The Tragic Truth About Tibet

In the 13th century, Tibet found itself in trouble with the era's most fearsome party crashers: The Mongols. As Matthew T. Kapstein tells us in his book, The Tibetans, Mongol movements around Asia had created a massive pincer around Tibet, and warnings about an impeding invasion started making rounds. In 1239, the Mongols finally made their move, when the army of Dorta the Black tore through into the central parts of Tibet, ransacking the monastery of Reting in the process.

As a small consolation to the grim situation, the Tibetans knew to play to their strengths. They were aware of the fearsome reputation of the Mongols, and some Mongol nobles had in turn become fascinated by Tibet's take on Buddhism. In 1244, the Mongol leader Kötan summoned Tibet's most revered spiritual leader, Sakya Pandita, to his court, where the latter spent the rest of his days. As a result, the Sakya's people, Sakyapa, eventually became "effective rulers" of Tibet. However, religion-based goodwill or not, Tibet was still very much set to find itself under the Mongol thumb. If there was any questions about that, those were definitely answered by Möngke Khan, who invaded Tibet in 1252.

If there's a single day that defines Tibet's current situation, the Free Tibet website tells us it's March 10, 1959. Tibetans and people sympathetic to their cause commemorate the date as National Uprising Day. 

According to the History article on the subject, March 10, 1959, was when 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama's summer palace, Norbulinka, in an act of open rebellion against the Chinese. The motivation behind this gigantic scene was the country's fear that the Chinese occupation forces were plotting to kidnap the Dalai Lama and take him to Beijing. The young Dalai Lama had been invited to visit the local People's Liberation Army headquarters for an evening of tea and theater, with the caveat that he must come alone. Evidently, Tibetan loyalists smelled a rat, and the masses gathered to prevent His Holiness from taking up the offer. 

The show of force quickly turned into a bloodbath. By March 17, the Tibetans had spirited the Dalai Lama away to India, and China aimed some serious firepower at the gathered Tibetans. By March 19, there was open combat between Tibetan rebels and the Chinese troops, with the former hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered. On March 21, the Chinese forces opened artillery fire on the poor folks gathered at the palace. China then went on to take severe measures against Tibetan resistance, execute the Dalai Lama's bodyguards, and wreck the capital's biggest monasteries. All in all, tens of thousands of people died. 

The Dalai Lama is the most esteemed religious leader in Tibet, but as Mike Nash of Smithsonian Magazine tells us, that doesn't mean everyone has good intentions towards the holder of the position. In fact, no less than four Dalai Lamas have met a mysterious end over the years, and as for what Mr. Nash thinks about their fate, well, his article is called "Murder in Tibet's High Places."

It turns out that the Potala Palace, the winter residence of the Dalai Lama, has seen more than its share of political drama. During the early parts of the 19th century, this may or may not have led to several Dalai Lamas falling victim to the power struggle hidden within the palace's confines. The country was in a period of political turmoil, and the eighth Dalai Lama had lived long and steered clear of secular affairs, opting to let other, lesser Lamas do the governing as regents. However, his successors all displayed more interest in earthly affairs ... and just so happened to meet premature ends. No less than four consecutive Dalai Lamas, the ninth to the 12th, fell fatally ill at a young age, in ways that could technically have been natural (though one source claims the 10th Dalai Lama died when the roof of a bedroom collapsed on him). However, this eyebrow-raising series of deaths over a short span of time has led some to believe these were murders by power-hungry nobles. 

As the BBC tells us, the Dalai Lama, a title that means "Ocean of Wisdom," is kind of a big deal in Tibet. He's the highest-ranking monk in Tibet's version of Buddhism, which traditionally puts him in charge of the whole country. Unfortunately, the 14th and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, finds himself somewhat at odds with China, which has very different ideas on how to govern Tibet. 

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Dalai Lama has been in exile since the failed Lhasa uprising in 1959. Accompanied by his family, teachers, and guerrilla fighters, the young Dalai Lama performed a daring escape over the Himalayas, and set up a new command center in Dharamsala, India. For years, he kept a relatively low profile. However, since 1973 the Dalai Lama has traveled the world in an effort to educate people on both Buddhism and the plight of Tibet. The latter, and his attempts to forge a "middle way" of co-existence between China and Tibet, earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. However, despite his high esteem, he remained a political and spiritual leader in exile, and in 2011, he stepped down from the political part of his duties. 

Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was originally a move to reclaim power in 1966, but ended up in chaos and disaster ... and that was just in China. As Dan Southerland of Radio Free Asia tells us, things weren't any easier on Tibet, which became a huge target for the revolution's policy to "create the new by smashing the old." 

The Tibet leg of the Cultural Revolution was started by young Tibetans who had been studying in China, and been indoctrinated by Maoists in the process. Since China had already done a pretty good job smashing up Tibet's old temples, their spin on the Red Guard set about looting what was left and breaking into people's homes in search of religious items to destroy. Prayer flags, images of esteemed Lamas, holy texts ... pretty much anything they could find was on the destruction menu.

As Luo Siling of the New York Times tells us, the situation soon devolved into a sort of Maoist civil war, where two factions, the Revolutionary Rebels Headquarters and the Great Alliance of Proletarian Revolutionaries Command, fought each other. The fighting spread out on the streets of Lhasa, and lasted until the end of 1967 ... after which, Mao dispatched troops to control the situation and started a string of executions. All along, Tibet's own culture continued to be targeted, and the Cultural Revolution didn't officially end until Mao's death in 1976.  

It's one thing to talk about the world's terrors in general terms, and completely another to bring it down to the scale of a single, more easily digestible but no less horrifying incident. In Tibet's case, one of the most internationally famous cases is the Nangpa La shooting incident. According to Jonathan Watts of the Guardian, the incident happened on September 30, 2006, when a group of over 70 Tibetan refugees were trudging through the snowy terrain of Nangpa La pass on their way to Nepal. They were completely exposed and helpless ... and, unfortunately, spotted by a group of Chinese border guards, who promptly opened fire on the helpless group. At least two people were hit: One was a 17-year-old nun, who died on the spot, and the other was a young man who took two bullets and was taken away by the guards. 

Unfortunately (for the Chinese), there were foreign witnesses, and a Romanian cameraman managed to capture the whole, horrifying sequence on tape. As Nolan Peterson tells us in his Newsweek account, this allowed the incident to go public, and a massive media backlash against China followed. However, as of 2015, the Nangpa La pass was still very closely monitored by the Chinese, and Peterson wrote that traders who attempted to cross the border have been known to report that the Chinese soldiers continued their trigger-happy ways.