The 10th March is a controversial day in the history of Tibet: It marks the anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 and thus contributed considerably to todays political state. As the Tibet Autonomous Region it is now governed as a Chinese province, and political demands for an independent Tibet regularly find their way into the public debate. The latest in these developments is the announcement of the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, to retire from political life. While the Tibetan Parliament is a government-in-exile, ethnic Tibetans are estimated to make up 93% of the population within the Tibet Autonomous Region, with an increasing rise of Han Chinese in the last decades. The total population living in Tibet is estimated to be 2.91 million, and the region has China’s lowest population density, with only 2.2 people per square km. Hence it is no surprise that the gridded population cartogram of China in the world population atlas gives Tibet little space in the map there (situated below the larger bulge that is Urumqi, and by far degraded by China’s populous Eastern provinces). To get a better picture of the population distribution within the region, I created a gridded population cartogram for the area of Tibet which gives a more detailed impression of the Tibet’s population distribution (using the boundaries of the Tibet Autonomous Region). The population cartogram also includes a transformed topographic display that illustrates at which elevations most people live in this region that is the highest region on earth :

(click for larger map)

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