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 birth place of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
The region of Amdo is distributed mainly in the Chinese province of Qinghai,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. 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].
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.
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.
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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
External links
| Traditional provinces and regions of Tibet |
| Ü-Tsang (Ü | Tsang | Ngari) | Kham | Amdo |
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