For decades, China has done something few imagined possible in the high, windswept plateaus of Tibet — it has taken aim at the heart of a civilisation, one monastery at a time. This isn’t just vandalism on a grand scale. It’s the slow unmaking of a people’s spiritual DNA. Since the first PLA units crossed the frontier in 1950, Beijing’s campaign has shifted shape but not aim: dismantle the pillars of Tibetan Buddhism, and the rest will follow.
The First Wave: 1950s–1970s
The destruction started early, before the world was paying much attention. By 1962, the 10th Panchen Lama — at great personal risk — wrote his 70,000-character petition to Zhou Enlai. His account was searing: 97 percent of Tibet’s monasteries and nunneries gone, the monastic population gutted by 93 percent. This was during the so-called “democratic reforms” between 1959 and 1961, years before the Cultural Revolution tore through China proper.
Tibet had once been home to 6,254 monasteries. By the late 1970s, fewer than a dozen were functioning. The destruction wasn’t random. Teams stripped religious buildings of precious stones and metals, dynamited the walls, and hauled away timber and stone. A clean job, if one can use that word for an act so dirty.
The Cultural Revolution’s Final Blow
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution arrived in Tibet in 1966, the ideological fury added a new cruelty. Red Guards — some Tibetan, many Han — smashed what was left. Statues were carted off to be melted, sacred texts dumped into rivers or mixed with animal dung. Monks and nuns were “re-educated,” often by forced marriages or hard labour. Jokhang Temple, the most sacred site in Tibetan Buddhism, was ransacked until it barely resembled a place of worship.
The aim wasn’t subtle. Tibetan religion was cast as one of the “four olds” — thoughts, customs, habits, culture — to be eradicated. Millions of manuscripts disappeared. What remained was fear, and a silence so deep you could almost hear it.
Xi Jinping’s Era: The “Sinicisation” of Faith
Fast forward. Under Xi Jinping, the destruction hasn’t stopped — it’s just become bureaucratised. In 2019, the Party formalised a five-year plan to make Tibetan Buddhism “adapt to socialism with Chinese characteristics.” At the Seventh Tibet Work Forum in 2020, Xi declared that without “Sinicisation,” the religion would be “eliminated by history.” The irony was lost on no one.
Portraits of CCP leaders now hang in monastery halls. Images of the Dalai Lama are banned. Sacred texts are being translated into Mandarin — not for convenience, but to smother the Tibetan language. Meanwhile, over a million Tibetan children have been moved into state-run boarding schools, far from their families, marinated in an official narrative that scrubs out their own.
Recent Demolitions: The Bulldozers Roll On
The 2010s and 2020s have seen the same old pattern in new concrete. Between 2016 and 2017, more than 10,000 dwellings at Larung Gar Buddhist Academy were torn down. Thousands of monks and nuns were forced into “patriotic re-education” camps. Some took their own lives.
In Drago County, from 2021 to 2022, authorities destroyed three massive Buddha statues, a monastic school, and dozens of prayer wheels. This past July, over 300 stupas were flattened in the same area. Atsok Monastery — 135 years old, officially protected — was demolished in 2024 for a hydropower project. The language of development masks the reality: a wrecking ball aimed squarely at the past.
The Endgame: Reincarnation Under Party Control
Perhaps the most audacious move lies ahead — Beijing’s plan to control the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. In 2023, officials met quietly to choreograph the process. Museum exhibits now push the Party’s version of reincarnation, softening the public for a CCP-approved successor. It would be the final capture: not just the body and brickwork of Tibetan Buddhism, but its spiritual lineage.
A Slow, Relentless Erasure
This is cultural genocide in real time. The Panchen Lama’s 1962 warning that “religion in Tibet today has no future” reads less like prophecy than diagnosis. And yet the outside world, distracted or cautious, has mostly looked away.
Every demolished monastery is more than rubble. It’s a severed thread in a tapestry centuries in the making. The question — and it grows sharper with each passing year — is whether enough will remain to stitch anything back together when the bulldozers finally fall silent.