Tebbu

The Tebbu are a Tibetan people of the Min Mountains in southern Gansu, holding the gorges of the Bailong River around Têwo and eastern Zhugqu on the edge of Amdo, and speaking an Amdo Tibetan dialect.

Their country entered the Tibetan Empire when Amdo was absorbed in the 600s and passed under the Tibetan Tsongkha theocracy after the empire's ninth-century collapse. The Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century tied the area into the priest-and-patron order of Tibetan Buddhism, and from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century Ming forces held garrisons while Mongol lords remained powerful nearby.

In the 1720s the Yongzheng emperor drove the Dzungars out of Amdo and left the Tebbu valleys to local Tibetan chiefs and monasteries rather than to direct rule from Lhasa. The Tebbu combined valley farming with herding on the high pastures above the gorges.