Introduction

Depending on what kind of guidebook you have, trying to decipher where things are geographically in Tibet can be difficult. First there's the question of Tibet. Traditionally, Greater Tibet covered much more area than what is currently defined as the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) by the Chinese. Tibetan regions expand into four Chinese provinces: Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. Visitors sometimes think they have to cross into the TAR to experience Tibet when in fact, you can experience high Tibetan culture in all of the regions that are still Tibetan outside the official map borders of the TAR.

• Read Visiting Greater Tibet for more on this.
• Look at these maps to understand just what I mean.

 

Getting Familiar with Multiple Names

If you're a student of China, you know that Mandarin is the common language but there are countless local dialects and regional languages. Since the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the Tibetan language counts as one of them. Of course, many places are still referred to by their traditional Tibetan names. If you've got a Tibet guidebook that has been printed by Tibetans (a very good one is Footprint's Tibet Handbook), then you'll find mostly Tibetan names for places (with Chinese names as a reference). If you've got something more standard like the Lonely Planet: China, then you'll probably find most place names in Chinese, with Tibetan references for places outside the TAR. Once you're in the TAR itself, you won't see many places referred to in Chinese.

To give you a confusing example, take "Shangri-La". Firstly, the name Shangri-La itself is taken from an English novel.

So it's been borrowed by the Chinese government to designate the Gyeltang Sonzanlin monastery town of Gyeltangteng (Tibetan) or Zhongdian (Mandarin Chinese) as a tourist destination.

Region Names

What I find most useful is thinking about the traditional regions of Tibet to understand why these large Tibetan areas (now mostly called Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures within the greater Chinese provincial delineations) are found in what we think of as "China" and not "Tibet".

The two traditional regions that reach outside the official lines of the TAR are Amdo and Kham. Amdo is comprised of much of what is now Qinghai Province and a small part of southern Gansu Province. Kham is made up of the eastern part of the TAR plus a large part of Sichuan Province as well as the northwest corner of Yunnnan Province.