AUTHOR’S NOTE

The dismantling of Tibet by the Chinese government over the past two generations is one of the darkest chapters of Asia’s long, rich history. While examples of more technically advanced, militarized nations overwhelming smaller countries can be found in nearly every century, the scope of Beijing’s conduct in Tibet, and the scale of the damage inflicted, has few parallels in any age. Tibet didn’t just have a vibrant spiritually centered culture, it had what by any objective criteria must be characterized as an entirely separate civilization, with vital centuries-old frameworks of medicine, literature, education, government, and religion that were unlike any in the world. Our entire planet lost something very important in the battles in which mountain warriors fought with muskets and swords against machine guns, and monks resisted with prayers against aerial bombs and artillery shells.

The suffering of the Tibetan people didn’t end with the loss of a million lives and thousands of temples in the original occupation of their country. I am sometimes asked whether in my Shan novels I exaggerate Beijing’s behavior in Tibet for dramatic effect. The answer is a steadfast no. The reality is dramatic enough. Armies of soldiers and police still crush every hint of political resistance. Armies of bureaucrats are dedicated to dismantling Tibetan society, teaching Tibetan children to chant only Beijing’s mantras, monitoring political usage of the Internet, regulating monks, and seizing the religious artifacts that were once fixtures of Tibetan life. These pages reflect how Beijing has in recent years turned up the heat, sharply swelling the ranks of Tibetans in remote internment camps, in part by arresting the family members of those suspected of engaging in dissidence. Monasteries that were once surrounded by shrines are now ringed by surveillance cameras. Undercover agents trained to pose as monks were introduced years ago, and are routinely employed to detect disloyal behavior in monasteries. The government has also launched a program to relocate over a million nomad shepherds into what it calls “productive” lives far from their ancestral lands.

For those who wish to learn more about the tragedies, and heroism, arising out of the modern Tibetan experience there are several excellent overviews, including John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of the Snows, David Patt’s Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, Tsering Shakya’s The Dragon in the Land of the Snows and Mary Craig’s Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet, as well as poignant personal chronicles such as Born in Lhasa by Namgyal Lhamo Taklha, The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk by Palden Gyatso with Tsering Shakya, In the Presence of My Enemies by Sumner Carnahan, and Ama Adhe: The Voice That Remembers by Adhe Tapontsang and Joy Blakeslee. For those who wish to play a more active role, the International Campaign for Tibet offers many opportunities.

One of the great paradoxes of Beijing’s role in Tibet is that the traditional culture of the Chinese people themselves was built on a family-centered spiritualistic life that was similar in many ways to that of Tibetans. Many Chinese, in fact, remain active practitioners of Buddhism, or follow the spiritual traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. Their government’s treatment of Tibetan and other ethnic groups often weighs heavily on the conscience of individual Chinese.

In a very real sense that conscience was once collectively expressed in the mandarin censors alluded to in Mandarin Gate. Attaining the rank of a mandarin official in imperial China required years of study and examination, so rigorous that many did not attain office until well advanced in age. The censors were a highly ethical, elite subset of these mandarins, charged with watching over the government. It was in their nature, and inherent in their office, to confront other officials over injustice and corruption and, like other mandarins who fell out of favor, they were sometimes banished to remote mountainous regions for their efforts.

Internal exiles like the professors of Baiyun therefore do not just have real-life counterparts in the remote western lands of modern China, they share their fate with many others who historically ran afoul of the government. Chinese culture was enriched in the process, since more than a few of these outcasts took up lives as hermit poets. The bittersweet verses of such exiles as Su tung-po, an official banished for criticizing the emperor in 1097, can still wrench the heart and would certainly resonate with Shan and the professors of the Vermilion Society.

Tales of those who have been thus abandoned by history are so plentiful at the roof of the world that they almost seem ingrained in the landscape. While there is much ugliness to be found in the behavior of the government in today’s Tibet, the power of that rugged landscape sometimes seems to eclipse it—and certainly the stark beauty of their land is only enhanced by the enduring strength of the Tibetan people.