Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme is a great survivor, the only Tibetan to have flourished equally under the Dalai Lama as under the Gang of Four. Decades of revolution and rebellion have torn apart most Tibetan families, yet nothing has touched Mr Jigme. Now 88, he is the patriarch of a clan with 60 members.
Tall and thin with thick glasses, Mr Jigme still looks the Tibetan aristocrat even in a Western suit. Yet after a lifetime of service to the Chinese state, mostly in Beijing, he prefers speaking Tibetan rather than Chinese.
He has rarely spoken to the press but, stung by being cast as the villain in Seven Years in Tibet - which opened in Hong Kong this week - he gave his version of his events in a lengthy interview.
It is a long story. In 1950, the Dalai Lama appointed him governor of eastern Tibet to take command of the front line against the invading People's Liberation Army. In May 1951, he led the delegation that went to Beijing to sign the 17-point agreement which laid out the conditions for China's annexation of Tibet. During the 1959 rebellion, he was in the camp of the Chinese garrison advising them as the Dalai Lama fled to India.
'Most Tibetans in Tibet despise him as a traitor,' says historian Tsering Shakya, fellow in Tibetan studies at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. 'The Chinese use him to legitimise their rule. He is the man who signed the 17-point agreement and that is very important to them.' In the early 1960s, it was also Mr Jigme who counselled the young Panchen Lama against writing his damning indictment of communist policies in Tibet. In 1965, Mr Jigme was made the first chairman of the newly-established Tibet Autonomous Region, and later figurehead to the revolutionary committee which ruled during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s he went on to be made a vice-chairman of the National People's Congress and remains a vice-chairman of the lesser body, the CPPCC.
Mr Jigme has not been back to Tibet since 1991 and has lived in Beijing since 1967, when Zhou Enlai had him lifted out after he was beaten by Red Guards. Most of his 12 children live in the capital and many hold high positions.
But his third son, Ngapo Jigme, defected 13 years ago and lives in Washington where he worked for the Free Tibet Campaign and now heads the Tibet section of Radio Free Asia.