1999 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the People's Republic of China - and the 40th anniversary of China brutally suppressing the uprising of Tibetans. Here in Brighton, Tibetan Soname Yangchen tells Rebecca Burgess why she fled her homeland.

CHINESE President Jiang Zemin has banqueted at Buckingham Palace, enjoyed the luxury of private planes, limousines and had protesters re-moved from his view last week.

Soname Yangchen lives in exile from her Tibetan homeland, was removed from her family at the age of nine to avoid being raped, and watched the Tibetan monk who helped her flee, beaten and tortured.

The singer now lives in Montpelier Street, Brighton, with her husband Michael Windsor. Aged only 24, she has already been through more than most. Yet she is one of thousands exiled from Tibet following its occupation by 40,000 soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1949 - many have not lived to tell their story.

Born into a noble family of landowners in the Tibetan countryside near Lhasa, Yangchen has never known life in an unoccupied Tibet.

Because her family were landowners the Chinese labelled them as 'bad' and Yangchen and her brothers and sisters were kept out of school for fear of their own safety.

Yangchen said: "My mother used to go to meetings, and one night she took me and I saw them beating up my mother.

"The Chinese destroyed all the monasteries and all the good things. They called me a bastard child.

"My mother was scared I would be raped in the village, so she sent me to live in Lhasa with a friend of my father when I was nine."

Yangchen's parents died when she was 11 years old and four years later, when she overheard a group of monks plotting to flee Tibet, she begged them to take her with them.

She said: "I didn't have any life and I wanted to see the Dalai Lama, go to India and have an education."

At 6am the next day she met a group of monks at a monastery and they made the five-day trek to the border where disaster struck.

Yangchen said: "One monk was taken at the border and he was hung from his thumbs and beaten with sticks - it was terrible - we never saw him again."

Freezing

With the help of guides, paid for with jewellery, the fugitives trekked for six weeks through the mountains in the freezing cold which claimed many lives.

As they arrived in Nepal they were stopped by police who took their money, clothes and jewellery but agreed to smuggle them across the border.

Yangchen stayed for a month with her uncle in a Tibetan community in Nepal before travelling to Dharmsala - the home of the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans in exile.

The Dalai Lama sent Yangchen to school for the first time in her life at the age of 16. Then she met a Tibetan man and became pregnant. But, after their daughter was born, he left for America.

She worked for a year and a half to support them, but the baby's father's parents came and took her daughter away.

Yangchen then worked as a housekeeper in an Indian hotel for six years before making her first trip to Europe to see friends she had made there.

Following a trip to Paris she travelled to London to visit her friend, 46-year-old

Michael Windsor.

In April 1998 the couple were married in Brighton.

Yangchen said: "I stayed here for six months and we became very close and then one day he asked me to marry him."

Now Yangchen is rebuilding her life in exile and pursuing the education which she was denied for so long - learning English at college.

"Sometimes I don't want to complain here in the West because I am here and I am safe, but my family is not safe in Tibet."

But, although Yangchen says she loves living in Brighton with her husband and fulfiling her dreams of an education, she still yearns for the country she calls home.

Steadfastly optimistic Yangchen concludes: "When Tibet is free I will go back. My heart is always in Tibet and I want to take my education there and teach schoolchildren or whatever I can do."

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