Published by: World Tibet Network News Monday, September 29, 1997

by Patrick French

The Times - London, September 28 1997

Fire under the Snow: The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner

by Palden Gyatso transl. by Tsering Shakya, Harvill L17 pp232

The official biography of the previous Dalai Lama of Tibet is subtitled A String of Wondrous Gems, A Drop From the Ocean of Liberated Life of the Incomparably Kind Lord of All Buddhas, He of the Highest Stage ? which gives some idea of biographical custom on the roof of the world. While hagiography is an essential part of Tibet's literary and religious canon, revelatory memoirs do not exist. This is what makes Fire under the Snow so fascinating and unique. It is a first-person account by a 65-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk, Palden Gyatso, which paints a disturbingly detailed picture of daily existence under Chinese occupation. Born into a small landowning family in central Tibet, he spent more than half his life in prison in his own land before escaping into exile in India in 1992. He smuggled with him various torture implements that are presently in use in Lhasa's prisons, including thumbcuffs and a high-voltage electric baton of a type that had once been inserted into his own mouth.

Palden's mother died when he was a baby and he joined a monastery as a novice at 11. His memories of Tibet before the 1950 Chinese invasion are not adulatory. As his translator Tsering Shakya writes in a preface: "Our history is governed by moments of brilliance and profound creativity, punctuated by the follies of leaders, the corruption of the ruling class and the poverty of the common people."

Palden's early experience of the Chinese communists was fairly benign. They showed propaganda films and distributed badges of Mao Tse-tung. It was only after the uprising of 1959 that repression became serious. There were interminable indoctrination sessions, which would be amusing if they were not so tragic. Palden describes a Chinese officer asking a terrified old monk where his robe came from. The cowering man answers "wool", and then in tears tries "a sheep": the correct answer was "the labour of the exploited serfs".

In 1960 Palden was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment by a Chinese military court for refusing to denounce his religious teacher as an imperialist spy. He was also classified as a reactionary and stripped of his political rights. From then on he passed through numerous prisons and labour camps, including one in which the inmates were reduced to eating the leather from their boots, boiled into a porridge. Since death from starvation was impossible in a communist society, the living were required to shout out "the breath left him" when the name of a dead prisoner was read out at roll call.

While flower children and designer leftists paraded around Europe's capitals in the 1960s, waving Mao's Little Red Book, Palden spent his time shackled in leg irons, witnessing the execution of other Tibetan nationalists. One day he was seen flicking water from his hands, and accused of performing a Buddhist ritual. He was severely beaten as a punishment.

It was not until 1976 that he learnt his father and elder brother had been killed a decade earlier; his stepmother was still alive, but paralysed. Mao died in the same year. It is worth comparing Palden's reaction to the Great Helmsman's death to that of Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans. While she is distressed by his demise, despite the suffering that her family have endured, Palden "was filled with a sense of elation. I could have jumped up and broken into song right there!" Having learnt to disguise his feelings, however, he "adopted a pensive look" instead. This is perhaps indicative of the fact that, although the whole of China suffered terribly under Mao, the cult of his leadership never permeated the soul of the Tibetans.

Fire under the Snow is an accessible, deeply moving and thoroughly contemporary book, telling the story of one man and the destruction of the ancient culture into which he was born. It is also a terrible indictment of the wastefulness and ignorance of Chinese colonial rule in Tibet. When he testified to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1995, Palden was denounced by China's ambassador to London as "a criminal who persisted in anti-government activities . . . Palden's story of how he was tortured by prison guards is untrue. Torture is forbidden in Chinese prisons".

Like a concentration-camp survivor, Palden Gyatso clearly feels a duty to remember and represent the fate of his fellow prisoners. "All I can do is bear witness," he writes, "and set down what I saw and heard and what the strange story of my life has been." The most enduring image in this book is of him and fellow inmates secretly listening to the BBC World Service in their prison dormitory each night on a smuggled radio, and deriving comfort from news of the Dalai Lama's visits to foreign countries. Every household in Britain should have a copy of Fire under the Snow, lest we forget what is happening in Tibet.