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Release from a cycle of servitude

By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-22 07:44

Not because the 83-year-old is losing his memory. Rather, it was an inhuman time he wants to forget.

A child chases pigeons in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, in this photo taken last May. Tremendous changes have taken place since the emancipation of serfs in the region 50 years ago. [China Daily]

"I consider myself dead then," Kerong said.

As a teenager in Tibet then, Kerong never liked, let alone romanticized, the life in any one of the ubiquitous monasteries of the region. Being born into the Tibetan Buddhism way of life that was nestled amid the Himalayas, Kerong, like most of his peers, was religious. But the monastery always invoked fear and despair in him.

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That was because Kerong was a Tralpa, a member of the hereditary "middle-class" of serf families in the Old Tibet. As the only son in his family, Kerong was spared the compulsory temple service demanded by the authorities for all boy serfs from families with two or more sons as a form of "atonement". But Kerong was still forced to provide free labor at the renowned Drepung Monastery after he turned 15.

"I was too young and weak to lift even a scoop used for stirring tea in those huge pots they had for brewing tea," Kerong said. "I just couldn't do it. But each time I failed to perform my duties, I would be brutally caned, day in and day out," he said.

"Just like that, I was gradually forced and beaten into a Tralpa. It was my life, my fate and my destiny."

Kerong's life is just one of the countless stories of servitude and suffering seen throughout the Old Tibet, existing for more than a millennium and brought to an end only in 1959, when the central government abolished slavery in the region on March 28 with the historic policy of Democratic Reform.

Serfs' Emancipation Day every March 28 is also the designated holiday for celebrating the end of serfdom in Tibet, following a bill passed on Monday at the autonomous region's People's Congress in its capital, Lhasa.

Before March 1959, serfs made up 95 percent of the Tibetan population. They were expected to serve the interests of the few lords and lamas who held an iron grip on the theocratic Himalayan region, both spiritually and for all practical purposes.

Tibet resident Kerong boils a pot of water via a solar energy facility in his courtyard last week. [China Daily/By Hu Yinan]

Contrary to what many believed and as cases such as Kerong's have shown, religion was never the sole force that advocated the tens of thousands of Tibetan serfs and beggars to "voluntarily" observe the laws of karma that bound them to such servitude.

Instead, a wide-ranging network of control was known to have been at play to tie the Tralpas and Duiqoins - serfs with a lower status and lesser land allocation than the Tralpas - to their limited share of land, and rule the Nangzan, or household slaves, through sheer violence.

All these groups were known to have been at the mercy of not more than 200 wealthy families and a handful of powerful temples. Kerong himself was only one of 25,000 serfs at the Drepung, which controlled 185 manors, 300 major pastures and 16,000 herdsmen in the 1950s.

"Every society progresses, but not the Old Tibet then," said Salung Phunlha, deputy chief of the influential Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigaze, Bailang county. "Ordinary people had to pay heavy taxes if they wanted to visit monasteries. Not many people had that luxury. Beggars were everywhere."

Salung entered the monastery aged 9 in 1951 and toiled for the senior lamas for nearly a decade. "Nobody cared, not even if you fell down and died from exhaustion," he said.

"That was the life of all serfs before 1959, not for one year, but for hundreds and thousands of years.

"You were a damned slave."

Like all the slaves in Tibet, Kerong suffered in the monastery. But he did not know where, or who to turn to. No one knew the true name of their master - it could have been a wealthy north Tibetan lama who earned the nickname "Apota", or "the Big Tiger", among Drepung's serfs.

"My parents, two elder sisters, wife and I lived in a low, damp and dark room measured out by a pole (about 20 sq m)," Kerong said. "We were all Tralpas; my mother and sisters were slaves carrying out transportation tasks for the monastery."

Yeshe Lodro was born to share Kerong's fate, but his mother was too poor to raise him. He was sent to Drepung by a local lama when he was 2. Three years later, Yeshe became a monk and, like Salung and most other young monks, became servants to a senior lama.

"My biggest hope as a child was not to be beaten and scolded. But it was futile," he said. "I could deal with the scolding, but I could only take so many beatings."

"I couldn't possibly live in the monastery," Yeshe said. "I had to escape."

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