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As the Dalai Lama celebrates his 80th birthday on Monday, here is a look at how The New York Times covered his early years as the spiritual leader of Tibet, a time when rare glimpses into the Himalayan territory’s politics came mostly from radio broadcasts from India and a few travelers and missionaries from war-torn China.

In December 1933, The Times reported the death of the Dalai Lama’s predecessor, the 13th in the line of spiritual rulers. That was followed by the start of a mission to find his reincarnation in a newborn child, and by international wrangling for influence in the capital, Lhasa.

“The question of succession has its ramifications in widely separated places,” The Times noted in 1934. “In the offices of the Indian government at Delhi; in the India office of London’s Downing Street; in the Kremlin of Moscow; at Kuomintang headquarters in Nanking; at the Japanese military headquarters in Manchuria; at the court of the Manchu Pu Yi; and in the inner councils of the militarists in Tokyo.”

Sir Francis Younghusband, who had led a British expedition to Lhasa 30 years earlier, described the search for a successor in an article for The Times in 1934. “What changes may come, who can say?” he wrote. “British influence may wane. Chinese influence may wax. Or the reverse may happen. In any case, the Tibetans will strive to preserve their soul.”

The current Dalai Lama was born a year later, in 1935. His discovery as the reincarnation of his predecessor seemingly went unreported. In 1940, The Times carried a report from Lhasa describing the child’s enthronement ceremony.

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“Wearing a scarlet cloak and riding through reverent crowds in a great golden palanquin, a 6-year-old Chinese peasant boy today was enthroned as the 14th Dalai Lama, chief civil and religious ruler of this monastic kingdom,” The Times wrote.

“Monks from the hundreds of monasteries scattered throughout the kingdom blessed the boy as he passed,” the report added. “The entire city was perfumed by incense burners that lined the route.”

The report noted that a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese republic, and Chinese flags were hung in the throne room to reflect acceptance of Chinese claims of sovereignty over Tibet. In Nanking, officials and monks kowtowed to the Dalai Lama’s image, The Times reported.

The first reports of Chinese Communist forces entering Tibet appeared in The Times in 1950, “blurred by cloudy gulfs of time and distance,” months after Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing.

In November 1950, Indian government sources told The Times that they had lost radio contact with Lhasa, “now under imminent threat of capture by the invading Chinese Communist forces.” The Dalai Lama had fled the capital, according to the report. A truce, with a reported assurance that Beijing would accept “internal autonomy in Tibet while the Chinese Communists take over the frontier patrol,” was reported on a Times front page in March 1951.

In August 1951, The Times reported the arrival of the Dalai Lama’s brother in the United States. In September, the People’s Liberation Army said it had entered Lhasa. “There is considerable opposition to the Communist regime in Lhasa, according to the latest news received at this border from the Tibetan capital,” a Times correspondent wrote from Kalimpong, in West Bengal, India.

“Resentment against the loss of their ancient freedom to the Chinese Communists smoulders angrily beneath the surface of the present apparent subservience of Tibet to Red occupation,” The Times’s longtime correspondent Robert Trumbull wrote in 1952. “It waits an opportune moment to burst into flame,” as it has always eventually done “in previous Chinese attempts to subjugate the Himalayan Lamaist state.”

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The same year, it was reported that Soviet engineers planned to rapidly industrialize the territory, starting with a wool processing plant. “This will serve a twofold purpose of providing employment and to some extent reducing Tibet’s dependence on foreign countries, especially the United States, for marketing raw wool,” The Times wrote.

Mr. Trumbull reported that the Dalai Lama openly defied the Chinese authorities in 1953 by refusing to fly the Chinese flag. Still, he stayed in power. “It is known from a high Tibetan source available in India that the Dalai Lama’s position, as the highest spiritual and temporal authority in the Buddhist state, has been too secure with his people for the Communists to override entirely,” Mr. Trumbull wrote.

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Reports of clashes in Tibet and efforts by Beijing to control the territory increased in frequency during the years leading up to the rebellion of 1959. On March 21, Elie Abel reported the first fighting in Lhasa. “Virtually the entire population of Lhasa had joined rebellious Khamba tribesmen in an unequal struggle against Chinese troops,” Mr. Abel wrote from New Delhi.

In a message broadcast on March 28, Premier Zhou Enlai of China said the Panchen Lama would replace the Dalai Lama, who Mr. Zhou said was being held by rebels, The Times reported. A week later, the newspaper reported the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India, the beginning of the life in exile he has led ever since.

“An envoy of the young god-king had reached the border Sunday, stating that the Dalai Lama had requested political asylum,” The Times reported, adding that the State Department was “greatly pleased” at the news.