Modern Era · South Asia · Politics

1959

Dalai Lama flees Tibet

March 10, 1959

After a Tibetan uprising in Lhasa, the twenty-three-year-old Dalai Lama disguised himself as a soldier and slipped out of his palace at night. He crossed the Himalayas on horseback to India, where he would spend the rest of his life in exile at Dharamsala, leading a Tibetan community, and becoming a global moral figure.