The oral sources for this book are roughly a hundred people met with during a four-year period in the United States and India. Though principal informants were interviewed repeatedly over a period of weeks and months and others on only one occasion, their firsthand accounts together provide the basis of the book The key contributors are mentioned in the Acknowledgments. Among the written sources, certain authors and periodicals, listed in the bibliography, were invaluable. For a portrait of Tibetan society at its apogee, the classics of Tibetan studies, written by Bell, Richardson, Shakabpa and Stein were fundamental, including a small but unique text on the discovery of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Sonam Wangdu, a member of the search party. For their firsthand accounts of Tibet in its declining days, the works of Heinrich Harrer and Robert Ford were indispensable as, for the Tibetans’ own view of their nation’s invasion and fall, were those of Rinchen Dolma Taring, Thubten Jigme Norbu and the Dalai Lama’s own autobiography, My Land and My People. Much of the Tibetan revolt was revealed in the history of Chushi Gangdruk, written by Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, as well as by Noel Barber’s account of the fighting in Lhasa in March 1959. For information on the Tibetan refugees’ quarter century in exile I am beholden to the various reporters of India’s chief newspapers and above all to the Tibetan Review, which, published in New Delhi, is essential reading for any student of Tibetan affairs. Main sources for the period covering China’s unabridged occupation of Tibet include the Union Research Institute’s Tibetan documentation, Tibet 1950–1967, and the personal accounts of Kunsang Paljor, Tsering Dorje Gashi and Dhondub Choedon, all of whom, as Tibetan cadres working in the region’s administration, had access to its interior functions. Peking’s numerous publications issued to present its achievements in Tibet have been of value, including the English-language staples, the Beijing Review and China Reconstructs. For an overview of the PRC’s Minority Policy since its inception I am indebted to June Teufel Dreyer’s definitive study, China’s Forty Millions. Special thanks to John Ackerley of the International Campaign for Tibet, and to the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet for the Chronology of Major Events from 1984–1994.