The Tibetan empire of the seventh to ninth centuries contested Central Asia with Tang China, then fragmented, and Buddhism, briefly persecuted, returned in a second diffusion through translators such as Rinchen Zangpo and the master Atisha. Mongol patronage raised the Sakya school to rule; the fifth Dalai Lama, with Mongol backing, unified Tibet in 1642 under the Ganden Phodrang government, and the Potala Palace rose over Lhasa as its seat. For three centuries a monastic state administered the plateau, its great Gelug monasteries around Lhasa numbering thousands of monks, while pilgrims circled Mount Kailash, sacred at once to Buddhists, Bonpos, Hindus and Jains.
The People's Republic of China annexed Tibet in 1950 and 1951; the Lhasa uprising of March 1959 failed, and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India with tens of thousands of followers. The Cultural Revolution destroyed most of Tibet's monasteries; partial rebuilding since the 1980s has restored much physical fabric under close state control, including state regulation of the recognition of reincarnate lamas.
In exile, Dharamsala became the seat of the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, and the great monasteries were refounded in south India. Tibetan Buddhism has since become a world religion, its teachers established on every continent, even as scholars such as Donald Lopez caution against the Western habit of turning Tibet into a fantasy of Shangri-La rather than a living people.