ON THIS DAY ·
Dalai Lama’s flight to India
31 Mar 1959 — The 23-year-old Dalai Lama reaches Khenzimane after a fortnight’s ride across the Himalaya. He crosses into India, where Nehru grants him asylum. About 80,000 Tibetans follow in 1959–60. The government-in-exile he establishes at Dharamsala still contests Beijing’s account of Tibet.
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The moment in context
The Qing empire had governed Han Chinese alongside Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and other peoples until 1912. Its successor, the Republic of China, lost control of Outer Mongolia, Tibet and much of Xinjiang. The Communists claimed the old imperial borders for the new People’s Republic. That ambition left a question: how would a state presenting itself as a nation govern peoples whose histories were bound to those borders in different ways?
From Tibet and Xinjiang under Mao, chapter 3 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1956).
The place: Dalai Lama’s flight to India — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The Qing borders as a national claim. Nationalists and Communists both claimed the Qing empire’s borders at their height as China’s rightful borders. On that view, Tibetan…
- The turn — Lithang, February–March 1956. Lithang showed how difficult it was to confine the effects of reform to one side of a provincial line. In February–March 1956 the army besieged and…
- What it changed — Tibet transformed after 1959. Beijing used the rising to end the 1951 settlement. It dissolved the old government, undertook land reform in Tibet in 1959–61, closed most…
Then ask the room: Was the People’s Republic of the 1950s a nation-state or an empire on its frontiers? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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