. All were cured. As a result, Dr. Choedrak was removed from his cell and, to his utter disbelief, sent to work as a doctor in Sangyip’s hospital. Then, in 1976, having served his full seventeen-year sentence, he was transferred outside the walls to Utitu, the mildest of Sangyip’s prisons. Here he lived as a “free laborer,” although he was officially still considered an “enemy of the people,” his identity papers marked by a “black hat.”

  Dr. Choedrak’s sudden elevation in life seemed to him like an ascent from hell. He was excited by the chance to practice medicine once more, but he knew that, on a moment’s notice, from either a stray remark or the whim of a disgruntled bureaucrat, he could be hurled below again. The improved circumstances themselves provided a constant reminder of his vulnerability.

  A Chinese woman physician named Dr. Liu, whom he described as “very rough, very crude, very bad,” had been sent to Tibet for a three-year tour of duty and was among the four doctors at Sangyip’s hospital, where Tenzin Choedrak and another physician were to practice Tibetan medicine. With the Party’s blessings, the female physician made it her business to discredit the Tibetan doctors and their practice, hoping to prove that Tibet’s culture held nothing of value. In the summer she insisted that the Tibetan doctors receive their patients in a corner of the hospital porch. While the Chinese physicians occupied heated offices during the winter, the Tibetans were relegated to an unheated storage room, empty save for their one table and a few chairs.

  Dr. Choedrak received 28 yuan or $14 a month as salary and only 500 yuan, or $250, with which to purchase the year’s medicines from Mendzekhang. Patients who visited him were afterwards summoned to the woman physician—whether they wished to be or not. Asking for his diagnosis, she then offered her own, whereupon she would bring the patient back to Dr. Choedrak and then to prison officials to denounce his methods. In the meantime, the battle became so heated that the authorities intervened to conduct a systematic survey of the conflicting diagnoses. After months of investigation, they reached a consensus which bestowed an unexpected blessing this time upon both Tenzin Choedrak and Tibetan medicine itself. In a public pronouncement, Chinese officials stated that although Tibetan medicine’s worth had long been doubted by the government, its value was now clear. Mendzekhang, it was decided, was worthy of state funding. Furthermore, under its auspices, a large-scale search for medical texts not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution was to be initiated. Plans for a modern building were drawn up, and a research project in Tibetan medicine, based at Drepung Monastery and headed by Dr. Choedrak, was begun. Dr. Choedrak himself was given the public title “Master Teacher of Tibetan Doctors.” His salary was raised to 53 and then 63 yuan. Moreover, by 1979, his persistence won the right for all Tibetan doctors to issue, on their own authority, work release permits to their patients. Though still based in Utitu, Dr. Choedrak felt that he had crossed a threshold in life. While the Chinese gave no sign that his designation as a class enemy was to be removed, their recognition of his skills was now beyond doubt. A modicum of freedom, at least, was finally his.

  AFTER TWELVE YEARS of Chinese rule, Tibet seemed broken: a poverty-ridden police state in which the land, people and even their captors all suffered from a pervasive loss of will. To the Chinese in Tibet, it was plain that the Cultural Revolution had failed. Rather than acting as a magic path to pure Communism, it had destroyed much of the six-year effort to create the TAR. The shining trophy of a socialist paradise seemed further off than ever. To recoup their losses, party planners looked to the 1970s as a period of entrenchment. Tibet would no longer serve as a forge for the creation of the new man; it would simply be required to produce grain and support the army. These now were the unglamorous goals of occupation, and as with all new policies, their implementation began with a reworking of the existing party structure, one tied to similar changes in China proper.

 
In the summer of 1971, the fourth shift in Communist rule took place in Tibet. This time it was the result of a struggle between Mao Zedong and his designated successor, China’s Minister of Defense, Lin Biao. In an attempt to undercut the power base of the very man he had raised, Mao replaced the military chiefs of the three most important of China’s five autonomous regions: Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang. The majority of those involved belonged to Lin Biao’s Fourth Field Army. In Tibet, Zeng Yongya was transferred to the Shenyang Military Region. Ren Rong, who had waited in the wings among thirteen vice-chairmen of the Revolutionary Committee, regained the leading role he had briefly exercised in the 1967 “February adverse current.” Though Ren Rong himself was a Fourth Field Army man, his conservative reputation gained him the spot. To restrict his power, however, another loyal Maoist and ex-leader in Tibet, Chen Mingyi, reappeared for a short while as the commander of the Tibet Military Region. Ren Rong was designated Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, as well as First Secretary of the TAR’s Party Committee when, in August 1971, five years after the Cultural Revolution had begun, a Communist Party structure was reinstated in Tibet, one of the last to be formed in China. As they had in 1959-65, the Chinese once more had to build a regional Communist Party apparatus to govern Tibet. Four subregional committees were established in 1972. Of 66 seats in the Lhasa Municipality Committee only two were held by Tibetans at the level of secretary; among the 293 office bearers in remaining committees, only 6 were Tibetan. Besides the virtually uneducated people’s activists, the only Tibetan of repute in the country’s administration was Sangay Yeshi, better known by his Chinese name, Tien Bao. Appointed as a secretary of the new regional CCP committee as well as second political commissar of the Tibet Military Command, he eventually succeeded Ren Rong himself in August 1979 as the head of the TAR’s government, if not of its party. His ascendancy was meant finally to convince the world that Tibetans indeed ruled their own affairs. In reality, although he was born in eastern Tibet, he had been a Communist since joining the Long March at the age of eighteen. His wife was Chinese, and he did not even speak Tibetan.