The hunt for the next Dalai Lama - podcast

The Guardian's south Asia correspondent, Hannah Ellis-Petersen, and the Tibet activist Lhadon Tethong discuss the battle between Buddhist monks and the Chinese state over the successor to the Dalai Lama

Before long, Tibetan Buddhism will enter an unknown world - one without its current Dalai Lama. He has been the leader since he was chosen as a toddler more than 80 years ago. But the Dalai Lama is now 90, and talking openly about the process to pick his successor.

Much has changed, however, since he was discovered by senior Buddhist monks in a village in north-west Tibet in 1937. Most pertinently, the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s and the subsequent exile of the region's Buddhist leadership to India in the decades since.