The 14th Dalai Lama was born to a farming family, in Taktser (Hongya in Chinese), in Amdo province (Qinghai in Chinese), northeastern Tibet. He was selected as the tulku of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1937 and formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in a public declaration near the town of Bumchen in 1939. As with the recognition process for the 13th Dalai Lama, a Golden Urn selection process was not used. His enthronement ceremony as the Dalai Lama was held in Lhasa on 22 February 1940 and he eventually assumed full temporal (political) duties on 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, after the People's Republic of China's occupation of Tibet. The Tibetan government administered the historic Tibetan regions of Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, and "In the course of Tibet's 2000-year history, the country came under a degree of foreign influence only for short periods of time in the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries."