Word: potala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tibetan aides gave further details of the flight from Lhasa. As relations with Red China worsened, food stocks were prepared for a quick journey, and part of the fabulous Potala treasure was crated for mountain transport. On the morning of March 17, as tension rose in Lhasa, officials filtered from the palace in small groups, ostensibly to visit other monasteries. That night, dressed in the robe of a poor monk and without his customary glasses, the Dalai Lama left the palace as if taking a stroll, but he was shadowed by bodyguards. His mother and brother departed even earlier...
...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...
...peasant family came with him to Lhasa, and his father was made a noble, but he saw little of them. His days were spent with monkish tutors, in learning the Tantric texts of Lamaism and the complex religious ceremonials. At night he went to sleep in the enormous, fortresslike Potala, and could hear the palace gates close harshly and the ringing shouts of the watchmen as they marched through the long, twisting corridors. Without playmates or attending parents, the Dalai Lama matured early, and at 14 he visited Lhasa's great monasteries of Drepung and Sera to engage...
...young Dalai Lama was seldom consulted in such matters. He passed his time in study and in a new absorption in Western gadgets. He took many photographs, often wandered on the terraces of the Potala armed with a telescope with which he could examine the busy life of his city without ever being permitted to join in it. Each spring he traveled in solemn procession through ranks of bowing, weeping people to the summer palace; each autumn he solemnly returned to the Potala. The Austrian Harrer tutored him in Western science and technology, found in the Dalai Lama an insatiable...
...before letting the Dalai Lama be taken from them. Hidden stores of arms were passed out to the furious populace. Khamba tribesmen with their rifles, swords and lean, savage dogs began to filter into Lhasa. The nervous Chinese set up machine-gun posts, trained artillery on the Potala and the Norbulingka palaces...