Dark era
Gaisang's story is hardly exceptional.
According to Gaisang Yeshes, former head of the Tibetan Press of Ancient Books and a sociologist with the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences, serfdom developed before the Yuan Dynasty (AD 1271-1368).
Serfdom was formalized after the hierarchic social system characterized by theocracy was established in the 13th century, when the Yuan Dynasty delegated Tibetan religious leaders to administer the region. The system was further developed after the Dalai Lama became the paramount leader of Tibet.
Serfs, who accounted for more than 90 percent of the population of old Tibet, were treated as private property by their owners, including the family of the Dalai Lama. The latter owned some 80 percent of production materials -- farm land, pastures and livestock.
Serfs were classified into three categories in accordance with their possessions -- tralpa, Duchung and Nangsan.
Landowners included aristocrats, monasteries and government officials. An exhibition by the Museum of Tibet showed that they owned 24 percent, 36.8 percent and 28.9 percent, respectively, of the arable land in the plateau region before 1959.
Landowners could legally insult, punish, buy and sell, give away, whip and even brutally kill their serfs.
In 1733, the 7th Dalai Lama controlled 3,150 monasteries and 121,440 households, and serfs had to work for the monasteries despite lack of enough food and proper clothing.
Saixim Village, Doilungdeqen County, 50 km northwest of Lhasa, was a manor of the 14th Dalai Lama's family before 1959. Older villagers can still recall that five people were beaten to death and 11 injured in the service of the Dalai Lama's family during a 10-year period.
In the museum there are about a score of black-and-white photos to show the brutality of landowners: slaves' eyes gouged out, fingers chopped off, noses cut and the tendons of their feet removed.
In the late 1940s, when the Dalai Lama was to celebrate his birthday, the Tibetan local government issued an order that people should prepare human skulls, blood, skin and guts for the religious ceremony.
In Gyangze, Xigaze, the aristocratic Parlha Manor has been preserved. There, Migmar Dondrup, now 75, served for 11 years as a nangsan.
Squeezed into a dark, 7 sq m adobe house with his wife and daughter, Migmar was once so starved that he stole some 10 kg of barley.
"The landlord got angry after hearing that and had two men whip me in turn," recalled the old man. His legs were tied together and he was struck more than 100 times on the hips.
"I couldn't sit. While in bed, I could only lie on my side," he said. It took more than 20 days for the wounds to heal.
He was lucky compared with one of his relatives, a groom, who was beaten to death because the landlord believed he wasted fodder when feeding the horses.
But the 14th Dalai Lama seemed to have been "ignorant" of these kinds of events.
On March 10, 1983, he said in India: "In the past, we Tibetans lived in peace and contentment under the Buddhist light shinning over our snow land." He also said: "Our serf system is different from any other serf system, because Tibet is sparsely populated, and Buddhism, which is for the happiness and benefit of the people, advises people to love each other."
The emancipation
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the central government originally planned to launch democratic reform and set up a preparatory committee for the establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1955, acting on the appeal of local residents to abolish the thousand-year-old serf system.
However, on Aug. 18, 1956, Mao Zedong wrote a letter to the 14th Dalai Lama, saying that it was not the right time for Tibet to undertake reform.
Rabgy, an 83-year-old veteran, remembered that time well.
A native Tibetan from the northwestern Gansu Province who joined the army in 1951, he moved to Gangba County, Xigaze, in 1956, when it was named a pioneer site for democratic reform.
In March 1957, he was notified that the trial of democracy had stopped, and he was sent to study in Shaanxi Province.
"I was told that the reform would only be launched when the nobles would really support it in addition to the public appeal," the old man said over a cup of ghee (tea) made by his wife, also a native Tibetan.
He was among the many taken by surprise in March 1959, when the Dalai Lama and some of the serf owners instigated an armed rebellion. Chinese historians believe that the rebellion was intended not just to postpone the reform, but to continue the feudal serf system forever.
Rabgy returned Lhasa the next month, only to see ruins everywhere: craters in the streets, holes left by bullets on the roof of the Ramoche Temple and water in the Jokhang Temple.
The People's Liberation Army soon quelled the rebellion and the Dalai Lama fled to India, where he established a "government in exile". Later, democratic reform was introduced to free the serfs and end their misery.
Possessions of participants in the rebellion were confiscated and given to serfs for free.
Migmar Dondrup, who now lives in a two-story house of about 400 sq m, remembers when the landowners' assets were distributed.
He got 1.4 ha of land and quilts the family had never used, having slept under a piece of goat furs before the reform.
Xinza Danzengquzha, 68, a living Buddha in Nagarze, Xigaze, said: "People brought out the contracts and burned them, dancing and singing around the fire."
Also a lawmaker, the former aristocrat said he learned a lot in his work after reform, including carpentry and painting.
He later worked as an editor and translator of Tibetan books and documents. He studied for three years in Beijing and went abroad several times for research. "My horizons were broadened by reform," he said.
Meanwhile, as a living Buddha, he still performs Buddhist rites.
