Amdo

In the 1720s the Yongzheng Emperor of Qing dynasty seized Amdo from the Dzungars and began forming the modern boundaries of Qinghai.

[9] People from Amdo and Kham have traditionally identified themselves as Amdowas and Khampas rather than Tibetans, sometimes more connected to the Chinese than they were to Ü-Tsang (Central Tibet).

[12] 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.

Many non-Tibetans of the region are multilingual and can speak Amdo Tibetan, making it difficult to ascertain their ethnicity based on language alone.

[9] During this period, control of Amdo moved from Songtsen Gampo and his successors to the royal family's ministers, the Gar (Wylie: 'gar).

Within Amdo, the historical independent polities of hereditary rulers and kingdoms remained, while Mongol and Chinese populations fluctuated among the indigenous peoples and Tibetans.

[6] The original inhabitants of the Amdo region were the forest-dwellers (nags-pa), the mountain-dwellers (ri-pa), the plains-dwellers (thang-pa), the grass-men (rtsa-mi), and the woodsmen (shing-mi).

[20] It was frequently drawn into conflicts with the Western Xia, formed by the Tangut people possibly of Qiang descent,[21] as well as the Song, Liao, and Jin dynasties.

[9] The Mongols had conquered eastern Amdo by 1240 and would manage it under the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs, separately from the other territories administered by the Yuan dynasty.

[31] Although the following Ming Dynasty nominally maintained the Mongol divisions of Tibet with some sub-division, its power is weaker and influenced Amdo mostly at their borders.

[citation needed] As trade between Mongols, Tibetans, Muslim and Han Chinese deepened, a system of xiejia developed around Gansu.

They initially served as lodgings for travelers but eventually assumed additional responsibilities, such as regulating commerce, collecting taxes, and settling legal disputes alongside the local yamens.

In 1642, Tibet was reunified under the 5th Dalai Lama, by gaining spiritual and temporal authority through the efforts of the Mongol king, Güshi Khan.

This allowed the Gelug school and its incarnated spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lamas, to gain enough support to last through the present day.

[34] Gushi Khan also returned portions of Eastern Tiber (Kham) to Tibet, but his base in the Kokonor region of Amdo remained under Mongol control.

[34] In 1705, with the approval of the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty, Lha-bzang Khan of the Khoshut deposed the regent and killed the 6th Dalai Lama.

The Dzungar Mongols invaded Tibet during the chaos, and held the entire region until their final defeat by an expedition of the Qing imperial army in 1720.

[35][36] 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.

East of these mountains, local chieftains ruled under the nominal authority of the Sichuan provincial government; Lhasa administered the area to the west.

The monasteries, such as Labrang, Rebkong, and Taktsang Lhamo supervised the choosing of the local leaders or headmen in the areas under their control.

[44] The Muslim warlord Ma Qi waged war in the name of the Republic of China against the Labrang monastery and Goloks.

Ma Qi responded with 3,000 Chinese Muslim troops, who retook Labrang and machine gunned thousands of Tibetan monks as they tried to flee.

[50] Due to the lack of a Chinese administrative presence in the region, however, most of the communities of the rural areas of Amdo and Kham remained under their own local, Tibetan lay and monastic leaders into the 1950s.

[51] The 14th Dalai Lama was born in the Amdo region, in 1935, and when he was announced as a possible candidate, Ma Bufang tried to prevent the boy from travelling to Tibet.

[52] In May 1949, Ma Bufang was appointed Military Governor of Northwest China, making him the highest-ranked administrator of the Amdo region.

[56] In July 1958 as the revolutionary fervor of the Great Leap Forward swept across the People's Republic of China, Zeku County in the Amdo region of cultural Tibet erupted in violence against efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose rapid collectivization on the pastoral communities of the grasslands.

The immediate ramifications of each disturbance both for the Amdo Tibetan elites and commoners, and for the Han cadres in their midst, elucidates early PRC nation-building and state-building struggles in minority nationality areas and the influence of this crucial transitional period on relations between Han and Tibetan in Amdo decades later.

In 1958, the arrest and murder of the Tseten Monastery's Khenpo Jigme Rigpai Nyingpo while incarcerated in Xining's Nantan prison marked the beginning of the period.

A typical family has two homes or bases: one for when they move up into the mountains with their animals in the summer for better grazing, and another down in the valleys where they weather harsh winters and grow fodder for their livestock in small agricultural fields.

In Amdo, communities of nomads, farmers, horse traders and monasteries were organized into these polities, which continued from the era of the Tibetan Empire.