LOOKING AT THINGS from a Tibetan point of view, the modern era began with the installation of the 14th Dalai Lama, who was installed in 1940 and is still in place.
From a Chinese point of view, Tibet was a Chinese territory that had wandered away, politically speaking, and was brought back where it belonged in 1959, and that’s the beginning of the “modern era.”
We have to keep this double viewpoint in mind as we consider Tibet. The whole time those coins we try to collect were being made, China was saying that the Tibetan government was illegal, and Tibet was part of China. They just weren’t able to do anything about it until 1950.
There is a Sino-Tibetan history of the period, and there is an internal Tibetan history of the period. They are not the same stories. Depending on what you’re looking at, they are both somewhat true.
The government of the 13th Dalai Lama first declared Tibet independent from China in 1913 and the Tibetan government headed by the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas did not deviate from that position until 1950, when the Tibetan government officials signed a treaty with the Peoples’ Republic that declared Tibet to be an autonomous part of China.
The 14th Dalai Lama then repudiated that treaty after his flight to exile in
