Amdo (
Tibetan ?????,
Chinese transliteration
??,
Pinyin Anduo) is one of the three traditional provinces of
Tibet, the other two being
Ü-Tsang and
Kham; it is also the birth place of
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th
Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu River (
Yellow River) to the Drichu river (Yangtse). While culturally and ethnically a Tibetan area, Amdo has been administered by a series of local rulers in recent centuries. Since the Chinese Communist party invasion in the 1950s, Amdo has been annexed into Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai.
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. It 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 Tewo (Taktsang Lhamo).
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. The Tibetan inhabitants of Amdo are referred to as Amdowa (amdo pa) as a regional distinction from the Tibetans of Kham (Khampa) and U-Tsang (Central Tibet), however, they are all considered ethnically Tibetan.
The region of Amdo is distributed mainly among the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, with smaller parts in Gansu and Sichuan. While identically named, the 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.
