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What we think of as “Tibet” is actually quite fuzzy. Any unified “Tibet” ended in the 10th century with the collapse of the Tibetan empire. The last king, Langdarma, persecuted Buddhists and was assassinated, throwing the empire in disarray. It took a century and a half for Tibetan affairs to stabilize but subsequent authorities such as the Dalai lamas failed to reunite the plateau. As a result, the three provinces of the Tibetan plateau, U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, lacked a centralized government and a clear sense of borders.

Most often people are referring to U-Tsang when they are discussing “Tibet”. This area was ruled by the Dalai lamas and is now referred to as the Tibetan Autonomous Region or the more grimly acronymed TAR. Beyond U-Tsang, a host of smaller kingdoms populated Kham and Amdo. These kingdoms maintained relations with Lhasa and Beijing yet maintained independence of both.

U-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo, however, are all identifiably Tibetan. They share history, culture, and and linguistic characteristics influenced by Buddhist and Bön beliefs and the Tibetan empire. Some scholars have suggested the appeal of the Gesar Epic has been how it alludes to the kings of the Tibetan Empire, a memory that unites the peoples of the Tibetan Plateau.

The issue of Tibet’s borders was a thorny one when China, Britain and various colonial powers sat down at the Simla conference in 1914. China’s attitude to the Tibetan plateau was initially quite ambiguous but shifted once the colonial powers of Britain and Russia expressed interest in Tibetan resources. China ultimately sat out the conference while Britain went on to define two types of Tibetan territory. One was “political Tibet”, the region ruled by the Dalai lamas. The other, “anthropological Tibet”, covered the provinces of Kham and Amdo. Despite the ambiguity of the designations, they clearly recognized “Tibet” as the entire plateau and acknowledged its cultural, historical, and linguistic continuity.