My name is not one that history will remember. I am a common man of this high, wind-swept land—a herder, a pilgrim, one of the countless souls whose life is defined by the thin air, the jagged rock, and the sacred heart of Lhasa. I do not concern myself with the politics of distant Beijing; my world is here, between the prayer flags and the snow-capped passes.
For the men in the imperial city, we are "nominally under the control of China." But for us, the rule that matters is the one of the 13th Dalai Lama. Since he took the reins, we have seen him work to reassert our own Tibetan autonomy from that weak Chinese imperial regime. Their officials are often distant, their authority mostly a shadow, and their control, as they themselves admit, is little.
Our fight came not with them, but from the south, when the British and their Indian soldiers marched across the Jellup Pass into the plateau. The British feared a Russian grand strategy, a 'Great Game' being played on our sacred soil. Yet, when they came, we did not see them as an attack on the Qing Empire’s holdings. We saw them as an army coming to seize Tibet.
We took up what we had: medieval weapons, swords, bows, and matchlock muskets. The warrior monks joined the peasants pressed into service, armed with sacred charms to ward off bullets, believing that devotion could stand against their modern, industrial Maxim machine guns. The resulting slaughter at places like Guruwas a tragedy, a sacrifice of our people's lifeblood for the freedom of our home.
When the foreign column finally reached the Forbidden City of Lhasa, a strange and revealing thing happened. We stood in the streets and watched the victorious British troops and the few Chinese officials who accompanied them. We watched with quiet, profound indifference. Their own leader, Younghusband, would later write that we "did not seem to care at Tuppent Dam whether we were there or not."
That indifference is the true answer to whether I belong to Qing China. My loyalty is to the Potala, to the Dharma, and to the earth under my feet. The Chinese flag may fly in a treaty, but the heart of the common Tibetan is a world away from Beijing. Our autonomy may be challenged by the British and nominally claimed by the Chinese, but in our minds, the Roof of the World belongs only to those who live and die upon it.
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