1959 Tibetan uprising in the context of "Dalai Lama's summer palace"

The Dalai Lama (UK: /ˈdælaɪ ˈlɑːmə/, US: /ˈdɑːlaɪ/; Tibetan: ཏཱ་ལའི་བླ་མ་, Wylie: Tā la'i bla ma [táːlɛː láma]) is the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. The term is part of the full title "Holiness Knowing Everything Vajradhara Dalai Lama" given by Altan Khan. He offered it in appreciation to the Gelug school's then-leader, Sonam Gyatso, who received it in 1578 at Yanghua Monastery. At that time, Sonam Gyatso had just given teachings to the Khan, and so the title of Dalai Lama was also given to the entire tulku lineage. Sonam Gyatso became the 3rd Dalai Lama, while the first two tulkus in the lineage, the 1st Dalai Lama and the 2nd Dalai Lama, were posthumously awarded the title.

Since the time of the 5th Dalai Lama in the 17th century, the Dalai Lama has been a symbol of unification of the state of Tibet. The Dalai Lama was an important figure of the Gelug tradition, which was dominant in Central Tibet, but his religious authority went beyond sectarian boundaries, representing Buddhist values and traditions not tied to a specific school. The Dalai Lama's traditional function as an ecumenical figure has been taken up by the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who has worked to overcome sectarian and other divisions in the exile community and become a symbol of Tibetan nationhood for Tibetans in Tibet and in exile. He is Tenzin Gyatso, who escaped from Lhasa in 1959 during the Tibetan uprising and lives in exile in Dharamshala, India.

The Sino-Indian War, also known as the China–India War or the Indo-China War, was an armed conflict between China and India that took place from October to November 1962. It was a military escalation of the Sino-Indian border dispute. Fighting occurred along India's border with China, in India's North-East Frontier Agency east of Bhutan, and in Aksai Chin west of Nepal.

There had been a series of border skirmishes between the two countries after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, when India granted asylum to the Dalai Lama. Chinese military action grew increasingly aggressive after India rejected proposed Chinese diplomatic settlements throughout 1960–1962, with China resuming previously banned "forward patrols" in Ladakh after 30 April 1962. Amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis, seeing that the U.S. was pre-occupied with dealing with it, China abandoned all attempts towards a peaceful resolution on 20 October 1962, invading disputed territory along the 3,225-kilometre (2,004 mi) border in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line in the northeastern frontier. Chinese troops pushed Indian forces back in both theatres, capturing all of their claimed territory in the western theatre and the Tawang Tract in the eastern theatre. The conflict ended when China unilaterally declared a ceasefire on 20 November 1962, which can be attributed to the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis and fears of U.S. intervention to support India, and simultaneously announced its withdrawal to its pre-war position, the effective China–India border (also known as the Line of Actual Control).

The Tibetan diaspora is the exile of Tibetan people from Tibet, their land of origin, to other nation states to live as immigrants and refugees in communities. The diaspora of Tibetan people began in the early 1950s, peaked after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, and continues.

Tibetan emigration has four separate stages. The first stage occurred when Tibetans began escaping from Kham in the early and mid 1950's, and moving to India. The internal migration of masses of Tibetans from Amdo and Kham to Lhasa and central Tibet also occurred at this time, before the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Lhasa. The second stage followed the March 1959 escape by the 14th Dalai Lama from Lhasa to Himachal Pradesh, India, before he eventually settled in Dharamsala. The third stage occurred in the 1980s, when China's Central Government partially eased their brutality within Tibet, and opened Tibet to foreigners. The fourth stage began in 1996, after the kidnapping of the 11th Panchen Lama and the reopening of China's forced "Political Re-education" programs, and it continues today.

The Ganden Phodrang or Ganden Podrang (Tibetan: དགའ་ལྡན་ཕོ་བྲང, Wylie: dGa' ldan pho brang, Lhasa dialect: [ˈkɑ̃̀tɛ̃̀ ˈpʰóʈɑ̀ŋ]; Chinese: 甘丹頗章; pinyin: Gāndān Pōzhāng) was the Tibetan system of government established by the 5th Dalai Lama in 1642, when the Oirat lord Güshi Khan who founded the Khoshut Khanate conferred all spiritual and political power in Tibet to him in a ceremony in Shigatse. During the ceremony, the Dalai Lama "made a proclamation declaring that Lhasa would be the capital of Tibet and the government of would be known as Gaden Phodrang" which eventually became the seat of the Gelug school's leadership authority. The Dalai Lama chose the name of his monastic residence at Drepung Monastery for the new Tibetan government's name: Ganden (དགའ་ལྡན), the Tibetan name for Tushita heaven, which, according to Buddhist cosmology, is where the future Buddha Maitreya resides; and Phodrang (ཕོ་བྲང), a palace, hall, or dwelling. Lhasa's Red Fort again became the capitol building of Tibet, and the Ganden Phodrang operated there and adjacent to the Potala Palace until 1959.

During the 17th century, the Dalai Lama established the priest and patron relationship with China's Qing emperors, a few decades before the Chinese expedition to Tibet (1720). Meanwhile, the Qing became increasingly active in governing Tibet with the establishment of imperial resident (Amban) and Chinese garrison stationed in Lhasa since the early 18th century and took advantage of crisis situations in Tibet to intervene in Tibetan affairs each time, although this also caused some dissatisfaction and uprisings within Tibet, such as the Batang uprising in 1905. A governing council known as the Kashag also operated in the Ganden Phodrang administration. During the British expedition to Tibet (1904) and the Chinese expedition to Tibet (1910) before the 1911 Revolution which led to the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, the Ganden Phodrang continued to govern Tibet under the Qing protectorate. After the Chinese Civil War which led to the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the subsequent signing of the Sino-Tibetan Seventeen Point Agreement in 1951, the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China began, although the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet and declared the revocation of the agreement following the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

The Tibet Area (Chinese: 西藏地方; pinyin: Xīzàng Dìfāng, also translated as Tibet Region in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement) was a province-level administrative division of China in the 20th century. It was de jure created after the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, and nominally includes the Ü-Tsang (central Tibet) and Ngari (western Tibet) areas, but not the Amdo and Kham areas. The territories were merely claimed by the ROC, but actually controlled by an independent Tibet with a government headed by the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. At this time, the scope of de facto independent Tibet included the "Tibet area" and the Chamdo area west of the Jinsha River, which claimed by China. The ROC retreated to Taiwan and lost control of mainland China to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949; afterwards, the ROC continued to claim Tibet.

The PRC annexed Tibet in 1951 and continued to call it Tibet Area. It merged with the Chamdo Region and was transformed to Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965 after the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

Central Tibet came under the control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the government of Tibet signed the Seventeen Point Agreement which the 14th Dalai Lama ratified on 24 October 1951. This followed attempts by the Tibetan government to modernize its military, negotiate with the PRC, and the defeat of the Tibetan Army by the People's Liberation Army at Chamdo in western Kham that resulted in several thousand casualties and captives. The Chinese government calls the signing of the agreement the "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet". The events are called the "Chinese invasion of Tibet" by the Central Tibetan Administration and the Tibetan diaspora.

The Tibetan government and local social structure remained in place under the authority of China until they were dissolved after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, when the 14th Dalai Lama fled into exile and repudiated the Seventeen Point Agreement, saying that he had approved it under duress.

The Sino-Nepalese Treaty of Peace and Friendship was an official settlement between the governments of Nepal and China signed on 28 April 1960, which ratified an earlier agreement on the borders separating the neighboring nations from each other. Gerry Van Tronder has argued that this document fitted into an attempt to maintain the image that Beijing was a "powerful but essentially benevolent leader in Asia", following the 1959 Tibetan Uprising. Contemporary Nepali, Chinese and Indian commentators have stressed the importance of the treaty in determining Nepal's relationship with China in the past and present.