Tendol Gyalzur

Tibetan-Swiss humanitarian
The basics

Quick Facts

IntroTibetan-Swiss humanitarian
PlacesSwitzerland
wasHumanitarian
Gender
Female
Birth2 December 1951, Samzhubzê District, Shigatse, Tibet Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China
Death3 May 2020Chur, Chur subdistrict, Plessur District, Switzerland (aged 68 years)
Star signSagittarius
The details

Biography

Tendol Gyalzur (undated photograph)

Tendol Gyalzur (c. 1951–3 May 2020) was a Tibetan-Swiss humanitarian, known for founding the first private orphanage in Tibet.

Biography

Gyalzur was born as Tenzin Dolkar in Shigatse, Tibet. She lost her parents in the Chinese annexation of Tibet and as a child crossed the Himalayas on foot and on horseback to flee to India. She grew up in an Indian orphanage, and was chosen to be one of a dozen children sent to Germany by the Tibetan government in exile in 1963. In Germany, she obtained a nursing degree, married another Tibetan refugee, Losang Gyalzur, and moved with him to Switzerland.

When revisiting Tibet as an adult, the sight of numerous street children motivated her to found Tibet's first private orphanage in Lhasa in 1993, in cooperation with a Chinese nonprofit organization and Chinese officials. She later founded another orphanage in Shangri-La and supported a school for nomadic herders' children in Sichuan. In 2016, Chinese restrictions on the work of foreign organizations forced her to yield control over her establishments to the Chinese government. They closed in 2017 and 2018.

One of her sons, Songtsen Gyalzur, became a professional ice hockey player, and established a brewery in Shangri-La, Shangri-La Beer. Gyalzur died from COVID-19 on 3 May 2020, in Chur, Switzerland, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland.

Works about Tendol Gyalzur

The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 19 Oct 2024. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.