photos of Chushi Gangdruk, Tibet’s volunteer guerilla army in 1959. They were made up of y

photos of ChushiGangdruk, Tibet’s volunteer guerilla army in 1959. They were made up of young males from Amdo and Kham (eastern Tibet) regions that border China. 

initially, the US State Department refused to support Chushi Gangdruk,  and they were forced to organize their own army and buy their weapons with their own money as well as meager donations from farmers sympathetic to the liberation struggle. After they formed, the CIA provided training and weapons to the troops for a short period, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek funded them temporarily. 

Chushi Gangdruk disbanded in 1974, effectively ending the Tibetan liberation movement, after Richard Nixon’s famous olive branch to Mao in 1973 that revived Sino-American relations, thus cutting all funding for the Tibetan freedom cause.