General works
The whole history
- Shakya, Tsering. The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947. London: Pimlico, 1999. The standard modern history, by a Tibetan historian writing from the documents. Start here.
- Goldstein, Melvyn C. A History of Modern Tibet. 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989–2019. Exhaustive, archive-based, and controversial in exile circles for its treatment of the old society.
- van Schaik, Sam. Tibet: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. The best single volume covering the whole sweep from the seventh century.
- Kapstein, Matthew T. The Tibetans. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
- Smith, Warren W. Tibetan Nation. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
- Richardson, Hugh. Tibet and Its History. 2nd ed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1984. By the last British representative in Lhasa, who was there from 1936 to 1950.
Chapters I–IV
Independence, Younghusband and the Simla years
- Allen, Charles. Duel in the Snows: The True Story of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa. London: John Murray, 2004.
- French, Patrick. Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer. London: HarperCollins, 1994.
- Lamb, Alastair. The McMahon Line. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1966. On Simla, and the border that India and China still dispute.
- McKay, Alex. Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904–1947. Richmond: Curzon, 1997.
- Bell, Charles. Portrait of the Dalai Lama. London: Collins, 1946. By a British official who knew the thirteenth Dalai Lama personally.
Chapters V–VII
Chamdo, the Seventeen Points and 1959
- Goldstein, Melvyn C. A History of Modern Tibet, Vol. 2: The Calm Before the Storm, 1951–1955. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
- Knaus, John Kenneth. Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival. New York: Public Affairs, 1999. By a CIA officer who ran part of the programme.
- McGranahan, Carole. Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
- Norbu, Dawa. China's Tibet Policy. Richmond: Curzon, 2001.
- Dalai Lama XIV. Freedom in Exile. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
Chapter VIII and after
Exile, the Cultural Revolution and the present
- Woeser, Tsering. Forbidden Memory: Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. Trans. Susan T. Chen. Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2020. Her father's photographs, with her commentary. The most important primary source on the period.
- Woeser, Tsering, and Wang Lixiong. Voices from Tibet. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014.
- Barnett, Robert. Lhasa: Streets with Memories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
- Yeh, Emily T. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
- Craig, Sienna R. The Ends of Kinship. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020.
- Sperling, Elliot. The Tibet-China Conflict: History and Polemics. Washington: East-West Center, 2004. A short, sharp corrective to the historical claims made by both sides.
Religion, society and travel
Context and companions
- Powers, John. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2007.
- Samuel, Geoffrey. Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington: Smithsonian, 1993.
- Harrer, Heinrich. Seven Years in Tibet. Trans. Richard Graves. London: Hart-Davis, 1953. An Austrian mountaineer's account of Lhasa in the 1940s; the best description of the old capital by an outsider.
- Tsarong, Dundul Namgyal. In the Service of His Country. Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2000.
- Buckley, Michael. Tibet. Bradt Travel Guides, latest edition. The practical guide, and unusually frank about the permit system.