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without spilling blood.” Above all, the Chinese left the monasteries and the religious authorities alone, knowing that to be seen as enemies of the faith would be to guarantee fierce resistance.
    For the first stages of the occupation, the strategy in large part worked. The Dalai Lama had been distraught and enraged by the invasion (and his own government’s abject failure to stop it), butthe reports of a disciplined PLA and Tibet’s need for modernization gave him hope. A key moment in the relationship came in the summer of 1954, when the Dalai Lama visited China for a nearly yearlong tour. China’s material progress under the Communists awed the Dalai Lama: hydroelectric dams, tractor factories, the sheer dynamism of a state-controlled economy in its first flush of production was a vision of what Tibet could become. And the ideas behind what he saw thrilled him as well. He thought Marx’s beliefs were deeply attuned to his own, perhaps the closest match to the tenets of Buddhism he’d ever encountered. The emphasis on justice and equality made these beliefs far more attractive to the young leader than American-style capitalism. “The more I looked at Marxism,” he said, “the more I liked it.” His main objection, of course, was to the system’s atheism, but he felt a synthesis between Buddhism and communism could be worked out.
    “If you’ve ever been to where the Dalai Lama grew up, even today it’s quite a poor area,” notes Professor Gray Tuttle of Columbia University, who visited His Holiness’s hometown. “I imagine in the 1930s when he lived there, it was much like Appalachia at that time: dirt poor. Coming from there, he probably thought, ‘With communism, things could be a lot better for a lot more Tibetans.’ ”
    Indeed, back in Lhasa, all things Chinese were fast becoming the subject of a minor fad. “There is everywhere a keenness to imitate the Chinese,” wrote one observer, “to dress, to talk, behave and sing as the Chinese do.” Portraits of Mao were placed next to the Dalai Lama’s in the domestic shrines of smart Lhasa homes. Tibet’s aristocrats, who’d always looked to England or America for direction, now saw Peking as the new ideal.
    When he finally met him, the Dalai Lama found Mao impressive in ways he hadn’t expected. He was physically strange: The Chairman’s dark skin was flawlessly smooth and covered with aperfect sheen, and his hands were doll-like, as if carved from fine cherrywood. He wore ratty clothes, “old and ruined,” shirts fraying at the cuff matched with scruffy jackets, so different from the Dalai Lama’s beautiful silk robes. And he had odd mannerisms. Mao spoke in slow, short sentences, and when he turned his head, it took him several seconds to complete the gesture, which gave the fifty-four-year-old leader an air of gravity. “I felt as if I was in the presence of a strong magnetic force,” the Dalai Lama said. For His Holiness, coming from a court dominated by endless ritual, Mao’s off-the-cuff naturalness was electrifying.
    Mao seemed remarkably flexible, announcing at one point that “the pace of reform was dictated by the wishes of the Tibetan people themselves.” The Chinese leader flattered the Dalai Lama by declaring that Tibet had been great in past centuries and could be great again, with China’s help. The Dalai Lama chose to trust his own heart and believe in Mao’s good intentions. The robotic obedience, the weirdly mechanical nature of daily life in China unnerved him, but he felt it was a passing phase in a great human project.
    But there was a jarring moment during the official visit. During one conversation, Mao leaned over to the Dalai Lama and said conversationally, “Of course, religion is poison.” The statement took the young Tibetan leader completely by surprise. “How could he have misjudged me so?” he wondered. “How could he have thought that I was not religious to the core of my being?” And on the way