Talk:Chengguan, Chamdo

How reliable are Lonely planet books as historic sources?

I have the impression that many the Lonely Planet Books served as the many (until now maybesingle) sources for this lemma. How reliable can they be? I hold the Lonely Planet Guidebooks in high esteem, but quality differs much with the authors, and we should be aware that guidebooks inform about almost every aspect - and who can know every aspect?

• I found the distance between Lhasa and Chamdo and the altitude of Chamdo were wrong, and the number of monks and inhabitants should be related to some historic sources, as should some other information.

Please be more careful with data. As for instance, in sources I know Chamdo at the beginning of the 20th century was related to as a small garrison town. I doubt it had 12.000 inhabitants and 3000 monks by then.

• Furthermore, we should ask the one who wrote: "At the turn of the 20th century..." at the turn of what to what? does he mean at the turn of the 19th to the 20th or 20th to the 21st century?
• In my eyes, sentences like "Chamdo, and the region around, it is the centre for the fierce Khampa tribesmen." belong to an adventure book, but not ton encyclopaedia of the 21st century. Hoohoo, the firce Khampas!! Are they all alike? who said that? Heinrich Harrer, yes, and some Lhasa people who look down on east Tibetan barbarians. Is that what we want to perpetuate?

--Wickipedinger (talk) 09:42, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Requested move 1

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was

Qamdo (town) → Chamdo — This article was recently moved from Chamdo to Qamdo (town) with no discussion. The edit summary was "official name", but I am aware of no naming convention requires the article title to be the official name. Note also that "Chamdo" and "Qamdo" are different transcriptions of the same underlying Tibetan name, so the issue here is not even the "official name" but the "official transcription of the official name".—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 05:39, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose Why have Chamdo town, but Qamdo Prefecture and Qamdo County? All three share the same name and should be translated/transliterated in the same way, whichever way that is. Would support a move to Qamdo, moving the disambiguation page to Qamdo (disambiguation), or even doing away with the disambiguation page entirely and redirecting by hatnotes. The town is clearly the primary topic, after which the other two institutions are named. Alternatively, move the town to Chamdo, and move the other two entities to Chamdo Prefecture and Chamdo County. Skinsmoke (talk) 08:32, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
• Comment And this sort of mess, Greg, is why there should be a clear convention for Tibetan placenames. Skinsmoke (talk) 08:36, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment I can see an argument for moving those other pages to Chamdo XYZ, but I don't see an argument for moving this page to Qamdo (town). It would be more consistent, but if Qamdo is the wrong title, using it consistently doesn't seem like a virtue.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 12:16, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
• Comment I would be quite happy either way round, from the point of view of consistency. However, why not wait and see what the Naming Convention discussion produces. Must admit that, when I had a look at it, I found it difficult to work out where the preferred names were derived from, and was completely confused. Not being an expert on Tibetan names, if I could see a policy that said we use X transliteration system from X language, I would be happier. It strikes me the proposed policy seems to be based on whatever Lonely Planet uses, but perhaps I'm reading it wrong. Skinsmoke (talk) 18:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

New proposal for Tibetan naming conventions

Partly in response to the "requested move" discussion on this page, I put up a new proposal for Tibetan naming conventions. Please see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Tibetan) and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan)#New naming convention proposal. This could affect the title that is eventually decided for this article. Your comments and feedback are requested.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 23:38, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I think one of the basic problems is due to the fact that the Chinese have gone right through Tibet changing spellings to approximate Pinyin equivalents of Tibetan names or, in other cases, using a totally different Chinese name for places that have been known by Tibetan names for centuries. These are now regarded as the "official" names because China controls Tibet. Another problem is, of course, that there are various ways of transliterating Tibetan into a Roman alphabet. Unfortunately, I have no easy solution to offer other than, where a form has become reasonably well-known in the English-speaking world (such as Lhasa, Shigatse, Gyantse, Chamdo, Kham, etc.) to continue to use them. With lesser-known names I don't know what to suggest - but it would be a very great help to those of us working on Tibetan articles to have some guidelines.John Hill (talk) 22:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Page title

Everything about the conventions used on this page is absurd. Here are some of the absurdities:

Chengguan, supposedly the name of this "town", is NOT a specific geographical name. It is simply a Chinese word meaning "urban gateway" that can be applied to the urban center of any town, as stated on the wikipedia page for Lhasa. Pretending that Chengguan is the name of Chamdo town is like pretending that the real name of Sydney is "CBD". It is absurd that this is in the title pretending to be the name of the town.

This page is for the town (or third-largest city, the words town and city apparently being used interchangeably, that's fine) named Chamdo that had a population of 45k in 2010. That's fine. However, the note at the top of the page pretends there is an associated city ("This article is about the town. For the city, see Chamdo"). If you click on that, you go to a page about a place called Chamdo that is emphatically not a city, it has an area of over 100,000km2 which is is fifty times the size of any of the largest cities on earth. That's not a city. It's a province. Translating whatever the underlying Chinese term for this is as "prefecture-level city" is nothing more or less than abuse of the English language.

Nobody expects to find the same place with the same name (whether Lhasa, Chamdo, Shigatse or Gyantse) to have a "town" with normal city/town dimensions, and a "city" with the dimensions of a province. The result is people are seriously misinformed about the area and population of Tibetan cities if they read Wikipedia.

For example, if you try to use Wikipedia and Google to compare the size of Gyantse and Shigatse, you get 68,650 vs 845,000.  Hmm, I guess Gyantse is tiny and Shigatse is incredibly huge. Oh, wait, you actually have to figure out that the city called Shigatse is not under the Wikipedia page for Shigatse, it's under the Wikipedia page for "Samzhubzê District" and the correct population figure is 158,290, so the two places are far more comparable in size. Same for Lhasa. Same for Chamdo, whose population is not what you get if you google "population of Chamdo", which tells you the population is almost 800,000 and sends you to the page for the "prefecture-level city" that has an area larger than Iceland.

The names of Tibetan cities (Lhasa, Gyantse, Shigatse, Chamdo, Tsetang) should each have a wikipedia page for the city with a population and area that is city-sized, whatever the terminology may be in Chinese. And the pages for the much larger provinces should make it unambiguously clear that they refer to a province, not a city. Remsunintun (talk) 13:59, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I broke this out into a new subsection because this discussion is unrelated to the old "Naming convention" proposal.

The problem here is that the Chinese have strange terminology such as "prefecture-level cities", which are supposed to be called "cities" rather than "prefectures". (Similarly there are "county-level of towns", which have similar problems.) So, we are supposed to call it the "Chamdo city", not the "Chamdo prefecture". I can fix the hatnote, but the bigger problem remains. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:37, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! I apologise if this is something everybody is supposed to know, but what are the relevant rules that dictate whether a place is called "Chamdo city", not "Chamdo prefecture", etc? Are these English Wikipedia rules or Chinese government rules?

Also, I am reading the wikipedia page for "Prefecture-level city" and the linked pages eg. Zhengzhou, Suzhou. My first impression is that I don't see separate pages for the PLC and the "town" in any of these Chinese cities, with a little topnote directing users from one to the other: there is just a single page, and it lists the areas of the PLC and the Urban and Metro areas in the sidebox, unlike the situation in Tibet where there are separate Wikipedia pages for the town/metro and for the "PLC". Was this decided deliberately at some point in the past? Remsunintun (talk) 17:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The rules are at WP:TITLE. Even though Chinese government rules don't govern us, their terminology affects the common usage, which then affects us. So we can't be blind to it.

Whether it should be a single page or separate pages for the city and the prefecture is an independent issue. I would support them being separate pages, because an urban center is quite different from a mini-province. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 23:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Meaning of Qamdo ?

While investigating the names of the river confluence in Qamdo for OpenStreetMap I stumbled upon the meaning of Qamdo being "where two rivers converge" - since I don't know chinese I leave this up to someone else to verify... but nonetheless: here seems to be the start of the Lancang River (Mekong). --katpatuka (talk) 05:59, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, "Chamdo" is Tibetan, not Chinese. I believe that mdo means something like "confluence of two rivers" (there are several towns in Tibet with this as part of their names). I'm not sure about the chab part, though.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 15:05, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Requested move 2

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Jenks24 (talk) 11:07, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

---

Qamdo Prefecture → Chamdo Prefecture – Spelling consistency as per Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Tibetan)#Use_consistent_spellings. The case of Chamdo is explicitely mentioned in the naming convention, I think this should be a rather technical and uncontroversial move. The previous move request took place before the existence of the naming convention. The same move request has been made at Talk:Qamdo Prefecture. Pseudois (talk) 22:30, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

• Support as per Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Tibetan)#Use_consistent_spellings. --Pseudois (talk) 22:35, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
• Support. Common English name.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 23:32, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.