Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
Even before the Panchen returned to Lhasa and before the arrival of the hundreds of former serfs now coming back from Institutes in Peking, Sian and Chengtu to help the reform, Lhasa began to throw off fetters of the past. The first weeks after quelling the rebellion went to giving medical aid to the wounded, seed to the looted peasants and rounding up stray outlaws, activities already noted by Captain Yang in an earlier chapter.
Action by Lhasa’s citizens was launched by a mammoth mass meeting on April 15 in the square below the Potala Palace. Twenty thousand people came, the biggest turn-out Lhasa had ever seen. The crimes of the rebels were related and the new policies discussed. During the round-ups and searches, data had come to light on that “Four Rivers and Six Ranges” organization. Claiming to be a fund-collecting mechanism for the Dalai Lama, it was an organ of military sabotage, with military detachments. It collected the air-drops of weapons from foreign sources, wrecked roads, ravaged villages, raided trucks, and ambushed PLA men and Central Government personnel on errands in the countryside. More than once it had encircled and threatened the offices of the Working Committee in various parts of Tibet.
Life now buzzed around the building of the Preparatory Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, a rather imposing new building in old Tibetan architecture with gold roofs and cornices. For three years the kasha had impeded its action; during the rebellion its members and employees had all been threatened by the rebels and ordered on pain of death to break off relations with the Hans. The Committee had now become Tibet’s local government — its membership had always been ninety-five percent Tibetan, representing all Tibet’s areas. Members were coming from Chamdo in the east, Ngachuka in the north, Yatung in the west, to discuss plans for the Committee’s third anniversary.
The swift growth of primary schools was perhaps the first sign of the change that came with the quelling of rebellion. Two primary schools had previously been established in Lhasa by the Central Government but had never been filled, for upper class parents feared the kasha’s disapproval while serf children courted a blow on the head from the master’s overseer if they were caught carrying books. As soon as the rebellion was beaten, fifteen hundred registrations poured into these schools, far more than they could handle. A third primary school was quickly opened to care for the surplus. Six hundred applications at once were made there, again more than the school could take. Plans were under way for a fourth school but meantime fourteen “special schools” were set up by the Lhasa people themselves, some part time, some full time, in which youths of twenty sat side by side with seven-year-olds to learn to read and write. By June this number was to grow to twenty-three special schools, and a total of five thousand people attending school in Lhasa, where before the rebellion there had been only a thousand pupils.
The Film Projection Team meantime made plans for mobile motion pictures, first in Lhasa and then elsewhere in Tibet. Such showings had been discouraged in the past by people who threw rocks at the projectors or even shot at the operators. Now motion pictures could be shown in peace.
Word from the Loka Area, where the rebels had had a main base for a year, and had badly looted the people, showed that here also education was booming. In Chetang, the main city, there had been a primary school established by the Working Committee; its enrollment trebled swiftly as soon as the rebels were gone. In Zongrin, on the mere suggestion of a school, the local people at once hunted premises, found carpenters who volunteered to make classroom desks and benches, and enrolled eighty percent of the children of school age. A new song in Loka ran:
The kasha was the worst thing,
The best thing was its downfall.
No more suffering, beating, cursing!
No more hated ula labor!
The sun of happiness has risen.
Many of the children now coming to school were so stunted that, even at thirteen, they were as small as a normal child of nine, yet they had old, wizened faces. Many of them had been born in dirty stables and cow-pens, with resultant heavy mortality from infection of both mothers and children. When their parents were doing forced labor, they would sometimes dig a hole in the ground to put the child in, or tie him to a tree with strips of cow-hide. They had had little normal, healthy life.
Lopu Drangdeng, in Primary School No. Two of Lhasa, came from two parents who had been beaten to death because they failed to do the labor given them. The child had become a child slave, but had managed to run away in 1956 and come to the school where they took him in. Chiangba Drurga, a little girl, had seen her father tortured to death when she was four years old and her mother had died two years later. She had begun to work as a slave at the age of six. With the quelling of rebellion and the flight of her master, she came to Primary School No. Three, which gave her lodging and food.
By May people everywhere were asking: When will the reform begin? Workers coming to the committees for employment were pouring out their stories. Serfs and household slaves came to express determination to free themselves, asking: What shall we do? Members of the upper strata also came, volunteering to be the first to carry out the reform on their manors. All through May and into June, groups from the Preparatory Committee and the Working Committee, together with reporters from Peking papers, toured towns and countryside of Tibet on various missions. The Working Committee was giving out interest-free seed loans to peasants who were asking more seed than before since their masters would not any longer take it away. But all these travelling groups, whatever their mission, also made social studies and held meetings, collecting from the people information and opinions and demands.
“The masters always told us that misery was our fate, our karma,” said many serfs, “because of sins done in a former life. Now we know that the misery came from serfdom and must be ended.”
A serf called Kalzang-tawa, who had run away from his village to Lhasa, said: “My father died of exhaustion. I could not pay the rents and I fled. Only a few households remain in my home village, for the old system brought them all to ruin. I want the reform so that I can go back home to work the land.”
Another named Lozong-routen said: “Long ago my grandfather was ill and borrowed 50 khal (1,375 lbs) of grain. He paid on this debt many years and so did my father and so did I, but they still say I owe 1,600 khal (22,000 lbs) because of the interest. Usury is a deep pit that you never get out of. That old way must change.” There were many such complaints of debts. In some areas ninety percent of the serfs were hopelessly in debt to the masters for whom they had continuously worked. Tsering Wongdi, a serf of the Gerden Monastery in Dechen Dzong, said his family had suffered under a growing debt for nine generations and it kept growing all the time and was now 13,500 khal (182 tons).
In Gyantse the Working Sub-Committee got thirteen collective letters from serf peasants on the north bank of the Nyangchu River. One of them said: “Usury, corvée and levies are the three chains that bind us hand and foot for generations. Until these are broken, we are chained.”
In the area of Dongka Dzong near Lhasa, serf peasants were singing aloud a song they had formerly sung when the master couldn’t hear:
O, Dentzen, my father, pray tell me
Whence comes this heavy debt on my back?
I never saw a grain of the barley.
Such misery, such misery,
O, when shall we stand up?
Behind the song was a local story of a peasant named Dentzen who once borrowed a single khal (27 lbs) of barley and the debt grew to 600 khal, so Dentzen fled and his wife died and his seven-year-old son was seized as slave for the payment. The son, when he grew up, wrote the song.
From many areas came reports that in 1956, when the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni spoke at the inauguration of the Preparatory Committee in Lhasa, and promised reform, the news had spread through Tibet rapidly, and meetings of peasants had been held to hail the idea. Peasants had sent collective letters to the Dalai Lama, signing it with their fingerprints. When the Central Government agreed to postpone reform till 1962, the serfs had been much upset. Then, as the rebellion built up, the masters began to threaten that serfs who even spoke of reform, might have their eyes gouged out or their noses slit or their whole family killed. Now that the worst serf-owners had rebelled and been beaten, the peasants began to hope again. They wanted to see some action.
The first action in the direction of satisfying these demands had been the emergency order by the People’s Liberation Army, that on all the rebels’ estates this year the crops should go to the cultivators without any deductions for rent or taxes. This had been widely hailed and was very successful in stimulating the cultivation, the immediate end for which it was designed.
In mid-May a Hsinhua correspondent reported on a 450-mile tour made with a team of the Working Committee, and gave especially a vivid picture of the Loka Area, where the rebels had had a main base where they received the air-drops from abroad.
“Loka,” he wrote, “is a large rectangular area along the Tsangpo River, reaching to the border of India and Bhutan. It is sometimes called the granary of Tibet for it is more fertile than other areas, with good valley soil and large pasture lands, and many mountain streams suitable for irrigation and for water-power. We found the barley three or four inches high, and the peasants were weeding and irrigating, working in groups. Enthusiasm was very high, both because of seed loans from the Military Control Committee and because so much of the land here belonged to the serf-owning rebels, and on these lands the crops would all go without rent or taxes to the cultivators. As we zigzagged through mountains, to a height of 16,000 to 19,000 feet between the valleys, we found rich mineral deposits, gold, silver, mica, sulphur. Many people, however, lacked even enough clothes to cover themselves, and many houses had been burned to the ground by the rebels before they left.
“For the year past, the rebels had turned this area into a hell. In Cheku Dzong they exacted from the people 5,000 khal of grain, 2,000 ko of butter, 200 head of cattle and many horses and much fodder. When the peasants could not deliver these things, the rebels tortured and killed people to make examples. They thus killed a peasant named Dorje, and threw his body on a much-travelled bridge for everyone to see, forbidding its burial for a week. At a place called Tsachinatse, all the one hundred and seventy women, both young and old, had been raped by the rebels. The people of Loka Area hated the rebels with a bitter hate.”
Stories of the previous fighting had been picked up in Loka by this correspondent. In Chetang, the political center of the area, the Working Committee had been under attack at intervals since August 1958. “Three heavy attacks had been made on the Working Committee and on the PLA garrison there. At that time the PLA did not fight back, but reported it to the kasha, which the rebels took as a sign of weakness. From January the rebels besieged the Working Committee and PLA. During all this period our people lived only in the tunnels and brought drinking water at night. They held on thus for seventy-four days with some casualties until finally the State Council’s order permitted the counter-attack.”
The PLA took only ten days to put down the rebels in the Loka Area, but the correspondent does not state whether this was done by the forces already in Loka alone or with the aid of reinforcements from Lhasa. From other sources I judge it was the latter. The correspondent noted that, as in Lhasa, order was quickly established with the aid of the local population, and that the PLA helped the peasants with the ploughing — which had been delayed by the fighting — carried fertilizer to the fields and sent mobile medical teams to treat the people.
Amazing tales were told of the capture of rebels with the help of the local people. An old herdsman, over fifty, walked thirty miles to tell the PLA that thirteen rebels were hiding in a temple near his home. He then insisted on guiding the army back. When they reached the temple together, the old man shouted to the hidden rebels: “The Liberation Army never kills those who surrender.” All the thirteen came out without firing a shot.
The morale of the rebels was so reduced that two soldiers of the PLA who lagged behind their detachment because of sore feet, came upon a band of ninety-six rebels, and picked off the leader with a rifle. The rest of the band not only then surrendered without fighting, but allowed themselves to be disarmed and then waited all night without guards while their two “captors” took two of the lesser leaders and went off to find the army. They located their detachment at midnight, and reported the capture. Next morning other soldiers went back with the two lesser leaders of the rebels and found the “captives” patiently waiting to be picked up and given the regular meals that would presumably follow.
In Lhasa from the middle of May people began to clean up the city. Age-old garbage heaps were removed, stagnant pools were drained or filled. Women made beautiful designs with white and yellow sand at the street corners. These symbolized good fortune but they also warned people: “This is not your privy or garbage dump.”
To the west under Luli Bridge was a stagnant pond, known as the dirtiest, most evil-smelling place in Lhasa. In 1955 a road was built from Jokhan to Norbu Lingka which divided the pond in two, and new houses appeared on that road. But the smell remained. After the rebellion was crushed, the Military Control Committee called on people to cultivate waste lands. People in the western area decided to clean up those ponds. Nearly a thousand people organized for it. They filled the ponds with earth and made an acre and a half of vegetable garden. It was operated under a joint committee, the vegetables going to those who worked. The smell was now that of spinach, cabbage and radishes. People came for walks at twilight to enjoy the place.
In early June over 1,500 graduates from Institutes for National Minorities arrived in Lhasa. Most of them were former serfs who had run away, been educated and were now coming to help the reform. They all applied for work in the hardest places. Most of them were sent out to work among the people in the outlying areas of Tibet, in Loka, Gyantse, Shigatse, Ngachuka and Chamdo. All over Tibet hundreds of Peasant Associations had already organized to manage their own affairs. They were helping the PLA establish order, they reclaimed waste land, they repaired or built reservoirs. The sown area was reported far greater than in previous years. Everywhere the weather had been favorable and crops were doing well.
“The Tibetan people have begun to free themselves from the shackles of serfdom,” the Panchen Erdeni wired on June 17 to Mao Tse-tung and the leaders of the Central Government. He had returned to Lhasa a few days earlier. He said he was “much impressed by the lively, joyous spirit that has emerged in towns and villages during the two months’ absence.” When he had left Lhasa to go to Peking in early April in many places the ecclesiastical and secular people were still suffering from the burning, killing, rape and plunder by the rebels, and in some places still fighting. In the interim order had been restored, many children of peasants and herdsmen were entering schools, many poor and homeless had been given jobs. County people’s governments had been set up in several counties. The Tibetan people “were becoming masters in their own house.”
“All this,” he concluded, “is of course just the beginning.”
With the Panchen Erdeni’s return, plans began to move towards the next session of the Preparatory Committee. Its members and chief employees had already been touring the country and talking with monks, laymen and progressive personages as well as with serfs. They had been making social surveys and collecting people’s views on reform. In late June, the last reports from all areas reaching Lhasa were wired to the Peking press.
“Lhasa. June 20. Lhasa has taken on a new look in these three months. The former rubbish-strewn Parkor has been cleaned and levelled into a broad half kilometer length of street. The three and a half kilometer road from Jokhan to Norbu Lingka, which the rebels destroyed, is now repaired. Men and women carrying butter offerings and turning prayer-wheels can be seen on their way to Jokhan. The buildings, pavilions and lawns at Norbu Lingka are all intact.
“Ten buildings suffering varying degrees of damage during the rebellion, including some used by rebel leaders as forts, have now been repaired. The residents themselves have cleaned up the streets and lanes; the garbage and waste that used to lie in the streets has all been taken away. Five big vegetable gardens are growing on sites of former garbage heaps and stagnant pools. Over 1,400 jobless people were given jobs in the city by the middle of May. In the former slums of “untouchables” there are hardly any ragged tents left; these poor folk either got jobs and housing in Lhasa or went back to their villages to work on the land.
“Besides the three regular primary schools and one middle school, twenty-three special schools have been organized by the people. Formerly only one thousand children got schooling; now five thousand children and adults are studying. . . . Amateur song and dance ensembles have been formed with over two hundred participants.”
Next comes report from the Loka Area.
“Chetang. June 22. Peace and vitality are everywhere in this Loka Area, for a year the lair of the rebels. Blossoming rape flowers are golden on both banks of the Tsangpo; in the valleys the barley sprouts. Houses the rebels destroyed for firewood have been rebuilt with PLA help. Many local men, who were impressed into the rebel forces and captured by the PLA, have been freed and have returned home to work. The serge handicraft industry which the rebels forced to a standstill, has resumed on government loan of raw wool. The ferries on the Tsangpo are very busy with the trade that stopped during the year the rebels were here. Incomplete figures show that over one hundred and fifty tons of grain, over 70,000 tea bricks and large quantities of yak butter and salt were supplied to the poor as relief or at low prices.
“A ceremony was held here for a serf to move into a new house. Potse, the serf, lost his house in the following manner. When the rebels held the area, the bailiff from the monastery tried to grab Potse’s daughter, and the father helped the girl hide. For this, the bailiff led a group of rebels to tear down Potse’s house and take all his grain. After the rebels were driven out, the Military Control Committee gave Potse grain and built him a new house.”
Here is a report that came from Yatung in mid-June.
“This town, four hundred miles by car southwest of Lhasa, gives an impression of deep patriotism. Seventy years ago, Yatung was the first town that fought the British invaders. They are still proud of it. An eighty-nine-year-old man told in detail how they fought them, with knives, arrows and home-made shot-guns. He said: ‘I myself killed several invaders.’ Yatung has only 966 families, and of these 300 people already are organized in groups discussing the democratic reform, and the relation of serfdom to the misery of the Tibetan people and to Tibet’s long decline.”
Chamdo reported, that city to the east where in 1950 the first contact of Tibet with the People’s Liberation Army began, “Barley and wheat are a foot high, and in colder areas at higher altitudes, the potatoes are growing well. Many villages have opened virgin land and planted it to crops. The area of irrigated land has been extended by repairing old ditches and making new ones. In the pastoral areas, the herdsmen are busy milking and making butter; special attention is being given to the young and the females in an effort to double the herds.
“This ancient city, after a long stagnation, has trebled in size since it was liberated in 1950. Then it had only one narrow, shabby street with some forty or fifty shops and stalls that closed usually in early afternoon. Now a new city much bigger than the old is built on the opposite bank of the Lantsang River, with bank, department store, book stores, a central hospital, a veterinary service, and schools. Since the quelling of the rebellion and the beginning of reforms, many new applications are coming into the schools. It is planned to double the number of pupils this fall.”
These accounts appeared in the Chinese press about the same time when a news report from Europe said that an Indian lawyer was indicting China before the “International Association of Jurists,” for the crime of genocide against the Tibetan race and religion. Most of the people I knew in Peking laughed.
The newsreel turned to the young Panchen Erdeni as he rose on June 28 to deliver the chairman’s address at the second plenary session of the Preparatory Committee. The first session had been held on April 8, when rebellion had just been put down, and the Committee had formally assumed the local government of Tibet. Now, at the second session, they were to begin the “democratic reform.” It was just eleven weeks, but to most of the people in this ancient land which Nehru called “a static society, fearful of what might be done to it in the name of reform,” it now seemed the reform was slow.
The eleven weeks had been busy ones. Reports from all the land had been collected. Order was everywhere basically restored. Everywhere the weather was good and crops were reported thriving. In the Himalayas the barley ripened on terraced fields while in Takun the harvest had begun. Everywhere the children poured into the schools and the peasants and herdsmen were organizing, and demanding reform. The Committee now could take account of hundreds of new Peasant Associations which were expressing their views, and also of many section meetings in Lhasa, in which, before opening the plenary session, the members had met with people of all classes to discuss the proposed reforms. Six hundred people of all social strata attended the plenary session as observers. The presence of one hundred of the serfs, now the new working class, sitting down among the nobles, was a new thing in Tibet’s long history.
The Panchen began by listing the achievements in eight years since liberation: more than 7,000 kilometers of highway built, two power-plants in Tibet’s main cities, several small industries “laying a base on which the Tibetan people can build industry of their own”; interest-free seed loans to the amount of 1,553,000 yuan (a yuan is 40 cents) and farm implements given free to a million yuan. The first modern hospitals built, the first public schools, the first veterinary help for the herds.
The old social system, however, still remained, because the previous local government failed to keep its pledges or to meet the people’s demands. They had made rebellion and been quelled. The unfinished task must now be done.
“The manorial lords are still serf-owners. The revolution will be a bloodless one. The policy is to buy out all the upper class except those that took part in armed rebellion. The livelihood of the others will be guaranteed and their political status assured.”
The reform would be in two stages. The first stage would be the stage of the “san fan and the shuang chien,” the “three abolitions and the two reductions.” The rebellion, the system of forced labor, and the personal servitude would be abolished; rents and interest would be reduced. When this was accomplished, the second stage would be the redistribution of land.
The Panchen’s statement on monasteries was awaited with special interest, for the monasteries own about one third of the land in Tibet. How would the Panchen handle the monasteries, on whose ancient domination his own status was based?
“They also possess manorial rights and are serf-owners,” said the Panchen. “It would not be beneficial to religion if the serfs of the nobles are emancipated while the serfs of the lamaseries remain in bondage. Genuine religion must not retain the stigma of serfdom.” He noted that “by the Constitution of China, everyone in the lamaseries enjoys the right of a citizen on coming of age. He may become a people’s deputy, hold government post, engage in social activities or in productive labor.” In the past, the Panchen noted, the internal rules of the lamaseries sometimes violated these constitutional rights of citizens.
“The lamas should be given freedom of person and recognized as citizens,” said the Panchen. These were revolutionary words. They would rally all the poor lamas and challenge all the chiefs of monastic rule in Tibet.
“Freedom of person” for the lamas meant that all those hundreds of thousands of monks who had been put into the monasteries in childhood, were free to leave if they chose. They would not be held by compulsion or by flogging. Those words would split the monasteries right down the middle. The Panchen himself, on his way back to Lhasa, had stopped at the great Gumbum Monastery in Chinghai and must have seen that in this birth-place of the Yellow Sect, the thousands of former lamas had been reduced in a year to a mere four or five hundred by this permission of free choice to the monks.
In his final words the Panchen spoke of the famous Tson Khapa, founder of the Yellow Sect, who was called “the Reformer” and who said: “Our religion teaches the deliverance of all beings.” All beings — that means the mass of the common people. “If a small number of evil-doers are permitted to harass the people, can this be called ‘the deliverance of all beings’?”
“Things keep changing and developing,” concluded the Panchen. “What I have said is inspired by a true love for our religious teaching and in the interests of the broad masses of the people of Tibet.”
It was a striking speech for a young man of twenty-one. I wondered how many people would notice what seemed to me a significant choice of words. The Panchen did not speak of love for “religion,” but of love, for the “religious teaching.” He was facing the great cleavage between the teaching and the institution, that reformers have faced down the ages. He was choosing the teaching of the compassionate Buddha and letting the institutions go. How the heads of the monasteries would hate him! How all the slave lamas would love him! Could he hold to that line against the most ancient, stubborn theocratic machine on earth? If he could, he would be in history a greater reformer than Tson Khapa. He would be a creator of a new Tibet. But could even the Panchen keep those thousand “Living Buddhas” in line with the teaching of the first Buddha?
The Panchen Erdeni, however, was not alone; he was only one of the new creators. Our old acquaintance Apei — Ngapo Ngawang-Jigme, to be formal — gave the political measures in greater definition, as a politician can, who is used to the technical job for centuries. In the first stage of reform, he said, the rebel remnants will be suppressed, the practice of forced labor (ula) abolished, and the serfs regain freedom of person. The lands of the rebels are confiscated. On lands of other manorial lords, the rents are sharply reduced, “on consultation” in each case, but with the general rule that the tillers get eighty percent of the crop after deduction of seed. Ancient and usurious feudal debts are abolished, but not ordinary commercial loans.
In the second stage of the reform, the lands and productive means of the manorial lords will be bought out in a manner that will not reduce their living standard nor their political status.
The old divisions of Tibet, said Apei, are based on nobles’ manors and are inconvenient for government. Tibet would now be divided more rationally into seven areas: Shigatse, Chamdo, Takun, Loka, Gyantse, Ari and the municipal district of Lhasa. The old regime would be abolished in the villages, where Peasant Associations would for the time exercise local government. Commerce would be safeguarded and law-abiding private merchants protected.
Apei spoke more harshly of the monasteries than had the Panchen. “The Tibetan people believe in religion,” he said, “but they hate the monasteries that cruelly oppress them. Within the monasteries there is also a rigid division of rank. The poor lamas are merely slaves in a monk’s robe.” In the future, religious belief and practises in the monasteries would be respected, but feudal exploitation and feudal privileges would cease.
The Living Buddha Pebala, a representative from Chamdo, supported the Panchen’s position in the discussion. “All feudal privileges that give the monasteries power to oppress the people must be abolished, as contrary to religious freedom and the Constitution and not conforming to religious doctrine. ‘Happiness to all living things’ is the basis of the Buddhist doctrine, but the bad political system that infiltrated into the temples has made the people hate them.”
In the presence of many serfs, for the first time listening in on government, Sampo Tsewong-rentzen, a big landowner and, with Apei, one of the two loyal kaloons, stated: “We aristocrats have in the past oppressed the working people and we must admit our guilt. We have gratitude for the arrangement by which the Central Government not only guarantees our living standard but our political standing.”
The plenary session closed on July 17, after three weeks’ discussion and after the adoption of the resolution on the “Democratic Reform.”
Across the roof of the world the news of the decision spread like wild fire to every corner.
In Lhasa crowds gathered in the streets as young Tibetan publicists explained the resolution. They danced and sang in the streets. In villages near Lhasa, serfs who had ceased to be serfs burned pine wood as an auspicious symbol, played stringed instruments and danced lion and yak dances.
Tserin Droma, a household serf of Surkong, the big rebel leader, declared: “Fifty years I toiled for that lord like an animal, sleeping up against a privy, with only half a bowl of barley a day for food, and no tea or salt given. Now we will never again be oppressed.”
In the Loka Area, in Chetang people shouted: “Every sentence is what we wanted to say.” In Gyantse, they thronged the streets around a newly installed wire hook-up, listening to the resolution by broadcast. Peasants en route with donkeys laden with firewood, halted on the way to listen.
“I feel I am dreaming,” exclaimed Pundo, a woman serf over sixty. “Can such good news exist on earth? Often, I thought of killing myself for misery. Now I want to live for a taste of this free life.”
Lhami, another serf, recounted the decades in which his father and he had paid instalments on a debt incurred by his grandfather to Pala, the rebel leader, but the debt was larger at the end than at the beginning. “Now I and my descendants are forever free.”
Ngachuka reported for the northern grasslands: “The news is especially welcome here. People have been demanding it ever since the rebellion was quelled.” Solang Tsedrub, a herdsman, said: “Usury, that old wolf that devoured so many lives, is dead!” Then he told how five years back he had borrowed half a sack of parched grain from the livestock-owner, and was still in debt, though his own poor livestock had been taken for it. “What a wolf,” he cried again, “is dead!”
An aged herdsman named Ngawang said: “Whenever I heard dogs at night, I feared some noble was coming to demand ula from me, or some soldiers of that old Tibetan Army to molest my daughters. Now I shall fear no more, being free!”
Trashi, of Ngachuka, said that he was torn between happiness and pain. “Just two years ago I had to sell my two children to pay a levy.”
Upper strata people also began to express favorable views. Forty tribal chiefs in the Ngachuka area pledged in a meeting to support the democratic reform. The Karchung Tserin Dondrub, whose manor was burned by the rebels because he refused to join them, said: “I was born an aristocrat but I fully support the democratic reform and express heartfelt thanks at the policy of buying us out.”
Support for the Panchen’s position began to come also from the monasteries. In Sera Monastery, one of the Big Three of Lhasa that has determined politics down the centuries, the Kansu Lhundrub-thbkhae declared: “Serfdom must of course be abolished in the monasteries. It would be absurd to keep it when it is abolished for the secular nobles.” He also scoffed at the ideas expressed abroad that Tibetan relics and monasteries are being destroyed. “They are slanders,” he said. “The Central Government has pursued to the letter its protection of religious belief even after the rebellion.”
In Demong Ladrang Monastery in Lhasa, Living Buddha Demong stated that the rebel artillery had shelled his monastery, and praised the policy of religious freedom of the Central Government.
In Palchhoe Monastery in Gyantse, the high-ranking lama said: “By our religious teaching it is impermissible for lamas to exploit people by usurious loans” and added that he “fully supported” the democratic reform. Sangngag Thutob, another lama in the same monastery, added: “For the purity of our religion and the observance of religious discipline, we must abolish the feudal privileges of the monasteries and restore their real purpose, which is to carry on religious activities.”
This support by the monastery leaders was only a trickle yet, but it would be encouraged to grow.
It was just three months, almost to a day, since the Dalai Lama had crossed into India with the rebel leaders, leaving Tibet to the Panchen Erdeni and to Peking. His palaces in Lhasa were still held in his name by his own servants, but from what he was saying and doing, it seemed every day less likely that he would ever come back. There was said to be a prediction that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would be the last one; he seemed acting to make it true.
People in Tibet were moving fast and with every day the gulf between them and the Dalai Lama’s actions was growing. They would forget him in the urgency of their own great affairs. Some day it would occur to them to make that great thirteen-story Potala Palace, with the dungeon of scorpions for punishment in the cellars and the gold and jewel-encrusted tombs of the “bodies” of past incarnations filling many floors, into one of the greatest — as it would also be the highest — of the museums of the world.
The Tibetan people would still be here. For the first time in a thousand years the conditions had been established for their survival and growth. They would expand to develop all corners and resources of the world’s high roof. They would have the strength of all China behind them, with modern ways of health and of industries and farms. They would show their children all the tortures in museums and tell them hero stories of our present day.