Kangding (), also called Tachienlu and Dartsedo (; ), is a

county-level city A county-level municipality (), county-level city or county city, formerly known as prefecture-controlled city (1949–1970: ; 1970–1983: ), is a county-level administrative division of the People's Republic of China. County-level ...

and the seat of

Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, often shortened to Ganzi Prefecture, is an autonomous prefecture in the western arm of Sichuan province, China, bordering Yunnan to the south, the Tibet Autonomous Region to the west, and Gansu to the north ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of t ...

province of Southwest China. Kangding is on the bank of the

Dadu River The Dadu River (), known in Tibetan as the Gyelmo Ngul Chu, is a major river located primarily in Sichuan province, southwestern China. The Dadu flows from the eastern Tibetan Plateau into the Sichuan Basin where it joins with the Min River, a t ...

and has been considered the historical border between the

Kham Kham (; ) is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions, the others being Amdo in the northeast, and Ü-Tsang in central Tibet. The original residents of Kham are called Khampas (), and were governed locally by chieftains and monasteries. Kham ...

region of Tibet and the Sichuan region. Kangding's urban center is called Lucheng, which has around 134,000 inhabitants.

Names

Historically, the urban center was known by Chinese as Dajianlu (written also as Tachienlu or Tatsienlu) from the Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan name Dartsedo or Darzêdo.

History

Kangding was on the historical border between Tibet and the rest of China, from Kangding to the west lies Tibetan civilization where as to the east Han cultural areas; It was the capital of the Kingdom of Chakla. During its history, Kangding has witnessed many conflicts between Tibetan and Han polities. Kangding was for many centuries an important trading city where Han brick tea was carried by porters from

Chengdu Chengdu (, ; simplified Chinese: 成都; pinyin: ''Chéngdū''; Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: ), alternatively romanized as Chengtu, is a sub-provincial city which serves as the capital of the Chinese provin ...

and other centres to trade for Tibetan wool. A dispute involving the sovereignty over the city between Tibet and the Qing was resolved when the Manchu forces took the city by storm in the Battle of Dartsedo in 1701. On July 1, 1786 an earthquake of 7.75 on the

Moment magnitude scale The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with or Mw, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on its seismic moment. It was defined in a 1979 pa ...

ruined nearly the entire city. :"Tachienlu is surely sui generis; there can be no other town quite like it. Situated eight thousand four hundred feet above the sea, it seems to lie at the bottom of a well, the surrounding snow-capped mountains towering perhaps fifteen thousand feet in the air above the little town which, small as it is, has hardly room to stand, while outside the wall there is scarcely a foot of level ground. It is wedged into the angle where three valleys come together, the Tar and the Chen rivers meeting just below the town to form the Tarchendo, and our first view of the place as we turned the cliff corner that here bars the gorge, was very striking, grey walls and curly roofs standing out sharply from the flanking hillsides." The city was renamed 'Kangding' in 1904. The American author Dorris Shelton Still, author of "Sue in Tibet", was born here. During time of the

Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeas ...

administration, Kangding was the capital of the now-defunct province of

Xikang Xikang (also Sikang or Hsikang) was a nominal province formed by the Republic of China in 1939 on the initiative of prominent Sichuan warlord Liu Wenhui and continued by the early People's Republic of China. Thei idea was to form a single unif ...

. Dartsedo had a "reform through labor" prison or

laogai ''Laogai'' (), short for ''laodong gaizao'' (), which means reform through labor, is a criminal justice system involving the use of penal labor and prison farms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and North Korea (DPRK). ''Láogǎi'' i ...

after 1959. Jasper Becker in '' Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine'' wrote, "The highest death rate was probably experienced by the Tibetans imprisoned after the abortive revolt of 1959. One survivor, Ama Adhe, describes in ''A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands'' what happened at the Dartsedo camp bordering

. By the roadside the authorities opened a

mass grave A mass grave is a grave containing multiple human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. The United Nations has defined a criminal mass grave as a burial site containing three or more victims of execution, although an exact ...

which was filled with corpses and gave off a terrible stench. 'Every day,' she recalls, 'they would deliver nine or ten truck loads of bodies to put there...' Of the 300 women arrested with her, only 100 survived."

Climate

Kangding has a

monsoon A monsoon () is traditionally a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal oscil ...

-influenced climate, lying in the transition between a

humid continental A humid continental climate is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and freez ...

(''Dwb'') and a

subtropical highland climate An oceanic climate, also known as a marine climate, is the humid temperate climate sub-type in Köppen classification ''Cfb'', typical of west coasts in higher middle latitudes of continents, generally featuring cool summers and mild winters ...

(''Cwb'') on the Köppen system. Despite the elevation of , the

diurnal temperature variation In meteorology, diurnal temperature variation is the variation between a high air temperature and a low temperature that occurs during the same day. Temperature lag Temperature lag is an important factor in diurnal temperature variation: peak da ...

averages at most in any month. From April to September, rain is a very common occurrence, with around two-thirds of the days receiving some rainfall; in addition, 77% of the annual precipitation is delivered from May to September. Monthly daily average temperatures range from in January to in July; the annual mean is . Over the course of the year, the frost-free period lasts 177 days and there are 1,738 hours of sunshine. The highest temperature ever recorded in Kangding was a high temperature record of measured on March 30, 2007.

Administrative divisions

Kangding is divided into three

towns A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an or ...

and 18

townships A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, C ...

: * Lucheng * Guzan * Xinduqiao * Yala *

Shiji ''Records of the Grand Historian'', also known by its Chinese name ''Shiji'', is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The ''Records'' was written in the early 1st century by the ancient Chinese his ...

* Qianxi * Shelian * Maibeng * Sanhe * Jintang * Pengta * Shade * Gonggashan * Pusharong * Jiju Township * Waze Township * Xiaba * Jiagenba * Pengbuxi * Tagong * Kongyu

Description

Kangding is located in a valley of the

Tibetan Plateau The Tibetan Plateau (, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or the Qing–Zang Plateau () or as the Himalayan Plateau in India, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia covering most of the Ti ...

about west-southwest of

, the provincial capital, and west of

Ya'an Ya'an (, Tibetan: Yak-Nga ) is a prefecture-level city in the western part of Sichuan province, China, located just below the Tibetan Plateau. The city is home to Sichuan Agricultural University, the only 211 Project university and the largest ...

. It is a city populated by significant proportions of both Tibetans and Han, and is part of the historical

Tibet Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa people, ...

an region of

. The raging Zheduo River flows through the city, thus the constant sound of water reverberates throughout much of the city. At the north end of Kangding near the bus station the Zheduo River converges with the Yala River. The city features a sizable square, People's Square, where young and old alike gather in the early hours of the morning to do Tai Chi, play badminton, or socialise. This square comes alive on the weekends as well, when families tend to fill it. Traditional Tibetan and Sichuanese restaurants are easily found throughout the city. Dentok, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery sits on the Paoma Mountain overlooking the city, and is accessible by cable car. As of October 2006, a stone amphitheatre is under construction at the upper monastery. It is a fast-growing city, with a rapidly developing tourist infrastructure, including a scenic cable car imported from Germany. In 2008 the PRC government opened an airport at Kangding in the province of Sichuan, with a runway. At the time this was the second-highest in the world, at above sea level, with the highest position held by Qamdo Bamda Airport at 4,400m. Since 2013, with the opening of the

Daocheng Yading Airport Daocheng Yading Airport ( zh, 稻城亚丁机场, bo, འདབ་པའི་ཉི་བརྟེན་གནམ་གྲུ་ཐང་, ) is an airport serving Daocheng County in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province ...

at an elevation 4,411m, Kangding Airport is the third highest in the world. The folk song '' Kangding Qingge'' enjoys popularity throughout China. Since Kangding city was a major town for trading of cloth and tea between Tibetans and Han people. With the increase of trade in Kangding it also attracted more traders with different nationalities creating this culturally diverse city today. Therefore singers also incorporate the music style of Tibet to acknowledge the diversity.WANG, BO. “A Study of Folk Songs in Kangding City, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.” DEStech Transactions on Social Science, Education and Human Science, no. icpcs, 3 Mar. 2020, 10.12783/dtssehs/icpcs2020/33885. Accessed 8 Aug. 2020. Kangding contains some notable Buddhist monasteries, including Nanwu Si Monastery, Anjue Monastery and Jinggang Monastery. It was from 1857 the see of the

Roman Catholic Diocese of Kangding The Roman Catholic Diocese of Kangding/Kanting ( la, Dioecesis Camtimensis, zh, t=天主教康定教區) is a Latin diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the Metropolitan of Chongqing in western China, but still dependent on the Roman Missi ...

, administered by

Paris Foreign Missions Society The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris (french: Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, short M.E.P.) is a Roman Catholic missionary organization. It is not a religious institute, but an organization of secular priests and lay persons de ...

. The Catholic church was destroyed during the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goa ...

and rebuilt in the 1980s. Today it is no longer in use and has been converted to shops and a hotel.

Transport

* Kangding Airport *

China National Highway 318 China National Highway 318 (G318) runs from Shanghai to Zhangmu on the China-Nepal border. It is the longest China National Highway at in length and runs west from Shanghai towards Zhejiang, Anhui, Hubei, Chongqing, Sichuan, and ends in Tibet Au ...

* () Ya'an–Kangding Section

References

Notes

Bibliography

*Dorje, Gyurme (1999). ''Footprint Tibet Handbook with Bhutan''. 2nd Edition. Footprint Handbooks, Bath, England. . * Forbes, Andrew ; Henley, David (2011). ''China's Ancient Tea Horse Road''. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. ASIN: B005DQV7Q2 *Kendall, Elizabeth (1913). ''A Wayfarer in China: Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia''. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. Boston and New York. *Leffman, David, et al. (2005). ''The Rough Guide to China''. 4th Edition. Rough Guides, New York, London, Delhi. .

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kangding (City) Populated places in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture County-level cities in Sichuan