On Serfs Emancipation Day, celebration, recollection, and wishes from across China

But 73-year-old Baya in Qamdo, who was born to be a Tralpa, or a kind of serf whose life was better among all, said she would never return to the old society.

"I began to graze cattle when I was nine years old," she said. "There were many wolves in the pasturing area, and the aristocrats always asked us to deliver messages in midnight."

"We were afraid of the ghost, and I once witnessed a horde of wolves attack a lama..." she was apparently still in fear.

What they wore then was goat's skin, dried under the sun, because they didn't have cloth. They didn't have shoes.

"If the feet bled, we just apply the oil of the goat to the wounds," she said.

Dinner was potherb soup. "We didn't have Tsampa (food made of barley floor) to eat, let alone rice and wheat."

Baya said her first taste of sugar was after the People's Liberation Army (PLA) entered Tibet. The sugar was brought to there from Yunnan Province.

Zhao Qingui, a 73-year-old Tibetan veteran soldier, joined the PLA in 1950.