Tibetan uprising and the Dalai Lama's flight
The Dalai Lama flees to India; Tibet becomes a global issue
On 10 March 1959 thousands of Lhasa residents surrounded the Norbulingka palace, fearing Chinese authorities would detain the Dalai Lama. On 17 March he secretly fled, crossing into India at the end of the month; tens of thousands of Tibetans followed. The People's Liberation Army crushed the uprising; the death toll remains disputed. Beijing calls it a rebellion by the feudal elite, Tibetan exiles a national uprising.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 20 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 11 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 10 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 21 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 23 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 18 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 6 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 2 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 18 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 17 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 14 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 2 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 11 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 11 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 6 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 19 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 20 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 3 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 1 year earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 1 year later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 4 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 8 years later
Americas
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — same year
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 1 year later
- 1969 Moon landing — 10 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 11 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 24 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 23 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 18 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 17 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 5 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — same year
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 85)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 78)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 70)
- Mao Zedong (aged 66)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 41)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 30)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 29)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 25)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 75)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 70)