Page 335 - The Secret Museum

had pieces of bamboo jammed under their fingernails – which makes me wince even

to think about it. The chief minister’s wife, who was in on the trick, was made to sit
in the street, where all of Lhasa could see her, wearing the cangue, a big bit of wood,
across her shoulders. Then she and her husband were sent into exile. The abbot who
once wore this costume drowned in a copper vat of water while in prison, which
sounds very suspicious to me.

Tengye Ling monastery was closed, and the monastery’s lineage was no longer
recognized. There would be no more reincarnations of regents from the monastery.
Later, the monastery supported China in its repression of Tibet. Because of these two

disgraces, the monastery was emptied and everything was sold on the street.

The costume was donated to the Asian collection of the Victoria and Albert
Museum by a friend of the 13th Dalai Lama, David McDonald, who lived in Tibet.
His job was to look after British Indian trade between Tibet and India. His mother
was from Sikkim, then a kingdom in northern India, and his father was Scottish.
McDonald was so accepted in Tibet that he had a Tibetan name: Dorje.

The 13th Dalai Lama had to deal with a British invasion of Tibet in 1903 and
1904, and then a Chinese invasion in 1910. To escape the latter, he went into exile
for two years in Darjeeling, in India. McDonald helped him to get safely out of Tibet.

It’s possible that McDonald was given the costume by the Dalai Lama as a gift of
thanks, or else he bought it from someone who acquired it in the street during the
monastery’s closing-in-disgrace sale.

When the 13th Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa in 1913, he assumed the spiritual and
political leadership of Tibet, declared its independence from China, created the
Tibetan flag as it is today and introduced secular education, postage stamps and
banknotes into the country. Before he died, he predicted:

Very soon in this land (with a harmonious blend of religion and politics)
deceptive acts may occur from without and within. At that time, if we do not

dare to protect our territory, our spiritual personalities, including the
Victorious Father and Son [Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama], may be
exterminated without trace, the property and authority of our Lakangs
[residences of reincarnated lamas] and monks may be taken away. Moreover,
our political system, developed by the Three Great Dharma Kings, will vanish
without anything remaining. The property of all people, high and low, will be
seized and the people forced to become slaves. All living beings will have to

endure endless days of suffering and will be stricken with fear. Such a time
will come.

He predicted the Chinese would invade and take over Tibet, and said he would
die early so that his reincarnation, the next Dalai Lama would be old enough to lead
the Tibetan people when that time came. His successor is the current Dalai Lama, the
14th, who has lived in exile since 1959, when he left Tibet with 80,000 Tibetan