Traveling Chinese history scholar Li Jianglin began working on the Tibet issue in 2004. She has traveled to India every year in search of Tibetan refugees, visited 14 Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal, contacted more than 200 exiled Tibetans from the three regions of Tibet, and personally interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in 2008. In 2010, Li Jianglin completed her book <i>Lhasa 1959!</i> by drawing on interviews, information searches, and rare historical photographs provided by the Tibetan government in exile, in the hope of reconstructing the little-known history of the Dalai Lama's departure from Tibet in 1959. The book was published by Taiwan's Lianjing Publishing House in 2010 and reprinted in 2016.
Around the eighth century A.D., the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Guru Rinpoche, prophesied, "When the iron bird flies in the sky and the iron horse runs on the earth, the Tibetans will be dispersed all over the world like ants, and the Buddha's Dharma will be spread into the land of the red people." More than 1,000 years later, in the middle of the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party drove the "iron bird" across the sky and rode the "iron horse" across the plateau. The Tibetans courageously rose up to resist resulting in with countless deaths countless deaths. Those who survived were forced to leave their homeland and live in exile in India, drifting around the world. Thus, the prophecy came true. From a military point of view, the Tibetan war in Tibet was a victory, but it received only minimal publicity. The official version of the Party's history is either vague or evasive about the bloody massacre during the entry into Tibet, attempting to cover it up by "suppressing armed rebellion" and "purging counter-revolutionaries". More than sixty years later, this war has yet to be demystified. Li Jianglin, an independent scholar, was moved by the tragedy of the war and the plight of the Tibetans, and endeavored to restore the historical facts. Since 2004, she has devoted herself to research, visiting hundreds of Tibetan elders, searching for tens of thousands of historical materials, collecting military archives, and comparing them with the official published materials of the Communist Party of China, in order to present memories of past, little by little.
