Teen tells story of flight to India

DHARMSALA, India — Struggling through knee-deep snow at the roof of the world, Jamyang Samten scrambled behind a boulder when he heard gunshots. Who was shooting? Who had been shot? He had no idea.

But foreign mountaineers camped nearby could see what was happening, and the video they made of Chinese border guards firing at a single-file line of 75 Tibetans wading through a snow-filled Himalayan pass provoked international anger.

While more than half the Tibetans managed to scramble away last Sept. 30 and reach Nepal, a 25-year-old Buddhist nun and a man were killed and 31 people were detained.

Samten, 15, was among the detainees. He had expected an arduous two- to three-week trek to escape Chinese-ruled Tibet. Instead he endured a five-month odyssey and was threatened with execution should he try to escape again.

The teenager ignored the warning from Chinese authorities on the advice of a Buddhist holy man, who told him he would succeed on his second attempt.

His story, while nearly impossible to verify, echoes other accounts that have filtered out of Tibet, where each year thousands of people who are unable to get passports try to flee Chinese rule and reach Dharmsala, the Indian city that is home to the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet's Buddhists and the Tibetan government-in-exile.

China has exercised an often harsh, intrusive rule over Tibet since communist troops marched into the region in 1950.

Beijing has attacked the foundations of Tibetans' identity, their Buddhist faith. It shut down religious institutions in the 1960s and '70s, and, though some have reopened, religion is still controlled. The Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959 following a failed uprising, is vilified.

Free-market reforms have brought a tide of Chinese migrants into Tibet, searching for economic opportunities and making Tibetans feel marginalized in their homeland.

Samten was one of the Tibetans left on the margins.

Raised in a middle-class family, he was 9 when he was kicked out of school for cutting class and sent by his parents to work on an uncle's farm. There, he heard of a relative who had escaped to India, and he began saving money he earned collecting Yarchagumba, a fungus prized as an aphrodisiac in traditional Chinese medicine.