Eat the Buddha

Barbara Demick, a journalist who served as the Los Angeles Times Beijing correspondent beginning in 2007, focuses on Ngaba, an obscure Tibetan town in Sichuan province at nearly 11,000 feet elevation, where the Tibetan plateau meets China. Through the interwoven lives of several residents spanning three generations, Demick traces Ngaba's transformation under Chinese Communist rule, from the destruction of its monarchy and monasteries in the 1950s through a wave of self-immolations beginning in 2009. Despite checkpoints and barricades erected to keep journalists out, Demick made three trips into Ngaba and interviewed residents across the Tibetan plateau and in exile communities in India and Nepal.

The narrative opens in 1958, when seven-year-old Gonpo, daughter of the last king of the Mei dynasty, Ngaba's hereditary ruling family, returned from a funeral to find Chinese People's Liberation Army tents on her family's property. Her father, Palgon Rapten Tinley, the 14th Mei king, had governed a kingdom extending 90 miles. After the Communist victory in 1949, he cooperated with the new government, even collecting 5,000 guns from his reluctant subjects. His compliance proved futile: While the king was lured to a meeting in the prefecture capital, the army seized the palace and expelled his family.

Demick provides historical context. The Tibetan plateau, spanning 1 million square miles, was home to an empire that once rivaled those of the Mongols and Turks. After the empire collapsed, the Mei kingdom's ancestors established their fiefdom in Ngaba, governing their own affairs. The first traumatic collision with the Chinese Communists came during the Red Army's Long March in the mid-1930s, when starving soldiers looted Tibetan fields and monasteries. Gonpo's grandmother, Queen Palchen Dhondup, led the armed resistance and burned down the royal palace rather than let the enemy occupy it.

Demick introduces Delek, born in 1949 in Meruma, a village in the Mei kingdom's domain. Delek's childhood illustrates the catastrophe of the Party's "Democratic Reforms," a campaign to collectivize Tibetan society. Armed men raided his grandparents' home, beating them and demanding hidden gold. All family animals were transferred to communes, private cooking was forbidden, and markets were closed. Tibetans experienced famine for the first time. Monasteries were demolished, monks evicted, and public "struggle sessions" forced the accused to endure beatings while children shouted approval. An estimated 300,000 Tibetans died during this period.

In March 1959, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader, fled to exile in India after a failed uprising in Lhasa. Gonpo's family, relocated to Chengdu, watched her father withdraw into silence after enduring struggle sessions and solitary confinement. Gonpo absorbed Mandarin so thoroughly that it displaced her mother tongue. During the Cultural Revolution in 1966, she learned both her parents were dead: Her mother had disappeared near a river, and her father had jumped from a bridge. Gonpo endured a year of struggle sessions before being exiled to Xinjiang, a remote northwestern region, where she labored on a military-run farm.

The Cultural Revolution also produced an unexpected uprising in Ngaba. In 1968, thousands of Tibetans joined the Red City faction of Mao's Red Guards, interpreting his call to root out corruption as an admission that the Party's destruction of monasteries had been a mistake. Former monks donned their crimson robes, political prisoners were freed, and commune animals were redistributed. Delek joined the rebels as a teenager. The uprising was crushed when Chinese snipers killed dozens of Tibetans on horseback, but for six months Tibetans worshipped freely and raised their own livestock.

In Xinjiang, Gonpo married Xiao Tu, a cheerful Chinese exile. After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, China's new leader, opened the country to capitalism, and Ngaba began to revive. Kirti Monastery, a major Buddhist institution in Ngaba, was rebuilt with volunteer labor. The 1980s brought a cultural renaissance under the liberal Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, who acknowledged that "there has been no great improvement in the lives of the people of Tibet." Tsegyam, a young poet and teacher, sneaked Tibetan history into the curriculum at the new Tibetan Middle School, pasted pro-independence posters around town, and was arrested and jailed. He escaped to India and became the Dalai Lama's private secretary.

Gonpo also ended up in permanent exile. After building a life in Nanjing with Xiao Tu, she traveled to India in 1989, urged by the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second-highest spiritual authority, to relearn Tibetan. The political climate following the Tiananmen Square massacre made return unwise, and she did not see her husband for 16 years.

Demick shifts to a younger generation. Dongtuk, nicknamed "wild baby yak," was born to a single mother with a disability in Meruma. He entered Kirti Monastery at age seven, where he thrived as a debater, but the Chinese government's campaign to control Tibetan religious life intensified: Officials conducted "patriotic education" lectures demanding monks denounce the Dalai Lama, the monastery school was closed, and underage monks hid during inspections. Pema, a devout market vendor, circumambulated the monastery's prayer wheels daily. Her young cousin Dechen, raised on Chinese television, sang patriotic songs wholeheartedly. Tsepey, a former resort performer from a nomadic community, developed political consciousness after witnessing Chinese condescension toward Tibetans and was imprisoned for distributing the Dalai Lama's teachings.

The March 2008 protests shattered these patterns. When monks at Kirti raised a photograph of the Dalai Lama and surged into the streets, Chinese paramilitary forces opened fire, killing at least 21 Tibetans. Pema's niece Lhundup Tso, an outspoken schoolgirl, was shot and killed. Dechen, watching one-sided Chinese news coverage, realized "how childish she had been to believe what she saw on television." The aftermath brought a siege of Kirti: Food deliveries were blocked, monks were paraded in stress positions, and surveillance cameras proliferated.

In February 2009, a monk named Tapey set himself on fire on Ngaba's main street, the first in a wave of self-immolations. When Dongtuk's childhood friend Phuntsog repeated the act on March 16, 2011, Chinese courts charged monks who had carried the dying man to the monastery rather than a hospital with homicide. The crackdown accelerated rather than deterred further immolations. By November 2019, 156 Tibetans had self-immolated, nearly one-third from Ngaba. Delek, now in exile, discovered that many were descendants of 1950s resistance fighters: The older generation produced fighters, while the younger generation, shaped by the Dalai Lama's teachings on nonviolence, could not bring themselves to kill anyone but themselves.

Pema and Dechen escaped to India via a harrowing zip line over a border river, a crossing costing $10,000 per person because Chinese authorities had stopped issuing Tibetans passports. Dongtuk also reached India, only to learn that his half brother Rinzen Dorjee had self-immolated back in Ngaba. In exile, the characters face family separation, grief, and political uncertainty. The Dalai Lama's retirement as head of the exile government in 2011 effectively ended negotiations with Beijing, which refuses to deal with the elected exile leadership. His mortality weighs heavily on Tibetans, as Beijing has indicated it will control the selection of his successor.

Demick's own travels reveal a landscape where improved material conditions coexist with pervasive discrimination and surveillance. A Tibetan businessman tells her, "I have everything I might possibly want in life, but my freedom." China advances toward what political scientist Stein Ringen terms a "perfect dictatorship," with hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, and a social credit system under development. Tibetans are required to display portraits of Xi Jinping, China's president, in their homes. The survival of Tibetan culture, language, and faith remains uncertain.