A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

We transcribed Chinese terms in pinyin and generally gave Tibetan terms a more readable romanized transcription in the text. The correct spelling of these terms using Tibetan characters can be found in the glossary. In the notes, we also transcribed Tibetan terms according to Wylie’s system of transliteration. Names of monasteries were given a readable phonetic romanized form in the text, with transcriptions according to Wylie sometimes given along with the Chinese name of the monastery when available. We regret that in a few cases we were not able to find the proper Tibetan name of a monastery in our Chinese-language sources, and in such cases we provide only the Chinese name.

For place-names, we use the Tibetan name in a romanized form and give the most common transliteration from Chinese in parentheses the first time the name appears in the chapter. The proper Tibetan transcriptions (according to Wylie) are in appendix 5. The romanized forms and Wylie transcriptions of all Tibetan county names are those used by the Amnye Machen Institute. Maps are bilingual, using romanized Tibetan forms (not Wylie’s) and pinyin Chinese.

After careful consideration, we concluded that it would be impractical to use Tibetan place-names without providing the Chinese equivalents. This is because the Tibetan names do not appear in any available Chinese maps or in any other published Chinese sources and are sometimes not even used by the majority of those living in the locality. Tibetan place-names are becoming obsolete in many of the areas under study, which is in itself another aspect of the problem discussed in this book.