Anna Louise Strong Reference Archive
“Have you seen the Exhibition?” everyone in Peking was asking in tones of mingled interest and horror in spring of 1959. You knew from the tone what exhibition they meant. It would not be the Hungarian Art Exhibition, or the Chinese Traditional Style Paintings, or the Czechoslovak Puppet Films, or the Graphic Arts of Kwangtung, or the Polish Stamps or the Children’s Art Exhibit, all of which were announced in Peking in those months, for Peking has many exhibitions. The tone meant the Exhibition on the Uprisings in Szechwan, Chinghai and Kansu, with the gory details of serfdom, being shown in the Labor Insurance Exhibition Hall.
This exhibition, travelling from city to city, was awakening the Chinese people to what serfdom meant in Tibet. The past had been dark enough in the central provinces of China, under the Empire and the Kuomintang, but not as dark as in Tibet. Now for the first time the instruments of torture were collected and on display, together with the whole skins of small children, who had been flayed alive in the depths of monasteries on the pretext that they were incarnate demons. There were also air-drops of American tommy-guns and radio transmitters, sent by Chiang Kai-shek in his American-given planes to promote rebellion against Peking. The rebellions were crushed; the evidence was in.
These were the small, preliminary revolts in the Tibetan Autonomous “chous” and counties, in provinces adjacent to Tibet. They were planned and incited from Lhasa by ministers and high clerical officials of the Dalai Lama. After the Dalai Lama’s trip to Peking in 1954-55, where he had presented that glowing Hymn To Mao Tse-tung which compared Mao to “Brahma, the Creator,” His Holiness had toured many Chinese cities and expressed enthusiasm for “the motherland’s great achievements,” and patriotic pride in belonging to this mighty People’s Republic of China. Then he had gone home by the Szechwan-Lhasa Highway built by the People’s Liberation Army, one of the world’s highest, hardest and most scenic roads. On the way back, some persons of his entourage dropped off in Kantse Autonomous Chou (district) in Szechwan, on pretext of religious business with the monasteries, and laid the base for future revolt.
Since, later in that year of 1955, a party of two score journalists from a dozen countries journeyed to Lhasa along that same road with an “entourage” of about a hundred interpreters, chauffeurs and other attendants, we have a vivid description from Alan Winnington1 of what Kantse was like. Kantse Chou is the most westerly 60,000 square miles of Szechwan Province, with a population of half a million people, mostly of Tibetan nationality. At least one in five of the males was a monk. Its capital, Kantse, was a typical mediaeval town, consisting chiefly of a fortress, a monastery and a market-place. The immediate area around the capital, Kantse county, had 36,913 people by the census of 1953, of whom 17,421 were males, and of these 12,097 were monks. . . . That makes two-thirds of the males monks, but the proportion is probably more concentrated in Kantse County than in the larger area, the Kantse Chou, since men from other districts may enter the monasteries near the county seat. There were forty-nine monasteries listed in Kantse County.
“Kantse’s streets,” writes Winnington, “are full of monks of all ages and classes, wealthy monks in the finest claret cashmere, poor monks in tattered home-spun that may once have been dyed, monks of three years old and impudent boy monks. Many of the stalls on the street were conducted by monks, some on their own behalf, some for the monastery. . . . Like every Tibetan town and Tibetan family, Kantse is partly in and partly out of the monastery but that part that is in dominates the part that is out, physically, economically and socially. . . . Kantse Chou has never been reckoned under the rule of the Dalai Lama, but yet was ethnically Tibetan with the same kind of social system in which the lands and herds were owned by the monasteries and the tribal nobility.”
Those unacquainted with the Tibetan monastery system will be surprised both at the tender age of some monks and at the great difference in wealth among monks. Boys may be put into the monastery by their families while still babies, but a more usual age is around eight, when they are considered old enough to work. Monks from wealthy or noble families keep their status in the monastery and often become heads of monasteries, while the monks from serf families remain lifelong servants within monastery walls.
Kantse, however, was “liberated” in 1950, and changes occurred by the time the journalists passed through in 1955. The area had become a Tibetan Autonomous Chou, or district, under its own chosen council of twenty-three Tibetans, two Hans, one Yi and one Moslem, this being about the proportion in the population. Most members on the council were from the old governing class of nobles and clericals, but there was a vice-chairman who had actually come from a serf family. His name was Sonam, and he had joined the old Red Army of the Communists when they passed through this area in the Long March. He had been educated by them and had come back to his former home as an active organizer.
“Our two biggest problems,” he told the visiting journalists, as reported by Winnington, “are clan warfare and ula.” This last is the unpaid labor which may be required of serfs by anyone who has an order from the government for transport. The peasants to whom this order is presented must at once furnish beasts of burden, or act as porters themselves over long distances, often taking their own food, and standing the loss of any animals that die on the way. . . . Many instances occurred of serfs who died of starvation while performing this unpaid labor. Ula had a long tradition and Sonam said “it was a delicate matter” to tackle. But the governing council of Kantse Chou finally decided to pay for all such labor, since Peking agreed to furnish the cash. No laws had yet been passed in 1955 prohibiting ula for the local nobles, but, with the government setting example, ula was becoming less.
It took several conferences of clan leaders, monastery chiefs and herdsmen to get general agreement that the clan wars should cease. The Chou government then acted as mediator, and within five years had settled no less than 1,808 conflicts, ranging from two major wars between areas down to ordinary cattle-rustling. Many old family and clan feuds went back so far that nobody now remembered how they had started.
Kantse Chou is a wild area of very high mountains and very deep valleys, where the upper courses of China’s greatest rivers lie. Crossing Bird Mountain, a pass 16,600 feet high, two thousand feet higher than the highest mountain peak in the United States, the party of journalists came to De Ge Gonchen, which means “The Big Monastery of De Ge,” a town consisting again of a great lamasery, the lord’s castle, and the adobe huts of the common folk. Here they met the Lady Janyang Bomo, also known as the Queen of De Ge, since she ruled over 70,000 serfs, mistress of one of the largest of the Tibetan tribes. She told the party: “There are thirty hereditary clan leaders under me and under them are some eighty smaller leaders . . . . From the thirty, I select . . . my ministers.”
After crossing the Kinsha River, the upper reaches of the Yangtze, which since 1955 has been the boundary between Szechwan and Chamdo, and after crossing three more majestic ranges by passes running up to 15,000 feet, the party finally reached the city of Chamdo, of which we have heard in previous chapters.
The entire area is thus very high, wild country, split by rivers difficult to cross and by breath-taking passes, with a few scattered walled towns where nobles lived in castles, and a very large number of monasteries all over the countryside, dominating a population in which a large proportion of the males became monks. In 1955, a few results were discernible from the new Central Government in Peking. Clan wars were beginning to be mediated, ula was discouraged but not abolished, a new highway brought trade and contact with the lowlands, and hospitals had been brought into some of the towns. What was called “the democratic reform,” which meant the recognition of serfs as free citizens, and which would lead up to land reform, giving land to the serfs, was just beginning in Kantse Chou, but not yet in Chamdo, since Chamdo was already reserved as part of the future Tibetan Autonomous Region, and would make its reforms with the rest of the larger Tibet.
It was into such an area that some of the Dalai Lama’s retainers dropped off in late 1955, and organized for rebellion, on two potent slogans: the preservation of religion, and the exaltation of Tibetan nationalism. The facts came out much later, after the rebellion was suppressed. They may now be found most graphically in the Exhibition, and most consecutively from the Commission on Nationalities at the State Council. I got the information from both places and also from Chang Ching-wu, representative of the Central Government in Tibet.
In 1955, said a representative from the Minorities Commission, Living Buddha Tze Tsiang went around the southern part of the Chou to organize rebellion, while Gama Ba went around the northern part on the same errand. Two kinds of documents, later discovered, give the nature of the appeal. One was the “Four Rivers and Six Ranges” organization, which promoted the idea of a Greater Tibet, to be organized under and through the monasteries and to include every area where Tibetans lived. When finally the headquarters of this organization was traced to Lhasa, its promoters claimed that it was merely a fund-collecting agency for the Dalai Lama. Under its shelter, however, a conspiracy for rebellion went on.
This appeared from various documents captured at different times and in different places. In the Kantse Chou, in 1957, two documents were found, both of which showed on their face that they had been printed in 1954 in India. They were in Tibetan, and the first was entitled: “For a Tibetan State,” and contained the preliminary rules of the alliance which had a “Greater Tibet” as its aim. It was widely distributed among serf-owners. Another document called “Program for a New Republic,” called specifically for Tibetans in Szechwan, Chinghai and Kansu to establish a separate Tibetan State.
Another document found on the dead body of a rebel killed during the fighting in Chinghai Province, was a “proclamation” of the “Defend Religion and Anti-Communist Army.” This bore a seal of the organization in Lhasa and was addressed to the “same army,” in Szechwan, Chinghai and Kansu. It began by announcing that “the present enemy of our religion and the common enemy of all living creatures, the Communist Party, is revealing its original form, the Dobu (name of a species of devil). They are bombing big and small monasteries up from the sky and shelling them from the ground. . . . They slaughter cruelly and without discrimination innocent people. . . . They take children away from their parents and send them to places where their parents cannot see them.” . . . The proclamation then announced that “Defend Religion and Anti-Communist Armies are appearing everywhere. . .” and urges the recipients to organize. “We must exterminate these evil people until not even their names remain.”
At the time when these proclamations were circulated, not only had no monasteries been “bombed from the sky and shelled from the ground” by the Communists, but the representatives from Peking in the areas inhabited by Tibetans, had not even yet ventured to curtail the vast lands of the monasteries, nor their serf system, nor even enforce rules against their exorbitant usury rates, which often made debtors of entire families for some small loan of grain made decades ago to a grandfather. The monasteries were still lording it over the tribes with little hindrance, but their chiefs were sensitive to the approach of a new power which might threaten their rule. As they were later to do in Lhasa, they struck in advance.
The rebellion in the Kanting area (Kantse Chou) broke in winter of 1955-56. At the time there was no force of the People’s Liberation Army in the area, but only the local police of the newly organized autonomous counties, which were made up of mixed nationalities. The rebellion took the form of murder of Central Government personnel, and Han citizens. When the army reached any place, they could put down the rebels at once, but the area is large and wild, and the rebels spread over the back country, communicating through the monasteries. As the Szechwan area was cleared, they infiltrated into Chamdo, where they had another hundred thousand square miles of mountains to roam. . . . When beaten in Chamdo, a considerable part of these rebels went into the areas of Tibet nearer to Lhasa and joined the next rebellion under direct Lhasa command. These were the forces known as “Khampas,” or “the Sikang troops,” and were cavalry, wild, undisciplined, living by loot.
This Szechwan-Chamdo rebellion was “basically suppressed” by the end of 1956. It is estimated that there were some 10,000 at the highest point. A few still left in the hills will probably remain there as long as they are supplied with food from the monasteries or from local nobles. Only when land reform, the freeing of serfs, both outside and inside the monasteries, and the subsequent organization of local community governments destroys the food base for outlaws, will the last of them surrender.
“Where did they get arms?” I asked.
“There were at least 50,000 rifles in that area, left from the clan wars and the warlord battles,” my informant said.
I asked whether the Lady of De Ge was personally implicated in the rebellion. This was pure curiosity because I had read Winnington’s account of her and had seen her in 1959, still a deputy to the National People’s Congress of China, and still presumably queen over some tens of thousands of serfs in Chamdo, though her Szechwan areas were “under reform.” I was told that one of her tribal chiefs had taken part in the rebellion but the lady herself was “not implicated.”
The revolts in Chinghai and Kansu came a full two years later. They had no connection with the Szechwan-Chamdo revolt except that all were organized from Lhasa, and under the top leadership of a kaloon named Neusha. They all were carried on through the monasteries and the serf-owners, and demanded a separate Greater Tibet, ruled by the nobles and the monasteries. Participants not only had the document of the “Four Rivers and Six Ranges” and the “Defend Religion and Anti-Communist Army,” but also distributed very strong and potent “Curses” against the Communists which were later found pasted in abbots’ prayer-rooms behind mirrors or holy pictures, to be used in the daily devotions.
In Chinghai and Kansu the revolts broke out in spring of 1958, as a protest against the “democratic reform” which had been promoted in the previous winter, and which aroused armed resistance from landlords, pasture lords and monastery chiefs. These revolts were much smaller than the earlier revolt, and had some 2,000 to 3,000 rebels in each. In Kansu the revolt was over by mid-summer, in Chinghai by late autumn, except in a few nomad areas where it dragged into winter. I shall give more details of Kansu in discussing the Exhibition, for I met there and interviewed a former lama who took part in suppressing the revolt.
Here again we note that monasteries were very thick in proportion to population. In Kannan, the Tibetan Autonomous Chou of South Kansu, lamas comprised twenty percent of the total population, while in some counties lamas made up half of all males.
“How far did the democratic reform really affect the life of the monasteries?” I asked at the Nationalities Commission.
In the winter of 1957-58, they told me, the reform only went as far as reducing the excessive land rents and the very high usury which the monasteries charged the peasants and abolishing “feudal privileges.” The monasteries previously held their own courts, and passed sentences against people, including imprisonment and torture, not only on monks but on laymen as well. These privileges were taken away in the 1957-58 reform, and monks were made amenable for crimes to the regular county courts. After the rebellion was suppressed, the democratic reform went further and gave “personal freedom” to all the monks.
Formerly, the monks entered the monastery at a very early age, being put into it by their parents. “The monastery really compelled the people to enter their sons in the monastery,” said the representative of the Nationalities Commission. “When once they entered, those from families of peasants or herdsmen became slaves for life to the higher lamas, who were usually of the upper class. If they ran away they were caught and brought back to punishment by torture, just like any other serfs. When ‘freedom of person’ was decreed for the monks, the overwhelming majority of the lamas were extremely glad. Their parents made joyous trips to the monastery to invite their sons home. In many cases they wanted to go back and take part in civil life and in labor on the land.”
I asked whether any statistics existed as to the number of monks who thus left the monasteries. No statistics had yet been compiled. However, the very holy monastery known as Gumbum in Tibetan, and as Ta-erh in Han language, which was famous as the birthplace of Tson Khapa, the founder of the Yellow Sect, was reported as still having four or five hundred lamas.
“How many did it have formerly?” I asked.
“Several thousand.”
“How do they now live?” I asked.
“They still get contributions from believers; nobody interferes with that. They are also allowed to keep considerable land, which they can work with their own labor if they wish. Or they can make contracts with local peasant communes to work the land for payment. They cannot exact unpaid labor any more. And if, as in Gumbum, it is mostly the older monks who remain while many of the young and able-bodied leave, the government gives the monastery a subsidy for maintenance.”
The Exhibition of objects collected from these three minor rebellions showed the Chinese public for the first time the nature of Tibet’s serfdom and monastic rule. It was hard for some, and will be still harder for the West, to believe the things I saw in the Exhibition in three large rooms of the Labor Insurance Exhibition Hall. They recalled the exhibits of mediaeval tortures I once, as a tourist, saw in Nuremberg.
The first room bore the prosaic title — “Before the Social Reform.” This was the veritable chamber of horrors. Here was exhibited the contents of a private prison in a monastery in Szechwan. There were hand-cuffs of many sizes, including small ones for small children; there were instruments for cutting off noses and ears, and other instruments for breaking off the hands. There were instruments for gouging out eyes, including a special stone cap with two holes in it that was pressed down over the head so that the eyes bulged out through the hole, in which position they were gouged out and hot oil was poured into the sockets. The victim usually died, but not always. There were also pictures of blinded victims that survived.
There were instruments for slicing off knee-caps, after which boiling oil was applied there also. Other instruments sliced off the heels or hamstrung men, making permanent cripples. There were instruments for sealing the forehead with a red hot brand. There were various kinds of whips for flogging, with wooden paddles, or with ropes or wires. There were special instruments for dis-embowelling.
Eighteen different ways of torture were here shown by paintings; they recalled things read long ago of the Middle Ages — strange and terrible methods of doing a man to death. He might be tied with ropes, one to each arm and leg and jerked apart by four horses, driven in different directions. He might be roasted alive, tied on a bronze horse with a fire built in its belly; or hung from a gallows with oil on his chest set afire. There is no need to mention more examples of the human imagination at its depraved worst.
There were pictures of victims still living: of a child of two with one eye put out, of two “activists” i.e. workers for the Communists, with noses and upper lips cut off, a woman who had been first raped and then had her nose cut off, a 78-year-old man whose ear was cut off because he refused to join the rebels, another “activist” with eyes gouged out and ears cut off, a cripple with heels cut off and another with hands cut off, these last being still in hospital.
Then came exhibits of an abnormality that made the previous horrors seem by contrast almost normal. These were the full skins of people, mostly of children, taken from their bodies while they lived, though of course they died in the process. There were quite a number of these.
From Chinghai, the Huangnan Chou, the Lapo Temple, were two full skins of two small children skinned alive by two “Living Buddhas,” named Tang Chiu-yen and Lung Tze, both of whom had been arrested, and the second of whom had been executed for his action, though he protested that the little girl, skinned in 1955, had been a “witch.” From Szechwan also came skins of a grown man and two small children, from Linglung Temple in Louhao County. When I asked what proof there was that the skins were taken from bodies previously living, I was told that people saw the lama do it, and he said these were devils, who were destroying the herds. A similar skin, this time of a child, came from Long Tsa Temple in Kantse. The witness to the act was one of the lesser lamas, who said he saw the child flayed. Later, the chief lama who did the deed was captured and admitted the act, giving the usual reason, that the child was an “incarnated devil.” This lama is reported as in prison but not executed for his deed.
One of the more exotic exhibits in this room was the “Sex Diary” of the high Lama Saitze, who had seduced or raped 800 women, in age from 16 to 60, and including two male lamas on whom he put false hair. He kept lists, and descriptions of the various ways of intercourse used with diagrams of the position of the male and female organs. People like that existed also in Italy and France of the Middle Ages and published diaries. I noted that these things were not shown in Peking as an “anti-religious exhibition,” as similar but lesser atrocities were earlier shown in the USSR. They were shown as the “abuse of religion,” as evil reactionary deeds “under cloak of religion.” The Chinese Communists have many religious people as allies, and are not attacking anyone’s “religion” as such.
The second room was devoted to “Armed Rebellion Under Cloak of Religion.” Here was the Proclamation of the “Defend Religion and Anti-Communist Armies,” which urged people to exterminate all Communists. It had been issued from Lhasa with a seal on it, and was found on the body of a rebel in Chinghai on January 10, 1959. It boasted: “Everywhere in the Tibetan regions exists now this army, and also food, military supplies and clothing come to us from helpers abroad and on Taiwan.”
Here was shown a holy picture brought from the Tal Temple in Chinghai, from the room of the Living Buddha Lako, with a curse hidden on its back and the words: “We must unite to kill those who do not believe in God.” Many pictures and Buddha statues hid curses and inscriptions like this.
American army and naval equipment, dropped into Kantse by plane from Chiang Kai-shek, was shown in this room. A list of one air-drop in 1957, captured May 1958, included three parachutes, two wireless sets, two hand motors, four military maps, three tommy-guns, a rifle and a dagger, forty rounds of ammunition, and considerable money in silver and in Taiwan paper. I noted a Life Jacket marked “Property Airforce US Army, Hodgman Rubber Co. 1942,” and a big yellow parachute stamped “24 ft diameter, Aerial Delivery container canopy, load capacity 300 lbs max. at 150 m.p.h. (Yellow silk on parachutes was a handy color, for after a secret agent dropped in a tight jacket of U.S. Army issue, he could quickly hide this with a trailing lama robe of yellow silk.) There was other equipment such as a radio transmitter and a signal to guide an air-drop, originating with the U.S. Army, which came into Tibetan Autonomous Districts by air drop from Chiang Kai-shek.
I was ready to quit the exhibition, for I had my fill of horrors, but I stepped briefly into the third room and then I stayed for more than another hour. It was called “The Rebellion Suppressed.” If the keynote of the first room had been horror, and of the second room, conspiracy with foreign powers, the keynote of the third was “Judgment and Recovery” . . . . Here one saw how the common people, even when seeming most helpless, have memory that endures and that one day brings to judgment.
Here was a great double photograph of a mass meeting of a thousand herdsmen on the Kansu plains, hearing accusations. And here were two hands cut off from a shepherd that the shepherd had saved as proof one day of his torment. In 1957, he said, his master owed him 290 yuan and 800 catties of wheat and refused to pay him. So he took a cow from his master and for this his hands were severed at the wrists. Now he brought the shrivelled hands as testimony.
Here were the bloody rags that a mother had saved, so blackened you hardly could see what they were, till she spoke in the meeting: “This was the only clothing of my son, a herdsman beaten to death by this lord here, twenty years ago.” Then she cried out: “I saved them for witness, and all my neighbors know it. He was my only son!”
Here was a large close-up photograph of a herdsman, speaking at the big mass meeting, with arms uplifted to show that the hands were long since broken off at the wrist. But the strong face spoke now neither of pain nor of horror but only of judgment as the man said: “This lord took away my wife and I never again saw her. He beat off my hands when I opposed him. He also beat off the hands of my younger brother, who was weaker than I and who died of shock and loss of blood. My sister died of the terror. My old mother is ill ever since.”
One of the attendants at the exhibit, a man in his twenties, seeing my interest, came up to me and said: “I myself was a lama for ten years and I ran away to Lanchow to study and later I went back to help in this reform. You should see how fast the new life grows when you set it free. That rebellion came in April and was basically suppressed in May. All summer we were holding meetings on the prairie first for judgment and then for organization. By October all of Kannan, the Tibetan Autonomous District of Kansu, went into communes. And see what has happened in the six months since.”
I looked at a line of pictures that showed triumph. First came the tatzepao, the posted statements which people put up to demand a commune. Then came the meetings, also in clusters on the prairie. Then pictures of what the commune was in spring of 1959, six months after organization. One photograph showed a cluster of large central offices and barns which would have been a creditable big farm anywhere, another showed a big milk truck pulling up to the herds on the grasslands, while women in long Tibetan skirts rather incongruously carried big milk cans on their heads from the cattle to the truck. There was a picture of a milk-powder factory and another where hundreds of eggs rolled off a sorting device into large baskets to be made into egg-powder for export.
It seemed a very prosperous happy commune that had flowered in six brief months after the long, slow, painful years: “What happened to the rebels?” I asked. The young ex-lama looked surprised that I should care to know.
“The Lord Dorje,” he said, “the one that beat the woman’s son to death, is in jail in Sining. I didn’t follow the other cases through.” After a pause he added: “I’d like to tell you about my life in the monastery.”
“Come around and see me,” I invited.
Chaotzeteh — the syllables are all one name — came to my home a few days later, a young man nearing thirty, in a neat blue suit with white shirt showing when his coat turned back, rather European in his clothes. His first words, as he seated himself and lifted his tea-cup, were anything but European:
“My father and grandfather were both of them lamas,” he said.
I thought this a bit surprising, since lamas are supposed to be celibate, but of course they might have become lamas late in life after raising a son. So I passed it up. But when he went on with the tale of his youth, it was clear that his father was a peasant, tilling “about thirteen stan of land” and raising many daughters and at least three sons. This seemed a rather permanent household for a lama, so I asked about it. He first replied that the grandfather who was a lama, had no real children of his own but adopted those of his brother. After that he began to speak of the lamas as his uncles. It occurred to me that this might be a case of the form of polyandry that occurs among Tibetan peasants and herdsmen, when the woman is wife to a group of brothers, but all children belong to the oldest brother, who also owns the family land. It would be a convenient form for lama-uncles. I didn’t press the question, since he clearly preferred to discuss something else.
The legal father with whom he lived had a wife, three sons and many daughters, the exact number being unmentioned because girls didn’t count. Of the three sons, the oldest might stay at home, but the others were expected to become lamas. The same thing had happened in his father’s generation; he also had been one of three brothers, of whom two became lamas. It also happened with his grandfather. The young Chaotzeteh himself was sent into the monastery at the age of eight.
“I was the second son,” he explained simply, “and so I had to go. I had a younger brother who was the third son. He had to go to the monastery too.” It was expected, he said, that the oldest son should marry and keep the family, but the others should become lamas. If a family was lax, the monastery itself kept watch over the matter. “My mother told me that when I was five and six years old, I was three times ill, and the Living Buddha told her I would die unless I became a lama.” That was enough of a hint; the boy was promised to the Living Buddha. At the age of eight, he went.
I assumed at first that the boys were sent to the monastery to save feeding so many at home, but this was not at all the case. In sending the boy, the family had to send also his food and clothing, and an equal amount for his teacher’s food and clothes.
“The family was poor,” he said, “because there were thirteen to feed, counting the old people and the daughters, and only two able-bodied men to work, my father and my older brother. Three rations had to be sent to the monastery, for myself, my younger brother and my uncle. The uncle was teacher for my brother and myself so we did not have to feed another teacher. The family had to send food for three.”
Besides this, he said, they had to pay the chief of the tribe for the thirteen stan of land they rented from him. “We had to pay seven and a half DO — that is a measure — and a silver dollar and a cartload of fodder to the chief. If you cannot pay the whole seven and a half but only pay five DO, then next year you owe the whole seven and a half over again, and this makes fifteen DO, and this you can never pay. So even if you have no food for the family and no seed for sowing, you pay that seven and a half and you pay the monastery.”
I asked what the relation was between the tribal chief and the monastery. Chaotzeteh replied: “The monastery has lots of land, and the tribes rent from them, and they pay the monastery half of what is reaped and the other half is for the tribes.” It was clear there would not be much after all this sub-division for the actual soil-tilling family. There would be still less when two of the three brothers were taken into the monastery and fed from the family’s grain which they did not help produce.
“Now I will tell you my life in the monastery,” said Chaotzeteh. “I was sent to Chuanting Monastery, in Chuni County of Kansu. It is the biggest monastery of that area, and controlled all the other monasteries. I was there for thirteen years. I worked many hours each day doing services for the big lamas, carrying water, cooking, making tea, carrying vegetables, cleaning the rooms. I also studied the scriptures.
“When they sent me, they stitched a red cloth on my coat shoulder to show that I now belong to the monastery. After that I cannot come home without the lama’s permission. In January or February the family sends all the food for a half year; in September the other half. The flour must be already ground, and they send other food, and also the fuel to cook it, both for me and for my teacher. At the Spring Festival they send the oil, butter, meat, salt, pepper and clothing for the year.
“I rose every day when it was still dark for I had much work to do before the dawn. I must sweep the ground in the compound, and bring water from the hill to make tea for the upper lamas, and do other work like this until it is light enough to see the lines on my hand. Then it is time to read scriptures. We read till eight or nine — the time is not exact because there are no clocks — and then we had our first meal of tsamba, which is ground barley parched and mixed with liquid. The big lamas are given butter and oil and salt and pepper and even meat with their tsamba. But none of these are allowed to the lesser lamas, not even onions to flavor. It is an offense to God.”
After this flavorless breakfast, the student lamas learned scripture. “We recite what we learned yesterday and the teacher gives us new scripture to learn. He flogs if we do not remember. When the sun is at midday we have a rest.”
Did they learn to read and write? I asked. Chaotzeteh replied that they learned to read and write the scriptures, which were in “classical Tibetan, not the language of every day.” It took a year and a half to learn to read single syllables, then another year and a half to learn the double-syllable words. “After five years we can read the scriptures; after another five years we can write them down.”
Chaotzeteh said that he himself was better treated than the poorer lamas were. “Because I had uncles that were big lamas,” he said. “The poorest lamas slept out of doors even in very cold weather, or if the weather was really so cold that they would freeze to death, they were allowed to sleep indoors in a corner of the floor.”
Despite the fact that his own condition was better, Chaotzeteh found it bad enough. He fled from the monastery in 1951. What made him flee and how did he do it? I asked.
“I wanted to leave because of the maltreatment by the upper lamas,” he answered. “Even my uncles cursed and flogged me. Even now I have scars on my body from those beatings. The worse time was when they caught me playing in the main hall of the temple when I was sixteen. I was so heavily flogged that I was laid up for four months from it. Then also I found that there was no truth in the monastery. After liberation I saw society changing around me and wanted to be in it.”
The first contact Chaotzeteh had with the new “liberation” was when the new government sent representatives to speak in the monastery and told the upper lamas not to flog the lesser lamas. “This sounded to me very good.” Then in 1951 the county section head for national minorities came to see him — “he was an old boy chum of mine,” and told him that a school for training government personnel was being opened in Lanchow and that he might like to go.
“I wanted very much to go but I was afraid even to think of it, for they might find out and torture or kill me. I told my friend to keep the news quiet. Twice more I saw him and told him I wanted to go if it could be done. I went home overnight to see my parents about it — I told the lamas my parents were ill and so I got an overnight permission. My father was against the idea. He said he would rather see me a beggar than an official. He was afraid if I left the monastery they would demand his last son from him to take my place, but if I went as a begging monk, they might not. When my parents had twice refused permission, I decided to run away without telling them. My friend in the government helped me. I went out of the gate before dawn as if on an errand and without any baggage; a car picked me up in front of a house we arranged, and took me out of town towards Lanchow before it was light.”
“Did the monastery do anything about it?” I asked.
“They told my parents to get me back, so I did not dare go home to visit for more than five years. Even when I graduated in 1956 in Lanchow, I did not dare go home. But later I joined the army to put down the rebellion in Kannan. When the rebellion was beaten then I went home from the army. I found that my younger uncle had been arrested as a rebel but my older uncle had come home from the monastery and was taking part in productive labor. He is a member of a commune now.”
Chaotzeteh told me what happened to his former monastery. “There were four head lamas there,” he said, “but one of them was only thirteen years old and was sent to Lhasa to study, another was 70 years old and joined the rebellion but he took no armed part, and only read curses against the Communists and spoke against them, so he was released. A third was not present during the rebellion, and is thought to have gone home like my elder uncle to join in productive labor. The fourth one, named Yilichang, was head of the rebellion for the county and eighty lamas followed him, including my younger uncle. Yilichang and some of the chief fighters went to jail.
“There is a new head of the monastery, named Yang Gang-chu. He didn’t want to stay and be abbot; he wanted to leave and get married, but everybody said, and the government also said, that somebody had to run the place with the four chiefs gone. So he agreed to stay for a time but everyone knows that he is engaged to be married. Many other lamas went home and some got married. Others stayed, but if these are young, they now take part in production, and raise food.”
“Do you yourself now believe any of the Buddhism you learned in the monastery?” I asked. Chaotzeteh gave an emphatic: “No.”
“There was no truth in that monastery,” he added. “I no longer believe in ghosts.”
It is usually the ex-priests who really hate religion. Most Chinese Communists are rather tolerant of old religious habits and even of the Buddha tooth. But the ex-lamas often hate them. Chaotzeteh, on his own proposal, had come all the way to my house and given an afternoon to expose that rather ordinary monastery, to which they had sold his youth.
1. Winnington, Tibet, Lawrence and Wishart, London.