Category: US

CNN
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Here’s a look at Tibet, an autonomous region within China.

(from National Bureau of Statistics of China)
Area: 1.22 million sq km (approximately 474,000 sq miles)

Capital: Lhasa

Language: Tibetan

Government (China): Governed by the Chinese Communist Party; the head of state is President Xi Jinping.

Government (Exiled): Centered in Dharamsala, India, includes a popularly elected assembly of deputies, ministers, a cabinet chairman (similar to a prime minister).

Tibet is an internationally recognized autonomous region within the People’s Republic of China, though many Tibetans dispute the legitimacy of China’s rule.

Tibet is officially called the Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region (TAR).

The Tibet Autonomous Region lies in the Plateau of Tibet, also called the Tibetan Highlands, which also includes portions of China’s Qinghai and Sichuan provinces and the Uygur Autonomous Region Xinjiang. A little more than half of the Plateau of Tibet lies outside of the TAR.

Mount Everest, the highest point on earth, lies on the border between Tibet and neighboring Nepal.

1640 – Güüshi Khan invades Tibet and defeats a regional king.

1642 – Khan enthrones the Dalai Lama as ruler of Tibet. Dalai Lama is the title of the head of the Dge-lugs-pa, or Yellow Hat, order of Tibetan Buddhists.

1792 – Tibet closes itself off to foreign visitors.

1904 – Tibet and Great Britain sign a treaty in Lhasa, ending a brief period of military aggression. The Dalai Lama flees to China. Great Britain’s interest is in securing trade rights and it overcomes Tibetan resistance with force. China is not involved in the treaty negotiation.

April 27, 1906 – Great Britain and China sign a treaty recognizing China’s dominion of Tibet; the treaty is negotiated without any Tibetan participation.

1910 – China attempts to gain physical control of Tibet; the Dalai Lama flees and takes refuge in India.

1912 – China becomes a republic; Tibet declares its independence and expels the Chinese.

July 6, 1935 – Lhamo Dhondup, the future Dalai Lama, is born to a farming family in Taktser, Amdo Province, Tibet.

1938 – Dhondup is removed from his family and taken to the Kumbum monastery after a delegation of monks looking for the new Dalai Lama finds him.

February 22, 1940 – Enthronement ceremony for the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, takes place in Lhasa, Tibet.

November 8, 1950 – Chinese soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army invade Tibet at Lhasa.

November 17, 1950 – The Dalai Lama assumes full political power as Tibetan Head of State and Government ahead of schedule. Investiture is moved up from his 18th birthday as a result of China’s invasion of Tibet.

May 23, 1951 – A Tibetan delegation signs a treaty with China, renouncing independence in return for religious and cultural autonomy.

March 1959 – The Dalai Lama, his government, and approximately 80,000 Tibetans flee to India.

1960 – Dharamsala, India, becomes home to the Dalai Lama and headquarters of the government-in-exile of Tibet.

1963 – The Dalai Lama enacts a new Tibetan democratic constitution based on Buddhist principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

1965 – China establishes the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

1966 – The Cultural Revolution in China begins, resulting in the closure of many monasteries and the secularization of Tibetan society.

May 1977 – The Chinese government makes the Dalai Lama a conditional offer, the opportunity to return to Tibet in return for acceptance of Chinese rule over Tibet. The offer is rejected.

July 1979 – China again invites the Dalai Lama to return on the condition that he recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. The Dalai Lama rejects this offer too.

1980 – China begins a series of reforms in Tibet, encouraging economic development, reserving a majority of government posts for Tibetans, and requiring Chinese workers in Tibet to learn the Tibetan language.

March 1989 – A march to demand Tibetan independence mushrooms into a two-day riot, resulting in the Chinese government’s declaration of martial law. The official death toll is 16, though the actual death toll is reported to be as high as 256.

April 30, 1990 – The Chinese government lifts martial law.

1993 – Representatives of the Dalai Lama begin a decade of on-and-off talks with the Chinese government concerning autonomy in Tibet.

July 1, 2006 – The China-Tibet railway begins regular service; the rail line terminates in Lhasa. Critics condemn the railway as a tool for diluting Tibetan culture.

March 10, 2008 – Buddhist monks stage the first of four days of protest marches in Lhasa to commemorate the failed 1959 uprising against the Chinese government.

March 14, 2008 – Four days of protest marches end in bloodshed. Tibetans say the situation escalated to violence when Chinese police beat monks who had been protesting peacefully; Chinese authorities claim Tibetans launched attacks on Chinese businesses. Officially the death toll is under 20; Tibetans in exile say the death toll is near 150.

March 15, 2008 – China closes Tibet off to foreigners. The closure effectively ends the climbing season on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest; the climbing season spans April, May and the beginning of June, with the primary window of opportunity taking place in mid-May.

March 18, 2008 – The Dalai Lama says in an interview that he would step down as leader of Tibetan exiles if violence in Tibet were to get out of control.

April 2008 – Summer Olympic torch relay rallies in London, Paris and San Francisco are interrupted by demonstrations protesting China’s treatment of Tibet.

April 2008 – In Tibet, 30 people are convicted of arson, robbery and attacking government offices in connection to the March violence. They receive prison sentences ranging from three years to life.

May 8, 2008 – The Olympic flame reaches the summit of Mount Everest at 9:18 a.m. (9:18 p.m. ET May 7). Of the 31 climbers who carry the flame up Mount Everest, 22 are Tibetan. Five torchbearers, three Tibetan and two Han Chinese, carry the torch to the summit, and Tsering Wangmo, a 23-year old Tibetan woman, carries the flame atop the peak. Concurrently, the main Olympic flame makes its way across China as part of the host country’s relay.

June 12, 2008 – The Dalai Lama urges his supporters not to cause trouble when the Olympic torch passes through Tibet; he also reiterates a general plea for his supporters not to target the torch or the Olympic Games.

June 21, 2008 – The Olympic torch passes through Lhasa without incident.

June 25, 2008 – Three months after closing Tibet to foreigners, the Chinese government reopens the region to tourists.

January 2009 – Tibetan lawmakers declare March 28 a holiday to mark the day China says one million people were freed in 1959 from serfdom, according to state media.

March 2009 – Near the first anniversary of the riots and 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising, a monk sets himself on fire in Sichuan Province. He is shot at by police according to human rights groups. State media claim the monk was transported to a hospital as soon as the flames were extinguished. Foreign tourists are banned from Tibet during March.

March 2010 – A government chosen, approved and groomed Panchen Lama, successor to the Dalai Lama, is appointed by the Chinese government. The Panchen Lama chosen by the Dalia Lama is denounced by Beijing as invalid as he was not chosen according to tradition.

February 2010 – China summons US Ambassador Jon Huntsman to express its “strong dissatisfaction” of a meeting between the Dalai Lama and US President Barack Obama.

October 2010 – Tibetan students protest the Chinese government overhaul of Tibet’s school system that limits the use of the Tibetan language in schools.

March 10, 2011 – The Dalai Lama announces he plans to retire as political head of the Tibetan exile movement.

March 16, 2011 – Monk Phuntsog sets himself ablaze in protest on the third anniversary of the 2008 demonstrations.

April 27, 2011 – The Tibetan government-in-exile announces that Lobsang Sangay has been elected Tibetan Prime Minister, with 55% of the vote.

May 29, 2011 – The Dalai Lama approves amendments to the exiled constitution, formally removing his political and administrative responsibilities. He remains the spiritual leader.

August 15, 2011 – Monk Tsewang Norbu, 29, an activist, sets himself ablaze, calling for Tibetan freedom.

February 2012 – The International Campaign for Tibet in Washington says 22 monks, nuns and other Tibetans have set themselves on fire in the last year alone, in protest of Chinese rule.

March 26, 2012 – Jampa Yeshi, 27, a Tibetan protester, sets himself alight in New Delhi ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to India. He is hospitalized with burns on 90% of his body and later succumbs to his injuries on March 28.

July 17, 2012 – Lobsan Lobzin, an 18-year-old Tibetan monk, sets himself on fire in a monastery in China’s Sichuan province, according to the Central Tibetan Administration.

August 13, 2012 – Two Tibetans set themselves on fire in Sichuan province. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) named the two Tibetans as Lungtok, a monk from the restive Kirti monastery in southwest China, and an ordinary citizen named Tashi.

February 13, 2013 – An unidentified Tibetan man sets himself ablaze in Katmandu, Nepal, near a major Buddhist structure. His actions coincide with the Tibetan festival of Losar, or New Year.

February 2014 – According to Tibetan advocacy groups, there have been at least 125 self-immolations by Tibetans in the last five years.

April 25, 2015 – A 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes Nepal killing more than 8,000 people. China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports 25 deaths in neighboring Tibet. Weeks later on May 12, another major earthquake strikes Nepal, killing at least 94 people, including a woman in Tibet.

March 23, 2018 – US President Donald Trump signs the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 into law, which approves continued and additional funding for Tibetan communities inside Tibet, as well as exiled Tibetans in India and Nepal.

December 9, 2022 – The US Treasury Dept. announces sanctions against two Chinese officials over alleged human rights abuses in Tibet. On December 23, China announces sanctions against two US citizens and their family members in retaliation.

(CNN) — When I sent DNA samples to genetic testing services last year searching for my birth family, I had no idea it would launch me on an adventure across three continents.

In 1961, I was adopted at birth in California. Over the years, I’ve searched for my birth family on and off, but have always been stymied by sealed records and tight-lipped officials. In the last decade, however, home DNA testing and easy online access to official records have changed the game.

I spit into plastic tubes (one for each of the two big players in this industry in the United States: 23andMe and Ancestry.com), dropped them in the mail, and waited, anxiously, for the results. When the email arrived, I was stunned.

After a lifetime believing I was a basic White American, I learned that was only half true. My birth mother was born in Iowa. But it turned out my father was North African.

I reached out to anonymous DNA matches through 23andMe and Ancestry’s messaging systems, but no one replied. Then came weeks of research using Ancestry.com and various public records databases until I was able to identify both my parents and find contact information for a handful of their close relatives.

I discovered my birth father had been born in the mid-1930s in Casablanca. Romantic visions of Bogart and Bergman (fictionally) escaping the Nazis swam in my head.

Records showed he had emigrated to the US in 1959 and ended up in San Francisco. My mother had been raised in San Diego, and also moved to San Francisco right after high school. But why had he left Morocco? What brought her to San Francisco? I had to know more.

The author, center, with newfound family connections at a July 2022 party held in Paris in his honor.

Courtesy Tim Curran

First contact

After days of imagining the best and worst, I drafted scripts for what to say to genetically close family members who most likely had no idea I even existed. Then I apprehensively reached out.

To my great relief, my mother’s and father’s families both welcomed me with open arms — despite their shock at discovering I existed.

I learned quickly that both my biological parents had died, and was deeply disappointed I had forever missed my chance to meet them. Would things have been different if I’d searched harder earlier?

But I was thrilled that all their siblings were still alive.

From my new family, I pieced together a rough sketch of my parents’ stories: On opposite sides of the world, they had both butted heads with difficult parents and left home at the first opportunity. They both wound up in one of the most free-thinking places on Earth: San Francisco.

He worked as floor installer in the city’s North Beach neighborhood — where she was a cocktail waitress and dancer. I pictured them meeting while he installed floors in a nightclub where she was working.

By all accounts, it must have been a very brief affair. My father was living with a girlfriend, and my mother’s sister says she never once heard my mother discuss my father in any way. Other than the sister and her mother, no one else in her family was told she was pregnant. My father’s family says they are 100% certain he was never told, either.

There were other big surprises: I was told my mother never had another child — or even a serious boyfriend — for the rest of her life. On my father’s side, I was shocked to learn I had a half-brother and -sister and dozens of cousins in France and Morocco.

They invited me to visit. I booked a trip to meet my father’s huge, welcoming family.

The author’s extended family owns property on a rocky promontory in Dar Bouazza, a coastal community just west of Casablanca.

Tim Curran/CNN

‘I was warmly embraced’

In Paris, a cousin threw me an exuberant party at her sunny suburban home, where I was warmly embraced by the entire French branch of the family. They gave me insiders’ hints tailored to my interests about where to go and what to see off the beaten track.

At their recommendation, I spent an afternoon in a huge, beautiful city park in eastern Paris called Buttes-Chaumont. I ate dinner at the French equivalent of a working-class diner (a bouillon, named for the broth) called Julien. It was my third time in Paris — but now I saw it through new eyes, imagining myself as something of an honorary son of the city.

Morocco was another world entirely. I had never traveled to a Muslim country, or anywhere outside Europe or the Americas. The experience was a strange and magical combination of foreign adventure and comfort travel, buffered by family looking out for me.

I spent the first six days in the seaside resort town of Dar Bouazza, about 45 minutes from Casablanca, where my large Moroccan family owns a set of neighboring summer homes just yards from the beach. The houses are built on property my grandfather bought nearly a century ago (when the land was thought to be worthless) as a place to escape the summer heat of Casablanca.

A photo of Fez at sunset, taken from the roof of a riad in the Moroccan city.

Tim Curran/CNN

French is the family’s primary language, and my aunts and uncles don’t speak English. Some younger cousin was usually available to translate, but group conversations at the table or on the back deck were always in French, leaving me no way to join in. I resolved to learn conversational French by my next visit.

Despite the language gap, I got to know them all — the stern uncle, the motherly aunts, the prankster cousin — and recognized many of their personality traits and quirks — how boisterous, curious and sly they are — in myself.

I spent nearly a week wolfing down delicious, authentic Moroccan meals like lamb tajine (steam roasted with vegetables inside a ceramic dish of the same name) and pastilla (spiced, shredded chicken or game bird wrapped in filo pastry) cooked and served on seaside terraces by the small household staffs common in middle-class Moroccan homes.

Exploring a new homeland

Yet I wanted to see more of my father’s homeland, so I left on a tour of Fez and Marrakech arranged by a cousin and her husband, who happen to own a luxury travel company.

Those two cities were beautiful and awe-inspiring, alien yet weirdly familiar. I experienced them in a unique and very personal way thanks to my DNA journey: as a son just one generation removed from his father’s homeland.

Professional guides created tours personalized to my interests and my newly discovered family’s culture and history — right down to a side-trip to my family’s ancestral mausoleum in Fez.

I saw the things my father might have seen touring the cities’ colorful medinas (marketplaces) where the guides introduced me to shopkeepers by my new family name. I saw gorgeous mosques and unexpected sidelights such as Marrakech’s largest Jewish temple, Synagogue Lazama. I watched craftsmen at work, making pottery, leather goods and fabric just as it has been done for centuries.

The Roman ruins at Volubilis are remarkably pristine because of their isolation and the fact that they were unoccupied for nearly a thousand years.

Tim Curran/CNN

The highlight of the tour was a side trip to the ancient Roman ruins at Volubilis, between Fez and the Moroccan capital of Rabat. The city was abandoned by Rome around the 3rd century and was not excavated until the early 20th. Seeing well-preserved walls, foundations, and floor mosaics on site — something that simply cannot be seen in the Americas — was a superb experience for a history buff like me.

The tour was capped by a hike in the High Atlas Mountains to spend an afternoon with a local family who gave me a Berber-style cooking lesson, teaching me how to stew lamb and vegetables in a traditional Moroccan tagine.

The patriarch even loaned me one a djellaba, a traditional Moroccan outer robe, to wear for a photo, which felt both strange and strangely comforting — a perfect encapsulation of the whole trip.

The author and his host sample the results of his Berber cooking lesson.

Courtesy Tim Curran

DNA traveler beware

Getting a home DNA test can launch you on your own great adventure — intended or not.

Former CNN correspondent Samuel Burke created an entire podcast series in partnership with CNN Philippines, “Suddenly Family,” around the surprises — pleasant and otherwise — that can spring from DNA analysis.

“DNA testing can open up this Pandora’s Box that nobody in the DNA industry talks about,” he said.

Burke said some people just want to know about genetic health conditions they may carry. Many more are just looking to learn more about their ethnicity, “how Irish, how Jewish, how Native American they are.” But he said few realize the testing services will connect them to other people, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In Fez, Curran visited several workshops where fabrics, leather goods and ceramics are hand-crafted using ancient techniques and tools.

Tim Curran/CNN

Whether you know nothing about your family background, or think you know everything, there are likely to be surprises. Among them, Burke lists finding out a parent was unfaithful or that you’re the product of artificial insemination. Or you could discover you’re not biologically related to one of your parents.

Burke said being prepared is key to avoiding some of the pitfalls.

“Expect that you will find out something unexpected.” And he says that if you suspect something bad, you can opt out of sharing your results. Burke added the single best piece of advice he’s heard while reporting on DNA is “slow down.” Don’t become “hell-bent on solving the mysteries” and sharing your results as quickly as possible.

Whether or not your DNA testing has unexpected results, it can inspire some fascinating travel across the country or, as in my case, around the world.

What I learned on my adventure, however, is that the best part — even more than the places you visit — is the people you bond with, your new-found family who are like you, but also very different.

Top image: Tim Curran visited the Hassan II Mosque on a day-trip into Casablanca (Photo courtesy Tim Curran)