Tricycle | Awake in the World

Tsipon Shuguba was the finance minister of Tibet in the Dalai Lama’s government prior to Chinese rule. Captured during the Chinese takeover in 1959, he endured nineteen years of imprisonment, and - perhaps even more painful - knowledge of the catastrophic occupation and destruction of his country: relentless execution, massacres, the bombing and dynamiting of over 6,000 monasteries into rubble. Once part of a wealthy and noble family, Tsipon Shuguba suffered the dissolution of his clan, the deaths of his wife and daughter, and the virtual extinction of his culture as he knew it. Finally “rehabilitated” and released in 1978, he emerged from prison into a Tibet now flooded with Han Chinese settlers and thick with PRC military enforcements, into a Lhasa teeming with Chinese bicycle shops and noodle stands, where no Tibetan has much of a chance of education, job opportunity, or personal safety.