The End of Tibet

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The small concrete room smells of urine. In the corner, a young woman lies on a metal cot, moaning softly and vomiting up blood. A former Buddhist nun, she is recovering from an operation on her stomach to fix internal injuries caused by beatings from Chinese guards. Her roommate, Lhundrub Zangmo, speaks in a whispery monotone. Zangmo's head is no longer shaven, and her straight black hair falls over her tight sweater emblazoned with the words The Coolest Boy. But even though she has left the clergy, Zangmo remains deeply religious. She has plastered the walls of the tiny room with photos of Buddhist deities and the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhists.

It has been only a few months since Zangmo and her friend fled Tibet on foot over the Himalayas to this squat, block-shaped center for Tibetan refugees in India. The two women had been imprisoned along with a group of other nuns, some for as long as sixteen years. They were first arrested in 1990 for staging a protest in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to demonstrate their outrage over China's continuing presence in their native land. As the women chanted "Free Tibet," Chinese police moved quickly, knocking them to the ground and dragging them to jail before their protest could attract attention. Inside the prison, Chinese authorities subjected the nuns to a brutal routine. "Police stuck electric prods into my vagina and then hung me from the ceiling," Zangmo says softly. Her voice doesn't waver, but she looks away. Some of her friends lost consciousness as soon as guards pushed the cattle prods inside them, but Zangmo remained alert throughout the torture. "I was totally, totally frightened," she says.

Police eventually transferred the women to Drapchi, the most feared prison in Lhasa. According to human rights organizations, there are hundreds of political prisoners in Tibet, the majority of them Buddhist clergy. Scores have died from torture at the hands of Chinese authorities: electric shock, hanging, forced blood extraction. "They tried to pull my arms out of my sockets, and beat my legs and arms with metal bars and shocked me," recalls Phuntsog Nyidron, another nun who was imprisoned at Drapchi. "I was worried they could easily kill me." After repeated beatings, a monk named Lobsang Choephel hanged himself at Drapchi, his body dangling from the iron bars of his cell.

The punishment was most severe for those who refused to give up their faith. "In Drapchi, there were numerous demonstrations," Zangmo says. One day, four nuns refused to renounce their Buddhist beliefs in front of the Chinese guards. "They were beaten until they died." Zangmo stares at the floor and starts to cry, her voice breaking. "They died together."

Before places like drapchi existed, Lhasa was the capital of a remote kingdom where a long line of Dalai Lamas presided over a civilization infused with spirituality, perpetuated in more than 6,000 monasteries and protected by the snow-capped Himalayas. In their sacred land, Tibetans built a distinct and mystical culture, a matchless experiment in faith that permeated their lives. "Tibetans are unique on the planet in that their national life is wholly dedicated to Buddhism," says Robert Thurman, the most famous Tibet scholar in America. By developing a worship of living things, he says, Tibetans also preserved the Earth's highest ecosystem, one that comprises biodiversity on the scale of the Amazon and serves as the source of rivers that sustain nearly half the world's population. "This is some of the most important environment in the world," Thurman says, "so fragile that, once it's gone, it can never come back."