Why is there Tibetan culture in Sichuan?

Two different things called Tibet

English uses one word for two different things, and that is where most of the confusion starts. Tibet can mean the Tibetan Plateau — a landform, the highest and largest plateau on earth — or it can mean the Tibet Autonomous Region, an administrative unit with its capital at Lhasa. They are not the same shape on a map, and only one of them is what you are driving through.

The plateau's Tibetan population lives across five provincial-level areas: the Tibet Autonomous Region itself, plus Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. Within that, the plateau has long been divided into three regions, by dialect and landscape:

Region	Where it is	On the routes here
Ü-Tsang	Lhasa, Shannan, Shigatse and Ngari — the Tibet Autonomous Region	No — and it is the part that needs a permit
Kham	Garzê in Sichuan, Yushu in Qinghai, Dêqên in Yunnan, Chamdo in the TAR	Yes — all of it. Danba, Tagong, Litang, Dêgê, Yushu
Amdo	Most of Qinghai outside Yushu, Gannan in Gansu, northern Aba, Sêrtar	Partly — the Qinghai Lake and Anemaqen stretch

The names are worth having because they are how people here describe themselves, and the three really are different in temper. Ü-Tsang is where the monasteries concentrated and where religious authority sat. Amdo is grassland and horses. Kham is the country of deep river gorges and of the tea-and-horse trade that ran through them, and its people have a reputation — not entirely undeserved — for being the most direct of the three.

So why are there Tibetans in Sichuan at all?

Because the frontier between China and the plateau was drawn a very long time ago, and it was drawn here.

In the seventh century the Tibetan empire expanded east and took in the whole eastern half of the plateau. In 783, after years of war, Tang China and the Tibetan empire agreed the Treaty of Qingshui, which fixed the frontier on the Min and Dadu rivers: east of the line to the Tang, west of it to Tibet. That line is still, roughly, the line between the Chinese and Tibetan parts of Sichuan today. Four and a half centuries later, when the Mongols assembled their empire, Kham was administered through the same machinery that governed the rest of the plateau — with census counts, post stations and appointed officials.

The short version, if you are asked at a petrol station: Kham was Tibetan long before "Sichuan" meant anything this far west, and it has been administered from China since the thirteenth century. Both halves of that sentence are true.

A short history, in the dates that come up

A skeleton on purpose, not a history. Some of these come up in ordinary conversation; the rest are here so that you recognise them when they do.

Date	What happened	Why it is worth holding on to
7th c.	Songtsen Gampo unites the plateau's kingdoms and founds the Tibetan empire, with its capital at Lhasa	The beginning of recorded Tibetan history — and of Tibetan writing
641	Songtsen Gampo marries Princess Wencheng, a princess of the Tang court	The start of the Tang–Tibet marriage alliance. Most of the stories you will hear along this road hang off this one
710	Princess Jincheng marries the Tibetan ruler Tride Tsuktsen	The second such marriage — and the one most often confused with the first
783	Treaty of Qingshui: the frontier is fixed on the Min and Dadu rivers	The hardest single piece of evidence for why Tibetan culture reaches into Sichuan
821–823	Treaty of Changqing. The stele recording it, raised at Lhasa in 823, calls the two rulers uncle and nephew	The stele is still standing in front of the Jokhang — the most tangible object in this whole story
877	The Tibetan empire breaks apart; roughly four centuries of competing local powers follow	A long gap, and an important one: it is when the great monasteries became the powers that actually governed
1247	Sakya Pandita meets the Mongol prince Godan at Liangzhou and negotiates the terms of Tibetan submission	The step that brings the plateau into central administration
1264 / 1288	Kublai creates a bureau to oversee Buddhist affairs and Tibetan local government; in 1288 it is renamed the Xuanzheng Yuan	"Administered since the Yuan" is the standard formulation. This is the institution behind it
1368	The Ming inherit the arrangement, dividing the plateau into Ü-Tsang and Kham commands and ruling by granting many titles rather than backing one house	Part of why the region's politics stayed fragmented for so long
1653 / 1713	The Qing court confers the titles Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni	Both titles, as the world now uses them, are Qing creations
1727	The Qing station an imperial resident in Lhasa. The same period fixes the boundary between Tibet and Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai	The administrative line you are driving across was drawn in this decade
1793	The Qing issue the twenty-nine-article ordinance for the governance of Tibet, establishing the golden urn lottery for recognising reincarnations	The golden urn is a phrase travellers ask about; this is where it comes from
1888 / 1903–04	British forces invade Tibet twice from India; local troops resist both times	The colonial-era turning point, and much of the reason "Tibet" is still a live political word in Europe
1951	The Seventeen-Point Agreement is signed. The People's Liberation Army enters Lhasa in October	The modern era begins
1959	An uprising is put down; on 28 March the State Council dissolves the local government, and the democratic reform that follows abolishes the feudal serf system	The period most often asked about, and the one most worth having in order
1965	The Tibet Autonomous Region is formally established	Note the asymmetry, which is genuinely useful: Garzê and Aba in Sichuan are autonomous prefectures, not an autonomous region

What you are standing in front of

The most useful part of this page, I think. When you are at the door of the place, this is the one thing worth knowing.

Printing at the Dêgê Printing House — two printers to a block, the same paired motion since 1729.

Dêgê Printing House · 1729

Begun in 1729 under the ruling house of Dêgê, and some thirty years in the making. It holds roughly 320,000 printing blocks — over 200,000 of them old — for more than 830 titles, and it is one of the three great printing houses of the Tibetan world, the others being at Lhasa and Shigatse. A national key cultural relic since 1996; the block-printing technique went onto UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009. The paper is made from the root of a local shrub, which is why the insects leave it alone and the pages are still legible.

Changqingchun Ke'er · Litang, 1580

Founded at the initiative of the Third Dalai Lama, Sönam Gyatso — the great Geluk monastery of Kham, and the one whose rooftops you see above the town.

Litang and the Seventh Dalai Lama · 1708

Kelsang Gyatso, the Seventh Dalai Lama, was born at Litang in 1708. The trail that led the search party there is said to have come from a line of the Sixth Dalai Lama's poetry: the white crane — lend me your wings; I will not fly far, only to Litang, and back.

Tagong Monastery · the story, and the record

A Sakya monastery, known here as "the little Jokhang", built around a statue of the Buddha at twelve. The story told about it is a legend, not history — there is a section on it further down, because it is the one place on this road where that difference matters most.

The Muyal Golden Stupa · Tagong, 1997

Nyingma, built with the support of a lama from Dzogchen Monastery; over a hundred kilograms of gold went onto the roof. It is often taken for something ancient and is not — which is a useful reminder about how this plateau works: new buildings go up on very old sites.

Baili Monastery · Ganzi county, 1936

Associated with the Fifth Geda Rinpoche. In 1936 the Red Army passed through Ganzi on the Long March and was given support here; there is a memorial in the county today.

Larung Gar · Sêrtar (Seda), 1880 and 1980

Two beginnings, and this is the part people get wrong. A Nyingma retreat was established in the Larung valley in 1880. The academy itself was founded in 1980 by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, with thirty-two students. It is Nyingma, and it sits at about 3,900 m.

Danba's watchtowers · Tang to Qing

The stone towers of Suopo and Zhonglu, in the Rgyalrong (Jiarong) Tibetan villages — 166 standing today, and by the account of the prefecture's own government the surviving ones run from the Tang to the Qing. Stone tower-building in these gorges is older than that: it is described in the Book of the Later Han, in the first or second century AD, as qionglong — dwellings of piled stone, some of them ten zhang high. What nobody agrees on is how old any particular tower is, so be careful of anyone who gives you a number.

Ganden Sumtseling · Shangri-La, 1679–1681

The largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery complex in Yunnan and the Geluk centre of the Yunnan–Sichuan borderland, known as "the little Potala".

Jyekundo Monastery · Yushu, late 14th century

The Sakya monastery on the hill above the town — the one you climb to before you enter Yushu, with the whole valley below it. Its usual founding date is 1398, and the Ninth Panchen Lama died here in 1937.

The Gyanak mani wall · Yushu, 1715

The great mani-stone pile at Xinzha, begun in 1715 by the first Gyanak Rinpoche of Jyekundo Monastery. Listed as a national key cultural relic in 2006, and entered in the Guinness records in 2002. It is a heap of carved stones that has been growing for three centuries. As to how many stones are in it — published counts run from a quarter of a billion to four billion, and no two sources agree. Treat any number you read, including anywhere on this site, as approximate.

What is history here, and what is story

Tibetans tell stories about their landscape. They are good stories, and they are not lies — but they are not records either, and it is worth keeping the two apart in your own head. Three cases, in the order you will meet them.

The Princess Wencheng story at Tagong — legend

The story told at Tagong goes like this. Crossing the Tagong grassland on her way to marry in Tibet, Princess Wencheng's party found that the statue of the Buddha at twelve, which she was carrying to Lhasa, had sunk into the mud and would not be moved. The statue spoke: it wished to stay. So a copy was cast from local gold sand and left at Tagong, and the original went on. While the copy was being made, its lower half was carved by hand and its upper half appeared by itself, overnight. Which is why Tagong's monastery is called the little Jokhang.

What the record says: the princess travelled to Tibet by way of Qinghai. Tagong is a long way east of that road, and she did not pass through it. The story is not history.

That does not make it worthless — quite the opposite. It is told because Tibetans have held Princess Wencheng in particular regard for thirteen centuries, and because a story that places her here says something about how this grassland sees itself. A story can be untrue and still be true about the people who tell it. Tell it as what it is, and it lands harder than it would if you passed it off as fact.

Two buildings next to each other, two different schools

At Tagong the monastery compound and the golden stupa stand a few hundred metres apart, and they are not the same institution. Tagong Monastery is Sakya. The Muyal Golden Stupa beside it is Nyingma. This is the mix-up I see most often, and it is the kind of thing a guest who knows Tibetan Buddhism will notice immediately.

Sêrtar is not a 1980 invention

The usual sentence — "the Larung academy was founded in 1980" — is about the academy, and it is right as far as it goes, but it is not the whole thing. The valley has been a Nyingma retreat since 1880. Say both and you are saying something most visitors do not know; say only the second and you make a place with a century and a half of history sound like a recent project.

Which monastery belongs to which school

Tibetan Buddhism is not one thing. You pass through three of its schools on these routes, sometimes within an hour of each other, and knowing which is which is most of what makes a monastery readable.

School	What the name means	Where you meet it
Nyingma	the Ancient Ones — the oldest school, tracing its transmission to the eighth century	The Muyal Golden Stupa at Tagong, Larung Gar at Sêrtar, Kathok
Sakya	pale earth — named for the grey soil of its founding monastery	Tagong Monastery, Jyekundo Monastery at Yushu
Geluk	the virtuous tradition — the school of the Dalai Lamas, founded by Tsongkhapa	Changqingchun at Litang, Sumtseling at Shangri-La
Kagyu	the oral lineage — the school of Milarepa	Rare on these particular routes

A note on the sources

Most of what is above is administrative and modern history, and it rests on Chinese official publications — embassy statements, the state Tibet portal, the news agencies. Some of it is the documentation of a particular building, which in this region usually means a local-government page or an encyclopaedia entry rather than a scholarly monograph. I have said which is which below, because you should know how much weight each one carries. Where sources conflict — the number of stones in the Gyanak mani wall is the clearest case — I have written down the disagreement instead of picking a winner. Where I could not find a reliable source at all, the claim is simply not on this page.

1. China's Tibet Online, Shihua Zangzu — the three traditional regions.
2. People's Daily app, How much do you know about Tibet — the three traditional regions.
3. A study of the formation of the three traditional Tibetan regions, drawing on Dunhuang Tibetan manuscript P.T.1288 — the regional division and its historical layers.
4. Embassy of China in New Zealand, Tibet has been an inalienable part of Chinese territory since ancient times — the Yuan and Ming administration, the census counts, the post stations.
5. Consulate-General of China in Strasbourg, Sovereignty over Tibet — the Qing institutions, the 1793 ordinance and the golden urn.
6. China's Tibet Online, The peaceful liberation and prosperity of Tibet (April 2025) — 1951, 1959 and 1965.
7. China Qiaowang, An outline of Tibetan history — the general chronology.
8. China's Tibet Online, The Dêgê Printing House, a place where Tibetan Buddhist culture was carried forward; and China News Service, Inside the century-old Dêgê Printing House — the 1729 founding, the block and title counts, the paper.
9. People's Daily Online, A walk on the Tagong grassland (30 October 2013) — the source for the statement that Princess Wencheng's route to Tibet lay through Qinghai and did not pass Tagong.
10. Sina Buddhism, Larung Gar, Sêrtar — the 1880 retreat and the 1980 founding. An encyclopaedic account rather than a scholarly one; the two dates are not in dispute.
11. China Daily, The Xinzha Gyanak mani-stone city, called the world's first stone-engraved library (22 August 2025) — the 1715 founding, the 2002 Guinness entry and the 2006 national relic listing. This is also the source that puts the current count at roughly four billion stones, against the several hundred million given in older accounts — which is why no number appears in the text.
12. Tibet Online, Jyekundo Monastery — the Sakya affiliation, the 1398 founding date, and the death of the Ninth Panchen Lama there in 1937.
13. Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture People's Government, The ancient towers of Danba (2012) — the Tang to Qing dating and the count of 166 standing towers.
14. Chinese National Geography, Danba: a thousand towers in the Hengduan mountains — the Book of the Later Han reference and the qionglong terminology.
15. Sogou Encyclopaedia, The Seventh Dalai Lama — the birth at Litang in 1708. Encyclopaedic; treated here as indicative rather than authoritative.
16. Sohu, Walking the tea-horse road again: Ganden Sumtseling — the 1679–1681 construction dates. The weakest source on this list, and flagged as such.

Driving this road and want to know what you are looking at? Write to me — I will tell you what I know about the stretch you are on.