A Banned Tibetan Epic Returns

The Great Amdo Rebellion was an uprising in the Amdo region of Tibet against Chinese Communist authorities in 1958. The crisis erupted with the enforcement of the Great Leap Forward, a utopian campaign intended to create a socialist society. Labeling the uprising a “counter revolutionary armed rebellion,” Chinese security forces unleashed disproportionate violence that destroyed traditional social structures, killed thousands, and led to widespread imprisonment and famine, which, according to historian Frank Dikötter, led to more than 45 million deaths across China.

A former Han Public Security Bureau official, Yin Shusheng, who witnessed events in Amdo during the 1950s and 1960s, documented the scale of repression in his book My Experiences in the Work of Implementing Nationality Policies. He presents figures on mass arrests, monastery closures, and deaths in custody: “From 1958 to 1960 . . . in the Qinghai (Amdo) . . . 63,064 people were arrested, 6,157 detained, 9,918 sentenced to live under surveillance, and 39,419 sent to collective political reeducation camps, making a total of 108,558, accounting for 4.4 percent of the province’s total population of 2.44 million.” This marked a catastrophic rupture in the region’s history, whose effects reverberate through the present generation.

The Red Wind Howls
by Tsering Döndrup, translated by Christopher Peacock
Columbia University Press, 2025, 320 pp., $25.00, paper

The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup emerges from this harrowing backdrop. Unable to find a publisher for this searing work, he self-published it in 2006. The Chinese government quickly banned the book, forced the author into early retirement, and forbade him from international travel. The novel, however, continued to circulate privately among Tibetans and has since been translated into Chinese and French, and now, into English. It has also found its way into exile and is soon to be published in its original Tibetan by the Dharamsala-based Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.

At the heart of this banned work is a complex protagonist whose journey mirrors Tibet’s traumatic transformation. The chief protagonist, Ala Drong (meaning Wild Yak and appearing in Döndrup’s other works, including his short story “Mahjong”), is an incarnate lama, or tulku, of Tsezhung Monastery. The story follows Ala’s lavish lifestyle as the head lama of the monastery, his collaboration with the Chinese army, his arrest, long imprisonment, and eventual rehabilitation to take charge of his ruined monastery.

Döndrup’s choice of a tulku as protagonist has precedents in contemporary Tibetan literature. A tulku first appeared in Dhondup Gyal’s 1981 short story “Tulku,” and later in several stories, including Takbum Gyal’s Dreams of Three Generations.

In The Red Wind Howls, Ala comes face-to-face with the full wrath of the occupying forces. When the people of Tsezhung were rounded up and jailed after the Harrowing Day, the Chinese army official roars, “You are nothing. And if you are something, you are parasites, you are garbage, you are dog shit. You are prisoners of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the subsequent years, they were turned into “labor machines” with “their minds totally annihilated” to “cut down every tree in sight to build cabins and to use as firewood” until “the hills around the river are as bald as the head of a newly ordained monk.”

For those familiar with accounts of contemporary Tibet under China, this book is an encyclopedia of suffering—ghastly and unimaginably inhuman.

Another protagonist in the novel, Lobsang Gyatso, and a cousin were carrying his dead mother to the charnel ground when Lobsang saw a girl half-buried in the snow, dead from cold, “her top button was undone and she was holding her baby to her breast with one hand.” On another occasion in Tsezhung, a woman jumped into the Machu River after her husband was shot by the Red Army. “She squeezed the baby to her breast as hard as she could, and after taking eight or nine steps, gradually vanished out of sight.”

This recalls Naktsang Nulo’s memoir My Tibetan Childhood, in which he describes seeing a woman below a cliff face. “Nothing remained of her sheepskin chuba with its blue and red trim, except small fragments at the waist where her belt was tied. Blood ran from the wound in her lung as she tried to breathe. More blood and the remains of her chuba were strewn on the ground around her. She was alive, and her right hand clutched the baby to her chest; her left hand held a leather belt lined with silver ornaments. ‘The wolves were clawing at her, and she was swinging the leather belt around her head,’ someone said. My father went close to the woman, who couldn’t say anything but pointed to the child at her chest and raised her thumb in a begging motion. My father picked up the baby, wiping its face and body.”

Anyone who openly speaks about these histories risks arrest and imprisonment.

The Red Wind Howls reminds us how survival in such circumstances often requires moral compromise. To survive at any cost, Ala changes his views and actions like a chameleon, adapting to the prevailing circumstances. In desperate hopes of getting a reduction in his prison sentence, he “informed on his fellow inmates’ every move like a madman.” His teacher, Dranak Geshe, however, stayed true to his vows as a Buddhist monk. Geshe told his inmates that “what frightens me, though, is that people are turning into savages. Mixing black and white, not distinguishing vices from virtues, no regard for the laws of karma. And it’s getting worse every day.” The next day, he passed away, sitting in the lotus position.

Döndrup’s narrative style is jagged and unpredictable, like the red wind that can howl at any time from any of the ten directions. Kismets changed faster than the snap of a finger, and, as Bob Dylan sang in 1964, “There’s no tellin’ who / That it’s namin’ / For the loser now / Will be later to win.”

When Mao died in 1976, the people of Tsezhung organized a mass memorial. They took down the white tent of the local People’s Militia and cut it into small pieces to make mourning flowers, and the men were ordered to cut strips from their sleeves for black armbands—both traditional Chinese mourning practices imposed on them.

Lhalha, “the professional bitterness speaker,” unleashes an ear-splitting shriek: “Ah ho! Class brethren! All is lost! The sun has set!” The color quickly drains from the faces of collaborators, like Lobsang Tsultrim, as if the ground beneath their feet had vanished. In the blink of an eye, “the Party had pinned responsibility for all the past mistakes on Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. All political prisoners and forced laborers were released, sent on their way with two bricks of tea per person and a flowery speech about the glorious future that lay ahead of them.”

And so, Ala Drong was free, but he “didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad.” In this moment of unclarity, Lobsang Tsultrim—who made Ala drink his urine during a struggle session some twenty years earlier—comes to see him. Lobsang brings a khata, a burgundy lamb-skin coat, a yellow undershirt, and a pair of shoes for the tulku.

Are they opportunists, survivors, weathercocks, or victims who need one another to carry on with no space to express the inhuman circumstances they were tossed into?

Their generation, who had undergone such extreme events in such a short span—starvation, deaths, and betrayal that turned their way of life upside down—did not have the time to reflect or come to terms with their destiny. The cumulative effects of their memory are passed on to the subsequent generation, who must face both personal and collective internal pain.

At the heart of this banned work is a complex protagonist whose journey mirrors Tibet’s traumatic transformation.

This unprocessed trauma persists because of the denial of any expression of inherited experiences in occupied Tibet. Fictionalizing is one of the few viable options, as seen in works such as Tashi Palden’s The Joys and Sorrows of an Ordinary Family and Tsering Döndrup’s My Two Fathers. Anyone who openly speaks about these histories risks arrest and imprisonment. Musician Tashi Dhondup was arrested at gunpoint while his wife wept and grabbed one of the police officers’ legs in an attempt to hold him back. He was sentenced to fifteen months of reeducation through labor because of his music album Torture Without Trace, in which he sang:

The year of 1958,
is when the black enemy entered Tibet,
is when lamas were put in prison.
That time was terrifying
That time was terrifying

Hey!
The year of 1958,
is when Tibetan heroes were put in prison,
is when innocent Tibetans were put in prison.
That time was terrifying
That time was terrifying.

For the next generation, the burden is not only the emotional and cultural trauma but also the danger that one’s own lived experience and possibilities are displaced and overtaken by the cumulative effects of our parents’ and grandparents’ suffering. This deepens the sense of loss and hopelessness for Tibetans living under occupation, and doubles the dislocation and uprootedness for those of us in exile.

The Red Wind Howls makes this collective suffering more personal, bringing it into more intimate contact with Tibetans scattered around the globe. This is Tsering Döndrup’s boldest and most meticulously researched novel yet. Capturing the complex and tragic existence of Tibet under Chinese occupation, the book is as much about human suffering as it is about moral courage and the survival of a civilization.