"Every society progresses, but not the Old Tibet then," said Salung Phunlha, deputy chief of the influential Tashilhunpo Monastery in Xigaze, Bailang county. "Ordinary people had to pay heavy taxes if they wanted to visit monasteries. Not many people had that luxury. Beggars were everywhere."

Salung entered the monastery aged 9 in 1951 and toiled for the senior lamas for nearly a decade. "Nobody cared, not even if you fell down and died from exhaustion," he said.

"That was the life of all serfs before 1959, not for one year, but for hundreds and thousands of years.

"You were a damned slave."

A child chases pigeons in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, in this photo taken last May. Tremendous changes have taken place since the emancipation of serfs in the region 50 years ago. [China Daily]

Like all the slaves in Tibet, Kerong suffered in the monastery. But he did not know where, or who to turn to. No one knew the true name of their master - it could have been a wealthy north Tibetan lama who earned the nickname "Apota", or "the Big Tiger", among Drepung's serfs.

"My parents, two elder sisters, wife and I lived in a low, damp and dark room measured out by a pole (about 20 sq m)," Kerong said. "We were all Tralpas; my mother and sisters were slaves carrying out transportation tasks for the monastery."

Yeshe Lodro was born to share Kerong's fate, but his mother was too poor to raise him. He was sent to Drepung by a local lama when he was 2. Three years later, Yeshe became a monk and, like Salung and most other young monks, became servants to a senior lama.

"My biggest hope as a child was not to be beaten and scolded. But it was futile," he said. "I could deal with the scolding, but I could only take so many beatings."

"I couldn't possibly live in the monastery," Yeshe said. "I had to escape." Then in 1954, Yeshe learned of the 17-Article Agreement between the Central People's Government and the Local Government of Tibet that had been signed three years before "I heard it from a batch of People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers on my way back from a trip to Qamdo," he said. "It was the first time I heard about it because people had no access to radio and could not read any newspapers."

"So I fled the monastery and became a servant of an aristocrat," Yeshe said. "Even slave labor for a lord felt better than working in Drepung."

Three years later, he joined the revolution and was assigned to study the Tibetan language for the first time in the PLA's Tibetan Cadre School. After the Democratic Reform, Yeshe became one of Lhasa's first batch of 25 traffic police officers.

Now 74, Yeshe has been a People's Congress delegate for the city's Chengguan district for five years.

Kerong was assigned a house the size of about 60 sq m, (0.4 of a hectare) of farmland, a pregnant cow, a donkey and two bulls he shared with three other serf families during the Democratic Reform.