Amdo (Tibetan: ཨ༌མདོ; Chinese: 安多; pinyin: Ānduō) is one of the three traditional regions of Tibet, the other two being Ü-Tsang and Kham; it is also the birth place of the 14th Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu River (Yellow River) to the Drichu river (Yangtze River). While culturally and ethnically a Tibetan area, Amdo has been administered by a series of local rulers in recent centuries. The Dalai Lamas have not ruled over Amdo since the mid-18th century [1] In 1928, the region of Amdo became part of the Qinghai province of the Republic of China.
The identically-named, 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.
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.
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The Tibetan inhabitants of Amdo are referred to as Amdowa (Tibetan: ཨ་མདོ་པ།; amdo pa) as a regional distinction from the Tibetans of Kham (Khampa) and U-Tsang (Central Tibet), however, they are all considered ethnically Tibetan.
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 Qinghai, 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.
The majority of Amdo Tibetans live in the larger part of Qinghai Province, including the Mtsho byang (Tibetan: མཚོ་བྱང་།; Ch. Haibai) TAP, Mtsho lho (Tibetan: མཚོ་ལྷོ་།; Ch. Hainan) TAP, Rma lho (Tibetan: རྨ་ལྷོ་།; Ch. Huangnan) TAP, and Mgo log (Tibetan: མགོ་ལོག།; Ch. Guoluo) TAP, as well as in the Kan lho (Tibetan: ཀན་ལྷོ།; Ch. Gannan) TAP of the southwest Gansu province, and sections of the Rnga ba (Tibetan: རྔ་བ།; Ch. Aba) Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous prefecture of north-west Sichuan Province. Additionally, a great many Amdo Tibetans live within the Haidong (Tibetan: མཚོ་ཤར།; Wylie: mtsho shar) Prefecture of Qinghai which is located to the east of the Blue Lake (Tibetan: མཚོ་སྔོན།, Wylie: Mtsho sngon; Kokonor) and around Xining city, but they constitute only a minority (ca. 8.5%) of the total population there and so the region did not attain TAP status. The vast Haixi (Mstho nub) Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, to the west of the Blue Lake, also has a minority Tibetan population (ca. 10%), and only those Tibetans in the eastern parts of this Prefecture are Amdo inhabitants.[2]
Mongols too have been long-term settlers in Amdo, arriving first during the time of Genghis Khan, but particularly in a series of settlement waves during the Ming period. Over the centuries, most of the Amdo Mongols have become highly Tibetanised and, superficially at least, it is now difficult to discern their original non-Tibetan ethnicity.[2]
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.
After the break-up of the central Tibetan kingdom in the 9th century, Amdo and Kham retained close cultural and religious links to central Tibet. Politically, however, they were organized as small kingdoms and tribes nominally under Chinese and Tibetan authority but actually controlled by leaders who held allegiance to neither.[3]
The Mongols conquered eastern Amdo in the early 13th century and made both Tibet and China subject nations of their empire.[4][5] A patron-priest relationship began in 1253 when a Tibetan priest, Phagspa, visited Kublai Khan he became so popular that he was made Kublai’s spiritual guide and later appointed by him to the rank of priest king of Tibet and constituted ruler of (1) Tibet Proper, comprising the thirteen states of U-Tsang Province; (2) Kham, and (3) Amdo.[6] Tibet regained its independence from the Mongols before native Chinese overthrew the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, but the unique priest/patron relationship with the Mongols endured.[7] Under the Mongol Yuan Empire 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.
The following Ming Dynasty nominally largely maintained the Mongol divisions of Tibet with some sub-division. However, from the middle of the Ming era, the Chinese government lost control in Amdo, 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 1642 the independent Mongol king, Gushi Khan, conferred temporal, as well as spiritual, authority on the fifth Dalai Lama, establishing a dominance for the Gelugpa Buddhist sect and the Dalai Lama that persists to this day. The Mongols also conferred parts of Eastern Tibet (Kham) on the Tibetans, while the Mongols continued to rule the Tibetan Amdo provide – raising present day questions as to which areas in Eastern Tibet the Tibetan government consistently ruled.[9]
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.[10][11]
When the Manchu Qing dynasty rose to power in the early 18th century it established Xining, a town to the north of Amdo, as the administrative base for the area. The rule of their administrator, the Amban, was light, however, and allowed relative autonomy to be retained by the monasteries and other local rulers.[12]
As the Qing Empire expanded in the 18th century it would intrude more and more on Tibetan autonomy, frequently invading Eastern Tibet and occasionally Central Tibet.[9]
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. A new boundary, following the Ning-ching mountain range, was established between Sichuan and Tibet. East of these mountains, local chieftains ruled under the nominal authority of the Sichuan provincial government; Lhasa administered the area to the west. The 1720s thus saw Tibet's first major reduction in area in centuries.[13] 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 predominantly 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.[14]
Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Tibetan areas enjoyed a period of de-facto independence. Central Tibet was the domain of the Dalai Lama’s government, while areas of Eastern Tibet (Kham) and Northeastern Tibet (Amdo) were governed by regional kings, chiefs, and warlords.[15] The Hui Muslims administered the agricultural areas in the north and east of the region.[12] A number of powerful local rulers emerged in Amdo. Monasteries such as Labrang, Repkong and Taktsang Lhamo appointed headmen, gowa (go ba), to the tribes within their areas, these tribes being groups consisting of several thousand nomads.[12] In other areas, such as Sokwo, Ngawa and Choni, secular leaders achieved the status of kings, similarly presiding over a group of tribes while certain tribes had their own hereditary gowa. The latter included the tribes beyond Labrang's influence in Machu.[12]
The Muslim Warlord Ma Qi waged war in the name of the Republic of China against the Labrang monastery and Ngoloks. After ethnic rioting between Muslims and Tibetans emerged in 1918, Ma Qi defeated the Tibetans. He heavily taxed the town for 8 years. In 1925, a Tibetan rebellion broke out, with thousands of Tibetans driving out the Muslims. Ma Qi responded with 3,000 Chinese Muslim troops, who retook Labrang and machine gunned thousands of Tibetan monks as they tried to flee.[16][17] Ma Qi besieged Labrang numerous times, the Tibetans and Mongols fought against his Muslim forces for control of Labrang, until Ma Qi gave it up in 1927.[18] Ma Qi defeated the Tibetan forces with his Muslim troops.[19] His forces were praised by foreigners who traveled through Qinghai for their fighting abilities.[20] However, that was not the last Labrang saw of General Ma. Ma Qi launched a genocidal war against the Tibetan Ngoloks, in 1928, inflicting a defeat upon them and seizing the Labrang Buddhist monastery.[21] The Muslim forces looted and ravaged the monastery again.[18]
In the 1930s, the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang seized the northeast corner of Amdo which had been ruled by the Hui Muslims, in the name of Chiang Kai-shek's weak central government and incorporated it into the Chinese province of Qinghai.[22] Amdo was officially incorporated into the Chinese provincial system, with the major portion of it becoming part of Qinghai province in 1928.[23] Most of the communities of the borderland regions of Kham and Amdo remained under their own local lay and monastic leaders into the 1950s. Tibetan region of Lho-Jang and Gyarong in Kham, and Ngapa (Chinese Aba) and Golok people in Amdo, were still independent of Chinese hegemony, despite the creation on paper of Qinghai Province in 1927.[24]
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. By 1952, the region was fully under the control of People's Republic of China.[25] By 1949, advance units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (the PLA) had taken much of Amdo from the Nationalists.[7]
In 1958, Communists assumed control of Tibetan regions in Kham and Amdo. Many of the nomads of Amdo revolted. Some areas were reported virtually empty of men: they either had been killed or imprisoned or had fled. The largest monastery in Amdo was forced to close. Of its three thousand monks, two thousand were arrested.[26]
Amdo 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 Taktsang Lhamo in Dzoge County (Ch: Ruanggui /Zoige Xian).[27]
Amdo Tibetans traditional lifestyle and economy is centred on agriculture. Depending on the region and environment they live in they are either nomads (Drog pa) or farmers (Sheng pa).
After 1949, the Chinese communists inherited and adopted the earlier Republican county system, and the basic arrangements of local government in Amdo have changed little up to the present day. With the advent of communist administrators in Amdo during the 1950s, a series of larger Tibetan autonomous prefectures were newly established on top of the existing county system in those places where Tibetans formed the majority of the population. This development was in line with the policy towards minority nationalities set down in the new constitution of the PRC.[2]
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