Tibetan and Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal Persecution and Exodus of Tibetan and Bhutanese Refugees The arrival of Tibetan refugees into Nepal began during the early 1950s. China had occupied Tibet in 1949 but it was only after the failed uprisings in Lhasa and Kham in March 1959 that the Dalai Lama and 80,000 Tibetans escaped to Nepal, India and Bhutan.8 Around 20,000 Tibetan refugees had settled in Nepal in 1959.9 While Tibetans mostly went into exile due to fear of religious persecution, some nomads fled to northern Nepal and Ladakh (India) because they feared their herds would be collectivised while others fled because they had fought against the Chinese army.10 The Chinese repression of Tibetans is reported to have included destruction of religious buildings and the imprisonment of monks and other community leaders.11 Many of the elderly refugees presently living in Nepal, who fled from Tibet in their youth in the late 1950s, report having faced violent religious persecution at the hands of Chinese authorities, including physical and sexual abuse, prior to their exodus from the country.12 Bhutanese refugees in Nepal are mainly Lhotshampas, or southerners of ethnic Nepali origin, most of whom are descendants of Hindu peasant farmers who first began to migrate to Bhutan after the Anglo-Bhutanese war of 1865.13 Lhotshampas were forced to leave Bhutan as a result of the nationalist policies in the 1980s, including the Citizenship Acts of 1977 and 1985 that narrowed the terms for acquiring Bhutanese citizenship, the Marriage Act of 1980 that made it more difficult for Bhutanese to marry non-Bhutanese, and the special census of 1988 that required Lhotshampas to 8 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows (India: Viking by Penguin Books India, 1997), 72. 9 Maura Moynihan, ‘Tibetan Refugees in Nepal’, in Exile as Challenge: The Tibetan Diaspora, ed. Dagmar Bernstorff and Hubertus von Weick (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004), 312-321. 10 George Woodcock, ‘Tibetan Refugees in a Decade of Exile’, Pacific Affairs 43, no. 3 (1970): 410. 11 See ‘The Invasion of Tibet’, Official Students for a Free Tibet, accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.umass.edu/rso/fretibet/education.html. 12 Interviews with Tibetan refugees in the Tashiling settlement, Chhorepatan and the Jampaling settlement, Dulegauda, 11/22/2019–11/25/2019. 13 Michael Hutt, ‘The Bhutanese Refugees: Between Verification, Repatriation and Royal Realpolitik’, Peace and Democracy in South Asia 1, no.1 (2005): 45. 67