Southern Tibet

Southern Tibet is a literal translation of the Chinese term "藏南" (pinyin: Zàng Nán), which may refer to different geographic areas:

The southern part of Tibet, covering the middle reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River Valley between Saga County to the west and Mainling County to the east, as well as neighbouring areas located between the Himalayas to the south and the Transhimalayas range to the north. The region extends around 1,000 km from west to east and 300 km from north to south. By this definition, Southern Tibet includes most of modern-day Shigatse, Lhasa, Lhoka (Shannan) Prefecture and Nyingchi Prefecture.

Southern Tibet may also refer to a shorter section of the Yarlung Tsangpo and tributaries covering most of Lhoka and Nyingchi Prefectures from the confluence with the Lhasa River to the west up to the beginning of the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon near Mainling County to the east.

When used in relation to the Sino-Indian border dispute, Southern Tibet is a term mainly used by the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan, ROC) to refer to an area south of the McMahon Line, part of the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. This region was recognised by the de facto independent state of Tibet (1912–1951) as belonging to British India under the McMahon Line Agreement (part of the 1914 Simla Convention). The PRC does not recognise the McMahon Line and claims that the area is a part of the Tibet Autonomous Region instead. The Dalai Lama, the head of the Central Tibetan Administration, did not recognize Arunachal Pradesh as part of India until 2003 claiming it part of Tibet. According to Hsiao-ting Lin and other western-backed scholars, both the British and the Chinese claim to sovereignty over the area can be deemed "largely imaginary", reflected only in official maps and political propaganda.

References

  1. ↑ Shi, Feng; Wang, Yanbin; Yu, Tony; Zhu, Lupei; Zhang, Junfeng; Wen, Jianguo; Gasc, Julien; Incel, Sarah; Schubnel, Alexandre; Li, Ziyu; Chen, Tao; Liu, Wenlong; Prakapenka, Vitali; Jin, Zhenmin (2018-08-28). "Lower-crustal earthquakes in southern Tibet are linked to eclogitization of dry metastable granulite". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 3483. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.3483S. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05964-1. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 6113232. PMID 30154406.
  2. ↑ Tremblay, Marissa M.; Fox, Matthew; Schmidt, Jennifer L.; Tripathy-Lang, Alka; Wielicki, Matthew M.; Harrison, T. Mark; Zeitler, Peter K.; Shuster, David L. (2015-09-29). "Erosion in southern Tibet shut down at ∼10 Ma due to enhanced rock uplift within the Himalaya". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (39): 12030–12035. Bibcode:2015PNAS..11212030T. doi:10.1073/pnas.1515652112. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4593086. PMID 26371325.
  3. ↑ Kola-Ojo, O; Meissner, R (2001-02-01). "Southern Tibet: its deep seismic structure and some tectonic implications". Journal of Asian Earth Sciences. 19 (1): 249–256. Bibcode:2001JAESc..19..249K. doi:10.1016/S1367-9120(00)00041-9. ISSN 1367-9120.
  4. ↑ Li, I-chuang (September 2009). "中印邊界談判與非武力解決共識" [Sino-Indian border negotiations and the consensus on peaceful resolution] (PDF). Ministry of Justice (Taiwan). Retrieved 2026-09-07. 中國方面自中華民國政府至中華人民共和國政府均未承認過「麥克馬洪線」。中方稱此一區域為「藏南」。 [The Chinese side, from the Republic of China government to the People's Republic of China government, has never recognized the 'McMahon Line'. The Chinese side calls this region 'South Tibet'.]
  5. ↑ Liao, Wen-shuo (March 2024). "India-China Disputes and the Development of Taiwan-India Relations, 1961-1966" (PDF). Academia Historica. Retrieved 2026-09-07.
  6. ↑ Lin, Yu-fang (2013-07-23). "立法院". 立法院 (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Legislative Yuan. Retrieved 2026-09-07. 小學生都知道麥克馬洪線有未定界，不能這樣就認了。 [even elementary school students know the McMahon Line is an undetermined boundary [未定界], we cannot just concede it]
  7. ↑ Smith, Jeff M. (2014), "Defining the Dispute", Cold Peace: India-China Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century, Lexington Books, p. 27, ISBN 978-0-7391-8279-6, Though not readily apparent in the above map [of China's claim line], the first notable feature about China's claim line is that it does not include the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh (as better seen in map 2.1 [of the Sino-Indian border dispute]). ... The other notable feature of China's claim line is that it includes a narrow sliver of the Indian state of Assam north of the Brahmaputra River. This tract of claimed land in Assam appears to be roughly 180 kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide at its widest point.
  8. ↑ "帝国遗梦: 中国印度的三段边境争议" [The Last Dream of an Empire: Three Border Disputes between China and India]. BBC News (in Simplified Chinese). 2020-05-27. Retrieved 2025-05-16.
  9. ↑ Lin, Hsiao-ting (2004), "Boundary, sovereignty, and imagination: Reconsidering the frontier disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914–47", The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32 (3): 25–47, doi:10.1080/0308653042000279650, S2CID 159560382: "... the professed sovereignties claimed by both Republican China and British India over the Assam-Tibetan tribal territory were largely imaginary, existing merely on official maps and political propagandas. .... More significantly, the war against Japanese encroachment also made it inevitable that the Kuomintang government would be obliged to [..] face the reality that its claimed sovereignty over the Sino-Indian frontier regions was in fact imaginary. ... China's sovereignty over the Tibet-Assam frontier thus existed only in cartography and imagination."
  10. ↑ Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice (2016), Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962, Cambridge University Press, pp. 55–57, ISBN 978-1-107-17679-9: "The contrast between Republican China's sensitivity towards its imaginary sovereignty and the British Empire's apparent forgetfulness in this regard are connected with the fact that British and Qing expansion attempts had very different 'sovereignty goals' in the eastern Himalayas. [British India's] vision followed an imperial logic: the eastern Himalayas should be a buffer between India and its neighbourhood. Confronted by Chinese expansionism, their aim was limited to achieving external sovereignty over the region – that is, to ensure that no foreign power would intrude into the eastern Himalayas, and that local people would have 'no relations or intercourse with any Foreign Power other than the British Government'."
  11. ↑ Caroe, Olaf (April 1963), "The Sino-Indian Frontier Dispute", Asian Review, LIX (218): 72–73 – via archive.org: "[The Times] actually shows the frontier before 1914 down here [at the foothills]; it never was. The Tibetans never penetrated this area, except for one or two monasteries right up in the north of it (Tawang was one of them), where monks levied certain monastic dues. The fact of the matter is that this area was a tribal, sort of semi-autonomous, area on the frontier of Assam..."
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