Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (36 page)

Author’s Note

IN JULY 1942, in one of the most adventurous missions ever devised by a wartime President, Franklin Roosevelt dispatched the colorful grandson of Leo Tolstoy, Ilya, on a year long journey to Tibet to explore supply routes and initiate a dialogue between the United States and the Dalai Lama. On behalf of Roosevelt, Ilya Tolstoy presented both a gold chronograph—which the Dalai Lama reportedly still uses today—and an offer of support if hostilities were to reach the roof of the world. Geopolitics had undergone a seismic shift by the time the Chinese occupied Tibet ten years later but the offer was not forgotten. The older brothers of the Dalai Lama, Gyalo Thondup and Thubten Norbu, started a new dialogue with Washington which, when the Chinese began open warfare, gave rise to the covert missions that underlie the plot of this novel.

It is not surprising that this American connection to the Tibetan resistance has been absent from our history books—the secrecy that shrouded it was so complete that the Tibetan trainees first arriving at Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies did not even know what continent they were on. The facts of that mission trickled out over decades, and only recently, as records have at last been declassified, has its full scope become known. Dozens of Tibetans were trained in America to use weapons, codes, radios, and parachutes, then dropped back into their native land from civilian American planes that sometimes flew hundreds of miles inside Tibet. While these airdrops lasted five years, the American support continued for seventeen years, during which secret Tibetan radio teams kept the Americans connected to the Four Rivers Six Ranges resistance army. The final remnants of that army of irregulars, vastly outnumbered and always on the run from Chinese troops, did not lay down their arms until 1971, when the Dalai Lama finally sent a taped message asking them to stop throwing away their lives for a futile cause. For those who wish to more closely follow the path of these freedom fighters and the Westerners who helped them, John Kenneth Knaus’
Orphans
of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival
does a masterful job of relating their intriguing, tragic, and ultimately inspiring, story.

The Everest region was one of several areas of operations for these resistance fighters, and it is not difficult to imagine some of those who faded into the local population later reconnecting with the new breed of foreigners who came to scale the Himalayas. The slopes of the mountain the Tibetans call Chomolungma and the surrounding peaks hold a drama all their own, poignant not just for the daring of mountaineers amidst the majestic landscape and the grisly remains of climbers that are readily visible below the summit but for the juxtaposition of the wealthy foreigners who annually descend on the mountain with local Tibetans whose annual income would not even pay for one of the foreigners’ boots.

Repression by the Red Guard and the Chinese army was particularly brutal in this area due to both the active resistance and the region’s special spiritual significance to Tibetans. The poet saint Milarepa, one of Tibet’s most revered figures, spent his last years there a millennia ago. It was also on these slopes that some of the most important Buddhist teachings were first offered by the Indian lama Padampa Sangye. For centuries life in the region centered around its many temples, monasteries, and hermitages, nearly all of which have been destroyed.

Like many parts of modern Tibet the Chomolungma region is deeply out of balance. It is no wonder that its native inhabitants are hesitant about the twenty-first century, when their exposure to the global economy and the West consists of foreigners paying massive fees to Beijing for the right to climb their sacred mountain. While the Chinese government has taken a step in the right direction by establishing a refuge below Chomolungma to preserve its wildlife, far greater effort is needed to address the needs of the indigenous human population of the region.

As in all my Shan novels, I have taken great care not to exaggerate the political and social plight of the Tibetans. The systematic destruction of Tibetan culture begun by Beijing fifty years ago has accelerated in the past decade. The inmate population of the hard labor gulag camps is swelling with Tibetan political dissidents and monks; that system also includes hospitals for the treatment of criminal “disorders.” Monks are expected to kowtow to political commissars of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, loyalty raids are indeed conducted on monasteries, and Tibetans have learned that the only holy places that are safe are those that remain out of sight of their government. As real life wheelsmashers roamed through Tibet following the most recent outbreak of protests, the future planned for these peaceful, compassionate, and deeply spiritual people was summed up by a senior official of the government that invaded their land two generations ago: “The Tibetan people,” he declared, “must accept that the Communist Party is their new Buddha.” But as the Tibetans have heroically demonstrated, neither their future nor their spiritual leaders will be determined by government decree.

Eliot Pattison