Afterword

It is a slightly daunting task, this writing of a new afterword for a book first published more than half a lifetime ago. To begin with, one has to read the book – and never before have I read one of my own products. That leads to an odd encounter: the sixty-seven-year-old meeting the thirty-two-year-old. In Tibetan Foothold the latter sounds to the former astonishingly politically naïve, my reaction to President Kennedy’s assassination being the most obvious example of this. Looking back, I can see that my political education began while I was living among the Tibetans. By 1966, when the Red Guards were devastating Tibet and my continuing involvement with the refugees had taken me to Nepal, the CIA was also covertly involved in their affairs.

Another sort of education came about during the first four months of 1969. Then, Mrs Rinchen Dolma Taring, first met in Mussoorie five years previously, came to stay with me in Ireland while writing her autobiography, Daughter of Tibet (John Murray, 1970; Wisdom Publications, London, 1986). Amala, as she is known on three continents, was still running the Tibetan Children’s Homes (see page 135) and her time off was limited. We therefore lived in isolation, except for the presence of my new-born daughter, working seven days a week – with just one day off, in February, to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

I was not ghosting Amala’s book but giving editorial advice – a much slower process – and soon I realised that a Buddhist’s autobiography is a contradiction in terms, especially if the writer is as ‘advanced’ a Buddhist as Amala. Her spiritual training had encouraged the obliteration of the Self; conventional autobiography requires a certain amount of concentration on that same Self. At an early stage in our joint endeavour, I recall standing with Amala in the kitchen, beside a round table, and laying a finger on its centre while saying, ‘You’re supposed to be here, in relation to this book. Everything else must derive its importance from being linked to you.’ Amala chuckled, dismissed this primitive notion and went on to write an incomparable volume of layered social and political history – with her family, rather than herself, at its centre. There exists no better account of daily life in Tibet between c. 1910 – the probable year of Amala’s birth – and 1959, when she followed the Dalai Lama into exile in India.

To spend four months with only one person, collaborating in the intrinsically intimate task of memoir-writing is a rare experience. And my companion, being a spiritually advanced and scholarly Tibetan Buddhist, during our time together taught me more about her belief system than could be learned from 108 books.

Amala’s father, Tsarong Shap-pe Wangchuk Gyalpo, was descended from a famous physician, Yuthok Yonten Gonpo, who, during the reign of King Trisong Detsen (AD 755–7), studied Sanskrit medicine at Nalanda University in India. Yonten Gonpo’s block print biography of 149 leaves, containing some of his own drawings and diagrams, was destroyed when the Red Guard attacked Lhasa’s Government Medical College. Tsarong Shap-pe married Yangchen Dolma, who was descended from the Tenth Dalai Lama’s family, and Amala was their ninth surviving child. In 1886 her paternal grandfather, Tsi-pon Tsarong, had been despatched to the Tibetan–Sikkimese border by the Dalai Lama to negotiate its demarcation with representatives of the Raj.

By 1903 the Raj was feeling twitchy about a Russian takeover of Tibet, and the Younghusband Mission set off for Khampa Dzong, just over the border from Sikkim, to put British relations with Tibet ‘on a proper basis’. This alarmed the Abbots of Lhasa’s three great monasteries – Ganden, Sera and Drepung – who regarded all outsiders as the enemies of Buddhism. Accordingly they urged the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to instruct Amala’s father, the senior lay Cabinet Minister, and his monk equivalent, to hasten to the border (a ride of three weeks) and persuade the British to come no further. As a result, the Younghusband Mission became the infamous 1904 Younghusband Expedition which on its way to Lhasa slaughtered some 500 Tibetan soldiers, armed mainly with swords. Later that year, Tsarong was one of the four Shap-pes who signed a Convention with Britain – a Convention forbidding Tibet to have relations with any other foreign power. In 1912, when Amala was a toddler, her father and eldest brother – then a twenty-five-year-old junior Government servant – were victims of a political assassination, murdered on the steps of the Potala. Some said Tsarong Shap-pe had made enemies by signing the 1904 Convention without consulting the Dalai Lama’s Government. Others believed that he and his son were distrusted for ‘liking foreigners too much’ and introducing to the country novelties of illomen. (When Tsarong Shap-pe went to India in 1907 on Government business he returned with cameras and sewing machines – inventions never before seen in Tibet.)

If living among the refugees had tempted me to idealise ‘Old Tibet’, Amala quickly brought me down to earth. With honesty, tolerance and humour, she wrote and talked of a society that genuinely revered non-violence and yet could be very bloody indeed. For this reason, her book serves as a powerful antidote to the many partisan volumes which either glorify or denigrate pre-Communist Tibet. She told it like it was, and as the weeks passed I felt as though I had left Ireland, mentally and emotionally, and been transported in time and space to a world that had survived, almost untouched by Outside, for more than a millennium – and had then been shattered forever a mere decade before Amala sat in my home distilling its essence on paper in her neat, firm handwriting.

It was a world of bewildering contradictions, of much laughter and song, of opaque monastic/political conspiracies and abruptly imprisoned Cabinet Ministers, of rarefied Buddhist metaphysics and un-Buddhist superstitions linked to the ancient Bön-po religion, of towering bejewelled head-dresses and lousy heads, of joyous week-long festivals when the entire population relaxed and picnicked by sparkling rivers, dancing and gambling and (apart from the more ascetic monks) drinking too much chang, of State Oracles whose pronouncements seemed to influence every Government decision, of Incarnate Lamas who did not always fulfil expectations – Amala’s brother Kalsang Lhawang being one such.

Amala vividly described noble families setting out from Lhasa on ten- or twelve-day rides to their country estates, attended by a battalion of ‘retainers’ – her word. There would be farm stewards, cooks, chang-girls, ladies’ maids, children’s nannies, a physician if anyone was in poor health, syces to look after the riding animals, and muleteers in charge of the long train of baggage animals carrying tents, bedding, clothes boxes, food and musical instruments for the family’s evening entertainment en route. Sometimes I gazed enviously at Amala, wishing that I, too, had been born in Tibet in 1910. I would have happily settled for reincarnation as a lady’s maid if that occupation required me to ride for twelve days across a landscape of incomparable beauty where humans were scarce but it was not unusual to glimpse bears, wolves, bighorn sheep, wild yak and musk deer. On every side roamed huge herds of chiru (a Tibetan antelope), gazelles and wild asses, and by the many lakes dwelt an abundance of birds. The creatures did not flee on the approach of a caravan, knowing they had nothing to fear. Hugh Richardson, a British Trade Consul who lived in Lhasa during the 1940s and was a good friend of the Tsarong family, observed: ‘The majority of people made efforts to live as much as possible with nature, not against it.’ The Chinese live otherwise and by now Tibet’s wildlife has been hunted to the verge of extinction.

Just as the Tibetan language, in 1950, lacked the vocabulary to deal with a mechanised, industrialised, scientific era, so we lack the vocabulary to deal with Old Tibet. In that context, such words as feudalism, serfdom, autonomy, education – even religion – have a misleading resonance; the Western connotations distort the Tibetan reality. Strictly speaking, Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion; the Lord Buddha is not, conceptually, the ‘equivalent’ of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim ‘God’.

As for ‘feudalism’, it doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of Tibet’s social organisation. The secular West is ill-equipped to comprehend a country in which all legal, social and political institutions and systems were based on the Buddhist dharma which had long ago been modified and adapted to produce that unique phenomenon known as ‘Tibetan Buddhism’. Although the pre-Communist way of life was not, as some like to imagine, ‘deeply spiritual’ – in the sense of being guided by devout, mystical scholar-priests with their sights fixed on Nirvana – it really was permeated through and through by abstract spiritual values. Few lamas were ‘hypocritical parasites’ living off the labour of ‘cowed serfs’; only a minority entered one of the great monasteries for no other motive than to enjoy a life of ease. The average monk was average: sincere in his beliefs, dutiful about performing his duties yet never aspiring to reach a high spiritual plane. To that extent he was no different from the average Christian priest or monk down the centuries, though of course a far smaller percentage of European men joined monastic orders or the priesthood.

Tibet’s comparatively rich nobility was based mainly in Lhasa. Each of the 200 or so families had to provide one layman to serve as a Government official with a monk colleague – the two having equal status and responsibility. Families lacking a male to fulfil this duty in theory forfeited the lease on their estates. (All land was State-owned.) But in practice there was an ‘escape clause’. With His Holiness’s permission, a son-in-law could change his forenames, take his wife’s family name and save the day. After the assassination of Amala’s father and brother, a peasant named Chensal Namgang – a favourite of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama – married one of her older sisters and was ennobled. Subsequently he married another sister – and in 1928 he married Amala and fathered her first child. (Polygamy and polyandry were equally acceptable in Tibet though the latter was more common – and most marriages were monogamous.) In 1929 Jigme Sumtsen Wang-po, Prince of Taring, arrived on the scene and Chensal Namgung helped to arrange the marriage of his third wife to her handsome young prince. When my daughter and I stayed with Amala and Jigme-la in Mussoorie in 1974 they were still very obviously in love.

The upward mobility of Chensal Namgang – son of a smallholder and arrow-maker – was not unusual. Although the nobility were unequivocally the ‘masters and mistresses’, an odd form of democracy prevailed in Old Tibet. Rich and poor visited each other’s homes and formed friendships if personally inclined to do so; there were no European-style class barriers. A monk from the humblest background, if suitably gifted, could rise high in his monastery’s hierarchy. The families of all Dalai Lamas were automatically ennobled – only two of the fourteen came from the hereditary nobility. The same schools served the children of nobles, traders, craftsmen and peasants, and an erring little noble might find him or herself being chastised by a peasant prefect. Family retainers gave heeded advice about who should marry whom and other important matters. Each craft – artists, goldsmiths, moulders, masons, boot-makers, tailors, carpenters – had its own respected guild, and many craftsmen were richer than some senior noble officials, whose public responsibilities were very costly. On ceremonial occasions (numerous in Lhasa), the guild leaders joined all other officials in the Potala and Norbu Lingka Palaces and were seated above the younger nobles. As Amala wrote: ‘Tibet had its own peculiar feudal system that no other country has ever experienced … Tibetans consider that the more wealth and luck one has, the better were one’s deeds in previous lives. Yet people who do not know how to utilise their wealth properly are thought to be great sufferers and a contented poor man is considered luckier than a miserly rich man.’

On first encountering the refugees, Westerners marvelled at their stoicism in the face of extreme hardship, their cheerful gentleness and serenity – all qualities assumed to be ‘natural’ to Tibetans. The reality is more complicated; Tibet’s cultural history – the Buddhism-powered evolution of a pacifist state – is very remarkable indeed.

According to the earliest records, the men of Tibet were renowned warriors – brave and ferocious. The Chinese can produce written evidence of nineteen serious Tibet versus China conflicts between ad 634 and 849 and the Tibetans were almost always the aggressors. (Those pioneer bureaucrats collected accurate facts and figures for periods which leave Europe’s historians relying on fuzzy guesswork.) At one stage Tibet’s army crossed the river Oxus, invaded Samarkand and prompted Harun Al-Rashed, the Caliph of Baghdad, to ally himself with the Chinese.

Then, after the death in 842 of the anti-Buddhist King Lang Dharma, Buddhism put down deep roots. By 1249, when the Sakya Pandita came to power, it was unthinkable that anyone could rule Tibet without the support of a Buddhist sect. The change from a militaristic society to a society guided by non-violent principles was gradual and sometimes faltering, but there was no going back, no fudging on a par with Christianity’s conveniently elastic concept of a ‘just war’. This is not to say that Tibet became a completely conflict-free zone. For centuries Tibetan Buddhism was riven by sectarian rivalries and inter-monastery jealousies – occasionally leading to brief battles. However, those lamentable aberrations were recognised as such at the time; physical violence was no longer taken for granted as a legitimate means of settling disputes. The institution of the Dalai Lama (reincarnations of the compassionate aspect of the Lord Buddha, over-simplified by many ordinary folk who worshipped His Holiness as the living Buddha) had, since the mid-seventeenth century, brought to Tibet an extraordinary degree of social stability – described by the Communist invaders as ‘stagnation’.

Naturally, the Chinese use Old Tibet’s bad habits in their ‘We have Liberated Tibet From Feudalism’ propaganda. Those habits were very bad in a standard sort of way: slicing off ears, noses and limbs, gouging out eyes and so on. But such un-Buddhist punishments were officially abandoned long before Europeans abandoned the thumbscrew, the rack and hanging, drawing and quartering. Moreover, some countries continue, as I write, to use the most up-to-date torture methods – commonly importing the necessary instruments from Western democracies. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama’s ‘message’, his forlorn but persistent attempts to find a peaceful solution to ‘the Tibet Problem’, is listened to as other pacifists’ messages are listened to: the already converted applaud him and feel encouraged, the majority who either advocate violence (‘Let’s bomb Iraq/Afghanistan/the Sudan!’), or accept its inevitability, regard him as a benevolent unrealist.

After the arrival in India of some 85,000 refugees (an insignificant number by present-day standards), China’s occupation of Tibet stirred strong feelings throughout the First World – though not strong enough to inspire the UN, or any government, to take action on Tibet’s behalf. Two opposing camps soon emerged. In one were those who cherished a vision of Old Tibet as Shangri-la, where everyone was all the time happy and holy. In the other were those who rejoiced that at last Tibet’s ‘serfs’ had been freed from the tyranny of manipulative lamas and rapacious nobles, and were being provided with roads, hospitals, factories and schools; now a generation could grow up equipped to live rationally in the second half of the twentieth century. Between the camps stood those who recognised that for better or worse Old Tibet was doomed but who wished change could have come about slowly and gently under the guidance of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama – a man with the inclination and capacity to become a keen reformer.

Shortly before Tibetan Foothold appeared, Stuart and Roma Gelder published The Timely Rain, describing a journey to Tibet in the autumn of 1962 when they were given the first permit to visit Tibet issued by Beijing. Thirteen years later Han Suyin published Lhasa, The Open City; in the interval no other English-language account of the New Tibet had appeared, proving how carefully Beijing chose visiting authors. Those three elderly, experienced, well-respected writers revealed an astonishing gullibility; having spent, respectively, five weeks and two months in Tibet, using guide-interpreters provided by the Chinese, they reported exactly what Beijing would have wished them to report.

The celebrated Beijing-born Han Suyin, her propaganda value immense since the publication of A Many-Splendoured Thing, misled her readers thus: ‘In Tibet as elsewhere in China the Cultural Revolution was a turning point in accelerating industrialisation. There is little documentation on what happened in Tibet during that time but … the Cultural Revolution, for the women of Tibet, was also a turning point. The “four olds”, old traditions, customs, behaviour, ways of thinking, were all violently denounced.’ In fact the documentation records that between May 1966 and January 1969 (when Amala came to Ireland), more than ninety per cent of Tibet’s temples, monasteries and historic monuments were demolished by the Red Guards – statues shattered, frescoes defaced, libraries burned, with monks banished to labour camps. In Tibet the Cultural Revolution reached a frenzied climax of hatred and rage. What distinguished that country was the extent to which its home-grown form of Buddhism influenced everyday life. To the Chinese this spirituality, percolating to the remotest corners of the land – even to the nomads’ tents on the furthest steppes – was anathema. A few years before the Cultural Revolution they had begun to extirpate Tibetan Buddhism with a determination fuelled by their own fervent belief in materialism. The emotional suffering thus inflicted on the ordinary Tibetans, as they experienced the dissolution and subsequent destruction of temples and monasteries, the public humiliation of revered senior lamas, and the outlawing of the domestic and communal rituals central to their inner well-being, exceeded even the unprecedented physical suffering (hunger, forced labour, imprisonment) caused by the new regime.

The Gelder and Suyin volumes grieved and/or enraged all friends of Tibet – then we cheered ourselves up by reflecting that most readers would be well able to measure their worth. However, over the intervening years I have noticed that even amongst robust anti-Communists such skilfully contrived propaganda leaves a mark.

When Tibetan Foothold was originally published some readers were taken aback by my honestly recorded impressions of a first meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama – then aged twenty-seven and as yet unable to speak fluent English, so we needed an interpreter. I remember a few people – from the Shangri-la camp – deploring what they misinterpreted as my lack of reverence for His Holiness, but on reading those pages now I cannot feel that the intervening decades have invalidated them. And I am surprised by my own prescience about what I described as ‘the Dharamsala ruling clique’. I used brackets to exclude the Dalai Lama from that clique – which was over-optimistic. Inevitably, the clique were able to co-opt him – for them an essential move, given that most Tibetans, at home and in exile, then regarded him as the person who should make all decisions for them and speak on their behalf. It would be unreasonable and unfair to criticise his leadership; he never chose to participate in what Dawa Norbu calls ‘this political game played on the religious terrain’ – it was his karma.

Four decades have passed since the Dalai Lama fled to India and those anxious and demanding years have not been made any easier for His Holiness by the Western media’s adoption of Tibet’s ‘God-King’ (in tabloid-speak) as one of their Cold War heroes. In this role, the Dalai Lama was all the more useful because of his appeal to generations of young Westerners earnestly seeking ‘eastern wisdom’. This is not to suggest that His Holiness lacks wisdom, compassion and genuine spirituality. But what I wrote recently of Nelson Mandela could equally apply to him: ‘In President Mandela the media have an ideal hero, someone whose image needs no touching up. Yet every leader deserves some criticism and may be rendered less effective by a media canonisation that stifles it.’

The political manoeuvres that have occupied so much of His Holiness’s time were and remain extremely convoluted. An excellent account – shrewd, lucid, courageous – is to be found in Dawa Norbu’s Tibet: The Road Ahead (HarperCollins, 1995). When I first heard of Dawa Norbu he was a little boy; Jill Buxton mentioned him, during our journey to Dharamsala, as one of the outstandingly gifted peasant children who must be ‘given a chance’. Jill gave him that chance and now – having acquired his doctorate at Berkeley University and published many scholarly papers – he is Professor of Central Asian studies at New Delhi’s Nehru University.

In 1980 China’s Tibet policy shifted – and became apparently more relaxed, more sensitive to outside opinion. Deng Xiaoping admitted that ‘mistakes had been made’. Tibetans were exempted from paying taxes until 1988. The rigidly controlled agricultural production teams (instituted in 1959 and loathed by Tibetans) were granted some degree of ‘autonomy’ and allowed to use five to seven per cent of their land as private plots. The ban on rural trade fairs – pivotal to the prosperity and gaiety of Old Tibet – was lifted and border trade resumed with Nepal, India, Bhutan and Burma. Holiday travel to India became possible and, after a twenty-one year separation, Amala and Jigme-la were joyously reunited with the many members of their family who had been unable to escape. Most startling of all, a fulsome Communist Party document praised Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a culture worthy of serious study and development based on socialist orientation’. Religious practices were permitted, on a restricted scale, and the Chinese presented their careful reconstruction of the more famous monasteries in and around Lhasa (tourist bait) as proof of their new benign policy of ‘freedom of religion’. However, Communist Partycontrolled committees run these major monasteries, usurping the traditional roles of the Abbots, and a thorough vetting of novices ensures that only ‘reliable’ youths are accepted. Many of the bureaucrats supervising this phoney ‘religious revival’ are the very men who before and during the Cultural Revolution joined in reducing the monasteries to rubble. But throughout the remoter regions, where even now Chinese administrators are few, restrictions seem to be less severe. In 1987 over 5000 pilgrims circled the sacred mountain of Kailas in Western Tibet – at least a week’s journey, by truck, from Lhasa. Evidently, for many resilient Tibetans, the Cultural Revolution’s erasing of the visible props of their faith has in no way weakened it.

When Tibet was opened to tourists in 1984 ‘to visit or not to visit’ became a bone of contention among Tibet-lovers. On the plus side, sympathetic foreigners, discreetly dispensing photographs of His Holiness, must be good for the Tibetans’ morale, making them feel less forgotten or ignored. Also, importantly, tourists can – and some do – bring back valuable eyewitness and ear-witness accounts of how things really are. On the minus side, to indulge in Chinese-regulated tourism signals a tacit acceptance of the brutal policy of ‘Sinicisation’ – an ugly word for an ugly deed. Moreover, the inflow of precious dollars benefits the Chinese rather than the Tibetans. In 1988 more than 40,000 tourists visited Lhasa – though in 1989 the imposition of martial law reduced the numbers to 4000. By now Tibet is attracting countless backpackers – some of whom daringly elude their official minders – and it seems His Holiness approves; he provided the Foreword to the 1996 Tibetan Handbook, a guide for visitors to the area.

Personally, I feel no desire to visit the New Tibet. When someone sent me a cutting from the South China Morning Post (23 September 1985) I shuddered to read Pierre Donnet’s report: ‘Tibet’s two largest cities, Lhasa and Shigatse, look thoroughly Chinese with residential districts and administrative buildings indistinguishable from their Beijing counterparts. Colourfully clad Tibetans are hard to spot among the Chinese who crowd the streets and make up more than half the population of Lhasa. The overwhelming majority of the merchants are Chinese.’

On 21 September 1987 His Holiness laid a five-point proposal before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus. It included an end to population transfers, an end to China’s abuse of Tibet for the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons and the dumping of nuclear waste, and the transformation, by international agreement, of the whole of Tibet (Inner and Outer) into a zone of peace – ‘in keeping with Tibet’s historical role as a peaceful and neutral Buddhist nation and buffer state separating the continent’s great powers’. The withdrawal of troops and military installations from Tibet, and from India’s Himalayan regions, would release incalculable amounts of money for the alleviation of poverty and this proposal appealed powerfully to sane people everywhere. But it was not even considered by Those In Charge. At the end of the second millennium, militarism has so taken over our world that Those In Charge have no intellectual space left for the concept of a peace zone.

A year later His Holiness addressed the European Parliament and suggested a new ‘Framework for Sino-Tibetan Negotiations’ – an initiative rewarded by the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. What became known as ‘the Strasbourg Statement’ made a major political concession: China could retain control of Tibet’s defence and foreign policy in exchange for ‘the whole of Tibet becoming a self-governing democratic political entity founded on law by agreement of the people … in association with the People’s Republic of China’. This concession, His Holiness emphasised, was based on a pragmatic acceptance of the status quo: the Communist annexation had made Tibet part of China. BUT pre-1950 Tibet had been an independent nation. This ‘BUT’ caused the Chinese to reject the proffered compromise. They were – and remain – paranoid in their insistence that the Dalai Lama must play the game their way, by publicly affirming that Tibet had always been part of China. Only this could cancel the popular impression of the People’s Republic of China as an imperial power which has greedily grabbed a defenceless neighbour – despite anti-imperialism being the ideological cornerstone of Mao’s revolution. So, post-Strasbourg – stalemate …

By this stage, many among the younger generations (the ‘Tiblets’ as adults) had become educated, thoughtful, emancipated citizens of India – and elsewhere. No longer did all exiles passively accept His Holiness’s political leadership, though the majority might still revere him as their spiritual mentor. His willingness to compromise with Beijing alarmed and distressed a considerable number, who continued to demand total independence for Tibet. Meanwhile, on the fringes of Tibland, a smallish but worrisome faction revived memories of Tibet Militant and plotted to organise a guerrilla army. Very unwisely, His Holiness has always overlooked the contributions the younger generations (both in exile and in Tibet) could make in any future selfgoverning Tibet; none of the detailed plans he has devised gives them any part to play. Nor has he fostered the growth of a new and flexible leadership class to replace the Dharamsala Government-in-exile – the ‘ruling clique’.

What I referred to in 1963 as that clique’s ‘high handed’ actions were, sadly, replicated in 1990–95 during the contest between the Dalai Lama and Beijing on the tricky issue of searching for and recognising the Panchen Lama’s eleventh Incarnation. This grim power struggle – Tibetan spiritual authority versus Chinese temporal authority – echoed several ancient confrontations and underlined those subtleties within the Sino–Tibet relationship which so confuse the modern West. When it comes to defining a nation-state, to questions of independence, self-determination and international relations, we don’t think in terms of balancing spiritual and temporal powers. From this bitterly fought contest no one emerged with honour. It ended when the six-year-old Gedun Choekyi Nyima disappeared, no doubt to spend his life sequestered in Beijing – unless a time comes when he can be of use as a political trump card.

The spring of 1998 brought bad news from Dharamsala; yet another fissure had appeared. An improbable Bon-po-influenced faction was challenging the Dalai Lama’s authority and his condemnation of this provoked the murder of three monks, followed by a threat to his own life. Indian police were guarding his home twenty-four hours a day.

The Panchen Lama conflict caused a five-year break in the Dalai Lama’s negotiations with Beijing. However, when President Clinton visited China in July 1998 he was assured by President Jiang Zemin that if only the Dalai Lama would acknowledge Tibet as an integral part of China ‘the door to dialogue and negotiation is open’. Soon after, His Holiness told a Time reporter: ‘I would like to undertake a purely spiritual pilgrimage to some of the holy places on mainland China. And while I’m there, the opportunity may arise for me to meet the press and intellectuals, and possibly some Chinese leaders. The important thing is to build up trust.’

In November 1998 the Dalai Lama’s representative in Washington, Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, told the South China Morning Post: ‘We are in a pre-negotiation mode, this is a critical initial period. There has been progress though various channels. His Holiness is preparing a constructive and conciliatory statement and we are trying through informal channels to get feedback.’ (Mr Gyari’s speech pattern suggests that he has spent quite a long time in Washington.) A week later His Holiness told a German audience: ‘Time is running out for Tibetans because of cultural genocide.’ At first hearing, ‘cultural genocide’ sounds like a tiresome buzz-phrase. At second hearing, in relation to Tibet and too many other countries, it sounds like a precise description of a methodical campaign. In 1999 one cannot get very excited about ‘negotiations’ with Beijing – the tragic truth is that the Tibetans have lost Tibet. Now the population is predominantly Chinese, a situation that cannot be non-violently reversed. The Chinese are experts at this Sinicisation game. Inner Mongolia’s two-and-a-half million Mongols have been swamped by eight-and-a-half million Chinese. A century ago the Manchus were recognised as a separate people, proud of their own language and culture; today the three million remaining in Manchuria are hard to find amidst seventy-five million Chinese settlers. The hope that Tibet’s altitude would protect it has long since been quenched. It is truly the Roof of the World, the highest country on earth – but it covers some 600,000 square miles. And very soon there will be one billion Chinese. Recently Beijing published many chilling statistics – for instance, in Amdo province, on Census Day, there were 2,359,979 Chinese residents and 754,254 Tibetans – and many of the Tibetans under thirty could not speak their own language. In Taktser village, the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, only eight out of forty families are Tibetan.

In June 1999 came heart-breaking news – a World Bank loan is to fund the resettlement of 55,750 Chinese farmers in Qinghai province, on its western plateaux and steppes, regions sparsely populated since time immemorial by Tibetan nomadic herders. Among these people, Tibetan culture of a peculiar but genuine sort has so far survived uncontaminated by the Han invasion. The World Bank’s US$160 million will bring about the destruction of a way of life that cannot possibly co-exist with the proposed project. According to the bank’s vice-president for East Asia, the loan will ‘provide seeds, fertilisers, forests, irrigation, land improvement, basic roads …’ Very likely, given the altitude and temperature extremes of western Qinghai, this resettlement scheme will become yet another of the World Bank’s infamous failures – leaving in its wake a voiceless multitude of uprooted and starving Chinese peasants and dispossessed and demoralised Tibetan nomads.

The US government – the World Bank’s major shareholder – has vigorously opposed the Qinghai project, as has Germany, the third-largest shareholder. Yet the bank approved the loan on 24 June, defying the US for the first time in its history.

There is a theory – I forget, if I ever knew, who first articulated it – that the Tibetan diaspora, though so heart-breaking for most of those involved, must benefit the rest of the world. Does this seem like a Shangri-la fantasy? Many Tibetan exiles, having set up business enterprises that do better if not too closely scrutinised, are unlikely to edify their neighbours. (In Old Tibet everyone, from the richest nobles to the poorest peasants, traded enthusiastically whenever the opportunity arose.) Yet I can easily believe that the majority of exiles, living quietly out of the limelight, are continually enriching the communities among whom they have settled. I know that my months of close companionship with Amala changed me by some mysterious process of osmosis – not in any obvious way, but inwardly. At the end of that happy time, the first local friends I met (an eminently civilised couple, by our standards) seemed almost crude in their perceptions, attitudes and reactions. Yet I was never even momentarily tempted to ‘become a Buddhist’, for the reasons which I hope have emerged incidentally in the preceding pages.

Lismore, June 1999