Palden Gyatso
Monk who spent more than 30 brutal years in prison following the Chinese invasion of Tibet
PALDEN GYATSO, who has died aged 85, was a Tibetan monk who survived torture, hard labour and virtual starvation during 33 years in prison following China’s invasion of Tibet. The Dalai Lama described his life as “one of the most extraordinary stories of suffering and endurance”.
He lived through one of the most harrowing eras in Tibetan history, witnessing executions during the Cultural Revolution and being forced to eat the leather from his own shoes rather than die of hunger. But he went into exile in 1992 and travelled the world to bear witness to his country’s suffering under Chinese rule.
Palden visited Britain in 1995, reducing audiences to tears with stories that China had sought to suppress. He brought with him a collection of torture implements, still stained with blood, that he had smuggled from Tibet after bribing a Chinese prison official.
When he travelled to Scotland, Edinburgh airport officials found he was carrying electric shock batons, handcuffs and knives (with a hook at the end for gouging out flesh) in his monk’s pouch. They detained him until representatives of the Dalai Lama could explain who he was.
Palden Gyatso was born in 1933 (like many Tibetans, he does not know the exact date) in the village of Panam, 125 miles west of Lhasa. Auspicious signs accompanied his birth, his grandmother told him, including a rainbow that arced over the village at the moment he was born, while an unkindness of ravens which usually perched on the roof of the monastery clustered instead on his family’s home.
Palden, whose mother died a month after he was born, lived with an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles – 29 altogether. On his release from prison in 1992, most of his family were dead, killed by executions, starvation or torture. Almost none had been able to visit him in prison, except for one relative who managed to deliver food occasionally. He later said that in prison “We all learned to live as though we were orphans, with no parents or brothers or sisters or even friends in the outside world.”
Aged 10, Palden became a monk at Gadrug Gompa in Shigatse, studying until he was 16. He then moved to the largest of the three great monasteries of Tibet, Drepung, near Lhasa.
On March 10 1959, he went to Lhasa on monastic business. He found that almost the entire population was on the streets, gathering outside the Dalai Lama’s palace. The Dalai Lama had been attempting wary conciliations with the Chinese rulers, but fears had grown that they would attempt to take him to China, and so crowds had gathered to protect him.
This was the beginning of the Tibetan Uprising: by the time the Chinese were firing shells into the crowd, the Dalai Lama was crossing the mountains into safety. Carrying his 72-year-old teacher monk on his back, Palden returned to his monastery. But Chinese officials were determined to punish anyone involved with the Uprising and Chinese officials went to the monastery and carried out “re-education”, often at gunpoint.
On one visit, Chinese officials showed an elderly monk a thick woollen gown and asked him where it came from. “Wool – from a sheep,” the monk said, starting to cry because he did not know what was expected of him. His answer was incorrect: he had failed to take into account the labour of the serfs, he was told.
Palden was branded a “reactionary counter-revolutionary” and after harsh interrogation, involving a gun to his head, he was imprisoned. For about six months he was held in leg irons with a metal bar that made it almost impossible to walk, and he could only move by shuffling. Palden relied on his cellmates for everything; he could not eat without their assistance. One prisoner would take a handful of tsampa (roasted barley flour) and make it into dough, then put it on the bed next to his mouth, and he would take small bites from it.
The prisoners were driven by hunger. “We thought of nothing else,” Palden wrote in his memoir Fire Under
the Snow. “Some prisoners would eat the bones of dead rats or insects they found in the fields. I soaked my leather boots in water and began to chew on them. Soon there was nothing left.”
Palden and other prisoners were forced to work for nine hours a day, frequently harnessed in a yoke and made to plough. If they stopped working, they would be beaten almost to death. In the mornings, prisoners did not have the strength to raise their heads without pushing them up with their hands. Every day officials would come into the jail with a cart pulled by three horses. They would load the cart with people who had died overnight or in the plough harness. Prisoners could see heads rolling about over the edge.
Palden was made to witness many executions during the Cultural Revolution. He said once that some died of fear before they were shot. Prisoners were forced to remain silent and to show no signs of grief. But often, they wept.
During endless re-education sessions, punishments were cruel and violent. When prisoners adopted a cross-legged posture for the sessions, they were accused of showing feudal respect to the Buddha and were forced to squat, emulating PLA soldiers.
A prison guard, furious by his refusal to renounce Tibetan independence, tortured Palden with an electric shock baton in his mouth, knocking out all his teeth. One of the Chinese guards ran out of the room in disgust.
As a result, for years Palden was unable to digest his food properly. When he arrived in London on his first visit to the West, he discovered a taste for croissants with blackcurrant jam, cut into small pieces. Friends took him to a London dentist and he was given a set of false teeth; it was impossible to forget his beaming smile of joy afterwards.
The Chinese government released Palden in 1992; he believes that pressure from groups such as Amnesty International and the International Campaign for Tibet was influential. Even close to release after 33 years, he remained intransigent in his opposition. When asked if he would continue to protest outside prison, he quoted from Mao’s “Little Red Book”, “Wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance”.
Palden spoke before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva and a human rights subcommittee of the House of Representatives in Washington. Advocates in Warsaw could never forget the face of the then Polish foreign minister during a meeting when Palden calmly took his false teeth out and put them on the table before him with the cattle prod.
Like many Tibetans and Chinese who lived through the trauma of famine, Palden would often open the cupboard to reassure himself that there was food.
In his last years, monks at Kirti monastery in Dharamsala, close to the Dalai Lama’s temple, cared for Palden. Former political prisoners would visit him to talk about their lives and tell stories, often with much laughter; on one occasion a former monk reminded Palden Gyatso of their names for their jailers – they called one particularly brutal guard “Saddam Hussein”.
Palden Gyatso, born 1933, died November 30 2018