Riding the Iron Rooster

On a back street of Nagqu I was accosted by some Tibetans who wanted to change money. They also had artifacts—copper tobacco tins and silver coins and Tibetan seals, for stamping messages or names onto documents. I bought a silver seal with a Tibetan motto that said, Worship the Sky for Enlightenment.

I wanted to hand out pictures of the Dalai Lama in this remote place, but to avoid attracting a crowd I followed individuals down the little icy lanes and, when there was no one else around, I whispered in phrase-book Tibetan, "Dalai Lama picture, Dalai Lama picture."

They hissed with pleasure as I handed over the pictures, and they always touched them to their foreheads before folding them into their quilted coats. They reacted to these pictures in a way that I found deeply moving. It was not their profuse thanks—though Tibetan gratitude was hardly ritualized: they were able to communicate great warmth in the simplest gestures. There was no question about their devotion to their god-king, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

They were like early Christians, and I was among them, encouraging them with little icons, spreading sedition. Virtually every Tibetan is a Buddhist and it is impossible to overestimate their love and respect for the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama, a political cleric, was in Peking, where he was reputed to be a member of the Central Committee. But this Dalai Lama had never capitulated to the Chinese. When he was attacked on St. Patrick's Day in 1959, he hurried away disguised as a herdsman on a horse, fleeing his Summer Palace, the Norbulingka, with thousands of his followers, while monks and warriors fought a rearguard action against the confused Chinese attackers. He has been in exile in India ever since, swearing that he will not return to Tibet until the Chinese have left.

Relations between Tibet and China had been uneasy from the seventh century (the Tang Dynasty) onward, and for the next 1300 years it is a history of patchy diplomacy, marriages of convenience and invasions (by the Chinese), using flimsy pretexts. Tibet was a sovereign country when the Chinese invaded in 1950. Tibet was also extremely isolated in every sense. There were no motor vehicles at all in Tibet. There were no schools (although monasteries provided education of a religious kind for novice monks and nuns). There were no banks. Money was not used much. There were no wages, for example—payments were usually made in kind, with barley, tea, yak butter and cloth. It was a medieval system, and the Dalai Lama had a divine right to govern. The class structure ranged from the nobility and a handful of rich aristocratic families to the lowest class of outcasts, whose single function in Tibetan society was to dispose of corpses.

The Chinese were eager to snatch Tibet and turn it upside down. "A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where the difficulties are greater," Mao had said. That exhortation had gotten Chinese settlers into Qinghai. Now the armies began to march into eastern Tibet. What good were swords and pikes against modern Chinese armaments? And when the Tibetans were overwhelmed, and they appealed to the U.N., and tried to publicize their case against the Chinese, the world turned its back while a Tibetan delegation signed a treaty that had been dictated by the victorious Chinese. No one had gone to Tibet's aid; and a few years later in the maniacal Maoist spasm known as Religious Reform, ancient monasteries were dynamited, monks were sent to work in factories, and all Buddhist rituals were banned, including all prayers and insignia. The Chinese believed that the liberation of Tibet was complete, especially when the humiliated Tibetans fought back in various uprisings in 1956 and were flattened.

Antireligious feeling in Tibet was a perfect frenzy during the Cultural Revolution. The few monasteries that remained were either pulled down or else used for secular functions. Pigs were kept in the most sacred chapels of the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, and the Jokhang Temple, the holiest of holies, was renamed Guest House Number Five. Soldiers bivouacked in its chapels and cloisters. The Buddha statues were beheaded. The gold filigree altar relics were melted down. The Red Guards yanked down the ancient medical college, Mendzekhang on Chakpori Hill in Lhasa, and a television antenna was erected in its place. Except for the Potala, Lhasa was destroyed.

"It was a mistake," a Chinese official told me. He was not belittling the damage. This after all was a man who had lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. Part of the Great Wall had been pulled down and plenty of temples and monuments had been wrecked. The whole of China had been vandalized. So what were a few dusty shrines and painted statues to that?