Amdo

Amdo (Tibetan: ཨ༌མདོ, Chinese: 安多, Pinyin: Ānduō) is one of the three 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 was and is the home of many important Tibetan Buddhist monk scholars or lamas who had a major influence on both politics and religious development of Tibet, like the great reformer Je Tsongkhapa, the 14th Dalai Lama as well as the 10th Panchen Lama. It was traditionally a place of great learning and academia and contains many great monasteries including Kumbum Jampa Ling (Chin. Ta'er Si) near Xining, Qutan Si and Labrang Tashi Khyil south of Lanzhou.

There are many dialects of the Amdo language due to the geographical isolation of many tribal groups. The (Tibetan) inhabitants therefore call themselves Amdowa (a mdo pa), and not Böpa (bod pa), as the Tibetan designation for (central) Tibetans suggests.

The region of Amdo is distributed mainly among the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan. The sparsely-populated Amdo County that is included in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) is a part of the Changthang region administered by Nagqu in the northern part of the TAR. The name being identical, however, this Amdo county is not a part of the Amdo cultural province.

Amdo is a large area of northeastern Tibet; it encompasses the section from the Yellow River northeastward to Gansu province in China. As Amdo is a large area and consists of a number of different regions, it is difficult to accurately summarise the history of the entire region of Amdo. Each smaller district/region has it's own unique and long history. However, it is well documented that in the 1200's the Mongols invaded Tibet. This was followed by periods of independence, during which regions of Amdo were ruled by Tibetan Kings. The Manchu's invaded in the 1700's.

This quote describes the political history of the Gansu region (which is a Chinese name given to one part of the larger region of Amdo) during the Manchu dynasty:

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]

The northeast corner of Amdo was seized by the warlord Ma Bufang in 1928 and this area was incorporated into the Chinese provincial system as part of Qinghai province^[1]. The other parts of Amdo were ruled by Tibetan Kings, until the Chinese Communist party invasion in 1949-1951. After that, Amdo was incorporated into the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Gansu.

References & 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

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

External links

• The East Tibet Website
• 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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