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War I in Europe and long before China had resolved its own civil war.

However, once the People's Republic of China had passed through the first of its birthing pains, the battle-hardened Chinese troops easily occupied the first of the Tibetan heartland provinces, Chamdo. Less than a year later, faced with troops far better equipped and more numerous than its own, Tibet had been forced for the first time ever to affirm China's sovereignty over Tibet in a seventeen-point agreement. At least one rebellion broke out over the implementation of these points in 1956, in the Chinese-controlled Tibetan provinces of eastern Kham and Amdo where, until now, Chinese rule had lain lightest. The 14th Dalai Lama, along with other key members of his government, fled to India, where he remains in exile to this day. Active resistance continued in isolated pockets for at least another decade. It is believed by some observers that the position of resisters became untenable after the CIA withdrew its support in 1969.

However, it is difficult to confirm specifics here, as well as from this point onward. What is certain is that Tibetans who have escaped from the Tibetan heartland have reported that many thousands of their monasteries had been destroyed by the Red Guard, and that religious observances are strongly discouraged by an officially atheistic government. Education, previously the province of the monasteries, has been entirely secularised. The former palatial home of the Dalai Lama is now a museum. Native Tibetan culture is gradually being eroded by an active policy of resettlement of various ethnicities of Chinese into Tibetan territory, a resettlement made much easier by the recent completion of the Qingzang railway connecting Qinghai and Lhasa, parts of which travel over five kilometres above sea level. Now that Lhasa has been made secularly and spectacularly accessible, tour companies are already advertising for future Lhasan adventure-treks, beginning with a ride on this railroad. One of the most challenging engineering projects in the world, the railway - which requires extreme measures to preserve the permafrost upon which almost half of it is built - is almost certainly doomed by global warming; but it has already accomplished its primary function, in much the same way as the railroads of the 18th and 19th centuries bound together large parts of North America into a single country and allowed settlers and entrepreneurs to relocate westward.

Personal accounts of Tibetan

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