Place · Tibetan exile hill town · India
Dharamshala
Also known as McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala
Seat of the 14th Dalai Lama and of the Tibetan government-in-exile since 1960. The Tsuglagkhang complex and Namgyal Monastery above McLeod Ganj have turned a colonial hill station into one of the principal centres of Tibetan Buddhism outside Tibet.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.219, 76.323
Worth knowing
He came because he could not stay. On 17 March 1959 two Chinese artillery shells landed near the Norbulingka, his summer palace in Lhasa, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama left the city that night in disguise. He crossed into India on 30 March through the Tawang salient and reached Tezpur in Assam on 18 April, where Nehru’s government confirmed asylum. The exile administration was first seated at Mussoorie in April 1959 and moved here in May 1960 — a Kangra hill station whose cantonment the 1905 earthquake had destroyed, and which had space for a government nobody expected to stay sixty years.
Connections (5)
- Life routeTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
The exile seat since May 1960, and the reason the town is what it is. The residence, the Namgyal monastery and the Tsuglagkhang stand above McLeod Ganj; the Central Tibetan Administration, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives he opened in 1970, and the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts sit below. A Kangra hill station became the working capital of a polity with no territory, which is why it is called Little Lhasa.
- Founder ofTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
After the Chinese suppression of the Lhasa uprising, the 14th Dalai Lama crossed the Himalaya into India in March 1959. From 1960 he has lived at Dharamshala in the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh, from where the Central Tibetan Administration runs the civil, educational, medical and religious institutions of the Tibetan diaspora.
- Peer institutionRumtek Monastery, Sikkim
Dharamshala and Rumtek together house the two principal Tibetan lineages in Indian exile — the Gelug (Dalai Lama) and the Karma Kagyu (Karmapa).
- Site withinMen-Tsee-Khang, Dharamshala
Men-Tsee-Khang, the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute, sits at Gangchen Kyishong, Dharamshala — 2 km down the ridge from McLeod Ganj where the 14th Dalai Lama resides. The institute's compound, hospital, pharmacy and training college are all in the Lower Dharamshala / Gangchen Kyishong administrative zone, inside the Dharamshala municipal area.
- Companion in the same setMainpat
Mainpat was settled with Tibetan refugees in 1962 and 1963 under the same Government of India rehabilitation scheme that made Dharamshala the exile capital. Seven camps still work on the plateau, living largely by weaving woollens.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Dharamshala”, “14th Dalai Lama”, “Central Tibetan Administration” and “1959 Tibetan uprising”; the Central Tibetan Administration’s own account of the move to Dharamshala in 1960.
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