What is Tibet? – Fact and Fancy

Ethnic Tibetan populations are distributed over an area as vast as Western Europe. They are found not only in the Tibet Autonomous Region (of China), the traditional heartland of political Tibet, but also in parts of the neighbouring Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan and Xinjiang, as well as in parts of other nations such as India (Ladakh, Sikkim, Northern Uttar Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh), Northern Nepal and Bhutan. Although all of these regions were once united under the rule of the early kings of Tibet, during the eleven centuries following the breakup of that kingdom in the 9 th century many of the regions on the periphery became independent or fell under the authority of neighbouring states. The detailed history of all of these peripheral areas is not well documented in the literature on Tibet, and this introduction will not attempt to consider each of them. Rather, it will be limited to those most relevant to this discussion, namely, the easternmost extension of ethnic Tibetan populations – the two major sub-ethnic regions known in Tibetan and Kham and Amdo. The ̳modern‘ Sino-Tibetan border in these two regions was generally established during the mid-18 th