This is a brave book. The author, Tsering Dondrup, was compelled to self-publish it in 2006, as mainstream publishers were reluctant to bring it out. The book is banned in China, with the author forfeiting his passport and job to speak about the unforgettable atrocities visited on Tibetans by Mao’s liberation army.

A Dip into History

Fortunately for those of us less attuned to the region’s history, the translator, Christopher Peacock, captures the key events in an engaging Introduction.

Well before the Cultural Revolution of 1966, wherein China sought to eliminate all traces of capitalism and traditional practices, the Amdo region in Tibet was subject to Chinese depredations. Revolts originated in 1958, with loosely organized Tibetans taking on the might of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Historical reports and oral narratives recall widespread torture and genocide. Later, during the cultural revolution, monks and nuns were disrobed and hounded out of their institutions, emptying monasteries. Estimates have it that a tenth of the population was killed or imprisoned.

Such impositions inevitably involve the suppression of languages, in this case of Tibetan in all its rich variants. Students were no longer permitted to learn in their mother tongue. But some teachers carried out secret lessons. One of the outcomes of such outlawed learning was an outpouring of fiction by students, of which this novel is an exemplar. Stitched together from oral accounts, it zigzags across time, and is told in snatches. The patchwork account, typical of trauma memoirs, evokes the place and time with exactitude. When the past is suddenly toppled and the present morphs into a horrific crawl through jailed days, time no longer feels linear. Micro-moments, embedded inside a larger civilizational collapse, loom into largeness: a bowl of thin soup, a razor blade, a hand-carved rosary, all acquire an aura that only scarcity can bestow.

Keeping the Greys Intact

These are also the kind of ordeals that give rise to a peculiar outlook, one that seeds the author’s “black humor and sharp satire.” Dondrup is too sage a writer to turn this into a black-and-white “us” versus “them.” His keen eye does not spare the Tibetan Buddhist establishment. His monks can be avaricious, materialist, faithless. The present may be nightmarish, but the past was never rose-tinted. There are kind invaders among the Chinese, just as there are ruthless telltales among the Tibetans. More than anything else, the camps that locals are herded into, shift their characters. Tibetans turn against each other, breaking bonds to diminish sentences or curry favors from guards.

Ordinary Men in Extraordinary Robes

As if to emphasize how the Tibetans deserve empathy but not worship, the book – broken into two parts – begins with the absurdities of Alak Drong, a Lama, who possesses “one wife, two mistresses and three children (including a bastard).” Drong is not only tethered to earthly attachments, he’s bereft of lofty learnings or even a pretense of self-restraint. When installed on the throne of his monastery, he quickly banishes his tutor, in order to gobble scrumptious treats. Prescient of the cultural winds that are to sweep in soon, a dusty red wind howls through the landscape, but it’s a sign that Drong is too thick to register.

Shifting Sands, Cultural Makeovers

Even later, while being ferried in a truck by Chinese soldiers, Drong does not get how grim and weighty all this is. He can only obsess with his thirst and hunger, while his followers look to him for guidance and hope.

Around them, the region is being remade. The Chinese take over their grasslands, ceasing a nomadic give-and-take that worked well in that environment. They force-fit farms on pastures, a violent reshaping that will lead to disastrous outcomes. But few can heed larger changes, when even the basics – food and water – are withheld at savage levels. While the truck passes by the blue Tsechu river, such waters are not offered to prisoners. At various points, the captives – including Alak Drong and another monk – are made to drink their own piss.

Treated and Caged Like Animals

The truck heads to a labor camp through ghost-filled fields. When someone dies on the way, the guards have others dispose of the body the way one might with a dead animal –by merely casting it off the vehicle. Later, they are made to walk and on the way, they are so thirsty, they gulp yellow, scummy water without sensing how foul it is. Some throw up.

They are locked into a hall where they also have to pee and shit, surrounded by the foul smell of their peers’ doings. It’s a monastery, but all the jewels from the statues have been stolen, the arms and limbs broken.

When finally imprisoned for an interminable time, Alak Drong asks for an extra corn bun, even acceding to an extended sentence to compensate. He’s thrown instead into a dark, solitary cell where he considers “proving himself” which involves squealing on fellow inmates who pray, plan escapes or contemplate suicide. He convinces himself that his treachery is worthwhile to shorten his own prison time. Besides, isn’t he saving those who might attempt foolhardy escapes or kill themselves?

Morphing Into Snitches

One of his followers, Tsetra, obtains a penknife from another prisoner who asks him for something in return. When he has nothing to offer, the prisoner snatches the knife back. Tsetra realizes how ephemeral material possessions are. After all, just that spring, his family owned so much, and suddenly it was all seized when the red wind howled through their region. Now he can’t even obtain this shiny object. In a fit of rage, he threatens to squeal on the prisoner if he doesn’t part with his blade.

Tsetra uses the knife to sculpt a special rosary for Alak Drong. When the cadre realizes one of them has a knife, they call in Drong for questioning. He squeals on Tsetra, hoping to win a shorter sentence. He returns to the room and sheds bitter, black tears. The eternally loyal Tsetra tries to relieve his leader’s suffering by offering him a strand of tobacco to smoke. He had been bequeathed to Drong by his father, so he had always sacrificed his own tiny pleasures in the prison to make the Lama’s life a little easier.

At the end, Tsetra gets back on Alak Drong for betraying him. He snitches about the leader’s activities, and Drong is beaten up and thrown in with felons. Drong’s sentence is shortened by a year, and now he snitches on his followers at all times. But they don’t know who the betrayer is, so they constantly suspect each other.

While the first part details prison life, the manner in which captives morph into unfeeling workers and traitors, the second part dwells on the alterations imposed on shaven pastures and spirit-crushed monks. Whether left-wing or right-wing, hegemonic regimes should glean the larger lessons from this book: that atrocities can be temporarily muffled or even denied, but in the long run, they will never be forgotten. Translated by Professor Peacock to mirror the vivacity of the original, the English version ferries an important work of Tibetan literature to a global audience.

About the Author: Tsering Dondrup, who has received several awards, is a well-known Tibetan author of many novels and short stories. Born into a family of herders, his works bring the country’s rich and harrowing history to light.

About the Translator: Professor Peacock teaches courses on Chinese language and Chinese and Tibetan literatures at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Earlier, he garnered a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Culture from Columbia University (2020). He’s also translated The Handsome Monk by Tsering Dondrup and Flowers of Lhasa by Tsering Yangkyi.

References

Tsering Dondrup, The Red Wind Howls: A Novel, Translated by Christopher Peacock, Speaking Tiger, 2026. (First published by Columbia University Press, 2025)