Amdo

Amdo (Tibetan: ཨ་མདོ་, Wylie: a mdo; Chinese: 安多; pinyin: Ānduō) is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions, the others being Ü-Tsang in central Tibet, and Kham in the east. Ngari (including former Guge kingdom) in the far west was incorporated into Ü-Tsang. Historically, Amdo and Kham were called Do Kham on maps and manuscripts. Amdo is also the birthplace of the 14th Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu (Yellow River) to the Drichu (Yangtze).^{[note 1]} Amdo was mostly distributed into China's present-day Qinghai province, with smaller portions in Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

Historically, culturally, and ethnically a part of Tibet, Amdo was from the mid-18th century and after administered by localized autonomous Tibetan leaders including monastic leaders, chieftains, and nomadic Golok peoples. The Dalai Lama's Ganden Podrang had not directly governed the area since that time,^[1] while the Kumbum Monastery and peoples in Amdo remained loyal to the Dalai Lamas.

From 1917 to 1928, a small area of Amdo's cultivated lands near Xining were occupied intermittently by the Hui Muslim warlords of the Ma Family. In 1928, the autonomous Ma Family joined the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. By 1951, Chinese Communist Party forces had defeated both the Kuomintang and the Tibetan forces when the Annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China took over the Amdo region, solidifying their hold on the area roughly by 1958. The Chushi Gangdruk Tibetan guerrilla forces in Amdo and Kham emerged in 1956 and continued operating through the 1959 Tibetan uprising until the 1970s, fighting the People's Liberation Army, its massacre of peoples and livestocks, its bombing of monasteries,^[2] and China's harsh land reform policies.

Amdo is the home of many important Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leaders and of lamas, monks, nuns, and scholars, including the 14th Dalai Lama, the 10th Panchen Lama Choekyi Gyaltsen, and the great Gelug school founder and reformer Je Tsongkhapa. The official name of this Tibetan region/province is Domey (Tibetan: མདོ་སྨད་).

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