Free In Exile From the Land of Snows by John Avedon Page A

was invited to China, where Mao Zedong planned to impose a new arrangement on him. Against the strong opposition of the Tibetan people, Tenzin Gyatso accepted. Ostensibly, he was merely being invited to attend the first Chinese People’s National Assembly, which was to adopt a constitution for the new republic.
    On the morning of July 11, 1954, all Lhasa gathered around a large tent on the north shore of the Kyichu River to bid the Dalai Lama farewell. Thousands wept as, the ceremonies concluded, the nineteen-year-old leader walked down a white carpet to the river’s shore, boarded a group of skin coracles lashed together and, a yellow silk parasol held above his head, set out across the water. On either side clouds of incense billowed across the Kyichu, revealing in clear spots hundreds of Chinese and Tibetan troops lining the banks to restrain the people, many of whom had threatened to throw themselves in after the Dalai Lama. While Tenzin Gyatso waved farewell, huge mounds of water swelling the river’s summer course appeared to swallow his diminishing figure, leaving Lhasans, as they returned to their city, feeling bereft of all hope.
    Five hundred of Tibet’s chief noble and religious dignitaries and their servants, however, accompanied the Dalai Lama. For twelve days the cavalcade rode east, camping nightly until, penetrating the beautiful juniper and pine forests of Poyul in southern Tibet, they entered one of two roads China was constructing to link Lhasa with the mother country. Here travel became increasingly difficult. The new road ran above shaftlike river gorges and in many places was washed out by rain, forcing the party to walk for hours on end through deep mud, boulders crashing down in their midst from the mountainside above. Many mules and three people died, yet the Chinese refused to divert to the old Tibetan trade route. The Tibetans’ spirits were further depressed by the inauspicious news that Gyantse, Tibet’s fourth-largest city, had been destroyed by flood.
    On the twenty-fourth day the party transferred to a fleet of slope-backed Russian jeeps and trucks which, in two more days, brought them to Chamdo. Here the Dalai Lama got his first look at the harsher face of the Chinese occupation. Under military control since the invasion, Chamdo had been rigged with loudspeakers which, as in cities in China proper, marshaled the population to work and delivered constant propaganda tomes throughout the day. Greeted under a welcome gate decked in fir boughs, by an accordion orchestra, and a line of brightly smiling Chinese women cadres holding flowers, the Dalai Lama gave his customaryblessings to the city’s inhabitants backed by a PLA honor guard, an incongruity which was now routinely required as tens of thousands flocked to see him in the remaining towns of Kham. Passing through Dartsedo toward the close of August, the high pass of Arleng Hren was crossed and China entered. “On the Tibetan side the ascent was gradual,” recalled the Dalai Lama, describing his first moments beyond Tibet’s borders. “But going down the route was long and steep. Reaching the plain of China, I thought: Oh, this is something really different. Rice paddies, water buffalo—it made a most vivid impression on my mind.” In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, Tenzin Gyatso boarded an airplane and flew to Xian, where he was joined by the sixteen-year-old Panchen Lama and his party of two hundred. Both men proceeded on by private train, and though it was the Dalai Lama’s first experience of the machines that had fascinated him for so long, he felt little joy. Arriving beneath the tall buildings of China’s capital, the Dalai and Panchen Lamas alighted in gold brocade robes and pith helmets—a legacy of Tibetan ties with the Mongol Khans—and carrying bouquets, strode down the platform to the vigorous applause of hundreds of workers and students marshaled by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Vice-Chairman Zhu De, Chief of the