Tibetan Uprising

At the age of 16 with his political awareness already resolved, Gyaltsen Wangchuk set out for Lhasa on the morning of March 3, 1989, with three fellow student monks from Nyethang Monastery. They started marching around the Tibetan capital waving the banned Tibetan flag. People began joining them in droves. This was the beginning of the Tibetan People’s Uprising of March 1989 - the most broad-based and significant citizen’s revolt by Tibetans against Chinese rule until the uprising of this year. For three days, these four teenage monks from a rural monastery roamed the sacred city, stirring up the emotions of the people. By day four, with a police station burned, police vehicles vandalized, rocks being hurled at Chinese security police and soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, Gyaltsen and his companions slipped back to their monastery. They were arrested there on April 3, 1989 by local police with submachine guns who recognized him from photographs from the protests. Six jeeps came to take them away in handcuffs.

The Chinese police took Gyaltsen to the Sangyik Prison in Lhasa where he stayed for the next year without a trial. Gyaltsen was tortured with electric cattle prods before being beaten until he was unconscious. Under violent interrogation, he confessed that he was the ringleader, securing an earlier release for his three monk friends. Eventually Gyaltsen was assigned work on a small vegetable farm on the prison grounds. However, his refusal to do prison labour led to him being beaten every evening. After 18 months in prison, Gyaltsen was released on November 4, 1990.

He began work as an artist for the Potala by writing golden letters into the prayer books. After six months of this work, the police found out about his new job. Gyaltsen was fired and forbidden to return to his monastery. During this time, he continued to put up posters around the city and snuck a Tibetan flag to his friends in prison by sewing it inside a shirt to help them protest for the return of the Dalai Lama. After a year of these clandestine activities, his policeman brother warned him that he was in imminent danger of arrest. Gyaltsen fled to Nepal via Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, along with 19 other former political prisoners with whom he served time. They arrived on September 9, 1991.

Gyaltsen first journeyed to Dharamsala to receive the blessings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in a public audience before being admitted to Sera Monastic University in Karnataka. In 2007 he participated in the Independence March from Bangalore to Chennai where he first met Tenzin Tsundue and learned about the planned long march homeward to Tibet. Gyaltsen, 37, signed on as soon as the March was confirmed and left Dharamsala on the morning of March 10, 2008 with the first wave of 101 core marchers.

On March 13, Gyaltsen was arrested alongside his fellow marchers at Dehra in the Kangra Valley. “I saw them grab Tenzin Tsundue. It reminded me of the moment when I was dragged away by the Chinese. I was frightened.” However, Gyaltsen soon understood that the local police were “… just doing their duty …not as bad as the Chinese police …no beatings.” Gyaltsen joined the second batch of marchers soon after his release from detention on March 21.