Kerong does not remember what life was like 50 years ago. Not because the 83-year-old is losing his memory. Rather, it was an inhuman time he wants to forget.

"I consider myself dead then," Kerong said.

Tibet resident Kerong boils a pot of water via a solar energy facility in his courtyard last week. [China Daily]

As a teenager in Tibet then, Kerong never liked, let alone romanticized, the life in any one of the ubiquitous monasteries of the region. Being born into the Tibetan Buddhism way of life that was nestled amid the Himalayas, Kerong, like most of his peers, was religious. But the monastery always invoked fear and despair in him.

That was because Kerong was a Tralpa, a member of the hereditary "middle-class" of serf families in the Old Tibet. As the only son in his family, Kerong was spared the compulsory temple service demanded by the authorities for all boy serfs from families with two or more sons as a form of "atonement". But Kerong was still forced to provide free labor at the renowned Drepung Monastery after he turned 15.

"I was too young and weak to lift even a scoop used for stirring tea in those huge pots they had for brewing tea," Kerong said. "I just couldn't do it. But each time I failed to perform my duties, I would be brutally caned, day in and day out," he said.

"Just like that, I was gradually forced and beaten into a Tralpa. It was my life, my fate and my destiny."

Kerong's life is just one of the countless stories of servitude and suffering seen throughout the Old Tibet, existing for more than a millennium and brought to an end only in 1959, when the central government abolished slavery in the region on March 28 with the historic policy of Democratic Reform.

Serfs' Emancipation Day every March 28 is also the designated holiday for celebrating the end of serfdom in Tibet, following a bill passed on Monday at the autonomous region's People's Congress in its capital, Lhasa.

Before March 1959, serfs made up 95 percent of the Tibetan population. They were expected to serve the interests of the few lords and lamas who held an iron grip on the theocratic Himalayan region, both spiritually and for all practical purposes.

Contrary to what many believed and as cases such as Kerong's have shown, religion was never the sole force that advocated the tens of thousands of Tibetan serfs and beggars to "voluntarily" observe the laws of karma that bound them to such servitude.

Instead, a wide-ranging network of control was known to have been at play to tie the Tralpas and Duiqoins - serfs with a lower status and lesser land allocation than the Tralpas - to their limited share of land, and rule the Nangzan, or household slaves, through sheer violence.

All these groups were known to have been at the mercy of not more than 200 wealthy families and a handful of powerful temples. Kerong himself was only one of 25,000 serfs at the Drepung, which controlled 185 manors, 300 major pastures and 16,000 herdsmen in the 1950s.