Word: lhasa
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Journey to Safety. As the Dalai Lama and his escort fled by night and hid by day in lamaseries, villages and Khamba encampments, the furious Red Chinese boasted that they had put down the three-day revolt in Lhasa that had served to cover the God-King's escape. Point-blank artillery fire drove diehard lamas from the Norbulingka, summer palace on the city's outskirts. Red infantrymen surged into the vast warrens of the Potala winter palace, rounded up defiant monks in narrow passages and dark rooms where flickering butter lamps made Tibet's grotesque gods...
Buffer State. Over the centuries, the mountain-locked nation of Tibet has often been overrun by invaders-Mongols, Manchus and Gurkhas, but most often Chinese. Whenever China was strong, it would send a garrison to occupy Lhasa. Whenever China was weak Tibetans would drive the garrison out. In 1904, uneasy about Russian encroachments in central Asia, the British launched an expedition from India and captured Lhasa with little difficulty. To keep each other at arm's length, Britain and Czarist Russia agreed to make a buffer state of Tibet and signed the Convention of 1907 recognizing China...
Finding the Dalai Lama proved easier than getting him home to Lhasa. The Chinese warlord of Tsinghai demanded $30,000 before he would let the boy leave. Glumly, the lamas paid it and set out for Tibet. They were stopped at the border. The warlord wanted more money, and it took two years of negotiations and a further payment of $90,000 before the Dalai Lama, by then four years old, could go in triumph to the palace of Potala...
...families, who have kept their names and acres intact down the centuries by a mixture of polygyny and polyandry. To safeguard their ancestral estate, three brothers will often share a single wife, and all children are considered to be fathered by the eldest of the brothers. Recently, a highborn Lhasa woman was simultaneously married to a local nobleman, to the Foreign Minister of Tibet, and to the Foreign Minister's son by another wife...
...China embarked on one of the most massive man hunts ever. Detachments of the estimated 300,000 Red troops in Tibet began to drive painfully into the rugged land south of the great Tsangpo River, which still remained in the hands of the Khamba guerrillas. Supply planes roared over Lhasa; other planes dropped paratroopers to seal off the passes north of the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, which the Dalai Lama might conceivably be heading for. To stifle all word of what was going on, the Chinese surrounded the Indian consulate in Lhasa, reduced its staff to virtual prisoners...