Palden Gyatso — The Monk Who Carried the Evidence Across the Himalayas | Lines Across Asia

In 1959 a young Tibetan monk joined a peaceful protest in Lhasa and pasted independence posters on a monastery wall.He was arrested three months later.He would not be free again for thirty-three years.Palden Gyatso served the longest documented prison term of any Tibetan political prisoner. He was beaten with nail-studded clubs. Tortured with electric batons that destroyed every tooth in his mouth. Starved until he ate leather from his own shoes. Seventy percent of the prisoners alongside him in his first prison died of starvation.He survived every attempt to break him.When he was released in 1992 he spent thirteen days in Lhasa before escaping across the Himalayas. During those thirteen days he bribed a prison official to obtain the instruments used to torture him — handcuffs, electric batons, leg irons, thumbscrews. Some still had traces of blood on them.He carried them to the United Nations. To the US Congress. To the British House of Commons.Because he understood something most survivors don't calculate in the moment of liberation — testimony without evidence can be dismissed. But a man who was there, who has the scars, who can hold up the instrument that made them — that cannot be dismissed.When journalists asked how he could possibly not hate his torturers — his answer never changed."With hate inside you — there is no chance to be at peace."He died in Dharamsala in 2018 at the age of 85. Tibet is still occupied.This is his story.