1959年以前的西藏，仍然保留着封建农奴制。法国旅行家亚历山大·大卫·妮尔1916-1924年间曾先后5次到西藏及其周边地区考察。1953年，她出版了《古老的西藏面对新生的中国》，对旧西藏的农奴制有过这样的描述：“在西藏，所有农民都是终身负债的农奴，在他们中间很难找到一个已经还清了债务的人。”“为了维系生活，农奴不得不借钱、借粮、借牲畜，支付高额利息。然而，来年的收获永远还不完膨胀的利息。”“在毫无办法的情况下，他们只好再借，借口粮，借种子。……如此下去，年复一年，永无完结，直到临死的时候也不能从债务中解脱出来，而这些债务就落到了他儿子的身上，可怜的儿子从刚一开始种田生涯起，就受到这些祖传的债务的压榨，而这些债的起源早已是遥远的过去的事了，他根本不知道这从什么时候说起。”“这些可怜的人们只能永远待在他们贫穷的土地上。他们完全失去了一切人的自由，一年更比一年穷。”
在封建农奴制下，人被划分为等级。在旧西藏通行了数百年的《十三法典》和《十六法典》，明确将人分成三等九级，将森严的等级制度法律化。法典规定：“人分上中下三等，每一等人又分上中下三级。此上中下三等，系就其血统贵贱职位高低而定”，“人有等级之分，因此命价也有高低”，“上等上级人命价为与尸体等重的黄金”，“下等下级人命价为一根草绳”。
Feudal serfdom dominated Tibet until 1959. The French traveler Alexandra David-Neel visited Tibet and its surrounding areas five times between 1916 and 1924. In 1953, she published Le vieux Tibet face a la Chine nouvelle, in which she described Tibet's serfdom as follows: In Tibet, all the peasants spent their whole lives as debt-laden serfs, and hardly any one of them could be found to have paid off their debts... To survive, the serfs had to borrow money, grain and cattle, and pay high rates of interest. But their harvests were never enough to cover their swelling interest... They had no other option but to borrow again, borrow grains and seeds... So on and so forth, year in and year out, the cycle continued on and on. They would be burdened with debts until the day they died, debts which would be passed on to their sons. From the day they started to toil in the fields, the poor boys would be oppressed by these ancestral debts, of whose origins he knew nothing... The poor could do nothing but toil indefinitely on the barren land, deprived of all freedom as human beings, and becoming poorer with every year that passed.
Under the feudal serfdom, there was a rigid hierarchy. The 13-Article Code and the 16-Article Code, which had been practiced for centuries in Tibet, divided people into three classes and nine ranks, enshrining the rigid hierarchy in law. According to these documents, there were three classes by blood and position, each class was further divided into three ranks... As people were divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differed... The bodies of people of the highest rank of the upper class were literally worth their weight in gold, while the lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class were only worth a straw rope.
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