11

Return

1977–1984

ON JANUARY 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai died. His demise was followed early in July by that of Chu The and on September 9, Mao Zedong himself passed away, completing, in nine months, a clean sweep of the triumvirate that had ruled China’s Communist Party for almost four decades. Three and a half weeks later, the Peking garrison, led by two of the PLA’s most venerable marshals, moved into the old imperial quarters at night and arrested what was soon to be known as the Gang of Four: the leaders of the extreme left wing of the Party who, under Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, had run the country from behind the mask of an ill and aging Chairman since the death of Lin Biao in 1971. Despite the initial visibility of Mao’s designated successor, Hua Guofeng, within two years Deng Xiaoping, leader of the Party moderates, had effectively assumed power.

To many observers the shift appeared to be merely the inevitable swing of the pendulum—this time from the left back to the right wing of the party—that had pulled China through internal upheaval for thirty years. But to Tibetans, it constituted a far more significant threshold. In the early seventies the Nechung Oracle had predicted a decline in China. A second prophecy stated that Mao’s death would be followed by the rapid dissolution of all that he had built. The successive deaths of the PRC’s top leaders, complemented by the Tangshan earthquake occurring at the end of July less than a hundred miles from Peking and claiming from 150,000 to 800,000 lives (depending on the estimate), signaled to the Tibetans an irrevocable turn in the fate of nations, one, they believed, presaged the end of an era in China and with it the possibility of a new beginning for Tibet.

The first political indication came the following spring. At the end of April 1977, in a meeting with a Japanese delegation in Peking, Ngabo Ngawang Jigme stated that China “would welcome the return of the Dalai Lama and his followers who fled to India.…” Within little more than a week, Peking permitted older Tibetans in Lhasa to circumambulate both the Lingkhor and the Barkhor on Saka Dawa—the anniversary of Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. Soon after, families with relatives abroad were told to invite them home “now that conditions are so good.” The “good conditions” were formalized by Hua Guofeng himself, who in mid-1977 called for a full-fledged revival of Tibetan customs. Local cadres, either unaware of the new policy or simply unwilling to grant such freedoms, introduced instead a new “three antis,” entailing a nationwide wave of mass executions. Before other mixed signals could occur, the Dalai Lama replied to China’s confused but clearly concilatory moves. In comments made to the Indian press during a trip to greet the newly elected Janata Party in New Delhi, he stated that the problem of Tibet was not that of his or the exiles’ cause alone, but the happiness of all the Tibetan people. If they did not feel “happy and satisfied,” he pointed out, there was no possibility of his returning. If he were to venture home before his country’s plight was remedied, he added humorously, “the Tibetans themselves might push me out.”

China’s new leaders, however, were plainly bent on effecting a major change in Tibet’s status. On February 25, 1978, after fourteen years, Peking suddenly released the Panchen Lama. He appeared at a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, at which, as reported by the New China News Agency, he said, “For a period of time I discarded the banner of patriotism and committed a crime. Guided by Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, I have corrected my errors.” Only a year later, and then by chance, did news of where the Panchen Lama had been held for so long leak out. At that time, Wei Jinsheng, one of China’s leading dissidents, hung a twenty-page big-character poster on Democracy Wall. The poster stated that he had been imprisoned with the Panchen Lama in Qin Cheng Prison No. 1, China’s elite jail for top party members, located an hour and a half northeast of Peking. Life had been so intolerable there, Wei reported, that in the midst of torture the Panchen Lama (known only by his number) attempted to commit suicide. Without detailing why the attempt failed, Wei’s poster described how the Panchen Lama had refused to eat, saying to prison officials, “You can take my body to the Central Committee.” Now that he was full, the Panchen Lama had obviously agreed to work with the Party’s new leadership, but to what extent remained to be seen. For Tibetans everywhere, it was sufficient just to know that he was alive.

While the Panchen Lama’s reappearance was further proof of Peking’s intention to find a solution to the problem of Tibet, a more significant event occurred in secrecy. Through private channels, a personal emissary of Deng Xiaoping contracted Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, at his business office in Hong Kong. Deng’s message was plain: he wanted direct communication with the Dalai Lama. After nineteen years of open hostility, China was offering an unconditional truce. To prove his good will, Deng invited Gyalo Thondup to Peking so that he could personally relate what he wished to tell the Dalai Lama. Gyalo Thondup, though, refused to go without first obtaining his brother’s approval. “On receiving this news, my brother immediately came to visit me,” recounted the Dalai Lama. “After listening to him I said, ‘Very good. We are not followers of a foreign power and we do not have personal or hidden motives but are acting sincerely and for a just cause. So there is no problem in discussing things face to face with China. But,’ I pointed out, ‘I have nothing to say—no offer to make—beyond explaining the real situation in and outside of Tibet. After seeing the Chinese leaders and listening to their views, we will consider the next step.’ Then my brother went to China and met some Chinese, including Deng Xiaoping. And at that time Deng admitted that China had made many mistakes in Tibet. He also said that he was very much concerned about the future of the country. And finally, besides discussing the general problem, he specifically asked for my return. He mentioned that I would be most welcome to come back—that the Dalai Lama should work not only for the welfare of the Tibetan people but for the whole People’s Republic of China. Very good, I thought. I decided these talks and discussions were good.”

Though Tenzin Gyatso knew that much of the refugee community would oppose compromise with China, he had always considered it to be the most practical means of regaining Tibetan freedom. Since the early sixties he had stressed Tibet’s human rights over its political status, portraying his country’s dilemma not as one of opposing ideologies but as one of a people’s suffering. In fact, he often told correspondents that Marxism and Buddhism could, theoretically, be integrated, both sharing an egalitarian social ideal. By removing the issue from a strictly political arena, he had allowed room for Peking to admit its mistakes without contradicting its own dogma. Now that it had done so, he felt confident there was a base for negotiations.

Such was the situation from the Dalai Lama’s standpoint. That of China’s, however, was far more complex. To begin with, Deng Xiaoping’s overture had to be appraised in light of his general policies and beliefs. By 1978, following almost fifteen years of turmoil under the radical left line, a major liberalization was occuring in the People’s Republic. Behind it lay the goal of a modernized China that had always been crucial to the right line and now, after the failure of the radical experiment, remained the sole means for the Party to recoup its credibility. As part of this the PRC’s new foreign policy was geared to play down international tensions while the economy grew. In Tibet’s case, the international legacy of China’s invasion remained entirely negative. What had once been a tranquil border now pitted Asia’s two giants, India and China, against one another in a confrontation that not only sapped vast reserves of men and capital, but also held the potential, however remote, of a renewed conflagration which could embroil almost half of the human race. More immediately, a strong opposition abroad continued to threaten legitimization of Chinese rule in Tibet and, in Peking’s viewpoint, remained a dangerous weapon in the hands of New Delhi. Finally, the question of Tibet cast a shadow over China’s most troublesome foreign concern—the Nationalist government on Taiwan. Disagreements with the Soviet Union, India and Vietnam centered in large part on border disputes, were secondary when compared with the potentially fatal legacy of a China divided against itself. Unlike his left-wing predecessors, Deng recognized that Taiwan could not—in the foreseeable future—be subdued by force. Tibetan refugees speculated that Peking’s overtures to them were part of its attempt to convince Taiwan that reunification was possible. Inversely, they surmised that China wished to destabilize the Tibetan diaspora by removing the object of its antagonism—an intractable Chinese government. Whatever its ulterior aims, it was evident that the cost of Peking’s occupation of Tibet had become prohibitive. While annexing Tibet had successfully closed China’s “back door” and given it a dominant position in Central Asia, the CCP’s leadership now seemed aware that it had not come near to fulfilling the invasion’s other goals. The great resources of Xizang, “The Western Treasure House,” were there; their exploitation remained elusive. In three decades, China had been able to obtain only what it could take with little effort—the rich skim of wealth coating the barrier of permafrost protecting the even greater treasure below; liquid currency from centuries of accumulated wealth in Tibet’s monasteries; lumber from Kham; livestock from Amdo. No matter how badly the PRC coveted the vast mineral reserves of the plateau, its new leaders had to ask themselves when and how would they ever obtain it. Unless subsidized at tremendous expense, large-scale settlement was out of the question. Even after a decade of living in Tibet many Han immigrants continued to suffer from severe health problems due to the altitude: the instance of heart failure, high blood pressure, miscarriage and stillbirth was far higher than in the homeland. The administrative structure running Tibet had stalled as well. China’s 80,000 Tibetan cadres—10,000 to 40,000 of whom, by varying estimates, belonged to the party—were, despite every effort at indoctrination, both suspect and inefficient. In its most sacred task of winning a broad base of popular support, the Party itself had unquestionably failed. The figureheads of the “patriotic upper strate,” such as the Panchen Lama and Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, were also unsuited for a governing role. Who then could lead Tibet, in a way that the Tibetans would follow, save the Dalai Lama? And just how necessary it was to have an acceptable accepted leader, if China indeed was to relinquish control, was clear from the most recent record of revolts.

Looked at plainly, “class enemies” abounded. Following the massive 1972 revolt, minor outbreaks had continued without stop. The eighteen districts of Kham that had turned into battlefronts overnight during the Cultural Revolution, along with the still fierce Goloks in Amdo, presented such a headache for the Chinese that the likelihood of ever fully subduing the wild inhabitants of eastern Tibet seemed small. As recently as 1977 a convoy of over a hundred PLA trucks had been ambushed on the Yunna–Tibet highway, looted and burned. In Central Tibet as well trouble continued. In a seven-month period between January and August 1976, Radio Lhasa issued twenty-six broadcasts—almost one a week—condemning subversive activity in the TAR. Sabotage by Tibetan cadres of senior rank was also on the increase, as evidenced by the severing in 1976 of a top secret underground cable linking the tracking station at Dhingri with Dakmar in southwestern Tibet. To discourage such acts, terror was consistently employed, primarily through executions. The “three antis” of May 1977—condemning “petty business, pilferage and bad elements”—resulted in thousands of arrests followed by a wave of executions, 20 alone reported to have been publicly executed in Lhasa on August 1 (PLA day). In the long run Tibet’s instability presented more of a problem than that of merely policing its six million inhabitants. Despite their small numbers, Tibetans occupied almost a quarter of the PRC’s land mass. China’s other minorities, most of whom, like the Tibetans, occupied sensitive border regions, continued to chafe under Han domination and would, given the chance, eagerly follow a Tibetan bid for greater freedom.

With the Dalai Lama’s return, perhaps Tibet could rebuild itself and begin to offer its abundant resources to the mainland. For internal as well as external reasons then, Peking’s desire for a dialogue appeared to be the only untried course remaining to it.

Having considered the situation in depth, the Dalai Lama entered the delicate game at hand. Little more than a week after the Panchen Lama’s reappearance, he tested China’s avowed leniency by calling, as part of his regular March 10 speech, for free travel in and out of Tibet. His appeal was heeded. In June 1978, Peking made the stunning announcement that for the first time since 1959 Tibetans would be permitted to contact and then actually visit their relatives abroad. In exile, Tibetans waited anxiously for letters informing them whether their parents, brothers and sisters were alive or dead. Before the mail began, Tien Bao himself led the first trade delegation to Nepal since 1954, to start the process of opening the sealed region.

On November 4, the Chinese took their next step. A grand “Release Meeting” was held in Lhasa at which thirty-four Tibetan prisoners were displayed. The so-called “last of the rebel leaders,” most of them were officials of the old Tibetan government, confined since the 1959 revolt. In photographs taken to publicize the meeting, the men sat weeping, incongruously dressed in new clothes and fur-lined Tibetan hats, with rolls of money and certificates of freedom clutched in their hands. Chinese periodicals reported that, having taken a month-long tour of the “new Tibet,” they were now to be assisted in obtaining jobs and even going abroad if they so chose. After thanking the People’s Republic for “educating them,” they addressed the real purpose of the meeting, that of inviting home, “with no digging up the past,” all “Tibetan brethren in exile.” The refugees’ reaction to this event was measured. Perceiving it as an example of the PRC’s penchant for blithely disavowing the past by the mere announcement of a change in policy, they nevertheless praised the move, hoping for their own people’s sake to encourage further liberalization. And so 1978 came to a close.

The new year opened with a carefully orchestrated series of events. Early on January 1, the People’s Republic was officially recognized by the United States. Wang Bingnan, a senior party member, publicly stated that, as a means of reuniting Taiwan with the motherland, “a Tibet-like solution” was possible. Simultaneously, the Panchen Lama called for the Dalai Lama and other exiles to return. “If the Dalai is genuinely interested in the happiness and welfare of the Tibetan masses, he need have no doubts about it,” said the Panchen Lama. “I can guarantee that the present standard of living of the Tibetan people in Tibet is many times better than that of the ‘old society.’ ” A week later, on January 8, the invitation was reaffirmed as Radio Lhasa announced that a meeting of five hundred officials of the TAR had decided to form a “reception committee” to greet visiting Tibetans from abroad. The news that China would fulfill its six-month-old pledge to permit open travel was joined, the following day, by an announcement from the newly formed Lhasa Reception Committee—an unlikely amalgam of all the chief collaborators, both people’s activists and members of the upper strata. It stated, referring to the period of Tibetan compromise in the fifties: “We would like to tell the Dalai frankly that he has done good historical work.” China, it seemed, was not only proving its “good intentions,” but hoping thereby to force reciprocal gestures on the Dalai Lama’s part, lest he appear intransigent.

On the last day of January 1979, while in Calcutta, Tenzin Gyatso responded by commenting to reporters that he was “trying to contact the Chinese embassy.” His intent, he revealed, was to open a channel to the small group of original Tibetan Communists. Concurrently, he sanctioned a plan—initiated by fifteen young men, including Tempa Tsering—to test China’s travel offer by applying for visas to Tibet. While the Chinese embassy in New Delhi worked out the details of their applications with Peking, the authorities in Lhasa granted permission for Tibetans to visit their relatives abroad for the first time since 1959. Once out, they revealed that people were allowed to circumambulate the Tsuglakhang, that meat and butter could be purchased in excess of the ration quota and that the Potala had been repainted, Tibetan workers secretly mixing sugar in with the whitewash as a traditional offering. Even the crows had returned to the desolate city, Lhasans having enough food now to place tormas or offering cakes on their rooftops for the birds to eat. In his speech on March 10, 1979, the Dalai Lama urged the Chinese to “accept their mistakes, the realities, and the right of all people of the human race to equality and happiness.” “Acceptance of this,” he said, “should not be merely on paper; it should be in practice.” Peking responded a week later, on March 17, by removing the “black hat” designation of 6,000 “class enemies,” while releasing 376 more prisoners—the first group, apparently, not having been the “last” of the incarcerated rebels. Though the fifteen exiles’ requests for visas were turned down, due to their having written, on the line requesting the applicant’s nationality, “Tibetan” rather than “Chinese,” a refugee living in Switzerland entered Tibet from Nepal in early May, the first exile to officially visit his home in two decades. His trip, though, was soon overshadowed by a far more dramatic development.

After almost two and a half years of contact, Dharamsala and Peking reached a breakthrough. At the Dalai Lama’s request, China agreed to receive an official fact-finding delegation to examine conditions in Tibet and reestablish contact between the exile government and its people in the homeland. Comprised of two Cabinet ministers, the Vice-Chairman of the Tibetan People’s Deputies, a department secretary and the Dalai Lama’s immediate elder brother, Lobsang Samten, the delegation was, if all went well, to be followed, in time, by three more. Between them, they were to crisscross every region, except the far west, of Tibet’s three original provinces, conducting one of the most extensive inspection tours in the nation’s history. Once their reports were received in India, the next stage in discussions would be considered.

ON AUGUST 2, 1979, the first delegation left New Delhi for Hong Kong. At their arrival the five men were greeted by Chinese officials at the airport and driven to a guest house in the city. The next day they attended a luncheon at the Hong Kong bureau of the New China News Agency, the motherland’s equivalent of a legation in the Crown Colony. With a glass of mai tai liquor in hand, their host rose to offer a toast. “Welcome,” he began. “We are the great land of China and you are the minority people. For too long you have been separated from your motherland. We two peoples, the Han and the Tibetan—one of the most important minority groups—should never be apart. Now we are very happy that you have come back to visit. Once again you can see your own homes and birthplace. You must understand,” he concluded, “that you have such a good opportunity only because of the enlightened policy and excellent qualities of the Communist Party leadership.”

“We were very patient,” said Lobsang Samten, recalling the delegation’s reaction to what, over the five months their tour lasted, proved to be a standard speech. “But of course it was infuriating. Everything the man said was a lie. Yet he spoke as though we all agreed. We didn’t return the toast but for the moment there was nothing else we could do.”

A few days later, the delegation entered China proper. Greeted on the tarmac of the Canton airport by the city’s deputy mayor and a bevy of officials, they were ushered into the terminal, where, beneath a colossal portrait of Mao Zedong and a giant-character slogan, stood clusters of Red Army soldiers. “It was very curious,” continued Lobsang Samten. “The airport was completely empty except for ourselves, customs officials and the troops. This made all of us uneasy. We had fled our country because of the Communist Chinese and here we were right back among them. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Now I’ve finally fallen into the hands of my enemies.’ ” Issued special permits noting their entry into China, without, however, stamps being affixed to their passports—thereby avoiding a dispute over citizenship—the delegates were driven on a tour of Canton and then returned to the airport for the flight to Peking. On landing in the capital at nine o’clock that evening, they were formally welcomed at the foot of the aircraft by thirty officials, among whom were the highest-ranking members of the Nationalities Affairs Commission of the PRC. Their presence reassured the delegation of its elite status. Nevertheless, the sense of being intentionally isolated soon returned. After a long ride into Peking’s suburbs, they were driven through a locked gate past rifle-bearing sentries to the entrance of a lone twelve-story building. Within, each man was shown to a small room, where a snack of yogurt and biscuits waited by a bed, and then left to what, for most, proved an uneasy sleep. The following morning they were escorted through a ground-floor dining hall to a breakfast room. En route they caught a glimpse of the guest house’s other occupants: hundreds of high-ranking officers and adjutants of the People’s Liberation Army. Having lost so many relatives and friends to the PLA, the delegates could not help but feel that the Chinese were attempting to intimidate them. As Lobsang Samten related, “Of course, army guest houses are among the better residences in China. But in our case, the choice of one to stay in had particular significance. It was meant to let us know who held the power.”

Two weeks of planning followed. Each day after breakfast—Mr. Kao, a senior official in the Nationalities Affairs Commission, arrived at a conference room in the company of a dozen assistants bearing detailed maps of Tibet. Gradually a three-and-a-half-month itinerary covering roughly 2,500 miles and 50 stops was settled on. Mr. Kao offered a virtual carte blanche, insisting that, except for areas without roads and bridges, the country was open. Between sessions he also sought to persuade the delegation to accede to China’s aims for Tibet. “There’s no use in staying outside any longer,” he repeated throughout their first days together. “You must come back to live in the motherland. We should be friends and work together. Please tell the Dalai that every suitable arrangement will be made for him if he returns.”

On a tour of the Peking Institute of National Minorities, the delegates met their first compatriots. As they strolled across the campus in the company of a few young Tibetans, free, temporarily, of surveillance, each man gingerly broached the topic of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. “It was very revealing,” said Lobsang Samten. “All the students we spoke with were extremely nationalistic. They had been born under alien rule. They had never known an independent Tibet. Yet every one was against the Chinese. We were amazed. These students, after all, are being trained as cadres.” A second encounter with Tibetans came after leaving Peking, once more at a Minorities Institute, this time in Langzhou, capital of Gansu Province, the last stop before entering northeast Tibet. Again breaking into small, unobtrusive groups, the delegates managed to speak with prominent Tibetans from adjacent Amdo, now called Chinghai Province. Walking through the tall fir trees and buildings of the campus, Lobsang Samten was told by one man, just released after nineteen years in prison: “Whatever the Chinese say or do, don’t trust them. Whatever they say about us Tibetans, don’t believe it. We are all united against them. There are underground groups across the whole country and even in the prisons. The young people in particular are very committed.”

Early on the morning of August 28 the delegation left Langzhou in two white Toyota minibuses. Escorted by six army jeeps containing twenty local officials plus ten who had accompanied them from Peking, they drove due west toward the foothills of the Hsi-ching Mountains. At the edge of the plain of China, the column paused for lunch in a small Moslem village. Afterwards, it began the two-hour ascent to the first pass, which, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, gave onto the far eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. Their mood increasingly expectant, the delegation stared at the countryside until a swarthy middle-aged nomad, dressed in a thick sheepskin robe, his single braid topped by a bright blue piece of turquoise, came into view by the side of the road. But it was the black-and-white animal standing next to him that brought forth an immediate outburst. “There’s a yak! A yak!” cried Lobsang Samten. “Stop the car!”

The column came to an abrupt halt and the delegates ran out, calling to the perplexed nomad who returned a polite but vacanat smile. Once informed that the men had been sent by the Dalai Lama, his face fell into a look of utter disbelief, whereupon he clasped both hands in prayer, bowed his head and said simply, “Thank you.” From a nearby field a group of women and children raced over. Sharing apples with them, the delegates insisted on taking their picture again and again with the yak. “We didn’t care what the Chinese thought about us,” said Lobsang Samten, laughing. “It might seem silly, but you can’t imagine how it felt just to see a yak after all those years.” Before returning to the buses, the men learned that their destination was now close by: Labrang Tashikhiel, the largest city in Amdo, renowned, since the eighteenth century, for its resplendent monastery of over 5,000 monks.

Yaks, fields and haystacks passed in increasing numbers. The sun began to dip behind the mountains and then, once more, the cars stopped. A group of Chinese officials stood in the center of the road, their jeep parked to one side. After a hurried conference, one of the cadres approached the delegation and, speaking through their interpreter, said, “You are two kilometers from Tashikhiel now. We are concerned, though, about your safety. There are thousands of people waiting up ahead. We don’t know how they heard that you were coming. Please don’t stop your bus, don’t open the door or windows, don’t put your hands out, keep everything closed. Whatever happens, you must not talk to the people.”

“We were very surprised,” recounted Lobsang Samten. “But at that juncture, we tried to compromise. Later, we learned that Tibetans in Langzhou had sent word to Tashikhiel saying that a delegation from the Dalai Lama was coming and that even a brother of His Holiness, myself, was in the group.”

In a few more minutes the outskirts of Tashikhiel came into view with more than 6,000 people lining the road on either side. As the first jeep slowed, the crowd began to clap and shout. Then, seeing the delegation, it closed in on the column. “We opened our windows,” continued Lobsang Samten. “It was unbelievable. Everywhere people were shouting, throwing scarves, apples and flowers. They were dying to see us. They broke the windows of all the cars. They climbed on the roofs and pushed inside, stretching out their hands to touch us. The Chinese were screaming, ‘Don’t go out! Don’t go out! They’ll kill you! They’ll kill you!” All of the Tibetans were weeping, calling, ‘How is the Dalai Lama? How is His Holiness?” We yelled back, ‘He is fine. How are you?’ Then, when we saw how poor they were, it was so sad, we all started crying, too.

With freedom of assembly banned for over twenty years, the demonstration was almost inconceivable to the Chinese. “Mr. Kao was sitting next to me in the bus,” Lobsang Samten related. “He was terrified. ‘You are the representative of the Dalai Lama,’ he shouted, ‘and the people are trying to get blessings even from you. What would happen if the Dalai himself came? We cannot control it. We cannot be responsible. These people are just crazy!’ I had to talk to him like a child. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We are used to it. They love the Dalai Lama. They’ve missed him for so many years, and when his people visit, they like it.’ ”

As Tashikhiel’s few electric lights came on an hour and a half later, the column, immersed in a sea of people, reached the gates of a PLA guest house. There, a troop of white-jacketed police held the Tibetans back until, disembarking inside the tall iron fence surrounding the complex, the delegates calmed the crowd by promising to see them in the morning. Hundreds, however, refused to depart and instead camped before the gates. Inside, the Chinese officials were in an uproar. The delegation tried to appease them, but at the moment their own feelings took precedence. As Lobsang Samten explained, “That night we were all very upset. We were so proud of our people. The way they received us—their strength—was so encouraging. But it was also very sad. Their poverty was extreme. Most were just in rags, like beggars. And then, too, the situation was very difficult. We Tibetans were back together again, but we weren’t free. The Chinese were still there between us.”

The next morning, Lobsang Samten was disturbed soon after rising, by a knock on his door. One of the two doctors traveling with the group, accompanied by a translator, stepped into his room. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked. “I expect you are not feeling well at all.” “I feel fine,” Lobsang Samten replied. “You must take care of yourself,” the physician continued. “Please do not exert yourself unduly and don’t become overexcited. The altitude can be very dangerous.” After taking blood pressure and temperature, the doctor departed, leaving Lobsang Samten laughing in spite of himself. “The Chinese are so careful when they go up to Tibet,” he reflected. “During the entire trip we Tibetans felt well, but the people from Peking constantly suffered headaches, nausea and nosebleeds. Their faces swelled up and every day they were forced to stop once or twice to vomit by the roadside.” Each jeep was equipped with four three-foot-long sausage-shaped rubber oxygen pillows with a tube protruding from one end. These were primarily used by the officials from Peking, who were soon breathing from them, slumped in their seats throughout the day. In some cases altitude sickness because so severe that the pillows had to be carried continually. The sight of the Chinese walking slowly about at rest stops, a long tube stuck in one nostril, an ungainly pillow tucked under an arm, more than offset the delegates’ own informal behavior.

After breakfast a meeting of forty of the cadres was convened. “It is our duty to protect you,” said the local party secretary to the delegation. “We don’t know who these people are and we can’t control them. To avoid being troubled, you must visit Tashikhiel Monastery by car today. You must stay together and not separate or mix with the people.” Lobsang Samten replied on the delegation’s behalf. “We are Tibetan,” he said. “The people greeting us are also Tibetan. Thus there is no problem. Whatever occurs, we will assume full responsibility.” The assurance, though, proved unsatisfactory. The party secretary replied, “Now, it is impossible for you to go out—unless you do so in the manner I’ve said.” Lobsang Samten paused before answering and then stated, “The Dalai Lama has informed the authorities in Peking that he has sent his people for the express purpose of discovering the feelings and conditions of the Tibetans in Tibet. This was agreed upon by the Peking government and the Dalai Lama. Therefore, we will not avoid the crowd but are going to walk directly through it and meet the people.” To diffuse the confrontation Mr. Kao intervened. “It is true,” he said. “This was agreed between Peking and the Dalai. Whatever they want we must let them do it.” “At that point everyone fell silent,” said Lobsang Samten. “We won this argument, but the same fight came up at every single stop. In general, the officials who traveled with us from Peking were patient, polite and diplomatic. On the other hand, the local authorities were terrible—short-tempered and narrow-minded. They behaved crudely, ordering and pushing us here and there. This is one thing we learned, that has made life very difficult for our people over the years.”

At ten o’clock, the delegation left the guest house and walked to the gate. The Tibetans who had slept the night beside it were waiting. Behind them, lining the road to Ashikhile Monastery a mile and a quarter away, stood almost 10,000 people. While a Chinese official filmed and took notes (a task he performed every day of the trip), the delegates walked eagerly through the gates to greet the crowd. As they did a nearby police officer ordered his waiting detachment to surround them. Simultaneously, the officials from the meeting converged on the five men hoping as well to block them off. The attempt lasted no more than a moment. Like a wave, the Tibetans surged in from all sides straining to reach the delegation. “It all happened just like before,” said Lobsang Samten. “Everyone rushed at us, weeping and calling for His Holiness. People were crying hysterically. There were some who just collapsed in tears on the ground. The others pulled our hair and tore our clothes for mementos—blessings in fact. From that time on, I lost so much hair, my hands were always cut and my voice was constantly hoarse from shouting to crowds. Altogether one overcoat, a raincoat, two shirts and a cap were torn off my back during the trip.”

The delegation had brought a few hundred small photos of the Dalai Lama, as well as a number of red protection cords personally blessed by him. After the second stop on their tour, the supply of both was exhausted, compelling the men to distribute their own rosaries, a bead at a time. On this first morning, the forty pictures they carried disappeared well before reaching the entrance to Tashikhiel Monastery. Lobsang Samten had seen the cloister in 1955, while returning with the Dalai Lama from his trip to China. Then, its massive gold-roofed assembly hall had presided over a city of whitewashed hostels and shrines, whose streets were filled with a cavalcade of monks and pilgrims. Now 90 percent of the monastery was gone, razed to the ground, with only a few fenced-in buildings remaining. On a vacant field, newly created before the surviving structures, a few hundred elderly Tibetans had arranged themselves into a long line. Holding white scarves and flowers, they wept profusely as the delegation walked by. “God! They were crying so much,” recounted Samten. “ ‘Now we have nothing left,’ they kept saying. ‘Everything has been destroyed!’ What could we say? Once Tashikhiel was a fantastic, a beautiful place. Now everything is finished. The Chinese just tore it all down.”

Eleven aged monks, dressed in brand-new robes, welcomed the delegates before the main building. Shown within, the men were surprised to find butter lamps burning, religious paintings neatly arranged on the walls and fresh offerings before the images. Then, over tea and biscuits in a reception room, a well-dressed cadre who had been waiting at the monastery stood up and made a speech. “You can see from these temples how the Communist Party ensures freedom of religion,” he began. “In the old society there was no such freedom. The monks never worked. They only exploited the people. But now, after land reform and the Party’s rule, all of that has been abolished. Conditions have become extremely good.” One of the Cabinet ministers in the delegation asked, “What happened to all the buildings?” “Unfortunately, under the left-deviationist policies of the Gang of Four, some excesses occurred,” replied the cadre. “And where are the five thousands monks?” inquired the minister. “Following the 1959 uprising, they voluntarily chose to leave and take up new lives as farmers. Today none wish to return.”

In reality, as Lobsang Samten knew from talking quietly to a monk during the tour, Labrang Tashikhiel had been destroyed a full decade before the Cultural Revolution. Prior to the 1959 revolt its riches had been shipped to China, its scholars, physicians and artists sent to prison camps, from which only a handful returned alive. Only the empty buildings had been demolished during the Cultural Revolution. A month earlier, the eleven monks present had been collected from various communes in the neighboring countryside, along with images, scriptures and butter lamps scavenged from other ruins. Brought to the abandoned monastery, they had been ordered to create a facsimile of its previous state in time for the exiles’ visit.

The delegates spent four days in Tashikhiel. On the second day Tibetans began to collect by the guest house, asking Chinese guards for permission to speak with the visitors. From them came the first broad sampling of the Tibetan people’s sentiments. “Whenever we asked people what had happened since the revolt,” related Lobsang Samten, “they would just start crying. Then, after composing themselves, they’d reply, ‘Our country has nothing now. Everthing is finished. But we Tibetans who are still alive, our spirit is strong. We’ll never lose it. As long as His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not in the hands of the Chinese we have hope. Please let him know whatever he is doing for our freedom, we are grateful.’ This is all they said, over and over again. Very few wanted to discuss their personal problems.” On one occasion, though, an old friend of Lobsang Samten’s came to visit. Formerly an important tribal leader in Amdo, he had been arrested after the uprising and imprisoned for twenty years at hard labor. He had been released, in a limited amnesty, only a few days before the delegation’s arrival. “He looked unbelievable,” said Samten. “He had been such a strong, heavily built man. Now I could barely recognize him. The fellow was just broken. He said everything he owned, his land, his home and possessions, were taken. His family had been separated. He had never seen them again. He had just heard a few days before that his son had died in prison. ‘Look at me, Lobsang,’ he said. ‘I have nothing left except this one suit of clothes they gave me.’ It was very upsetting. When we finally did get people to talk about themselves,” concluded Lobsang Samten, “there wasn’t a single family without some kind of story like this one.”

Between visitors, the delegation toured Tashikhiel itself. Here they found two entirely separate worlds: the original city, still inhabited by Tibetans, and a Chinese “new town” surrounding it. The Tibetan section was little better than an open grave. Its buildings were in total disrepair, its streets muddy and impassable. The people lived in dark, decaying rooms with barely any furniture or utensils and no running water and only intermittent electricity. On the other hand, the Chinese quarter, though itself showing signs of neglect, was newly built, its inhabitants far better fed and clothed than the Tibetans. Seeing one impoverished home after another, the delegates began to find themselves overwhelmed.

“We were so shocked that after a few days none of us could eat or sleep,” related Lobsang Samten. “We remembered life in the old Tibet. We thought of our freedom in India and we compared this to what had occurred in our country. All the while, the Chinese kept shamelessly repeating propaganda about improved conditions and how joyful the people were. We were furious about this, and on top of it all we had this mixed feeling of joy and sadness on seeing our people again. It was too much. When I reached Hong Kong at the end of the tour, I actually slept day and night for a week.”

The delegation remained in Amdo for three weeks more. Twenty towns and dozens of villages, communes and nomad stations, spanning thousands of square miles, were visited. Drives lasting an entire day were common, always across barren windswept tundra, a network of Chinese military roads and telegraph lines having replaced the old caravan routes. Somehow, word of the delegation’s approach preceded it, and invariably resulted in tumultuous greetings. By mid-September, after only a month in Tibet, the exiles had been mobbed by tens of thousands of Tibetans. The necessity of appearing liberal prevented the Chinese from calling on the PLA to suppress the near-riots, yet it was clear that some action had to be taken. As a result, word was sent by Mr. Kao to the leaders of the Tibet Autonomous Region in Lhasa concerning the difficulties being encountered. Following this, last-minute efforts were made to prevent the flood inundating the countryside from pouring into the capital itself.

At Lhasa’s nightly meetings Chinese cadres departed from their policy of secrecy, and announced that representatives of the Dalai Lama would soon arrive in the city. The men were logchoepas—“reactionaries”—it was said. Nevertheless, the facades of the buildings lining Lhasa’s major thoroughfares were to be washed and the streets kept free of puddles and rubble. Lhasans were to wear their best clothes and if, by chance, they encountered visitors, were to maintain a cheerful demeanor. They were to talk only if spoken to first, and then in a firm, convincing tone, they should relate how good life was under the new order. Families whom the authorities thought might be visited by the delegation were issued coupons for new worker’s suits as well as gaudy pink and blue ribbons to be braided in the women’s hair. Tea thermoses, blankets and quilts were given to the most important and their rooms were inspected to make sure that portraits of Mao and Party Chairman Hua Guofeng were prominently displayed on the walls. A few days before the delegation’s arrival, Chinese officials conveyed a final set of instructions. It was now revealed that the delegation had already been in Amdo. Tibetans there, unable to suppress their natural hatred for all logchoepas, had, it was claimed, openly attacked the group. Wherever the men appeared, hundreds turned out to throw dirt and stones and denounce and spit on them. Party workers were adamant: similar behavior would not be tolerated in the capital—though it seemed this was precisely what was being sought. As a gesture to the delegation itself, the Revolutionary Committee that had administered Tibet since 1968 was abruptly replaced by a new People’s Government of the Autonomous Region of Tibet, headed by Tien Bao, a Tibetan. Ren Rong, however, retained his position as first party secretary of the regional CCP, the true repository of power in Tibet.

On the morning of September 26, the delegation left Langzhou on a three-hour flight to Central Tibet. At Gongkar Airport they were met by new minibuses and two hours later, entering the western end of the Lhasan Valley, they caught their first glimpse of the Potala’s golden rooftops shining in the distance. “I always believed that one day I would see my home again,” recalled Lobsang Samten. “When I did, I was overwhelmed by memories. My whole childhood, living with His Holiness in that beautiful building, came into my mind. Then it was full of life; people worked in the offices, prayed in the chapels, walked on the outside stairways and on the rooftops and at night its windows were always lit by hundreds of butter lamps. Now it looked completely dead—empty and cold. All of its dignity was gone.” Before reaching the Potala, the delegation was surprised to find itself routed away from the city and driven to a remote guest house four miles west of Lhasa. “This is the best residence available,” local officials informed the party on their arrival. “Everything here is quiet and clean. Whatever you need we’ll be happy to bring to you.” The group demanded to be taken to Lhasa immediately, where the Tibetan people could see them, but were refused. A standoff ensued, until Lobsang Samten attempted to ease the tension with a joke. “Actually, my home is in Lhasa,” he mentioned wryly. “I don’t need to stay in a military guest house. I am just going over to stay in my mother’s place right now.” “The Chinese all had a good laugh when I said that,” he remarked. “Then they said, ‘Lobsang, your home doesn’t exist anymore. Now it belongs to the public.’ ‘What public?’ I couldn’t help asking. ‘Tibetans or Chinese?’ ‘Oh, just the ordinary public,’ they said. After that everyone was quiet.”

Three days later the delegation was transferred to Guest House No. 2 in the old city itself. By then it was amply clear that a new level of discord had been reached. On September 29, the delegates’ first morning in Lhasa, 17,000 Tibetans stormed the Central Cathedral, where the group had come to worship. Chinese security personnel were trampled, the cathedral’s front gates broken open and the delegates mobbed in a wild frenzy that profoundly shocked Tibet’s highest authorities. That night meetings were convened and a strict warning issued to the city’s population not to engage in demonstrations. Regardless, the very next day Lhasans openly defied the orders, taking to the streets by the thousands whenever the delegates ventured out. Before dawn each morning long lines formed in the courtyard of Guest House No. 2. Many of those waiting were close friends whom the men hadn’t seen since 1959. From them, they learned that despite the general mood of defiance, hundreds of people were still too frightened to appear. Thereafter, they took long walks through Lhasa’s narrow streets, where the size of the accompanying crowds made surveillance difficult. In this way they were able to visit many people directly in their homes.

On October 1, China’s liberation day, officials of the Tibet Autonomous Region insisted they attend a celebration at the Norbulingka or “People’s Park.” The event was a crucial test for Ren Rong, Tien Bao and the TAR’s other chief administrators. Having failed to check an increasingly unstable situation, they hoped under controlled conditions and on the most important holiday of the year to present a convincingly different view of Tibet. Accordingly, scores of Tibetan cadres and their families were instructed to picnic at the Jewel Park, their best clothes, thermoses, radios and mah-jong tiles prominently on display. By 10 a.m., however, almost 8,000 uninvited guests had gathered in the park. Like all the others, the crowd erupted and a phalanx of police was required to clear the way to a building beside the Takten Mingyur, the Dalai Lama’s residence, built, under Lobsang Samten’s own supervision, in 1956. There, greeted by the TAR’s leading officials, the exile group was served tea and biscuits, and requested not to venture into the gathering; as one of their hosts put it, they “might get lost.”

The delegation had already toured the Norbulingka a few days before. Its gardens, save for the immediate area surrounding the Takten Mingyur, were a jungle. Among the ramshackle shells of old temples and pavilions, the only improvement had been an odd zoo of artificial rocks and monkey cages. Guided by a Chinese man and woman through the Dalai Lama’s modest two-story residence, they had been treated to a description, given to the palace’s few visitors, of the Tibetan leader’s lifestyle. “This is where the Dalai slept. This is where he ate. This is where the Dalai met his mother. This is his record player and his electric fan,” they were told. Finally, Lobsang Samten interjected, “I understand very well what you are saying, but don’t you think I should tell you people where you are? I built this palace and worked here every day.” “Oh yes, Lobsang knows better than we do,” they replied, laughing, before going on with their account. Shortly afterwards the delegation had walked past the Kalsang Phodrang, a large palace in the Norbulingka, once used for state occasions. Finding the front doors locked, they mounted the building by exterior steps and peered through a bay of broken windows into the main hall. Inside, the temple was filled to a height of twenty-five feet with a mass of shattered heads, limbs and pedestals, the mangled remains of centuries-old statuues. “We saved these from the people,” the guides explained. “It was the people themselves who destroyed them, not us, during the Cultural Revolution. They robbed the jewels and gold. In fact, if we hadn’t protected these statues, they would have been stolen as well.”

Recalling the wreckage in the Kalsang Phodrang, Lobsang Samten left the official reception and contrary to an understanding with the Chinese—never to make a public speech—strode to the palace’s front steps to address the crowd.

Thousands of Tibetans had jammed into the flagstone yard in front of the building. A single line of police, their arms interlocked, held them back, while plainclothes cadres filmed and took notes. The moment Lobsang Samten appeared, the crowd started to chant, “Long live the Dalai Lama!” A man waving a stick with a white scarf tied to its end pushed forward crying, “This scarf is for you from the people of Tibet.” On accepting it, Samten gestured for silence and then began to speak. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama misses you,” he said. “And he knows how you have suffered. We hope that one day he will come to see you. In the meantime, we are here to view the progress that has been made as well as the mistakes. Whatever we do, when we return to His Holiness we will report the truth.”

Lobsang Samten walked inside, and as he did, hundreds of Tibetans broke through the police cordon and stormed the building. Seeing them, he ignored the Chinese officials within who, terrified, forbade him to go back out, and immediately rejoined the gathering. Ten young men linked arms to protect him from the commotion. In their midst he spent the next five hours walking back and forth across the Jewel Park. Several times, the whole group was inadvertently pushed over, once waist-deep into a pond. “It was so chaotic that I only managed to sit down and picnic with people in a few spots,” Lobsang Samten remembered. “When I did, after only a few minutes of polite conversation, the people’s real feelings would pour out and they would start to cry uncontrollably. I’d try to get up to move on, and they would beg me to stay. Then they’d insist that we all have just one dance. So, for a little while, everyone, old men, women and children would join arms and try to do a few of our own Tibetan steps, laughing, singing, crying and dancing all at once.”

Halfway through the afternoon, a voice in the crowd called out, “Lobsang! Dr. Tenzin Choedrak is here. He’s looking for you.” In the next moment Dr. Choedrak appeared and the two men met each other for the first time since the mid-fifties. “You must be very tired” is all Dr. Choedrak said. It was he, though, as Lobsang Samten recalled, who looked “half dead.” Having asked the Chinese to find the doctor, Lobsang Samten now resolved to test their sincerity by requesting that Tenzin Choedrak be permitted to leave Tibet and come to India.

A few days after October 1, the delegates were informed of something else that had happened that day. Carried away by the excitement, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Tsering Lhamo, the wife of one of the Norbulingka’s gardeners and a mother of seven, had yelled, “Tibet is independent!” Arrested on the spot, she had been taken to a commune hall in southern Lhasa and held for three days. Between interrogation sessions, she was brought before the six hundred people in her neighborhood and given thamzing. Despite the beatings, she persistently said that her words were not an act of defiance but merely a simple mistake. Seeing Lobsang Samten standing on the steps of the Takten Mingyur, she was sure that he would soon be followed by the Dalai Lama and with him would come Tibet’s independence. She had only called out what she believed was obvious to all. Her account failed to satisfy the Chinese. Determined to make an example of Tsering Lhamo, the Public Security Bureau threw her in prison, where, according to many accounts, she was tortured with electric shock. “As soon as we heard this,” related Lobsang Samten, “we decided that there was no point in going on with our trip. We realized that our presence could only bring trouble for these poor people. That day, we did not go out. We canceled all our plans and told Mr. Kao that we wished to return as soon as possible to Peking and from there to India.” Fearful of the consequences of cutting the trip short, Mr. Kao swiftly secured the woman’s release. By way of explanation he stated that hers was a “very serious case”; her arrest had occurred “because the people themselves demanded it.”

On October 6, the delegation arrived at Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city. Shigatse, however, was empty. The entire city, save for a few frightened and infirm old people, had been sent to the fields before dawn. The same held true for Sakya, the next stop, and then Gyantse as well. It was only as the delegates were making their way out of the country, through the less closely administered mountainous areas of Kham, that they were able to meet people freely once more. Lobsang Samten recalled one incident in particular on this final stage of the journey. “One day we stopped in a small village for lunch,” he related. “A crowd gathered before the guest house, but Chinese guards kept them out. We were waiting to eat when a young Tibetan man somehow got in the door. He was very young, about twenty, and very strongly built. A great robust fellow—a real Khampa—bare-chested, in a sheepskin robe, with long hair. He didn’t give a damn about the Chinese. He walked right past them up to our table, stopped and just stared at me. He was trembling violently all over. Then he burst into tears. Tears, I mean, were just rolling out of his eyes. I tried to console him. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know how you feel.’ He didn’t say a word. He squeezed my hands tightly, stared at me, then just turned around and walked out.”

Leaving Tibet in the first week of November, the delegation flew from Chengdu to Peking, where they spent ten days meeting with high-ranking officials in both the Great Hall of the People and the Minority People’s Hall. During the discussions, those in charge of the new relations with the Tibetan exiles candidly asked the delegates what they thought of conditions in Tibet. “We decided beforehand that there was no use in antagonizing the situation by telling the whole truth,” recalled Lobsang Samten. “But we did say that Tibet was much poorer now than it had ever been in the past. ‘Education, health care, decent housing and employment, these things don’t exist,’ we told them. ‘Your people don’t even speak the language—and they treat the Tibetans very badly,’ ‘Yes, yes,’ they replied. ‘It’s all true. We are sorry. In the future we promise to improve conditions.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry. They have done such terrible things in our country. So many atrocities for so many years. What could the Chinese possibly do to compensate for our tragedy? Finally I said, ‘We have been very upset by what we saw but now it’s finished. In the future, these things will be discussed directly between His Holiness and Peking. We will wait and see what happens.’ ”

Flying to New Delhi via Hong Kong, the delegation returned to Dharamsala on December 21, 1979. They brought with them eleven hours of film, seven thousand letters written to relatives in exile, countless requests for the Dalai Lama to mention personal names in his prayers and a number of rare scriptures and relics secretly preserved during the destruction of the monasteries. They were met, though, by a somewhat confused, if expectant mood. To forestall a potentially divisive debate, their departure five months before had been kept strictly secret. The highest policy-making organ of the exile government, the National Working Committee, had been informed of the journey only a day before the group left Dharamsala. Two days later, on August 3, the Cabinet released a carefully worded circular, stating that, other than assessing “true conditions in Tibet,” the delegation had no “authority to decide any issue.” Despite this, fears of a sellout to China, mixed with indignation at the undisclosed departure, resulted in hundreds of letters pouring into Thekchen Chöling, most begging the Dalai Lama himself not to go to Peking.

The Tibetan leader, however, had already left India late in July on a trip to Europe and the United States, having visited the U.S.S.R. and Mongolia a month before. Undoubtedly, the specter of a Soviet-backed pan-nationalities front, led by the Dalai Lama, troubled Peking, just as did the renewed publicity Tibet received as the Dalai Lama toured Asia and the West. Yet, while applying pressure in this manner, Tenzin Gyatso, on receiving the delegation’s report after their return, refused to release its condemnatory findings to the world press, believing that to do so would only cause Peking to curtail its liberalization and harm the Tibetans themselves. Instead, the Dalai Lama, on March 10, 1980, called for China to accept exile youth as teachers in Tibet, a step designed to broaden the growing contact. Though no response was forthcoming, it was announced in April that a second delegation would visit Tibet. It was to leave in May, to be followed by a third group a month later. Meanwhile, as a two-hour film showing crowds of destitute people, destroyed monasteries, and small children working in labor gangs circulated refugee settlements, the controversy over the value of “delegation diplomacy” paled, even the Youth Congress declaring its support for the government so long as it settled for nothing less than full independence in future negotiations.

In Tibet, the Chinese spent the winter of 1980 busily preparing for the next delegation’s visit. On April 15, meetings were held identifying members of the second delegation as “agents of the Dalai’s false government” whose mission it was to advocate Tibetan independence. Tibetans were forbidden to meet with them. If they were encountered by accident, the people were not to smile, cry, shake hands, stand up if seated, remove their hats, offer scarves or invite them to their homes. The logchoepas, it was said, would hand out “independence badges,” small medals bearing the Tibetan flag. These should be thrown on the ground and stamped on. Pamphlets were then issued, outlining approved answers to questions the visitors might ask, while party cadres were given a crash course in Tibet’s history as an integral part of China.

On May 22, CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang, accompanied by Vice-Premier Wan Li, paid a visit to Tibet, the highest-ranking officials ever to come there in thirty years of Chinese occupation. During an inspection tour, Hu publicly expressed shock at the Tibetans’ living conditions. As a result, Ren Rong lost his post as the regional CCP’s First Secretary and was replaced by Yin Fatang, another military man who had been in Tibet since the arrival of the first occupation forces in 1950. A two-year six-point plan, intended to revitalize the area, was then announced. In it, withdrawal of 85 percent of the Chinese settlers was promised, as well as tax exemption, the right to engage in private enterprise and the lifting of the requirement to plant winter wheat instead of the more successful but, for the Chinese, unappetizing native barley.

In contrast to these conciliatory gestures, last-minute preparations to discourage public displays were carried out. Police in Lhasa and other major cities received shipments of arms, manacles and electric stunning equipment. Tibetan collaborators, posing as Khampas, attempted to rekindle regional animosities in a series of brawls staged in the Barkhor. Permission to consume alcohol was granted for the first time since 1959, it apparently being a local party officer’s hope that the Tibetans would become too inebriated to care about the visit. Finally, on the eve of the second delegation’s arrival, the case of Tsering Lhamo, the woman who had advocated Tibetan independence at the Norbulingka, was brought up at nightly meetings. As soon as the first delegation had departed, she had been thrown back in prison, where, it was now disseminated, she had been turned into “a vegetable” from electric shock. The names of those who had greeted the first delegation were on file, it was said; if they appeared again, they could expect a similar fate after the delegations had left. “The clouds of summer float by,” stated Han cadres—quoting an old Tibetan proverb—“but the sky stays where it is forever.” “The frog lives in the well all year round while the white crane comes briefly and then flies away.”

In the first week of May the second delegation arrived in Peking. Unlike the first delegation, they were lodged in civilian quarters. Nonetheless, on their first major outing they were taken to a large field in the capital’s suburbs to witness a military parade. For an hour and a half tanks rolled in formation past the reviewing stand, wheeled around and engaged in mock battle. The point was not missed. As Tenzin Tethong, head of the Office of Tibet in New York and the group’s leader, put it, “It was obvious that the Chinese wanted to intimidate us, but in reality, I think we threatened them.” Comprised of the Dalai Lama’s representatives in the United States, Japan and Switzerland, the head of the Tibetan community in Great Britain and the president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, the five delegates—all in their early thirties—had been chosen to demonstrate that the question of Tibetan independence would not pass with time. “The Chinese took one look at us and realized we were not the type of Tibetans they were used to dealing with,” explained Tenzin Tethong. “We were very outspoken. We challenged every statement they made, pointed out all their lies and mistakes. On top of that, they couldn’t understand us. The fact that we were so well educated yet still had faith in our religion and traditional culture was incomprehensible to them. It didn’t fit in with their dogma. Because of all this, there was a lot of tension between us.”

On May 17 the delegation left Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, for southern Amdo. As they entered the Tibetan highlands, people defiantly greeted them all along their route. In the next weeks, blockades of carts and bicycles pulled across roads deep in the countryside and continually forced their eight-car convoy to stop. When the Chinese attempted to clear the way, hundreds of people, collected from remote villages, appeared out of hiding to mob the party. Smaller groups prostrated in the road, bringing the speeding cars to a sudden halt. Everywhere the delegation was asked for “independence badges,” which they did not have, while, as emissaries of the Dalai Lama, their own persons were treated as though sacred. Both they and the third delegation repeatedly saw people collect dirt from the roads over which their cars passed. In Chamdo, where hair cuttings from the first delegation had been scooped up for blessings from a barbershop floor, they were met with scores of requests to name babies, an act normally performed only by a high lama. Even seven- and eight-year-old children sought their blessings, begging to be touched by the friends of “Chairman Dalai.”

On June 1, as the second delegation headed across Kham toward Central Tibet, the third delegation entered Canton. Sent to investigate educational standards, its seven members were led by Pema Gyalpo, the Dalai Lama’s younger sister and head of the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala. “You can’t imagine what our first sight of China was like,” she recalled, describing the negative impressions which beset her group from the start of its journey. “It was a miserable rainy day. Outside our train hundreds of people were queued up behind a high wire fence in the Canton train station. A line of policemen held them back, and they were all pushing to get out of the country. I mean, as Tibetan refugees we’ve learned so many bad things about the Chinese Communists and now the very first thing we saw in China, after all these years, was crowds of people trying to escape. It put a chill into all of us.”

The third delegation’s personal discomfort was accented by a pronounced shift in the behavior of their hosts. Aware of the second delegation’s tumultuous greeting in Tibet, officials of the Nationalities Affairs Commission’s “Third,” or Tibetan, department dropped the veneer of hospitality the earlier hosts had assumed. Quartered in the same military guest house that the first delegation had stayed in, the third delegation was maneuvered away from foreigners in Peking’s streets, taken on circuitous routes to their destinations—to discourage them, they assumed, from venturing out on their own—and on the few occasions they did take unguided walks, openly trailed by undercover police. “From the start the Chinese were studying us,” observed Pema Gyalpo. “In the guest house in Peking, the Tibetan interpreters who worked for them came one at a time to our rooms, knocked on the door, stepped inside and said, ‘How are you today?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, they would just sit down and begin asking questions. ‘How do the Tibetans in India live? What are their feelings about the Dalai Lama? How are they employed? What are their schools like? What are the children studying?’ It was clear that their intentions were not good.” On receiving answers from one delegate, the interpreters would go to a second, ask the same questions, and then, if the replies varied, return to the first to inquire why he had given one answer while his colleague employed another. As Pema Gyalpo explained, “Because of this cross-examination they soon knew each of our characters perfectly. I’m a very blunt, straightforward person. Not at all diplomatic. They couldn’t get anything but an argument out of me, but with the others they directly tried to manipulate some of them and cause trouble.” On one occasion, a Swiss-raised Tibetan photographer with the group was missing for three hours. When he returned the other delegates discovered that he had been subjected to an intensive grilling. “Our photographer didn’t understand what the Chinese were getting at when they asked if the Tibetans in exile were disunited,” said Pema Gyalpo. “He just answered candidly concerning the differences that do exist, which is exactly what they sought in order to make trouble.” At the time, the questions themselves created dissension among the delegates, as the pressure of appraising different responses led to divisiveness. The photographer’s replies became the subject of a heated argument and he was finally told “just to take photos and keep quiet.”

But though all the delegates from then on behaved with the utmost care, the questions never ceased. “By the time our stay was coming to an end,” said Pema Gyalpo, “they were trying to get as much information from us as possible. The cadres from Peking would go so far as to have teachers in schools we visited ask exactly how much aid the refugees receive from the government of India. What the budget for individual schools are, and who gives money to them. I couldn’t believe how devious their thinking was.”

In this strained atmosphere, the first untoward occurrence inevitably produced a breakdown in relations. Shortly after entering Tibet, while driving to a destination near Tashikhiel, in Amdo, the delegation suddenly found the road blocked by 7,000 people. In a rage, one of the officials from Peking leaped from the lead car, in which Pema Gyalpo was sitting, and began to beat the Tibetans back. Deluged by their numbers, he soon retreated to the jeep, locked the door and pushed Pema Gyalpo between himself and a Chinese woman cadre, who in turn forbade her to open the windows. “It took us three hours to get out of that crowd,” Pema Gyalpo related. “The people were tearing bits of canvas from the jeep’s roof. They were calling to meet me, but the Chinese kept me like a prisoner in the jeep. I was furious. A while after lunch we came to another large crowd on the road, and this time I opened the window myself. The Chinese woman ordered me to close it, and then I really blew my top. I told the interpreter in the front seat to translate every word I said and I let her have it. I told her that if I chose to greet my own people, that was my wish, and that I would not tolerate her dictating to me. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had sent us to meet the people and if she persisted in blocking this, I said that I would return to India immediately. Then everything I thought finally came out. There were our people in rags, half starving, in tears, calling out all around the jeep, and I said to this lady, ‘Everywhere we’ve gone you’ve claimed that you’ve made so much progress. Look at these people. Is that progress? I want you to ask them when they had their last taste of meat like we had for lunch. What have you achieved in twenty years but this?’ Then all she said was: ‘Why are these people acting so wildly? Do the Tibetans in India behave like that?’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Of course not.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘In India we are free. These people are acting like this because you have suppressed them too much. This is the result of your cruelty.’ Then they just kept quiet. I was really in tears. When the Tibetan interpreter tried to calm me down, I turned on him and shouted, ‘What are you doing for your people? Just look at them!’ ”

That evening Pema Gyalpo decided to cancel the tour. Apprised of her decision, the Chinese approached Rabten Chazotsang, the rector of the Mussoorie school, and tried to apologize. The woman, they explained, suffered from arthritis and could not bear a draft on her shoulder. For this reason—and no other—she had ordered Pema Gyalpo to keep the jeep’s window closed. Promised that henceforth they would not be interfered with, the delegation continued its tour. From that time on, though, a state of open hostility threatened to break relations at any time.

After traveling for almost two months, the second delegation entered Lhasa in the last week of July 1980. On the morning of July 25, they were mobbed by 10,000 people while en route to the Central Cathedral. It took half an hour to drive the few blocks from the guest house and an hour to cross the short distance from where the bus stopped to the cathedral’s entrance. Offered a white scarf by the temple’s caretaker (fired that same day for his action), the delegation toured the interior and emerged on the roof to make a brief speech to the crowd, which had quietly seated itself in Tsuglakhang front courtyard. During their talk a group of young Tibetan men shouted in unison three times, “Tibet is fully independent!” The Chinese took no action, nor did they the next day, when, during a speech to a gathering of 3,500 at the base of the Potala, a man stood up and again yelled, “Tibet is independent!” On the following day, however, July 27, the most volatile demonstration to date exhausted their restraint.

Driving out of Lhasa at nine in the morning, the delegation crossed the Kyichu River and headed northeast. Thirty miles up the valley, they rounded the end of a long scarp in the mountains and began to climb upwards. At the first turn in the road a Tibetan family stood waiting to greet them holding sticks of incense, scarves and a thermos of tea. After halting their minibus for a brief talk, the delegation proceeded to the next turn, where two more groups waited. Stopping again, they then resumed driving until, turning a final bend, they caught sight of their destination: Ganden Monastery. Thirty-two years before, on the eve of the Chinese invasion, the renowned Tibetan scholar Giuseppe Tucci had described the traveler’s first view of Ganden as “a sight out of this world.” Its “freshly whitewashed walls framing the blazing red of the temples and the garish gold of the roofs … looked bodiless,” he had written, “a mere outline silhouetted against the spotlessly blue sky.” Now, where over a hundred great buildings had once stood, only long lines of jagged ruins remained. Ganden had literally been blown to pieces. “We’d heard about Ganden’s destruction before,” recalled Tenzin Tethong, “but no words could ever describe the sight. Ganden means ‘the Joyful Paradise,’ and it truly used to be a shining city on a hill. Now it’s a blasted, bombed-out hulk. It looks as though it was destroyed five hundred years ago, not twelve.”

At the last turn, more than eighty trucks, parked up to the first of the broken walls, blocked the road. Five thousand people waited beside them. “The moment we arrived, the crowd simply couldn’t contain itself,” related Tenzin Tethong. “Everyone came running down the hill, crying and calling out. I remember a few young boys and girls, teen-agers, grabbing on to my jacket. They were practically howling in tears. They refused to let go. People beside them were saying, ‘Please, you mustn’t cry so much,’ but then they started crying as well, pointing up the hill and saying, ‘Look. There is our Ganden. See what they’ve done to it!’ ”

The Tibetans had gathered at Ganden not merely to welcome the delegation but to undertake the seemingly impossible task of reconstructing it. Using stones and lumber pilfered from construction sites around Lhasa, groups of volunteers had begun to work a few weeks before. Before dawn each Sunday they would assemble at designated spots to be picked up by Tibetan truck drivers. With their materials piled on board Chinese trucks, they set out on what, with repeated stops for new groups, amounted to a four-hour drive to the ruins of the monastery. Arriving at the foot of the hill below Ganden, all would dismount and help to push the overladen vehicles up the slope. Their labor, on the one free day in the week, continued until after dark. Supervised by a group of monks, carpenters and masons, the workers had already begun to rebuild a residence for the Dalai Lama and the temple which once housed Je Tsongkhapa’s tomb. Not merely a defiance of Chinese ideology, the effort represented the essence of the Tibetan people’s will to pursue their own vision of life, and, on the day of the delegation’s visit—the 571st anniversary of Ganden’s founding—the underground meant to mark it as such, by openly escorting the exiles through the demolished monastery to three tents in which monks, wearing robes they had kept hidden for decades, waited to conduct religious services before outdoor altars fashioned from images preserved until then in secret caches. After reciting the Dalai Lama’s prayers for a free Tibet, the delegates made lengthy, impassioned speeches, during which thousands, emboldened by both the moment and the distance from Lhasa, raised their hands in clenched fists, shouting for Tibet’s freedom.

Receiving reports of the day’s event, Chinese authorities in Lhasa finally decided to act—regardless of its effect on relations with the Dalai Lama. Rumors of a demonstration at which the Tibetan flag was to be raised were circulating through the capital. Moreover a group of twenty-one Western correspondents, each representing a major periodical and only the second such party permitted into Tibet, were staying at the same guest house as the delegation. So far they had successfully been kept away from the visitors. Their presence, though, plainly threatened to turn an as yet unknown internal disturbance into an international publicity disaster.

At 4:00 p.m. on July 28, a few reporters noticed Tibetans beginning to gather in the courtyard of Guest House No. 2. Within an hour, over 2,000 people were standing shoulder to shoulder in the yard. As the sun set, the familiar white minibus appeared and the crowd went wild. Men raised clenched fists; women and children cried. Those closest to the bus stormed its occupants, placing their hands on top of their own heads in blessing, embracing them, tearing their clothes. Amazed, the correspondents began photographing while Phuntso Wangyal, chairman of the Tibetan community in Great Britain, addressed the gathering from the steps of the Guest House, “May the Dalai Lama’s hopes and aspirations be fulfilled,” he began, but before he could continue, a young man leapt up crying, “Long live His Holiness, the Dalai Lama,” a call the crowd began to chant in unison, raising their fists with each repetition. As the delegation retired indoors, correspondents rushed to speak with them, but were prevented from doing so by the Chinese.

The next morning the bus failed to arrive as usual. By 11:30, a meeting of sixteen officials was convened in the sitting room of the guest house. Here, the second delegation was informed that its tour had been canceled. They were to pack immediately and return to Peking. “By your actions,” Sonam Norbu, a Tibetan vice-chairman of the TAR, stated, “you have deliberately incited the Tibetan people to break with the motherland, and to sever their ties with their elder brothers, the Han Chinese. This amounts to a grave breach in relations between the Dalai and Peking and will not be tolerated.” Hustled three hours later out the building’s back door, having, in the interim, been detained in their rooms, the second delegation was driven from Lhasa. Their route was watched over by cadres of the Public Security Bureau, soon to be reinforced by PLA squads, who had been meticulously held on their bases until now. Taken to Gongkar Airport, the delegation spent the night, and the next day was flown out of the country to Chengdu and thence to Peking.

On hearing of the second delegation’s expulsion, the third delegation cabled Dharamsala from Shigatse. They received instructions to complete the remaining six weeks of their tour. A fourth delegation, however, scheduled to depart in August, never left India. Put off by Peking until the spring of 1981, it was then told that, although Ngabo Ngawang Jigme had replaced Tien Bao as the head of the TAR government (a further gesture of Chinese conciliation), their visit was postponed indefinitely. Nothing substantial occurred for another year until, in April 1982, a three-member team—comprised of Juchen Thubten Namgyal, the senior minister in the Dalai Lama’s Cabinet; P. T. Takla, Minister of Security; and Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, Chairman of the renamed Assembly of the Tibetan People’s Deputies—flew to Peking. There they met with Xi Zhongxun, Secretary of the Party Central Secretariat, Ulanfu, longtime head of the Nationalities Affairs Commission, and Yang Jiren, a Vice Premier. In several weeks of discussion, the highest level exchange to date, both sides sought to clarify their positions on Tibet’s status while exploring possible compromise solutions. Unfortunately, these talks ended in a stalemate. Their contents, though, were kept secret until a November editorial in Beijing Review claimed that the exiles had requested China to incorporate all Tibetan areas into a “unified big Tibetan Autonomous Region” which would be granted the same status offered by the PRC to Taiwan in its 9-point reunification proposal of October 1, 1981. It also noted that the most recent entreaty from the Tibetans had been automatically rejected since Tibet had been “liberated for more than three decades.” Ongoing calls for its independence were, it said, nothing more than “a dirty allegation of imperialist aggression … opposed by the Chinese people and most strenuously by the Tibetan people.”

On May 9, 1983, Dharamsala finally responded. Not bothering to address the claim that the Tibetans had, in the manner of supplicants, initiated contact with China, the Kashag nevertheless refuted virtually every other point in the Beijing Review’s editorial. The Tibetan delegation had not asked for the status offered to Taiwan nor had it suggested the creation of a new autonomous region. Instead, while presenting a detailed brief on Tibet’s racial, cultural and historic independence, the delegation had noted the correct boundaries of the region (of which the TAR was only one third) and concluded, as an aside, that any concessions from Peking must entail “a far greater degree of freedom” than that presented to Taiwan.

The contrasting versions of the talks underscored how far the two sides actually were from a negotiated settlement. Although the Panchen Lama had been permitted to visit Lhasa during the summer of 1982—where tens of thousands of people greeted him—a new wave of mass arrests, the imposition of a curfew in Lhasa and the public execution of a number of “counterrevolutionaries” occurred as late as the autumn of 1983. The attempt to find a solution to Tibet’s problems had, it seemed, collapsed, only a few years after it had begun. One single benefit continued to accrue, keeping alive the hopes of individual Tibetans: permission, granted warily and to a chosen few, to travel abroad.

LATE IN OCTOBER 1980—a year after the first delegation’s visit to Lhasa—Dr. Tenzin Choedrak’s “black hat” was removed before 3,000 inmates of Sangyip Prison and he was proclaimed a free man. He was then informed that Lobsang Samten’s request had been granted. He would be permitted to go to India. Aware of his imminent departure, hundreds of people came to visit, bearing letters for the Dalai Lama. Unable to carry them, Dr. Choedrak promised instead to relate in person to the Dalai Lama how bad conditions in Tibet were. Meanwhile, at a tea party given for him by prison authorities on the eve of his departure, Tenzin Choedrak dutifully swore to abide by the Party’s newest maxim, that of “seeking truth from facts.” The next day he went by jeep to Shigatse and from there to the Nepalese border. On the Tibetan side stood a PLA guardhouse, the red five-starred flag of China displayed beside a single sentry standing rigidly at attention. Across the Nepal-China Friendship bridge, which spanned the fast-flowing Nyanang river, flew the blue and maroon double pennant of the kingdom, Nepalese soldiers relaxing over a cup of tea by a customs house beneath it. Dr. Choedrak walked in company with another Tibetan, and as he stood on the red line dividing the bridge, turned to face the PLA for the last time. The first real feeling of freedom he had experienced in twenty-one years surged up, and with the realization that he was beyond the control of his guards forever, he yelled, “Now all of you Chinese can go to hell, and may I never see you again!” Then smiling, but somewhat confused, he walked across the remainder of the bridge and stepped onto the free soil of Nepal.

Dr. Choedrak continued his story: “A friend of Lobsang Samten’s picked me up at the border. He owns a restaurant and he drove me into Katmandu. When we arrived, there was so much noise and commotion that I didn’t feel settled. I wanted to relax, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘When will there be a problem in this place? When will there be an unsettled period? When will trouble come here? Katmandu is such a small city and Nepal so little in comparison to Tibet that the Chinese could topple the whole country in just one or two hours if they wanted.’ That’s the feeling I had because of all the confusion. Nothing seemed secure.”

Tenzin Choedrak stayed in Katmandu for almost a week before flying to India. During his first days of freedom the conflicting impressions continued.

“When I entered Katmandu I was surprised by how much people possessed,” he said. “It was a shock to realize that the merchandise in the stores and that all the cars and scooters on the streets were privately owned. In all of Tibet there is not a single good cooking pot that a person can buy or sell individually. I asked the man who was my host, ‘Are these cars made in Nepal, or do they come from India?’ He replied, ‘No. These cars are made mostly in Japan.’ So I asked him, ‘How much does a car cost?’ And he said, ‘Oh, about fifty to sixty thousand rupees.’ And then I was completely overwhelmed, because if all the families in Lhasa put their money together, they still couldn’t afford to buy one car, and here many people actually owned their own.”

Following his arrival in India Dr. Choedrak’s disorientation grew stronger. “I flew from Katmandu to New Delhi at night,” he said. “All I could think about was how anxious I was to see His Holiness. But the next morning, when I walked through the city, again I became completely confused. There was so much more prosperity than even in Nepal, that I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This world really is unfair. In Tibet a person struggles just to eat and here they have so much!’ I remember seeing a store that sold silverware and another that sold meat. When I watched people shopping in them, I realized, ‘Oh, this really is a free country. If you have money you can buy as much as you want and no one can stop you.’ In Tibet, there is nothing to buy, there are no products and no one has money. Then I saw Indian ladies strolling about, well dressed and doing nothing. ‘This really is a free world,’ I thought. ‘People can just be idle if they choose to.’ And I wondered, ‘How can they have so much improvement if the people are not working all the time?’ In Tibet everyone works constantly. The women, especially, work all the time, day and night. But still there is no improvement. While here in India no one was working but there was so much of everything. This development must somehow result from freedom, but how it does is very confusing to me.”

Arriving in Dharamsala on November 19, 1980, Tenzin Choedrak was reunited with Lobsang Samten and given a room in Meunkay Khangsa, the government guest house, in McLeod Ganj. Though he wished to meet the Dalai Lama in the traditional manner, on an astrologically auspicious day, he was summoned almost immediately to Thekchen Chöling. Dressed in a new chuba with leather shoes replacing the blue sneakers he had been issued in Lhasa, he walked through McLeod Ganj’s main street and out the far end of town. Reaching the Dialectical School behind the exiles’ own Central Cathedral, he passed a group of young monks, lined up in pairs for their morning debate class. Then, met by a secretary at the green and white canopied gate of the Dalai Lama’s compound, he was ushered past turbaned Indian guards up the hillside to the Tibetan leader’s office. Holding a white scarf, he walked nervously down a flower-lined veranda and into a large room hung with bright thankas. The Dalai Lama stood waiting for him, smiling broadly. “The moment I saw His Holiness,” recounted Dr. Choedrak, “I couldn’t say a word. I just started to cry. He led me to a chair and sat beside me. He called for tea. I tried to speak but I couldn’t. Every time I began to talk I would break into tears again. His Holiness just sat patiently, and finally, when the tea came, I felt composed. While we talked I noticed how much older he looked. Of course, he was a young man when I saw him last and now he has grown into middle age. But he also looked very well, and I could tell that he has learnt so much about the world, very different from how we were in Tibet before. I was happy because I found that after all my doubt and concern, he was living quite comfortably. Everything was well kept and clean. This was the most important thing to me—that His Holiness was well.”

After meeting with the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Choedrak visited the Cabinet. Here, however, the changes between the old and new Tibetan society reinvoked his sense of disquiet.

“The Kashag appeared to be working in better quarters than His Holiness. Their office seemed more decorative, richer,” he explained. “I became quite upset, quite angry. ‘Now the world has gone upside down,’ I thought. ‘Our leader is sitting on a small cushion and the members of his Cabinet have fat mattresses with beautiful Tibetan rugs on them.’ I know I’m from the old Tibet now, but I think that this new equality is not right. And also, when I looked around at all the large buildings in Dharamsala, the library, the government buildings, the medical center, I wondered if the Tibetans in exile are really planning to go back to Tibet at all. I asked them, ‘Have you bought these buildings?’ And when they said, ‘Yes,’ I couldn’t help thinking that the money should have been saved to use in Tibet when we are free. But now my ideas are gradually changing. I realize that over twenty years something had to be done. And perhaps the Tibetan question won’t be resolved all that quickly. So naturally the Tibetans in India need some place to settle. And I realize that there is much for the government officials to do as well. It is with those outside of Tibet that the hope for our freedom really lies.”

Despite Dr. Choedrak’s difficulties in adjusting to life outside prison and Tibet, he was soon absorbed in his duties as the newly designated head of the Tibetan Medical Center’s hospital and pharmacy. Appointed to be the Dalai Lama’s chief personal physician, he walked to Thekchen Chöling just after dawn every other day to examine the leader’s pulse. With the Dalai Lama’s support, he undertook the manufacture of tsother, one of Tibetan medicine’s most powerful drugs, whose ingredients had been unknown in exile until his arrival. Having received the medicine’s formula directly from Kenrab Norbu, the Master of Mendzekhang, Dr. Choedrak was eager to pass on his knowledge before it was lost. Under the Dalai Lama’s insistence, the drug was made—by a staff of eighteen pharmacists working twenty-four hours a day for three months—in Thekchen Chöling itself, where he could observe the preparation. Successfully completed, it was the largest quantity of tsother to be manufactured in the history of Tibetan medicine and once combined with other compounds, vastly enhanced their efficacy. In light of the achievement, Dr. Choedrak looked back over both his own fate and that of Tibet as a whole. “Of the 76 men in my group who went to China only four are now alive,” he said. “I have survived and so the lineage of this important medicine, tsother, has too. This is true for Tibet as well. We came very close to losing everything, but we have not. We have endured. In his last testament the Thirteenth Dalai Lama warned us of what lay ahead. He plainly said that if people behaved according to the precepts of religion and ceased to deceive one another, acting out of self-interest alone, the disaster could be averted. But the Tibetan people ignored his advice and as a result Tibet became a land of beggars. Now Tibetans in and out of Tibet are following closely the white way, the religious path. Our faith has been strengthened. For the future, we are placing all our hope in it and the guidance of His Holiness.”

DHARAMSALA, JANUARY 21, 1983, 4:00 A.M. An alarm clock rings in the Dalai Lama’s hilltop cottage. Tenzin Gyatso wakes, rises from his bed, washes and, once dressed, moves through an adjoining room to the center of the house. Outside the night is overcast. The Central Cathedral looms dark against the mountains. A lone Indian sentry, rifle by his side, guards the canopied gate of Thekchen Chöling. As lights come on in the Dalai Lama’s cottage, his attendants stir in the staff quarters below and a kettle is set atop the stove for the day’s first pot of butter tea.

In a large, windowless room Tenzin Gyatso stands before a golden statue of Avalokiteshvara. Folding his palms in prayer, he prostrates three times and then, sitting on a cushion to the left of the image, briskly polishes the surface of a small, copper tray with his right sleeve. Upon it, he doles out handfuls of rice, gradually building, along with prayers and visualizations, a three-tiered cone. Buttressed by circular bands, crowned by a solar and lunar disk, the mandala represents an image of the cosmos. When it is complete, the Dalai Lama offers it to the assembly of Buddhas, together with a request that they continue to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings. At 5:30 sharp, he leans to his left, uncovers a large shortwave radio and tunes in the international news on BBC World Service. President Mitterand of France is in Bonn to mark the twentieth anniversary of the West German-French friendship treaty. A nuclear-powered satellite belonging to the Soviet Union is due to fall to earth two days hence. President Reagan has called for the establishment of “Democracy Institutes” around the world. After listening, he continues to meditate. At 6:00 he walks to his study, a narrow room carpeted in a maroon rug at the rear of the cottage. Its windows are lined with pink and white flowers tinged now by a soft gray light. It is dawn. Sparrows and finches dart between the fir trees of the garden and a wooden bird-house the Dalai Lama has hung close by. Their singing fills his room. Seated beneath a portrait of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a color postcard of Bodh Gaya stuck in the corner of its frame, Tenzin Gyatso glances across the way at a neatly arranged altar case. A doorway to its left opens on his workroom where a pile of broken watches waits to be repaired. There is a low murmur at the front of the study and Lobsang Gawa, the Dalai Lama’s chief attendant, enters, setting a breakfast tray of toast, tea, cornflakes and tsamba on a low table. He returns the Dalai Lama’s greeting and departs, as the Tibetan leader opens a clothbound scripture to read while he eats.

At seven o’clock Tenzin Gyatso leaves his residence and descends a steep flight of stairs to a beige Range Rover. After bidding farewell to the Cabinet, which is lined up to see him off, he is driven past his greenhouse and office complex, before which wait two Ambassadors filled with nine members of his party. Together the cars leave Thekchen Chöling, bypass the Cathedral beyond and, turning right at the edge of McLeod Ganj, drive gingerly down the precipitous back road, past Gangchan Kyishong, the Secretariat Compound, and through the silent streets of Katwali Bazaar. Despite a run of foul, winter weather the day is pleasantly mild. Ngari Rinpoché, riding in the second car with Dr. Tenzin Choedrak and Delhi’s new liaison officer, Mr. A. N. Khanna, notes that Dharamsala itself is particularly warm. The closer the car comes to the plains, the colder the temperature turns. Emerging from the foothills to battle Pathankot’s perennial snarl of traffic, he rolls up his window against the chill, barely heeding the familiar sight of dust-encrusted buildings, their cockeyed balconies melting, it seems, off the insipid mud of their walls. Then Pathankot is gone and a grueling drive across the Punjab begins, ending, after one flat tire and a thorough assault from the local roadworks, at the Amritsar airport two and a half hours later.

Flight IC-424, a small jet which makes the daily run from New Delhi up to Srinigar and back, takes off for the capital at 3:15. On board, the Dalai Lama sits beside a Kashmiri Moslem with whom he converses until the sari-clad stewardess appears with a basket of candies and the plane lands at Palam Airport. Tenzin Gyatso bids his companion farewell, disembarks and is welcomed on the tarmac by officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, North Division. On the far side of the terminal, three hundred Tibetans wait around the school band of the Majnu-ka Tilla refugee camp. Flutes and drums play beneath the Indian and Tibetan flags, and the children sing “Channa Palmo,” Holder of the Lotus, a paean to Tibet’s patron saint, Avalokiteshvara and the favorite anthem of Tibet’s old regimental bands. The Dalai Lama then drives to the Ashoka Hotel, the Indian Tourist Ministry’s state-owned complex where, for the next two days, he conducts audiences from a suite on the fourth floor of the large sandstone annex.

At 10:30 on the morning of January 24, Tenzin Gyatso leaves the Ashoka to fulfill the purpose of his stop in New Delhi. A police car leads the way from the hotel’s grand, arched doorway, down the capital’s wide, tree-lined avenues to its Parliament building, which, half a mile in circumference, stands entirely ringed by an open colonnade. Arriving beneath the massive portico, the Dalai Lama enters the building and, turning right, is led into the office of the Prime Minister’s special assistant, adjacent to the chamber of the Lok Sabha or lower house. There he is greeted by Indira Gandhi who ushers him through an adjoining door into her wood-paneled office overlooking the rose gardens and fountains in the Parliament’s interior. Their talk is strictly confidential. It is plain, however, that matters of some significance are being discussed. Of late, India and China have begun to negotiate a resolution to their border differences. This is rejected as a possible topic by Tibetans who know of the meeting. So is the likelihood of a bid by the Dalai Lama to have Tibet’s plight addressed at the seventh summit of non-aligned nations to be held in New Delhi in little over a month. Only one thing seems plausible—a development in relations between Dharamsala and Peking critical enough to warrant informing the Indian Prime Minister. This is heady stuff, but when the Dalai Lama leaves an hour later, as expected, no explanation is given, not even a rumor slips out. Instead, the party departs the Ashoka the following morning, drives to Palam Airport and, after a two-hour delay, boards IC-489 bound east to Patna, capital of Bihar.

Late Afternoon: In the distance, the rocket-like capstan of Bodh Gaya’s temple comes into view. Its massive stone flanks, coated in a ruddy, pastel light, grow in size until they loom over the plain. Then, as the lead car of the Dalai Lama’s column passes before the Japanese Monastery on the right, the sound of two Tibetan long horns thunders off its roof, reverberates ahead and is picked up by relaying pairs at the Thai, Chinese and finally the Tibetan gompa itself. Welcome gates grace the way and abruptly the cars slow to a near halt. Khatas, incense and flowers in hand, almost thirty thousand Tibetans stretch in two long lines down either side of the road. Among them stand five hundred pilgrims from Tibet, noticeable not just for the ragged condition of their robes but, as the Dalai Lama’s car passes, an almost universal weeping. Dressed in crested yellow hats, holding rainbow-hued victory banners, and playing cymbals, horns and drums, Bodh Gaya’s monks welcome the Dalai Lama at the monastery’s threshold. He is shown to his usual quarters on the second floor and while the entourage adjourns to the dining room for a meal, the great crowd sees to its own dinner in the adjacent tent city.

At 8:30 in the morning of February 1, the Dalai Lama leaves the Tibetan monastery. Behind a phalanx of khaki-clad police he walks to the precincts of the temple, enters at the west gate, circumambulates the highest, outer ring and, descending at the shrine room, rounds the monument to the site of the Bodhi Tree. The entire crowd rises as he comes before them, palms pressed together at his chest, smiling broadly. The weather is bright and warm, the flowering gardens filled with birdsong, the Bodhi Tree itself a ship of green sails hung in pennants and prayer-flags. The Dalai Lama prostrates quickly, dons his yellow teaching robe and mounts the brocade-draped throne beneath its red and blue cotton canopy. As he places his wristwatch face upwards on the table to his right, the assembly completes its prostrations, thousands of heads bobbing up for a final time before settling into a motionless sea. The preliminary prayers, led by the umze or chant master, begin. At their conclusion, hundreds of white puffs, like a silent cannonade, advance on the tree and throne from the rear of the audience. Coming closer, they focus into a wave of khatas, bunched and hurled forward, bunched again and hurled again by each tier of listeners. When the fusillade ends five minutes later, the high lamas in the front row appear to be floating in a cloud of white cotton descended to earth. Clearing little islands around their knees, they lean forward attentively as the Dalai Lama starts to speak. As always, he prefaces his teaching with remarks on the usefulness of religious practice in daily life. Today, however, he delivers a piece of news which, more than explaining his meeting with Indira Gandhi, amounts to one of the most significant statements he has made since coming into exile twenty-four years before.

“If conditions permit,” he says informally in the middle of his talk, “I am thinking of paying a visit to Tibet sometime in 1985. I am not likely to fall into any traps,” he quickly adds to reassure the crowd. “I’ve had thirty years’ experience dealing with the Chinese.”

The Dalai Lama’s announcement, which he has chosen to deliver at the center of his faith, signals a quantum leap to the Tibetan refugees. After three years of stalemate between Dharamsala and Peking, the Tibetan diaspora once more comes alive with anticipation. Despite the torrent of speculation, Tenzin Gyatso seems almost unconcerned with the nuances of the present political maneuvering. Already, following his return from Bodh Gaya, he is thinking of the future, toward the day when Tibet once more will control its own destiny. Sitting behind his desk, piled high with government reports, he reflects on that time. “During our stay in India we have prepared some sort of solution for the future of Tibet based on our own draft constitution,” he explains. “We practice according to it as much as we can in a foreign land. In the future, from this side, we will make a presentation to our people inside. Now, you see, we will discuss it, but the ultimate decision will be made by Tibetans in Tibet itself. Those people have really suffered. It is their determination which inspires us. The younger ones in particular have gone through tremendous difficulties and have gained useful experience. I am quite sure that they will take the right path.”

And for the distant future, the Dalai Lama reveals that he has long considered retiring, though doing so in a manner which would radically alter the nature of his position and, with it, Tibet’s government. “There are many prophecies which indicate that I will be the last Dalai Lama,” he continues, matter-of-factly. “The world is changing so dramatically, that there may no longer be a need for the lineage. Even if the institution of the Dalai Lama does remain, the method of choosing the new Dalai Lama may not be the old, traditional way. I may pick the next Dalai Lama myself. Theoretically, this is possible, and for practical reasons it may be more sound. Then, once I have chosen him I can become an extra Dalai Lama. Just a simple Buddhist monk,” he adds, laughing. “In any event, the future is very open, very large. Anything can happen. In general, if we handle our situation carefully and act in accordance with our beliefs it is possible that things will turn out well in the end. Certain of the predictions concerning Tibet’s future make this point and I myself have always been convinced of it.”