Word: potala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the irritated Red commander sent another message to the Dalai Lama, peremptorily ordering him to report alone, even without his senior abbots, to Red headquarters in Lhasa. As word spread among the 55,000 inhabitants of the city, angry Tibetans thronged around the towering, 40-ft. Potala (Winter Palace), so that the Dalai Lama could not leave it, even if he wished to. When the Dalai Lama's mother heard the news, she burst into tears, and a crowd of weeping women surged around the Indian consulate general, begging help for the Dalai Lama. Some Lhasans broke...
...hold Tibet firmly," goes an old Tibetan saying, "the conqueror must win Potala's top floor." Potala is the 500-ft.-high, 1,400-room Lhasa stronghold of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's powerful temporal ruler, and the top floor is the Lama's private residence. Since Red China "liberated" Tibet in 1951, hundreds of Chinese officials have been popping in and out of Potala's top floor, wooing the 21-year-old Dalai Lama with flattery and gifts (among them: ten autos, a direct phone to Peking), and isolating him from his own countrymen...
Beneath triumphal arches, about 350 Communist trucks roared through Tibet into the Forbidden City of Lhasa last week, along two new main roads from Red China. Thirty thousand Tibetans gathered before the legendary Potala palace to greet the trucks, which symbolized their first main road contact with the outside world. Communist authorities paid tribute to the eternal friendship between Red China and Tibet, which the Communists had conquered in 1951, and decorated the workers who had drawn the new highways across the roof of the world...
...Lhasa with its gold-roofed Potala ("Palace of the Gods"), the Dalai Lama's magnificent winter residence. Lhasa itself at times looks less like a holy place than a sort of religious slum. The poorly clothed priests are herded in their hopelessly overcrowded cloisters (one of which has 10,000 inmates), and the camera in one distasteful sequence watches them being fed as cattle are, by the scoop. The scene enforces the impression of a country where -according to the Thomas' narration-so many men become priests that few are left to be fathers...
From the gilded rooftop of Lhasa's Potala Palace, heralds blew 14-foot-long copper trumpets. Below, in the building's ornate Assembly Hall, a bright-eyed, 16-year-old boy sat on a high throne, about which clustered Tibet's most powerful lamas, abbots and monks. They had come in the country's hour of peril, with Chinese Communist invaders lodged deep in the Himalayan upland, to witness the coronation of the 14th Dalai Lama, the reincarnated Buddha of Mercy. Hours of prayer and ritual reached a climax when the adolescent god-king accepted...