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Situation of the east Tibetan region of Amdo

Amdo (Tibetan: ཨ༌མདོ, Chinese: 安多, Pinyin: Ānduō) is one of the three former provinces of Tibet, the other two being Ü-Tsang and Kham; it is also the place from which Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, comes from. To designate Amdo as a province is only correct in the cultural sense, but not politically, since it was never administered by a single regional government, be it Tibetan or Chinese. The Tibetan cultural sphere of Amdo is one of the most important and varied within the Tibetan Plateau. The Amdo dialect is also one of the major dialects of the Tibetan language. 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 in the Chinese province of Qinghai, with smaller, but relevant parts in Gansu and Sichuan. The sparsely-populated Amdo County that is included in the Tibetan Autonomous Region 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 roughly the northeastern part of ethnic Tibet; it encompasses the section from the Yellow River northeastward to Gansu province in China. It was conquered by the Manchu in 1724 following their victory over a Mongol revolt. It was incorporated in 1928 into the Chinese provincial system as part of Qinghai province^[1].

Shadzong Ritro in Amdo

Amdo was and is the home of many important Tibetan Buddhist monk teachers or lamas) who had a major influence on both politics and religious development of Tibet, like the great reformer Tsongkhapa, the 14th Dalai Lama as well as the 10th Panchen Lama.

Labrang monastery in Amdo

It is, therefore, a region spotted with many Buddhist monasteries - with Kumbum Jampa Ling (Chin. Ta'er Si) near Xining, Qutan Si and Labrang Tashi Khyil south of Lanzhou being among the most famous and important within the Tibetan cultural realm.

• 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

• The East Tibet Website
• The Huge Thangka of Amdo
• Images of Amdo