Kham Project

Throughout the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), more and more travelers –officials, military and merchants- went to the Southwest border of China and dedicated some of their time to writing travel accounts,

From 1907 to 1911, some 4,000 commoners from the Sichuan Basin ventured west. Enticed by promises of large tracts of uncultivated land and three years of free rent, seeds, animals, and farm implements

When a nation-state looks to intensive agriculture for its national essence, what are the implications at the local level? This paper looks at agricultural colonization efforts (tunken屯垦) of the

This conference is an outcome of the collaborative ERC-funded research project “Territories, Communities, and Exchanges in the Sino-Tibetan Kham Borderlands” This research project focuses on the

As a member of a deeply-rooted traditional craft-making family in the Meshö (Sman Shod) Valley of Kham region, I will present the results of my ongoing fieldwork and academic study on the renaissance

In this paper, I will begin by considering the concept of “house society” and its applicability to Southwest China. I ask the question of why no scholar, Levi-Strauss included since he originally

Two weddings in 2009 and 2015 respectively have received wide publicity among Tibetans and others within and out of China. The first was that of Lobsang Dundrup, a renowned singer from Gyalrong, and

This paper discuses rivalry for the throne of Dergé between 1890 and 1940. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, internecine feuds created a power vacuum serious enough to invite

The Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) sent their first missionary on an exploratory mission to the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in 1847, and they retained a presence in the region until 1952. Together

In recent years, increasingly sophisticated work has traced the remarkable changes in early twentieth-century state-building along China's southwestern and Tibetan borderlands. During this same period

Frontier territories characterised by intense socio-economic, political, and cultural inter-actions, in the mid-nineteenth century the easternmost fringes of the Tibetan plateau saw the rise of the

The practice of a non-contractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive visiting sexual system among a matrilineal group in Southwest China has generated as much interest in anthropology as in the mass

Pre-1959 Tibet was not a “closed off land” as is often assumed, but a place of dynamic economic structures and a diverse body of economic actors. The Trehor region, an area located in modern day

This paper examines the fascinating life of Wangchuk Tempa 汪学鼎 (1886-1961), the de facto early-twentieth-century political and military leader of Gyalthang (rGyal Thang) in southern Kham, in order to

This project seeks to discern the physical and conceptual boundaries of the Tibetan region of Gyalthang, in southern Kham.  At issue are questions about the relationships between older

For centuries, Central Tibet and its capital Lhasa were regarded as the center—as is obviously expressed in the very name of the region in Tibetan, dBus, “Center”—of political and religious life in