Tibet is an enormous plateau in central Asia, 2600 kilometers long and 1300 wide, situated at a medium height of about 4500 meters. Even if it is effectively protected by two big mountain-ranges, Himalaya to the south and Kun-Lun to the north, Tibet has very hard living conditions and human settlements are concentrated in the valleys of the great Indian, Chinese and Indo-Chinese rivers that have their sources in Tibet. At that height agriculture gives scarce yields and the tibetan economy is therefore based mostly on stock-raising.

Geography also conditions the history of Tibet: in the Middle Ages the country tried to carry out an imperial policy but failed because of the demographic insufficiency and the difficulty of communications. Since then Tibet remained apart from the history of Asia, until the beginning of this century: in 1903 the English entered the capital city Lhasa and imposed a treaty that opened these new markets to British commerce. In 1911 the tibetans, supported by the English, drove away the Chinese garrison and the fifteenth Dalai Lama, who had taken refuge in India the year before, was put on the throne again.

The end of the second World War completely upset the existing force ratios in the himalayan region: the English abandoned India while China, under communist rule since 1949, could resume the policy of the ancient Manchu emperors. A treaty in 1951 recognized China had the right to occupy Tibet with its troops and to direct its foreign politics, but had to respect the regional autonomy, to allow tibetan people to follow the traditional beliefs and to preserve the regime of the lamaism. Actually in 1952 a campaign of systematic destruction of monasteries was carried out. The popular upraising of Tibet burst in 1959, starting from Lhasa, and this movement was repressed by China: in 1965 Tibet became an independent region of the People's Republic of China.

Since 1987 the Dalai Lama, wishing to obtain a status of wide autonomy for Tibet, has developed an intense diplomatic activity at international level in order to induce the Chinese government to open negotiations. At the same time a separatist movement developed in Tibet and violent fights between exponents of this group and Chinese forces have gone on in the first half of the Nineties.

The exiled tibetan government has been reorganized according to modern democratic principles. It manages all the issues that concern the tibetan people in exile, including the refoundation, the preservation and the development of the tibetan culture and educational structures, and leads the fight for the restoration of freedom in Tibet. The tibetan people, living either in or outside Tibet, consider the Government in exile, which has its seat in Dharamsala, in northern India, as their only legitimate representative.