The basic facts about Tibet are well documented. Once the Chinese were firmly in control, land seizures, interrogations, struggle sessions, torture and the pulverizing of Buddhist images were conducted with a degree of fury only possible at the hands of religious or political zealots. Over 95 percent of Tibet's monasteries were dynamited; Tibetans claim that over 1 million people were killed.
Less known is the plight of Tibetan women during the early years of the occupation. The writer, Canyon Sam, points out a little known fact: that when the Chinese occupied Lhasa in March, 1959, it was a city largely inhabited by women. These invaluable eyewitnesses to the atrocities of history are the subjects of this book.
Pre-Chinese Tibet, a rigid feudal society dominated by a landed aristocracy and monastic elite, was no democracy. When practiced, polygamy gave the very privileged a degree of hereditary and marital rights comparable to those in Islam. Curiously, this strangely dissociated world appears to have had few dissenters among the lower orders of society.