On 24 October 2004, the 71 year-old Tibetan writer Yidam Tsering passed away in Lanzhou city, Gansu Province. Yidam Tsering only wrote in Chinese but his work was translated into Tibetan and was widely read. He was regarded as a great writer, both by his readership in Chinese and in Tibetan. The exile-based newspaper Tibet Times wrote that Yidam Tsering “gave Tibetan people a new image to the Chinese readers”.
Yidam Tsering was born in Tsongkhakar (Chin: Pingan) county in Tsoshar prefecture (Chin:Haidong) in 1933, into a poor family. As a child he used to be a shepherd, but he did attend school, though rather sporadically. His formal education was disrupted by the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Lanzhou, the capital of present-day Gansu. In an interview published in China in April 2004, Yidam recalls:
“In August 1949, Lanzhou was liberated; consequently, most of the students ran away from the school. We gathered and followed them and it took three nights and three days till at last we arrived home through the mountains. Then in October of that year, a friend who was a schoolmate called me and we went together to Xining [capital of Qinghai]. There I joined a young cadres training class [Chinese: qingnian ganbu peixun ban] and studied for some months, then I started to work in that school.”
In a conversation with the Italian scholar Lara Maconi, Yidam Tsering mentioned that his first contact with the PLA annoyed him, since a general had called him xiao gui (little devil). Disappointed once he had established that PLA soldiers were just “normal people”, Yidam nevertheless thought they were “good guys” because they distributed food and money to the villagers. Soon after that, Yidam himself joined the revolutionary ranks: “When I joined the revolution, I was just a 15/16-year old baby. At that time, all I knew was that the old society meant suffering. Except for this, everything was obscure to me. In the revolutionary ranks, I was taught the Party principles and Mao’s revolutionary philosophy. I became a member of the Party and I really thought the Party was giving me wisdom and ideals.”
Eventually, in 1954, Yidam joined the Northwest Nationality Dance Troupe: “I held a position of art and dance teacher and also I was the choreographer there. Around the time there was nobody who wrote song lyrics, so I sort of started to write lyrics. So that you can say was the first time when I started writing, and it might have been my karma”. He started to collect, arrange and translate Tibetan folk songs into Chinese and to compose new texts for ancient, well-known tunes. He published a collection of traditional folk songs in 1963, Hunli ge (Wedding Songs). His own first poem, written in 1958, “Jinse de junma” (The Golden Steed), was a hymn to the co-operative transformation of agriculture and to the efforts and determination of people in constructing Socialism.
In September 1964, he finished his first collection of poems, “Xueshan ji” (Snowy Mountains Collection). Due to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, however, the book was only published in 1980. During the Cultural Revolution, Yidam Tsering was stigmatised as a “seventeen year literary black line’s black specimen” and a “reactionary nationalist”. The early poems he composed were burned by the Red Guards. The early 1970s was the most difficult time for him.
The events of the Cultural Revolution initiated in Yidam Tsering a phase of self-searching, during which he became aware of his previous immaturity and began searching for his Tibetan identity. It was in this period that Yidam Tsering became increasingly concerned with the development of Tibet and Tibetan educational improvement.
In an introduction to Yidam’s book `Beloved Country’ his close friend and translator, Khargang Tashi Tsering, currently a teacher at Northwest Minorities University in Lanzhou, describes how the young Yidam Tsering was deeply influenced by the songs his mother sung while working in the fields.
Yidam Tsering’s writing was innovative, both in form and content. He was one of the first poets who introduced Tibetan culture into the Chinese language. Students who met Yidam and saw him recite poems in public have told TIN how he would be deeply moved as he read poems that were rich in their use of Tibetan symbols, such as the snow lion and snow. Yidam Tsering is reported to have expressed his deep regret at not being able to write in Tibetan but many of his readers have commented on the significance of how his writing introduced Tibetan culture and history to a large Chinese readership.
In ‘Crystalline Seeds’, a poem written in 1983, Yidam Tsering celebrates the richness of the Tibetan language. In spite of the recent “dismembering practices of an ice knife and a snow sword, [and after] the jade dragon’s roar has calmed down,” he wrote, the “thirty crystalline seeds [a metaphor for the Tibetan script and language] would fully bloom again”. He encouraged young Tibetan intellectuals to write in their mother tongue. Some of his papers dealt with this subject and focused on talented young Tibetan poets.
A former Tibetan official from Qinghai, when asked about the work of Yidam Tsering told TIN, “The arrow-like honestly of his character and his fire-like spirit will remain in the minds of many young Tibetan writers and for this I feel really happy. Generally the impact of the characters of many great writers and their spirit gets lost because of pressure and their role in government positions. In the case of Yidam Tsering however his character and his spirit remained until he passed away and many young writers will keep this in their minds forever.”
According to Tibet Times: “He was a writer who has left the the strongest memory among the Tibetan people. The short poem that he wrote called ‘Ngachen rolyang’ [the music of big drum] is performed as songs by many monks and students during festivals and ceremonies. Praise of him can be seen in many magazines and songs recorded on tapes.”
Lara Marconi writes: “He never denied his socialist credo and past, and the conception of poetry and life of the two generations remained very different. For the young he was a symbol of moral integrity and human dignity, a powerful spur and a source of enthusiasm and hope in a better future”.
Yidam Tsering’s main works are:
- ‘Xueshan ji’ (Snowy Mountains Collection), 1980
- ‘Xueshi ji’ (Snow Lion Collection), 1991
- ‘Xueyi ji’ (Snowland Collection), 1992
- ‘Xueyun ji’ (Snow Rhymes Collection), 1996
- ‘Xueyu de taiyang’ (The Snow Land Sun), 1997
- ‘Xueshan shizi hou’ (The Lion of the Snowy Mountain Roars), 1999
