This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution reached Tibet in February 1966 with the banning of the Monlam prayer festival, the region's most important annual religious gathering. Over the decade that followed, a campaign against religious practice generally swept across Tibet, and temples were shuttered and texts burned elsewhere in China in the same years.
The Tibetan government in exile's own count tallies the destruction as reducing more than six thousand monasteries and nunneries to fewer than ten still standing by 1976, alongside the persecution, forced disrobing and labor conscription of monks and nuns that intensified once the Cultural Revolution itself began. The historian Fabienne Jagou has disputed these precise figures, arguing that much of the physical destruction had in fact already occurred in the years before 1966, though she does not dispute the scale of the loss or the persecution that followed.
What this changed for Buddhism's spread was the near total dismantling, within a single decade, of a monastic infrastructure that had taken centuries to build in Tibet, whatever the exact chronology of when each monastery actually fell. Even on the more conservative reading of when the destruction happened, fewer than ten of Tibet's thousands of monasteries and nunneries remained standing by the Cultural Revolution's official end in 1976.