It may have been sixty years since the Dalai Lama ran away into exile, but in the isolated mountain small village where he was born, he remains very much on the minds of devotees and Chinese authorities similarly.

On the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, Taktser, in Qinghai province, where Dalai Lama was born in 1935 to parents who used to farm buckwheat and barley. His homeland is a temptation to worshippers, foreign tourists as well as to security personnel.

During a recent visit to Taktser, known in Chinese as Hongya, police armed with automatic weapons barricaded the meandering road that leads into the village that contains around 60 houses.

Police and over a dozen plain-clothed officials who refused to identify themselves stated that the village was private and not open to the public.

The Qinghai government and China’s State Council Information Office, which pose as the Communist Party’s spokesman’s office, did not comment.

Beijing looks the Nobel Peace Prize laureate as a deadly separatist and has condemned the 83-year-old spiritual leader as a “wolf in monk’s robes”. The Dalai Lama declines to adopt violence and states that he only wants real freedom for Tibet.

Many of China’s 6 million Tibetans still idolize the Dalai Lama, regardless of government constraints on displays of his picture or any public display of devotion.

This Sunday observes 60 years since the Dalai Lama, disguised as a soldier, escaped the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, after rumours that Chinese troops were planning his kidnapping or assassination instigated a popular uprising.

The Dalai Lama crossed into India two weeks later and has not set foot in Tibet since.

Despite the passage of time, during sensitive political anniversaries, China’s security apparatus commonly prohibit access to the village where the Dalai Lama’s old family is located, behind a pair of wooden doors and high concrete walls.