Kham in the context of "Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture"

The Tibetan diaspora is the exile of Tibetan people from Tibet, their land of origin, to other nation states to live as immigrants and refugees in communities. The diaspora of Tibetan people began in the early 1950s, peaked after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, and continues.

Tibetan emigration has four separate stages. The first stage occurred when Tibetans began escaping from Kham in the early and mid 1950's, and moving to India. The internal migration of masses of Tibetans from Amdo and Kham to Lhasa and central Tibet also occurred at this time, before the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Lhasa. The second stage followed the March 1959 escape by the 14th Dalai Lama from Lhasa to Himachal Pradesh, India, before he eventually settled in Dharamsala. The third stage occurred in the 1980s, when China's Central Government partially eased their brutality within Tibet, and opened Tibet to foreigners. The fourth stage began in 1996, after the kidnapping of the 11th Panchen Lama and the reopening of China's forced "Political Re-education" programs, and it continues today.

The 1959 Tibetan uprising or Lhasa uprising began on 10 March 1959 as a series of protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, fueled by fears that the government of the People's Republic of China planned to arrest the Dalai Lama. Over the next ten days, the demonstrations evolved from expressions of support for the 14th Dalai Lama to demands for independence and the reversal of the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet. After protesters acquired weapons, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) shelled protesters in the Dalai Lama's summer palace and deployed tanks to suppress the demonstrations. Bloody fighting continued for the next three days while the Dalai Lama escaped to India. Thousands of Tibetans were killed during the 1959 uprising, but the exact number is disputed.

The CIA provided extensive support to the uprising, including training for Tibetan fighters, logistical assistance through camps based in Nepal, and the organization of several aerial supply missions. Earlier in 1956, armed conflict between Tibetan guerrillas and the PLA started in the Kham and Amdo regions, which had been subjected to socialist reform. Guerrilla warfare later spread to other areas of Tibet and lasted through 1962. Some regard the Xunhua Incident in 1958 as a precursor of the Tibetan uprising.

The Tibet Area (Chinese: 西藏地方; pinyin: Xīzàng Dìfāng, also translated as Tibet Region in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement) was a province-level administrative division of China in the 20th century. It was de jure created after the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, and nominally includes the Ü-Tsang (central Tibet) and Ngari (western Tibet) areas, but not the Amdo and Kham areas. The territories were merely claimed by the ROC, but actually controlled by an independent Tibet with a government headed by the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. At this time, the scope of de facto independent Tibet included the "Tibet area" and the Chamdo area west of the Jinsha River, which claimed by China. The ROC retreated to Taiwan and lost control of mainland China to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949; afterwards, the ROC continued to claim Tibet.

The PRC annexed Tibet in 1951 and continued to call it Tibet Area. It merged with the Chamdo Region and was transformed to Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965 after the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

The Hengduan Mountains (simplified Chinese: 横断山脉; traditional Chinese: 橫斷山脈; pinyin: Héngduàn Shānmài) are a group of mountain ranges in southwest China that connect the southeast portions of the Tibetan Plateau with the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau. The Hengduan Mountains are primarily large north-south mountain ranges that effectively separate lowlands in northern Myanmar from the lowlands of the Sichuan Basin. These ranges are characterized by significant vertical relief originating from the Indian subcontinent's collision with the Eurasian Plate, and further carved out by the major rivers draining the eastern Tibetan Plateau. These rivers, the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween, are recognized today as the Three Parallel Rivers UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Hengduan Mountains cover much of western present-day Sichuan province as well as the northwestern portions of Yunnan, the easternmost section of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and touching upon parts of southern Qinghai. Additionally, some parts of eastern Kachin State in neighbouring Myanmar are considered part of the Hengduan group. The Hengduan Mountains are approximately 900 kilometres (560 mi) long, stretching from 33°N to 25°N. Depending on extent of the definition, the Hengduan Mountains are also approximately 400 kilometres (250 mi) wide under the narrowest definition, ranging from 98°E to 102°E. The area covered by these ranges roughly corresponds with the Tibetan region known as Kham.

Khams Tibetan (Tibetan: ཁམས་སྐད, Wylie: Khams skad, THL: Khamké), Kham dialect is the Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Amdo Tibetan and Ü-Tsang Tibetan). In terms of mutual intelligibility, Khams could communicate at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan).

Both Khams Tibetan and Lhasa Tibetan evolve to not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan. Also, Kham and Lhasa Tibetan evolved to be tonal, which Classical Tibetan was not. Khams Tibetan has 80% lexical similarity with Central Tibetan.

The Simla Convention (Traditional Chinese: 西姆拉條約; Simplified Chinese: 西姆拉条约), officially the Convention Between Great Britain, China, and Tibet, was an ambiguous treaty concerning the status of Tibet negotiated by representatives of the Republic of China, Tibet and Great Britain in Simla and Delhi during 1913–1914, with the eventual signing of the Convention taking place in Simla.The Simla Convention provided that Tibet would be divided into "Outer Tibet" and "Inner Tibet". Outer Tibet, which roughly corresponded to Ü-Tsang and western Kham, would "remain in the hands of the Tibetan Government at Lhasa under Chinese suzerainty", but China would not interfere in its administration. "Inner Tibet", roughly equivalent to Amdo and eastern Kham, would be under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government. The convention with its annexes also defined the boundary between Tibet and China proper and that between Tibet and British India (with the latter coming to be known as the McMahon Line).

A draft convention was initialled by all three parties on 27 April 1914, but China immediately repudiated it.A slightly revised convention was signed again on 3 July 1914, but only by Britain and Tibet. The Chinese plenipotentiary, Ivan Chen, declined to sign it. The British and Tibetan plenipotentiaries then signed a bilateral declaration that stated that the convention would be binding on themselves and that China would be denied any privileges under the convention until it signed it.

Central Tibet came under the control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the government of Tibet signed the Seventeen Point Agreement which the 14th Dalai Lama ratified on 24 October 1951. This followed attempts by the Tibetan government to modernize its military, negotiate with the PRC, and the defeat of the Tibetan Army by the People's Liberation Army at Chamdo in western Kham that resulted in several thousand casualties and captives. The Chinese government calls the signing of the agreement the "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet". The events are called the "Chinese invasion of Tibet" by the Central Tibetan Administration and the Tibetan diaspora.

The Tibetan government and local social structure remained in place under the authority of China until they were dissolved after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, when the 14th Dalai Lama fled into exile and repudiated the Seventeen Point Agreement, saying that he had approved it under duress.

The 8th Dalai Lama, Jamphel Gyatso (1758–1804) was recognized as the 8th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

Born in 1758 at Lhari Gang (Tob-rgyal Lha-ri Gang) in the Upper Ü-Tsang region of southwestern Tibet his father, Sonam Dhargye and mother, Phuntsok Wangmo, were originally from Kham.They were distant descendants of Dhrala Tsegyal, who was one of the major heroes of the Gesar epic.