The fate of the Dalai Lama’s birthplace high on a lonely mountainside shows the absolute supremacy of China over his ancestral land on the eve of a critical meeting between Tibetan exiles to debate the future of their cause.

The farmhouse in Taktser where he was born in 1935 stands silent in a walled compound. Destroyed by Red Guards, it was rebuilt and adorned with a golden roof at a time when China and the Tibetan spiritual leader were on better terms. Gaily coloured prayer flags flutter from a tall pole outside.

“We hope he will come back,” said a villager, “but whether that is possible or not is up to the government.”

Today only a handful of pilgrims brave the snow flurries, the precipitous ascent and the police post far below in the valley to pay their respects at a small shrine in a room that is normally kept locked.

As far as the eye can see over pastures and ridges where yaks, horses and sheep graze, the land known to Tibetans as Amdo at the time of the Dalai Lama’s birth is now the Chinese province of Qinghai. His only relative remaining in the village, a grandnephew, is a member of the Chinese Communist party’s local political consultative conference.

The exiles are gathering in India tomorrow to argue over the “middle way” of peaceful dialogue for which the Dalai Lama won the Nobel peace prize in 1989.

The policy did not call for an independent Tibet, only genuine autonomy for its people. Now he says it has failed.

An uprising across the Tibetan plateau last spring brought stern repression, yet the international protests that followed did not stop China staging a triumphant Olympic Games in Beijing attended by world leaders who made no mention of Tibet.

The toll of dead and injured was never independently verified but at least 200 people died after peaceful demonstrations by monks were violently dispersed, leading to riots in Lhasa and unrest in dozens of monasteries and towns.

Several Chinese civilians were burnt to death in Lhasa and an unknown number of Tibetan civilians died at the hands of the security forces. At least 1,300 people were arrested and heavy jail sentences meted out.

In frustration, young Tibetans are now agitating for militancy, resistance and a declaration that independence is their goal. Tsewang Rigzin, leader of the Tibetan Youth Congress, said Tibetans “will have to pay a price for confronting the Chinese and they are prepared to pay it in their own blood”.

China has already sent a harshly worded signal that if Tibetans want to shed more of their own blood, its security forces stand ready.

“We will never make a concession,” declared Zhu Weiqun, the Communist party official overseeing talks with the Tibetan exiles. Not even the “middle way” is acceptable to Beijing, said Zhu. The latest of nine rounds of talks between China and envoys of the Tibetan government in exile has ended with neither side reporting progress.

The complex reasons become simpler when seen from the perspective of Taktser, where the Dalai Lama’s parents raised seven children. Here the little boy named after “the wish-fulfilling goddess” played on the slopes until the day when Buddhist monks came to identify him through mystical gifts as the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama.

They took him away on horseback to Lhasa at the age of five, across the mountains of Amdo contested by Muslim warlords and Chinese troops. As he ascended the Lion Throne in 1940, chaos and war swirled around the Himalayas.

Ten years later the Chinese communists “liberated” Tibet. Only once after that, in 1955, did the Dalai Lama return to visit his home and to gaze out at a single sacred white stupa that pierces a distant ridgeline. It is a sign that these lands have been inhabited by Tibetans for centuries.

When the Dalai Lama fled into exile after another failed uprising in 1959, the Chinese carved away a great swathe of territory, drew a line around a smaller area and declared only this to be the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The two sides cannot even agree on what constitutes Tibet and when the Dalai Lama calls for autonomy, religious and cultural freedom for all Tibetans, the Chinese accuse him of “a trick” to split the nation.

National unity remains so important a principle to China that despite worldwide sympathy for their cause, the Tibetans meet tomorrow in the knowledge that political reality is not on their side.

From interviews with monks and ordinary Tibetans, plus an extensive review of public and internal Chinese policy documents, a picture emerges of a resistance movement stifled by a resolute, shrewd Chinese strategy that combines threats with incentives to collaborate.

In speeches to party members, Zhang Qingli, the party chief in Lhasa, ordered the imposition of political committees to control monasteries and the revival of the Mao-era system of vigilant party informers spying on every street.

At the same time, Chinese tactics and propaganda worked on the needs of a poverty-stricken people of nomads and herders.

“We are not allowed to display pictures of the Dalai Lama although he is our spiritual leader,” said one monk, “If they forbid us to believe in him, who do they want us to believe in? Is it possible they want us to believe in a leader of materialism?”

Yet as he spoke he was looking out from a Tibetan temple said to be 1,000 years old over a valley where highways, railways, factories, new hospitals and apartment buildings all testified to the enormous investment that China is pouring into its western regions.

At another great monastery, once the fourth largest in Tibetan Buddhism, informers, security cameras and a handful of policemen enforce a sullen outward compliance with the Chinese regulations.

In the quiet of their rooms, however, the monks keep old pictures of the Dalai Lama concealed among images of venerated abbots and photographs of Lhasa.

“Officials here are much wiser than those in Lhasa,” said an old monk. “They leave us alone and in return we just practise Buddhism and avoid action.”

An even more intriguing tale unfolded from a younger monk who lived in a remote monastery atop a 3,000-metre cliff at the end of a track that spiralled up through clouds and ice.

“I escaped to India by walking for 70 days across the mountains,” he said. “There I learnt English and studied under the Dalai Lama. I stayed some years and then I came back because my family missed me.”

Were there any reprisals? “None,” he said and led his visitors inside a gilded temple where monks were preparing 1,000 lamps of yak butter for a ceremony at dawn.

A portrait of the exiled leader, wreathed in silks, stood prominently on the altar. Whenever the Chinese officials pay one of their rare visits, it vanishes.

All the evidence suggests that Chinese state policy, while capable of violence, has become as subtle and flexible as the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism itself. On this high plateau the two have blended for centuries: “Great Buddhism, Grand Temple” reads an inscription by Qianlong, the 18th-century Chinese emperor, at the entrance to one shrine.

Even if the path for the “middle way” looks as bleak as the snow-shrouded trails around the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, there are rumours in Beijing that behind the rhetoric, draft elements of a compromise exist but are being fought over by party factions.

The Tibetan meeting – the largest in 60 years – will need to consider that.

“It’s very difficult to say what the outcome of the meeting will be but I will say I don’t think the Tibetan people’s hunger for freedom has diminished,” said Matt Whitticase of the Free Tibet Campaign in London.

Yet if the Tibetans decide on militant resistance, it may only play into the hands of the most intransigent men in the Chinese Communist party and make Tibet’s tragedy both deeper and more prolonged.

Additional reporting: Sara Hashash in London; Dean Nelson in Delhi

Tibet’s tears

1935 Born Lhamo Thondup, one of seven children in a farming family in Taktser

1939 Taken to Lhasa, aged four, after he is identified as reincarnation of deceased Dalai Lama

1940 Enthroned as Dalai Lama. Feudal society is governed in his name

1950 China “liberates” Tibet. Dalai Lama flees but returns to work with Chinese

1959 Escapes into exile in India after failed uprising

1976 Death of Mao Tsetung raises false hopes of deal for Tibetans

1988 China crushes protests in Lhasa. One year later Dalai Lama wins Nobel peace prize

1995-2008 Talks fail; riots in Lhasa in run-up to Olympics. Dalai Lama says “middle way” has failed

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