Jan Vinař
Tibet – a Country Where People Have Leapt a Thousand Years Forward
Bělka & Kamila Hladíková (eds.)
Luboš
vanished horizons
Jan Vinař
Tibet — a Country Where People Have Leapt a Thousand Years Forward
Luboš Bělka & Kamila Hladíková (eds.)
Translation: Lenka Bělková / Kamila Hladíková / Martin Špirk
Olomouc 2024
Key words
Tibet; PRC; Jan Vinař; Zbyněk Málek; Lhasa uprising 1959; Czechoslovakia and Tibet; journalist expeditions to Tibet 1955 and 1959; fourteenth Dalai Lama; tenth Panchen Lama; history of Tibet in the 1950s.
Bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, XIV., 1935-
Dalai Lamas twentieth, twenty-first century Tibet (China)
Spiritual leaders twentieth, twenty-first century Tibet (China)
Tibetan Buddhism twentieth, twenty-first century
Autonomist movements twentieth, twenty-first century Tibet (China)
Exile political activities twentieth, twenty-first century
Buddhism and society twentieth, twenty-first century
Buddhism and politics twentieth, twenty-first century
Photographic publication
This publication was funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) within the project Representation and Role of Tibetan Buddhism in Narratives about Tibet from 1950s to Present, reg. no 23-06406S.
Unauthorised use of this work is an infringement of copyright and may give rise to civil, administrative or criminal liability.
Reviewers:
Mgr. Jiří Holba, PhD.
Mgr. Jakub Hrubý, PhD.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license:
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
To view the license terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
1st edition
Eds. © Luboš Bělka, Kamila Hladíková, 2024
© Tomáš Vinař
Translation © Lenka Bělková, Kamila Hladíková, Martin Špirk, 2024
Cover photo © Czech-Chinese Society
Cover & Typo © Pavel Křepela, 2024
© Palacký University in Olomouc, 2024
DOI: 10.5507/ff.24.24465067
ISBN 978-80-244-6506-7 (print)
ISBN 978-80-244-6507-4 (online: iPDF)
1 — List of participants in the first journalist expedition to Lhasa, Zhikatse and Gyantse in 1955
2 — List of participants of the second journalist expedition to Lhasa, Lhoka, and Zhikatse in 1959
This book is dedicated to Martin Slobodník who stood at the beginning of this project
Foreword
Luboš Bělka / Kamila Hladíková
(transl. Kamila Hladíková)
A few years ago, one of our unforgettable friends and long-time collaborators found a completely unknown text entitled Tibet — země, kde lidé dohánějí celé tisíciletí jediným skokem (Tibet — A Country Where People Have Leapt a Thousand Years Forward)1 and we immediately realised that it was an exceptionally precious historical source. The friend was Martin Slobodník, a Slovak professor of Sinology and outstanding Tibetologist, longtime head of the Chinese Studies department and newly appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava, who passed away prematurely shortly after his forty-ninth birthday in April 2019. He presented the text at the 12th Czech-Slovak Sinological Conference in Prague in November 2018. In his abstract he wrote:
This unknown text provides historical evidence about Chinese policy in Tibet after the rapid shift towards ‘democratic reforms’. This paper analyses the text from a comparative perspective, because Anna Louise Strong’s well-known book When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet (1959) was written based on the same propagandist expedition to Tibet, organised by the Beijing government.
The Czech journalist Jan Vinař completed the text in 1960, but it was not published during his lifetime. Three months after his death in September 1983 in their Zurich exile, his wife Věra Vinařová published the report without any editing, explanation, or comments in the form of 15 numbered samizdat copies. They
were intended to commemorate the memory of the late Jan Vinař for family and friends, as we were told. Martin Slobodník received one of the copies 35 years later from the author’s grandson, Tomáš Vinař who was at the time associate professor and vice-dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. Therefore, our first words of gratitude are directed to this closest living relative of Jan Vinař, because without his initiative, this book would not exist.
Unfortunately, Martin Slobodník was prevented, by his untimely death, from carrying out his plan to publish the original text in a critical commented edition accompanied by relevant academic studies. Due to the nature of the text, it was apparent that cooperation with a Sinologist-Tibetologist was conditio sine qua non After some time, this important and irreplaceable role was taken up by a Sinologist focusing on contemporary Tibet, Kamila Hladíková, who joined Luboš Bělka as a co-editor of this book.
A critical edition of a historical source is a specific genre, different from other academic works. Both editors did their best to present the original text with annotations and in its comprehensive context. It is important to note that we always made a clear distinction between the original text of Jan Vinař and our edits and comments, including the footnotes. Vinař’s original Czech language text was written in 1960 and is thus over 60 years old. The Czech language has understandably undergone some changes since then and we had to adjust the original for the Czech edition (2022), in
accordance with some of these changes. We kept, however, numerous specific words used by Vinař, because we considered them expressions of his individual authorial style. These could not be reflected in the English translation, which makes the text more up to date regarding vocabulary and style than the Czech original. Vinař’s text also included footnotes, which we kept and marked in order to differentiate them from the editor’s notes and comments.
Note on the transcription of Tibetan and Chinese
This publication includes a number of terms as well as personal and place names in two mutually very different languages: Tibetan and Chinese. These two languages use two different writing systems: Chinese, unlike Tibetan, does not use an alphabet. Chinese characters, which mostly serve as self-standing morphemes, are also syllables that can be used for phonetic transcription regardless of the original meaning of the morphemes. This can be confusing when terms and names from foreign languages are written in Chinese, making them at times difficult to identify. Since Jan Vinař’s access to Tibetans was through the Chinese organisers of the expedition, the information he received was based on the Chinese language and then translated into several European languages (Jan Vinař was able to communicate in all of those used by the interpreters on the expedition from Russian to French and German to English). In many cases, we were unable to reconstruct the original Tibetan names from his hybrid forms and these were consequently maintained with only slight phonetic adjustments for the English translation. When we were able to identify them, we used the English transcription based on the THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan by David Germano and Nicolas Tournadre, as it is the easiest way to record standard Tibetan pronunciation for non-Tibetan speakers. There are only two exceptions, when we keep the more common form of a frequently used name: Tashi (instead of THL’s Trashi) and Dolma (instead of Drölma). As a rule, we kept the orig-
inal form of the transcription in citations and in the bibliography, which is often different from the THL. With the first occurrence of each term, we also added the Wylie transliteration and Tibetan script wherever possible. The correct Chinese form in pinyin, with simplified characters, is provided on certain occasions as a source of Vinař’s information.
Eg. trülku (sprul sku སྤྲུལ་སྐུ་; huofo 活佛 )
Drepung (‘bras spungs འབྲས་སྤུངས་; Zhebang si 哲蚌寺 )
Note on the illustrations
It is important to explain the origin of the images used in this book to clarify their lower definition. Several sources were used to extract the illustrations to the text as the original photographs from Tibet made by Jan Vinař have, unfortunately, not been discovered. The author’s biography is accompanied by photographs and scanned documents primarily from the National Archives of the Czech Republic. Several photographs from Jan Vinař’s travels during his stay in China in the late 1950s and from his life in Swiss exile after 1968 were provided by Adéla Stoulilová, whose mother and namely grandmother were close family friends of Jan Vinař and his wife Věra. We know that on his trip to Tibet, Jan Vinař not only took pictures, but — as a radio reporter — also made audio recordings with a bulky tape-recorder. Neither his photographs nor audio tapes have, however, been located as yet. He himself did not write about his journalist work in his Tibet travelogue, but his older colleague, the American journalist and writer Anna Louise Strong in her book describes a scene at the Beijing airport before the expedition’s departure to Xining. Although Jan Vinař does mention her name with admiration right at the beginning of his text, she did not record the name of the incriminated Czech journalist:
Being officially six whole kilos underweight, we felt gloatingly virtuous over the Czech with the two big cameras and the tape-recorder, who was really in
desperate circumstances. If anyone is worried about the Czech news services, I can report that a special dispensation was finally granted to him.2
It is possible that in this case it was not Jan Vinař, but Zbyněk Málek, the second Czechoslovak participant in the journalist expedition in 1959. He published several articles in Rudé právo, 3 some of them with photographs indicating his authorship.4 Málek was a correspondent, however, and we can thus assume that he was not the one who used the tape recorder. The size of the equipment is evident from a photograph published by Eva Siao — Sandberg; the tape recorder was the size of a medium-large suitcase.5
Although no photographs from Tibet taken by Jan Vinař have been discovered, it was possible to use other unpublished material from this 1959 expedition. There is an unidentified 16 mm/21 min. film material, located in a private collection in Prague, where it has been in all probability since 1959. Šoty z Tibetu 1959 (Shots from Tibet 1959), as we call it, is a unique visual material recorded during the second international journalist expedition to Tibet in August and September 1959. This material was not even used in the Chinese 1959 propagandist black and white documentary Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet (Pingxi Xizang panluan 平息西藏叛乱),6 as Shots was filmed between August 12 (when the expedition departed from Xining) and September 9 (the departure from Lhasa), while the said documentary premiered on May 10 in Beijing. This material is thus unique as it was not used in any known film depicting the 1959 events. Almost all the frames could be located and identified, although the film fragment has no sound and does not provide any explanatory information. It is namely thanks to Jan Vinař’s travelogue that we can decode Shots
Additional important published sources, concerning the second journalist expedition to Tibet, include books by the Soviet citizens, Mikhail Domogatskikh7 and Vsevolod Ovchinnikov,8 the American writer Anna Louise Strong,9 and journalists from the German Democratic Republic, Eva Siao Sandberg and Harald Hauser.10 About one third of the members of the expedition
were Chinese functionaries from various external propaganda organs, as is apparent from Vinař’s description on p. three of his samizdat copy:
There were nearly thirty of us who arrived in Tibet in four Ilyushins of the Air Force of the People’s Republic of China on 12 August 1959. […] There were eighteen correspondents from ten countries; an American writer, Anna Louise Strong, as well as Comrade Dan Li, the General Secretary of Renmin Ribao ’s editorial board, which organised the trip, six comrades from the Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who comprised the expedition staff, and a doctor.
It is not known who filmed Shots, but in all probability it was a Chinese cameraman. There were eighteen foreigners, most of them from the Central and Eastern European countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Eastern Germany, and the Soviet Union, but there were also individuals from the USA, Canada, the UK and France. All the foreign journalists, who the expedition was organised for, had their own cameras and were shooting their own materials, but the fate of this material is unknown. It is not clear whether any film documentary emerged out of this expedition. Apart from film and photographic material, some journalists made audio recordings, however, Shots does not have a soundtrack. It is not all that probable that some of the foreign journalists would have provided their film material to Beijing and Beijing would have passed it on to the Czechs without any editing. We cannot therefore be sure about the origin and purpose of Shots from Tibet 1959
The question therefore arises as to why and how this material was brought to Prague? A plausible hypothesis is that the Chinese side might have sent it together with the Chinese version of Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet for the Czechoslovak party to use for production of their own propagandist materials about Tibet. It is not clear if it was supposed to be with the help of either Jan Vinař or Zbyněk Málek, but only those two actually knew what was in the shots. Regardless of what
was actually planned, it never finally happened and the Czechoslovak-produced propagandist documentary Zrada v Tibetu (Betrayal in Tibet) did not include any footage from Shots. But why? We can only speculate, but with some certainty. At the time when both film tapes (with the documentary Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet and Shots from Tibet 1959) arrived from China to Prague, i.e. in the fall or winter of 1959, Jan Vinař was still in Beijing. There is no information regarding Málek’s whereabouts, but neither of the two participated in the production of Betrayal in Tibet. Karel Beba, who figured in the production of the 11 min. black and white cut and who himself visited Tibet twice in 1955 and 1956, did not use Shots, because he could not be certain as to what it depicted. He could have recognised, for example, the tenth Panchen Lama, but from the propagandist point of view it was much more convenient to use the footage of his arrival to Lhasa and visit to Jokhang Temple on 7 April 195911 and from the meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region the following day, which was the first meeting after the suppression of the uprising (the next one was on 28 June 1959).12 All these scenes were included in the Chinese film Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet and also appeared in the Czech cut of Betrayal in Tibet.
Despite its propagandist nature, Shots from Tibet 1959 is a valuable piece of historical evidence as it documents specific historical circumstances. Although many of the depicted scenes were staged (as were the scenes in Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet), it was not mere “performance for foreign correspondents”, because it had enormous local implications. These events as such were authentic and were not only staged for the foreign audience. The primary target audience was the Tibetans themselves and the role of foreign journalists was nothing more than to report about them for the
international community. Some of the most valuable scenes in the film are the footage from the Drepung Monastery, both from the satirical theatre performance prepared by monks for their peers under the guidance of Chinese cadres, and the other ‘theatre’ which the expedition members could watch twice, for the first time in the monastery and later in the town below it. It was the so-called struggle session, in Tibetan known as tamdzing. In Drepung, it was held against three senior lamas under the guidance of low-rank monk representatives supported from behind by the Chinese army and police. Another one targeted a member of the Tibetan aristocracy Lhalu. The footage shows many details of these struggle sessions to which Jan Vinař provides a written commentary.
This publication thus includes images from March 1959 and subsequent months, extracted from the Chinese version of Putting Down the Rebellion in Tibet and Shots from Tibet 1959 discovered in the Prague private archives.
This book is first and foremost dedicated to the memory of Martin Slobodník who originally came up with this project and to Jan Vinař’s grandson, Tomáš Vinař whose idea it was to give the text to Slovakia’s only expert on Tibet. They were not alone, however, in terms of contributing to this publication and the editors would like to extend their sincere gratitude to many colleagues and acquaintances of Jan Vinař (listed alphabetically and without academic titles):
Sylva Amos, Robert Barnett, Daniel Berounský, Lenka Bělková, Tom Grunfeld, Martin Hanker, Jiří Holba, Jakub Hrubý, Aleš Chalupa, Pavel Křepela, Radek Kundt, Martin Lavička, Ondřej Kučera, Olga Lomová, Nicholas Orsillo, Tomáš Pavlíček, Jaroslava Picková, Françoise Robin, Martin Špirk, Tsering Woeser, David Sís, Petr Sís, Adéla Stoulilová, Jan Vaniš.
Notes:
1) A critical edition of this source with accompanying texts has already been published in Czech. This book is a revised English version, for the Czech text, see Luboš Bělka, Kamila Hladíková, ed., Jan Vinař: Tibet — Tibet. kde lidé dohánějí celé tisíciletí jediným skokem [Tibet — A Country Where People Have Leapt a Thousand Years Forward] (Olomouc: Vydavatelství Univerzity Palackého, 2022).
2) Anna Louise Strong, When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet (Peking: New World Press 1960), 8.
3) Rudé právo (Red Justice or Red Right), founded in 1920, was the primary press organ of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the leading newspaper in socialist Czechoslovakia after 1948.
4) For example, Zbyněk Málek, “Setkání ve Lhase. Z cesty našeho zpravodaje do Tibetu 1” [An Encounter in Lhasa. From Our Reporter’s Rrip to Tibet 1], Rudé právo (November 15, 1959): 3.
5) See Eva Siao — Harald Hauser, Sterne über Tibet (Leipzig: VEB F. A. Brockhaus, 1961), fig. 80.
6) The propagandist documentary was produced by the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China shortly after the uprising in 1959 and was released in Chinese, Tibetan, English, and Russian in the late summer of 1959. The English version was previously published by the Tibetan writer, historian and activist Jamyang Norbu on his web page M10 Memorial; see “Putting Down the Rebellion”, M10 Memorial, accessed March 13, 2024, https://m10memorial.org/videos/putting-down-the-rebellion-intibet/.
7) Mikhail Domogatskikh, Utro Tibeta [Sunrise in Tibet] (Moskva: Molodaja gvardija, 1962).
8) Vsevolod Vladimirovich Ovchinnikov, Puteshestviye v Tibet [Trip to Tibet] (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoye izdatelstvo detskoy literatury, 1957); Vsevolod Vladimirovich Ovchinnikov, Vozneseniye v Shambalu. Sto dney v Tibete piatidesiatykh i devianostykh [Flight to Shambhala. A Hundred Days in Tibet in the 1950s and 1990s] (Moskva, 1997).
9) Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959); Strong, When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet (Peking: New World Press, 1960; or San Francisco: Red Sun Publishers, 1976).
10) Siao — Hauser, Sterne über Tibet.
11) Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 158.
12) Ibid, 190.
Tibet a Country Where People Have
Leapt a Thousand Years Forward
(transl. Lenka Bělková)
Jan Vinař
The story began in Brno. I wouldn’t have believed the journey from Beijing to Lhasa led via Brno, but by odd coincidence it did.
After some difficulties, I found a hotel room. When I checked in, the receptionist looked at me and said, “Mr. Vinař? I have a message for you.”
I shot him an incredulous glance. Ten minutes before, I didn’t know myself I would end up in Morava Hotel; I didn’t even know if I would find a room at all. I had no idea the comrades from Radio Brno had taken the pain and telephoned every hotel to find me. Nevertheless, I got the message and that was the end of my holiday before it even started. I went to Beethoven Street, the location of Czechoslovak Radio Brno, to get in touch with the Prague office and learned that a telegram had arrived in Prague from Beijing half an hour after my departure from Prague: “I recommend returning immediately. Xie Guangyu.” I knew right away what this was about. Barely two months before, during a break at the National People’s Congress, I was sitting with Comrade Xu Huang, the deputy head of the Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We were drinking tea, and I casually mentioned I was going on holiday after I return from the congress. Comrade Xu was silent for a while and then all of a sudden asked, “Have you heard that the editorial board of Renmin Ribao1 is considering organizing a trip to Tibet for foreign correspondents?” He knew just as well as I that there was no way I could have heard about it; at the time, it was not clear whether the trip could be made, and therefore no one told us. He only subtly warned me so that I would have the possibility to postpone my holiday.
That’s what I did, of course. A trip to Tibet! The dream of every journalist since long time ago, and especially now in 1959, shortly after the Tibetan aristocracy’s rebellion was suppressed. We knew that big changes were in store for Tibet. The old medieval system was crumbling, and reforms that would liberate the ninety-six percent of Tibetan people living in
serfdom were introduced. Such an opportunity occurs once in a journalist’s lifetime. To heck with my holiday! So, I waited for instructions. Two weeks, three weeks passed; from time to time, I asked whether the comrades knew any details. In the end they said the trip would be possible, but later. So, I left China but instructed my translator, Comrade Xie Guangyu, to send me a telegram immediately in case the issue was finally decided.
I spent a month attending meetings at the radio and taking exams at the university,2 and then left for Brno. The telegram arrived on the very first day of my holiday! The wheels had started to turn. The airline ticket was purchased before I got to Prague. I left for China, but the flight took three days due to bad weather. Would they leave without me?
They didn’t, and it took some time before we all set out on the journey. There were the inevitable preliminary consultations and medical examinations. I was a bit afraid because I knew that they were not inclined to let people with high-blood pressure into Tibet, but it was fine. Finally, the much-awaited day came, and the special aircraft carrying our expedition took off from Beijing airport. Three more days of waiting in Xining, the capital of the Qinghai province, till the gale storming over the mountains subsided — and we landed in Tibet.
Before I start my story about Tibet, I would like to tell you something that doesn’t quite fit into it. It doesn’t belong here because it is a plea made by a man in shabby dungarees, with whom we sat around the table the first day we arrived in Tibet and then again shortly before our departure from Tibet. If you met him on a busy Chinese street, you wouldn’t notice him; nevertheless, he is worth listening to. His name is Zhang Jingwu,3 and his full title is “Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Tibet Work Committee, Representative of the Central Government in Tibet, Major General and the Commander of People’s Liberation Army Tibet Military Headquarters”.
Fig. 1 / On board the plane during the flight to Tibet — seats on the right side.
View of the cabin of the plane during the flight to Tibet. All passengers were wearing oxygen masks. Source: Shots from Tibet.
Fig. 2 / On board a plane during the flight to Tibet — seats on the left side.
One of the journalists (probably Alan Winnington) on board of plane with an oxygen mask during the flight to Tibet. Jan Vinař wrote about the flight: “It was probably my fault, as I took off the oxygen mask on the plane to have a smoke. Now, the oxygen tube was in my mouth, together with my heart. Never mind the nausea, you can survive that. However, when I had to walk twenty meters down the yard to the toilet, my legs felt like lead, my head was spinning, the road seemed endless, and I asked myself, ‘Will I be able to work here at all?’” Source: Shots from Tibet.