In the past two years, well over a hundred Tibetans have set fire to themselves in protest against Chinese rule.Illustration by Martin Ansin

On January 12th, the day that Tsering Tashi set himself on fire, he didn’t seem particularly troubled. He ate an early breakfast with his wife and his parents in the house they shared in a village near Amchok, a historically Tibetan township in China’s Gansu Province. Then he took the family herd—most of the animals were dzomos, female yak-cow hybrids prized for their milk yield—to frozen grasslands nearby. He was twenty-two years old and an accomplished horseman, and his family was well respected locally. Tashi watched the animals graze for a few hours, then went home around noon, leaving the herd in the care of friends. It was a frigid, overcast day. Tashi told his mother that he wanted to wear a traditional Tibetan cloak, or chuba. “You should wear a nice thick one,” she said. She asked if Tashi would like to join her for lunch, but he said that he needed to get back to work.

Tashi stopped to see his friends and asked if they would look after his animals a little longer. “I have to go into town,” he said. “There’s something I need to do there.” He seemed to be carrying something heavy in the folds of his chuba, but they didn’t ask what it might be.

When Tashi got to the main square of Amchok, he took a container from his cloak, doused his clothes in gasoline, and set himself alight. He had wrapped wire around his limbs, apparently to insure that the fuel-soaked clothing would stay in place. As flames engulfed his body, he fell to the ground. Then he got up and ran, darting away from some Chinese police he saw on the road. Finally, he collapsed again, the flames sweeping this way and that in the wind. As his clothes turned to ash, Tashi managed to raise his arms and bring his hands together in a final gesture of Buddhist prayer. “Gyawa Tenzin Gyatso,” he called out. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” A thirteen-second video, apparently shot by a passerby with a phone, shows Tashi’s flaming body at the moment he raises his arms. In the background, a Tibetan woman hurries a shocked child past the blazing man.

In the past two years, well over a hundred Tibetans have immolated themselves in protest against Chinese rule. The demonstrations have spread across the Tibetan plateau, both in Chinese provinces with significant Tibetan populations—Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu—and in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In 2011, a dozen Tibetans set themselves ablaze—most of them monks or former monks of Kirti Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Sichuan. Last year, more than eighty Tibetans—monks and nuns, farmers, nomads, students, restaurant workers, and at least one writer—burned to death. The oldest was in his early sixties; the youngest was just fifteen.

Chinese security forces in Tibet quickly seal off areas where immolations occur, to block independent news coverage. Documentaries on the state-run network CCTV portray immolators as delinquents and dupes of the “Dalai Lama clique” and other outside powers, and fire extinguishers have been installed in Tiananmen Square, in case any Tibetans try to set themselves ablaze there. Financial benefits are withheld from the relatives of self-immolators, and there are large rewards for information about people who incite or abet them, an activity that can lead to a charge of “intentional homicide.” Early this year, a monk received a suspended death sentence (which in practice generally means life imprisonment) after being convicted of instigating eight immolations. A foreign-ministry spokesperson told reporters, “We hope that the international community can clearly see, via this judgment, the sinister, malicious methods used by the Dalai Lama clique.” According to the court, the man was working at the behest of monks from Kirti Monastery living in exile in India, an accusation that the monks deny.

Many of the immolations have been captured on camera, and footage and photographs circulate among Tibetan activists. On one level, the protests are a form of political theatre, designed to attract sympathetic attention to the cause of a free Tibet, but their more immediate aim is harder to pin down. There is little likelihood that Chinese policies will change significantly, or that other countries are prepared to expend much diplomatic energy on the matter. Yet, according to Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, the more oblique aspect of the protests is recognizably Tibetan—the self-expression of a people who have long been deprived of the fundamental freedom to organize and express themselves politically. He told me, “It’s a hidden politics—a politics without words, a politics of symbols, a politics of gestures.”

The tensions between China and Tibet go back more than a millennium. In the eighth century, Tibet was a sizable empire, extending into Central Asia; under the Mongols, in the thirteenth century, it was almost completely overpowered. For long periods, Tibet and China were politically linked while remaining culturally and ethnically distinct: Chinese emperors sent official representatives to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, where they served as symbols of Chinese authority. Tibet was most assertive when China was weakest. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, in 1912, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet independent, but in 1950, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Communists invaded a poorly defended border region and negotiated an agreement that brought Tibet all but entirely under Beijing’s control. Many Tibetans resisted the creeping military takeover, and in 1959, during a failed uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India.

In the People’s Republic, Tibetans became one of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities. James Leibold, an Australian Sinologist who specializes in China’s ethnic politics, explains that the Communists, faced with the country’s demographic diversity, created a large number of autonomous areas. In theory, minorities had the right to preserve or reform their language and customs, and their regions were given preferences in education and in development funding. But autonomy was severely compromised, in part because of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who make up more than ninety per cent of the over-all population. Leibold believes that a consensus is emerging among China’s political élite that the model of autonomous regions should be jettisoned in favor of assimilation. The pro-assimilation camp points to the breakup of the Soviet Union as a sign that autonomy undermines national unity. “They say, the problem may be bad now, but it will only get worse if you don’t reduce the identification of Tibetans with their own nationality,” Leibold said.

To promote integration, Beijing has invested heavily in infrastructure, building roads and railways across the Tibetan plateau. This has led to better standards of living, particularly for a Tibetan élite that has adopted the language and entrepreneurial outlook of the Chinese. But Tibetans maintain that locals often lack the education and the capital to participate in the boom and that the main beneficiaries have been non-Tibetan migrants, mostly Han Chinese. Furthermore, the imposition of Mandarin Chinese in schools and the settlement of nomads have diluted the Tibetan language and culture. A 2009 report by independent Chinese researchers, studying the causes of a mass Tibetan protest a year earlier, found that “the current rapid process of modernization has not given the ordinary Tibetan people any greater developmental benefits; indeed, they are becoming increasingly marginalized.” The report mentions that many employers consider Tibetans lazy and lacking in business sense. It goes on to say that “non-Tibetans control all major aspects of the local economy,” and that “Tibetans have no way of competing with non-Tibetans in the modernization process.”

Amid mass protests, including attacks on businesses owned by Han Chinese, the Dalai Lama has consistently advocated dialogue over confrontation. His position, known as “the Middle Way,” and formally adopted in the nineteen-eighties, involves renouncing the demand for independence in the hope of securing meaningful autonomy. Yet nine rounds of negotiations ended without result in 2010, and Tibetans worry that China is simply waiting for the Dalai Lama, who is seventy-seven, to die, leaving them without their most powerful symbol of national identity and international support. Lodi Gyari, who was the lead negotiator with China until he resigned last year, said that, if so, the Chinese are miscalculating. He told the Chinese delegates, “Once this Dalai Lama is either too old to be effective or, sadly, not there, then the resentment of the Tibetan people against you will be a hundred times more than what they feel now.”

The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile are based in Dharamsala, a hill town in the north of India, three hundred miles from the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region. The town is a cluster of villages, and the Dalai Lama’s residence and the main temple complex are in the village of McLeod Ganj, high up in the hills. There are several streets with shops, sidewalk stalls, and small restaurants. Tibetan monks and nuns with shaved heads and crimson robes walk among tourists bargaining over Buddha statues, jewelry, and colorful scarves. The buildings are covered with posters advertising Tibetan massage, meditation, yoga, and Hindi lessons. Larger posters and billboards commemorate self-immolations, and whenever one occurs activists organize a solemn candlelit procession.

The exiled wing of the Kirti Monastery, established by the lama Kirti Rinpoche after he fled Tibet half a century ago, is a multi-story concrete structure, a five-minute walk from the Dalai Lama’s residence. The monastery is built into the side of a hill, with a view of the valley below and snowcapped peaks above. In February, I went there to visit Kanyag Tsering, a thirty-four-year-old monk who spends most of his days and evenings collecting information about self-immolations and other activism in the region surrounding the main Kirti Monastery, on the Tibetan plateau. He fled Tibet when he was nineteen, during a period of “reëducation” campaigns, in which Tibetans were forced to pledge their loyalty to the Communist Party and denounce the Dalai Lama.

Tsering works with another monk, Lobsang Yeshe, in a storage room that has been converted into an office. Like reporters, the two monks gather tips and try to substantiate them, passing on what they find out to N.G.O.s, media outlets, and agencies of Tibet’s government-in-exile. A lot of information comes from other exiles, but they also talk to people inside Tibet, who speak in hints and codes, using unregistered cell phones. Voice messages, particularly in local dialects, are safer than text messages, which can be monitored by Chinese security agents. The two monks don’t share information about their sources, even with each other. “When we contact Tibetans inside Tibet, we’re putting their lives at risk,” Tsering explained.

Tsering and Yeshe often have difficulty collating the piecemeal information they receive. On February 4th, Tsering received a message from a Tibetan in exile. The man had heard that someone had set himself on fire near Taktsa Monastery, in Sichuan, and that the body had been taken to the monastery, but he had no further details. A day later, another monk came to Tsering’s office and told him he had heard that a Kirti monk named Lobsang Namgyal had self-immolated, but he didn’t know precisely where or when. For more than a week, Tsering and Yeshe tried to turn ambiguous hints into a coherent account, until Tsering heard from a reliable source who confirmed that the man who self-immolated was indeed Namgyal. He had set himself alight at six in the morning in front of a police station. It was the hundredth self-immolation in Tibet.

“I’m returning home triumphant–do you need me to pick anything up?”

Namgyal’s death was particularly upsetting for Tsering and Yeshe, who both knew him from their days at Kirti Monastery. He had been two classes ahead of Tsering and sat across from Yeshe during prayers. Tsering remembers Namgyal as “a very simple monk, very practical,” always fingering his prayer beads. He was not an outstanding student, but he was regarded as disciplined and reliable. The monks heard that things had gone badly for Namgyal in the past year. In September, he disappeared for two weeks; it turned out that he had been in jail. Police spread word in the monastery that he had been caught consorting with prostitutes. Namgyal quietly told a few fellow-monks that this wasn’t true, that he had been interrogated about a relative living in Australia but had refused to speak. Some monks believed his account, Tsering says, but could not openly defend him. Others in the monastery, who didn’t know the full story, began harassing Namgyal for not being a “pure monk.” He felt humiliated and pressured, and eventually left the monastery. “He had nothing left but to set himself on fire,” Tsering said.

I first met Tsering last summer. In his tiny monk’s cell, which until recently doubled as his office, he sat cross-legged on a Tibetan carpet with a dragon motif. He juggled smartphones and SIM cards, surfed Web sites, and organized files on a Samsung computer. He was friendly and talkative, and I learned that he was renowned among the monks as a soccer fanatic—Chelsea is his team—and that he once circumvented the monastery’s strict rationing of television by tapping into the main cable line to watch matches. When I saw Tsering again this year, he seemed more oppressed by his work. As we discussed the burnings, he rubbed the bridge of his nose and sometimes clasped his hands over his ears as if his head might explode. His friends told me that he was suffering from depression. He said that he no longer had time to watch soccer, and that he had migraines and high blood pressure. He had been to the hospital to get checked for chest pains, and one doctor advised him to change jobs. To Tsering, that was inconceivable, because so many people relied on him for information about protests inside Tibet. “We have this responsibility,” Tsering said. “We can’t shrug it off our shoulders.”

Tsering obtained permission for me to spend a night at the monastery, and I stayed in his cell with him. The room, secured by a brown steel door with a large sliding bolt, was big enough for a mattress on a wooden platform, a metal wardrobe, two knee-high tables, and a two-burner gas stove. Small bookshelves were built into the walls. There was a photograph of Tsering’s father, mother, and three younger brothers propped on a ledge. It was a season of bone-chilling rains, but Tsering kept his window open to get fresh air. He put his mattress on the floor and offered me the wooden platform for my sleeping bag. As night fell, we could hear the patter of footsteps in the hallways, yelping dogs in the distance, a monk chanting evening prayers, metal pots being washed, and someone spitting into a communal sink. Shortly before turning in, Tsering read a message on his white iPhone and told me, “Tonight, one Tibetan self-immolated in Tibet.”

The immolations have placed exiled Tibetan leaders in an awkward position: they must pay their respects to the self-immolators without being seen to have encouraged them. Lobsang Sangay, the leader of the government-in-exile, has called for the protests to stop, while also saying it’s a “sacred duty” to honor the self-immolators. Senior lamas have mourned the loss of life, but still extoll the selfless virtues of Tibetans who give their lives to a larger purpose. “We don’t encourage people to self-immolate,” Kirti Rinpoche told me. “But it’s obvious that they have sacrificed for the Tibetan cause, and it’s our responsibility to give voice to what they have done.”

No one is more ambivalent than the Dalai Lama. Regarded by Tibetans as the embodiment of the Buddha of Compassion, he is a deeply committed pacifist. When the first Tibetan self-immolation occurred—in India, a decade before the current protests—the Dalai Lama visited the dying man in the hospital. Whispering through the gauze wrapped around the man’s head, the Dalai Lama said, “Do not pass over with hatred for the Chinese in your heart.”

During the recent wave of immolations, the Dalai Lama has avoided taking a clear stand, but many people close to him feel certain that he wants them to stop. Jeffrey Hopkins, a Tibetologist at the University of Virginia, told me, “There is no doubt he would counsel anyone not to feel hatred.” In an interview with NBC in October, the Dalai Lama said that it was difficult to judge the sacrifices: they could be seen as positive if they were done for the “well-being of the people,” but they were wrong if “carried out with full anger and hatred.” He worries that the Chinese regime will take advantage of any statement he makes. “If he calls on them to stop, and they stop, what will the Chinese say?” one of his aides asked me. “They’ll say, ‘The whole time the Dalai Lama was behind it!’ ”

The Chinese government and its supporters have argued that suicide violates Buddhist principles of nonviolence. “No killing is the first precept of Buddhism and must never be violated,” the Chinese Tibetologist Li Decheng wrote in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Tibetans tend to dismiss this line of argument as disingenuous. Several Buddhist scholars told me that the deaths were, generally speaking, a sacrifice for a higher cause, and should be viewed as different from violence against others or from suicides committed out of personal despair. Lhakdor, a monk who heads the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, said that it was important not to confuse “nonviolence with the absence of violence.” He gave the example of a mother jumping into a pit of fire to save her child as an act of pure compassion. Seen in this light, he said, sacrificing your life for the benefit of others is “not a contradiction, because your life is precious in saving others.”

The exiled Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu has written of the need for “an action-oriented tradition of Buddhism,” in contrast to what he sees as a “quietist, passive, even escapist perception of Buddhism which has gained more widespread acceptance, especially in the West.” Norbu recounted a story from Buddhist scripture in which the Buddha, in an incarnation before his enlightenment, killed a man who was planning a mass murder, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of innocents. Another story describes how the future Buddha came across a starving tigress and her newborn cubs. In an act of supreme compassion, he found a sharp piece of wood, cut himself open, and fed himself to the famished mother. Today, a monastery about forty kilometres outside Kathmandu marks the spot where this is believed to have happened. It’s a popular pilgrimage site, at which people leave offerings of money and food, hang prayer flags, and light butter lamps.

Analysts trying to explain the recent upsurge of immolations point to various possible influences. In addition to Buddhist stories of self-sacrifice, there is the famous example of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who set himself alight in Saigon in 1963, and the more recent case of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vender whose self-immolation gave rise to the Arab Spring. Neither of these explanations seems quite adequate: Tibetan protests began before Bouazizi killed himself, and the Vietnamese example is not well known in Tibet. Robert Barnett told me that he thought one inspiration for the acts might, in fact, be Chinese. “Modern Chinese politics is all about models who die for the party or the nation,” he said. “It’s a culture where martyrdom is seen as the highest political value.” In “Red River Valley,” a popular Chinese film set during the British occupation of Tibet in 1904, a Tibetan hero lights a spreading pool of fuel to kill himself and his enemies. The film was released in 1997 and was shown widely in Tibet, as part of a policy of identifying China’s struggle against Western countries with the region’s earlier suffering at the hands of the British.

Several Tibetan self-immolators have left written statements explaining their actions. Many demand freedom, including religious freedom and the protection of Tibetan culture and language; others call more specifically for independence. The most common sentiment is an appeal for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet. Nangdrol, an eighteen-year-old who self-immolated in February, 2012, wrote, “My requests to the Tibetans are: Be United, Be Tibetan, Dress Tibetan, and Speak Tibetan.” Sonam Wangyal, the highest-ranking monk to have immolated himself, declared, “I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering, and to lead them—each of whom has been our mother in the past and yet has been led by ignorance to commit immoral acts—to the Amitabha, the Buddha of infinite light.”

When Tsering Tashi set himself on fire, his aunt, Tsering Kyi, was asleep in her apartment, in Washington, D.C. She had escaped from Tibet in 1999, when she was sixteen, walking for nearly a month through Himalayan mountain passes into Nepal, and came to the United States a decade later. She now hosts television and radio programs for Voice of America, including one called “Cyber Tibet,” which explores Tibetan political and cultural news on the Web.

At around seven o’clock in the morning, her iPhone started to vibrate, and when she answered it all she could hear was a background clamor of cries and prayers in her dialect of Tibetan. Kyi called an elderly friend from her village. “Your brother’s son has passed away,” the man said. “He set fire to himself around two-thirty, and just burned to ash.”

Her first reaction was fury at her nephew. He was his parents’ only son, and the family was devastated. Kyi had spoken on the phone with him only a few days before. He had playfully berated her for the way she dressed on Voice of America television broadcasts. “Why are you always wearing the same chuba?” he said. “You don’t have any other Tibetan dress?” She told him that it was difficult to get Tibetan clothing in the United States: “If you have time, maybe you can bring me one!”

A few hours after learning of Tashi’s death, Kyi reached his father. “He couldn’t talk much. So many people were coming to offer condolences,” she recalled later. Yet he tried to console her. “Why are you crying?” he said. “So many people die in accidents, so many die of sickness. But my son has not died without reason.”

Later that day, someone sent her the short video clip of Tashi’s last moments. Watching the footage of him folding his arms in prayer, she started to respect his fortitude. “That is a really, really strong image,” she said. “He is suffering death by putting his whole body on fire, and he’s still calling out His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s name.”

Beyond that, Tashi left no statement. Kyi suspects that Tashi’s final act was a response to the restrictions placed on Tibetan farmers and herders, the mining of Tibet’s mineral-rich land, the influx of Han Chinese. She also thinks that he may have been inspired by an ancestor, Tenpa Yarko, who, in 1958, led a local rebellion against Communist Chinese forces and shot himself rather than surrender. Yarko’s relatives came to regard him as a family deity. “We pray to him,” Kyi said. “If I talk about these things to a Westerner, it sounds like an ancient story. But it’s a reality.”

After Tashi died, Kyi told me, Chinese security forces set up roadblocks at the three entrances to his village, but local people still found ways in. A few monks came and chanted prayers, defying Chinese orders to stay away. Normally, a body must be kept for several days while astrological charts are consulted and special prayers conducted—to soothe the lingering spirit and insure a good rebirth. But Chinese officials put pressure on the leading lama in the area to make sure that Tashi’s family removed his body quickly and quietly. The second night, when there were no crowds about, men came to help Tashi’s uncle take his body across a nearby river and through the grasslands to a holy mountain. There they lit fires to work by and made preparations for a traditional “sky burial,” in which bodies are left for vultures and other scavengers.

Sky burials are still performed in some Tibetan areas where the frozen ground is too hard to dig and where, according to Buddhist precepts, the dead body is regarded as a spent vessel. The spirit of the deceased, it is thought, has already moved on and its progress will be helped by offering wild creatures a meal. The ceremony is called jhator, which means “alms for the birds.” The men cleaned Tashi’s body of ash, cut up the flesh, and broke the bones to facilitate consumption. Then Tashi’s remains were strewn about on the sacred peak. ♦