Amdo

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Amdo (Tibetan: ཨ༌མདོ, Chinese transliteration: 安多, Pinyin: Ānduō) is one of the three traditional provinces of Tibet, the other two being Ü-Tsang and Kham; it is also the birth place of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu River (Yellow River) to the Drichu river (Yangtse). While culturally and ethnically a Tibetan area, Amdo has been administered by a series of local rulers in recent centuries. Since the Chinese Communist party invasion in the 1950's, Amdo has been annexed into Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai.

Amdo was and is the home of many important Tibetan Buddhist monks (or lamas), scholars who had a major influence on both politics and religious development of Tibet like the 14th Dalai Lama, the 10th Panchen Lama, and the great reformer Je Tsongkhapa. It was traditionally a place of great learning and scholarship and contains many great monasteries including Kumbum Jampa Ling (Chin. Ta'er Si) near Xining, Labrang Tashi Khyil south of Lanzhou, and the Kirti Monasteries of Ngaba and Tewo (Taktsang Lhamo).

There are many dialects of the Tibetan language spoke in Amdo due to the traditional geographical isolation of many tribal groups, however the written Tibetan language is the same throughout Tibet. The Tibetan inhabitants of Amdo are referred to as Amdowa (amdo pa) as a regional distinction from the Tibetans of Kham (Khampa) and U-Tsang (Central Tibet), however, they are all considered ethnically Tibetan.

The region of Amdo is distributed mainly among the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, with smaller parts in Gansu and Sichuan. While identically named, the sparsely-populated Amdo County in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is not part of the Amdo cultural province. It was directly administered by the Dalai Lama from Lhasa and is today a part of the Changthang region administered by Nagqu in the northern part of the TAR.

Contents 1 History 2 Present demographics 3 References and notes 4 External links

[edit] History

From the 3rd century AD, the area was controlled by the Tuyuhun Kingdom, a Xianbei people whose descendants have assimilated into the Han and Mongol ethnic groups. In 663, Tuyuhun was conquered by the Tibetan kingdom, and over the following centuries the local Qiang people became assimilated by Tibetans. Attempts by the Chinese Tang Dynasty to rescue Tuyuhun and later wrest control of the area failed finally after a defeat at the hands of the Tibetan army in 670.

The southern portion of what became Amdo (in modern-day Gansu and Sichuan) was controlled by the Tangut. After their defeat by Tibet, the Tangut dispersed, with some fleeing north, later founding the Western Xia empire in the modern-day provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Ningxia. In Mongol and Manchu documents, the inhabitants of Amdo continued to be referred to as "Tangut" for many centuries afterwards.

The Tibetan-Qiang-Tangut confederation continued to expand to the north and east, sacking the Tang capital Chang'an in 673. Subsequently, the confederation controlled the Silk Road, forcing Tang trade routes into the Gobi, partly responsible for the collapse of the Tang empire. However, the Tibetan empire itself collapsed in the 9th century AD, and parts of the former empire became controlled by local administrations. Parts of Amdo came under the influence of the Western Xia, founded by the Tangut who broke from the Tibetan confederation. The Western Xia itself became a vassal of the Song Dynasty and later Jurchen Jin Dynasty in the 12th century. Xining, today the capital of Qinghai, was established in 1103 as a prefecture by the Song Dynasty.^{[1] [2]}

The Mongols conquered eastern Amdo in 1227^[3], before making both Tibet and China subject nations of their empire^[4][5]. While some historians see this incorporation as the legal incorporation of Tibet, including Amdo, into the Chinese state from the Yuan Dynasty onwards,^[6] the Tibetan Government in Exile see the relationship between Tibetan religious leaders and Mongol Khans as a "patron-priest" relationship, whereby Tibetan religious leaders exchanged political control for religious submission.^[7]

Under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty of Kublai Khan, Amdo and Kham were split into two commandaries, which, along with Ü-Tsang, were collectively referred to as the three commandaries of Tibet. Eastern Amdo was placed under the administration of Gansu province in 1281.^[3] The following Ming Dynasty nominally largely maintained the Mongol divisions with some sub-division. However, from the middle of the Ming era, the Chinese government lost control in Tibet, and the Mongols again seized political control.^[8] Power struggles among various Mongol factions in Tibet and Amdo led to a period alternating between the supremacy of the Dalai Lama (nominally) and Mongol overlords.

In 1705, with the approval of the Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, Lobzang Khan of the Khoshud deposed the regent and sent the 6th Dalai Lama to Beijing; the 6th Dalai Lama died soon after, probably near Qinghai Lake (Koko nur) in Amdo. The Dzungar Mongols invaded Tibet during the chaos, and held the entire region until their final defeat by the Qing imperial army in 1720.^[9][10] The Qing forces withdrew from Tibet proper, but not from Amdo, most of which became Kokonor, or Xining Prefecture, under Gansu province.

The Yongzheng Emperor seized full control of Tibet from 1726-1728. The boundaries of Xining Prefecture, which contains most of Amdo, with Sichuan and Tibet-proper was established following this. The boundary of Xining Prefecture and Xizang, or central Tibet, was the Dangla Mountains. This roughly corresponds with the modern boundary of Qinghai with the Tibet Autonomous Region. The boundary of Xining Prefecture with Sichuan was also set at this time, dividing the Ngaba area of the former Amdo into Sichuan. This boundary also roughly corresponds with the modern boundary of Qinghai with Sichuan. Other parts of old Amdo was administered by the Administrator of Qinghai. Kokonor Mongols from northern Xinjiang moved into Qinghai in this period.

In all these predominently culturally Tibetan areas, the Qing Empire used a system of administration relying on local, Tibetan, rulers. A 1977 University of Chicago PhD. thesis, described the political history of the Tibetan region in Gansu (which was historically one part of Amdo) during the Qing dynasty as follows:

In the time of the Manchu dynasty, the entire region was administered by a viceroy of the Imperial Government. That portion of the country occupied by Chinese Moslems and some other, smaller, racial units was under traditional Chinese law. The Tibetans enjoyed almost complete independence and varying degrees of prestige. The Chone Prince ruled over the forty-eight "banners" of one group of Tibetans; other Tibetan rulers or chiefs held grants or commissions- some of them hundreds of years old- from the Imperial Government. At that time the ethnic frontier corresponded almost exactly with the administrative frontier. [1]

Proposals to establish Qinghai as a province were first raised in 1907, but lapsed when the imperial government fell to a revolution in 1912. After the collapse of the Qing empire, Yuan Shikai, President of the Republic of China, appointed Ma Qi as garrison commander in Xining in 1912. In 1915, the governor of Xining prefecture was removed and replaced by Ma Qi. In 1925, the National Army under Feng Yuxiang took over Gansu. In the same year, Ma Qi's troops were incorporated into the National Army. In 1928, after its victory in the Northern Expedition, the Kuomintang-controlled government established Qinghai as a province of the Republic of China, which encompassed most of Amdo.^[11]. Ma Qi and his family Ma Lin, and the more famous Ma Bufang, who though nominally served as governors for the Republican government and commanders of National Revolutionary Army units, in truth ruled as autonomous warlords. During this period, Ma Bufang's troops put down several rebellions by local Tibetans, Kazakhs, and Communists.^[12] In May 1949, Ma Bufang was appointed Military Governor of Northwest China, making him the highest-ranked administrator of the Amdo region. However, by August 1949, the advancing People's Liberation Army had annihilated Ma's army, though residual forces took several years to defeat. The Communist Party of China took full control in the region in 1952.^[13]

[edit] Present demographics

Today, ethnic Tibetans predominate in the western and southern parts of Amdo, which are now administered as various Tibetan, Tibetan-Qiang, or Mongol-Tibetan autonomous prefectures. The Han Chinese are a majority in the eastern part of Qinghai and the provincial capital Xining. While geographically small compared to the rest of Amdo, this area has the largest population density, with the result that the Han Chinese outnumber other ethnicities in Qinghai generally. The northern part of Qinghai has a Mongol majority. For details on the demographics of various Tibetan entities in Amdo and Tibet generally, see Tibet - Major ethnic groups in Greater Tibet by region, 2000 census.

[edit] References and notes

• Andreas Gruschke: The Cultural Monuments of Tibet’s Outer Provinces: Amdo, 2 Bände, White Lotus Press, Bangkok 2001 ISBN 974-7534-59-2
• Toni Huber (Hg.): Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar of the Iats, 2000) ISBN 90-04-12596-5
• Paul Kocot Nietupski: Labrang: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Crossroads of Four Civilizations ISBN 1-55939-090-5
• Robert B. Ekvall. Cultural Relations on the Kansu-Tibetan Border. Retrieved on 2008-04-15.

[edit] External links

• The East Tibet Website
• Amdo - delineation and history in brief (PDF file; 216 kb) (engl.)
• The Huge Thangka of Amdo
• The Skor lam and the Long March: Notes on the Transformation of Tibetan Ritual Territory in Southern A mdo in the Context of Chinese Developments

http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/booksAndPapers/EKVALL.htm

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