They carry their years quietly, faces lined by the high-altitude sun and the low gray light of prison cells. Many live in exile now, scattered across Europe, North America, and the Indian Himalayas. Others remain inside Tibet, their names known only to relatives and a handful of researchers who keep fragile records. These are the survivors among Tibet’s oldest political prisoners, men and women who endured decades behind bars for acts that, elsewhere, might have passed as peaceful dissent: a banner waved, a song recorded, a leaflet shared, a sermon preached without permission.
Their stories rarely make the nightly news. Yet they explain how a generation learned to measure time in interrogation sessions, how a culture preserved its voice in whispers, and how memory can outlast walls.
A Generation Shaped by Silence
The modern history of political imprisonment in Tibet stretches back to the late 1950s and 1960s, then surged again after waves of protest from the late 1980s onward. The targets were often monks, nuns, teachers, and students. Prison terms were measured in long increments, ten years, fifteen, life. Documentation from human rights groups and independent databases shows a consistent pattern: arrests for peaceful activity, prolonged pretrial detention, limited access to lawyers, harsh conditions, and sentence extensions for acts inside prison that authorities defined as political.
Among those who became symbols for the outside world was the former schoolteacher Takna Jigme Sangpo. He spent thirty-seven years in prison near Lhasa, one of the longest terms served by any Tibetan prisoner of conscience. Released on medical parole in 2002, he rebuilt a life in exile and died in Switzerland in October 2020 at the age of ninety-four. His passing became a moment of collective remembrance among Tibetans, a reminder that the elders who endured the worst years are leaving a heavy archive of pain, perseverance, and testimony.
Songs That Carried Through Bars
If the men often became known for years endured, the women became known for songs. The most storied case involves the Drapchi nuns, a group of young nuns imprisoned after protests in Lhasa in 1989. Inside Drapchi Prison, they secretly recorded devotional and freedom songs on a smuggled tape recorder. The cassette traveled far beyond the prison walls, a short, defiant message set to melody.
Several of the nuns later spoke publicly about beatings, extended sentences, and the deaths of fellow prisoners after protests inside the prison in 1998. Their accounts, preserved by rights groups and journalists, shaped how the world understood prison life in Tibet during the 1990s. One of the best known, Phuntsog Nyidron, spent fifteen years in custody before her release and eventual resettlement abroad.
Today, some of those women are elders in exile communities. They attend small gatherings, speak in quiet tones, and mentor younger activists. Their message is consistent: memory is a duty. For those still inside, memory is the only thing that travels safely.
The Arithmetic of Erasure
Ask researchers how many Tibetans remain imprisoned for political reasons, and they will answer with caveats. The numbers fluctuate. Arrests spike after protests or sensitive anniversaries, records are sealed, and baseline data are scarce. The most consistent approach has been case-by-case documentation, matching names with dates, sentences, and locations wherever possible.
The Dui Hua Foundation’s Political Prisoner Database, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China have maintained some of the most detailed records. None claims completeness, but together they form the core of what is known about Tibet’s political prisoners.
For older prisoners, those gaps are especially wide. In the 1980s and 1990s, arrests often took place far from major towns. Communications were limited. Families feared retaliation for speaking. Even when a release occurred, the outside world might learn about it late, or never. The result is an arithmetic of erasure, as one researcher put it, in which the most vulnerable cases are also the hardest to count.
Inside the Cells, a Long Apprenticeship
For many who served long terms, prison became a harsh apprenticeship. Accounts collected by former detainees and human rights groups describe routines that were punishing and intimate. Work brigades, military drill, patriotic education sessions, solitary confinement for minor infractions, repeated threats to family members, and hunger that shaped memory as powerfully as fear.
Former prisoners recall how they created small strategies to keep sanity: sharing scraps of paper for prayers, teaching languages and scripture to one another in secret, tapping codes on the walls at night. Some learned hard pragmatism, signs of deference reduced beatings, a well-timed silence could protect a friend. Others learned stubbornness, they refused to sing patriotic songs at prison ceremonies and paid with scars and sentence extensions.
Testimonies about prison protests in the late 1990s describe elderly prisoners protecting the young, and the young refusing to leave elders behind. The old and the new generations of Tibetans met behind those walls, exchanging a silent curriculum of endurance.
When Time Becomes a Weapon
In most accounts, time itself becomes the most effective punishment. A sentence of ten or twenty years outlasts governments, family members, and sometimes the very language of protest that caused the arrest. For elderly prisoners, the body becomes the battleground, malnutrition, untreated illness, and physical exhaustion.
Medical parole, often presented as humanitarian, is usually conditional. Former prisoners are monitored, denied passports, and restricted in travel. Some are forced to sign pledges not to speak publicly. A few manage to leave Tibet and reach exile communities, where they become living records of what imprisonment meant during the most repressive years.
Takna Jigme Sangpo once described his release as “the beginning of another kind of prison,” referring to the loneliness of freedom after decades of isolation. Many others echo the sentiment. The world outside had changed, but their habits of caution and silence lingered.
Exile: Rebuilding a Life
For the small group who made it out, rebuilding life in exile came with its own complexities. Some arrived in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, where younger generations often view them as living symbols of an era of struggle. They give talks at schools and monasteries, helping keep the memory of resistance alive.
Others settled quietly in Europe or North America, aided by refugee programs and human rights organisations. They rarely seek attention. A few, however, became outspoken advocates, speaking at United Nations sessions and international conferences about the need to document remaining prisoners and push for access to Tibet’s detention facilities.
For the exiled elders, survival itself becomes testimony. Their presence is a reminder that the political struggle for Tibet did not end with the closing of prison gates. It simply changed form.
The Vanishing Witnesses
The passing of Tibet’s oldest prisoners brings a growing sense of urgency among activists and scholars. Many of the key eyewitnesses to early decades of repression are now in their eighties and nineties. Their memories fill the gap left by destroyed documents and restricted archives.
Oral historians are racing against time to record these stories. Interviews conducted in India and Switzerland preserve details about prison routines, psychological survival, and small acts of rebellion. Some have been published in exile magazines, others stored in private archives awaiting translation and editing. For younger Tibetans born in exile, these voices are often their only direct connection to what happened inside Tibet’s prisons during the twentieth century.
Without these witnesses, the risk is historical amnesia, a future in which the most painful parts of Tibet’s modern history fade into political myth rather than documented fact.
Why Their Stories Still Matter
The experiences of Tibet’s oldest political prisoners are not only about the past; they continue to shape Tibet’s human rights narrative today. Advocacy campaigns frequently invoke their names to highlight ongoing repression of expression and religion. The United Nations and international NGOs continue to call for access to Tibet to monitor conditions and investigate prison health care.
At a broader level, their endurance has inspired global movements for nonviolent resistance. Many of these prisoners drew strength from Buddhist teachings about compassion and impermanence, using meditation as survival. Their philosophy of endurance, resisting hatred while never renouncing identity, became part of the moral vocabulary of modern Tibetan activism.
They are, in a sense, custodians of two struggles: one political, demanding freedom and self-determination; the other spiritual, asserting dignity in the face of systematic dehumanisation. Both continue to resonate long after their release.
The Final Years
As the remaining elders age, Tibetans in exile have begun to hold annual remembrance gatherings. These events are less about politics than gratitude. Photos of former prisoners are displayed, their quotes read aloud by children, their names written in both Tibetan and English script.
In Lhasa and other towns inside Tibet, remembrance is quieter, more cautious, often a simple butter lamp lit in private. The act itself carries risk, but it endures.
The old prisoners’ lives now stand as bridges between eras: between an occupied homeland and a scattered diaspora, between silence and speech, between memory and loss. Their stories remind the world that while prisons can crush bodies, they cannot erase conviction.
Their time is nearly gone, yet their testimonies remain. To forget them would be to lose one of the clearest windows into Tibet’s recent history, a story still being written, still contested, and still echoing across the Himalayas.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, “Trapped in Tibet: Political Prisoners and Repression”
- Amnesty International, “People’s Republic of China: Repression in Tibet”
- Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, Annual Reports
- Dui Hua Foundation, Political Prisoner Database
- Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Political Prisoner Database
- International Campaign for Tibet, Reports on Tibetan Prisoners of Conscience
- BBC News, Obituary: Takna Jigme Sangpo, Tibet’s Longest-Serving Political Prisoner
- Tibet Post International, Interviews with Former Drapchi Nuns
- Central Tibetan Administration, Documentation on Former Prisoners in Exile
