Rich and beautiful Europe experienced a period known
as the "Dark Ages" when barbaric methods of
torture were used and the inhuman rule that sea-owners had
the right to sleep with a female serf before she married her
husband was enforced . However similar practices continued
to exist in old Tibet for another400 years.
Before 1959, Tibet had long been a society of
feudal serfdom under the despotic political- religious rule
of lamas and nobles. The masses of serfs in Ti- bet did not
even possess fundamental rights. Serf-owners principally
local administrative officials nobles and upper- ranking
lamas, accounted for less than 5 percent of Tibet's
population but they owned all of Tibet's farmlands pastures,
forests, mountains and rivers as well as most of the
livestock. The serfs making up more than 90 percent of
Tibet's population lived no better than the slaves
in the plantations in the southern states of America. The
serf-owners could
sell or transfer their
serfs, present them as gifts, or use them as mortgages
payments for debts. They could even ex- change them,molest
them or maltreat them. When two serfs got married, the
husband and wife still belonged to different owners and
their children were fated to be serfs from the moment they
were born.
The statutory code of old Tibet
stipulated that people were unequal in status by dividing
people into three classes and nine ranks. In a peculiar law
concerning the value of human life it was written that the
lives of people belonging to the highest rank of the upper
class such as a prince or leading living Buddha, were
calculated to be worth the weight of the dead body in gold
whilst the dives of people belonging to the lowest rank of
the lower class, such as women, butchers, hunters and
craftsmen were worth a straw rope. The judicial system of
old Tibet gave monasteries and serf - owners the right to
judge lawsuits. The judicial system itself was characterized
by its bloodcurdling system of cruel tortures: punishments
issued by the courts were extremely savage and cruel and
included gouging out the eyes, cutting off the ears, hands
or feet; pulling out tendons; throwing the
criminal into water or shutting the criminal into a wooden
case lined with nails facing inwards. These bloody
historical facto were displayed in an Exhibition of Tibetan
Social and Historical Relics in the Beijing Cultural Palace
of Nationalities. Imagine what people thought when they saw
the amputated limbs, the flayed human skins and the ghastly
torture implemented.
One letter kept in file
which attracted much attention. It read:
''Rab
Ge:''
A Buddhist ceremony will be held here.
We need meat,hearts and blood from all kind of animals 4
human heads, intestines, pure blood, turbid blood, earth
from ruins, the menstrual blood of a widow, the blood of a
leper, water from beneath the surface of the earth, earth
raised in a whirlwind, brambles growing towards the north,
excrement of both dog and man and the boots of a butcher.
All these should be sent to Tsechykhang on the 27th.
Tsechykhang , the 19th"
From this letter we can imagine how many serfs
would have been killed for that single ceremony. In such
barbaric and brutal times. Tibet's economic and social
development was out of the question. The economy in Ti- bet
had been at a standstill for a long time and was even
declining as was the output of grain. Crude wooden ploughs
were the basic tools for agricultural production: the
primitive method of herding were causing the deterioration
of both the pastoralland and the breeds of livestock disease
was epidemic and harmful beasts were rampant. The seas were
cruelly exploited. They were forced not only into hard
labour but also to bear the heavy burdens of corvee and tax.
Living in poverty and starvation, they were struggling for
existence on the brink of death all year round. In the
1950s, there were more than 4,000 beggars in the
city of Lhasa, out of a opulation of only 37,000.
The rate was even higher in Shigatse, the second largest
city in Tibet. Because Of the high frequency of uncontrolled
epidemics, the average life-span of a Tibetan was only 35.5
years.
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