Kangding

Kangding (Chinese: 康定), also known as Dartsedo (Tibetan: དར་རྩེ་མདོ།), is a county-level city and the seat of Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province of Southwest China. Kangding is on the bank of the Zheduo River and has been considered the historical border between the Kham region of Tibet and the Sichuan region. Kangding's urban center is called Lucheng, which has around 134,000 inhabitants.

Historically, the urban center was known in Chinese as Dajianlu (Chinese: 打箭炉, also transliterated Tachienlu or Tatsienlu) from the Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan name Dartsedo or Darzêdo.

Kangding was on the historical border between Tibet and China. From Kangding to the west lies Tibetan civilization, whereas to the east are 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 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 ruined nearly the entire city.

The city was renamed 'Kangding' in 1904.^{[citation needed]} The American author Dorris Shelton Still, author of Sue in Tibet, was born here.

During the time of the Republic of China administration, Kangding was the capital of the now-defunct province of Xikang.

Dartsedo had a "reform through labor" prison or laogai 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 Sichuan. By the roadside the authorities opened a mass grave 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."

Dartsedo was particularly famous in France under the name 'Tatsienlou' in the 19th and earl 20th century as famous French travellers visited it, such as Alexandra David-Néel, Joseph Gabet and Évariste Huc, Gabriel Bonvalot and prince Henri d'Orléans or Victor Segalen.