Beijing had once been close to Tibetan Buddhism; emperors had kept thousands of monks in the capital to pray for protection of the empire. But the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled China in 1959 after rejecting the Communist Party’s claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. In exile, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and helped turn Tibetans, in the words of his friend Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor and former monk, into the “the baby seals of the human-rights movement.” Just as Pope John Paul II had been an icon of opposition to the Soviet empire,
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