The Last "Dark Age"

Rich and beautiful Europe experienced a period known as the "Dark Ages" when barbaric methods of torture were used and the inhuman rule that sea-owners had the right to sleep with a female serf before she married her husband was enforced . However similar practices continued to exist in old Tibet for another400 years.

Before 1959, Tibet had long been a society of feudal serfdom under the despotic political- religious rule of lamas and nobles. The masses of serfs in Ti- bet did not even possess fundamental rights. Serf-owners principally local administrative officials nobles and upper- ranking lamas, accounted for less than 5 percent of Tibet's population but they owned all of Tibet's farmlands pastures, forests, mountains and rivers as well as most of the livestock. The serfs making up more than 90 percent of Tibet's population lived no better than the slaves in the plantations in the southern states of America. The serf-owners could sell or transfer their serfs, present them as gifts, or use them as mortgages payments for debts. They could even ex- change them,molest them or maltreat them. When two serfs got married, the husband and wife still belonged to different owners and their children were fated to be serfs from the moment they were born.

The statutory code of old Tibet stipulated that people were unequal in status by dividing people into three classes and nine ranks. In a peculiar law concerning the value of human life it was written that the lives of people belonging to the highest rank of the upper class such as a prince or leading living Buddha, were calculated to be worth the weight of the dead body in gold whilst the dives of people belonging to the lowest rank of the lower class, such as women, butchers, hunters and craftsmen were worth a straw rope. The judicial system of old Tibet gave monasteries and serf - owners the right to judge lawsuits. The judicial system itself was characterized by its bloodcurdling system of cruel tortures: punishments issued by the courts were extremely savage and cruel and included gouging out the eyes, cutting off the ears, hands or feet; pulling out tendons; throwing the criminal into water or shutting the criminal into a wooden case lined with nails facing inwards. These bloody historical facto were displayed in an Exhibition of Tibetan Social and Historical Relics in the Beijing Cultural Palace of Nationalities. Imagine what people thought when they saw the amputated limbs, the flayed human skins and the ghastly torture implemented.