Kědāng

Kedang was the Yuan county attached to Taozhou, in the Tao River country of present-day Lintan. Its administration belonged to the empire's institutions for the Tibetan frontier, rather than to an ordinary interior prefecture. The county stood within a borderland repeatedly contested by Tibetan and Chinese powers, where the survival and location of fortified centers mattered as much as their official titles.

The Ming established a military-civilian thousand-household command at Taozhou in 1371, subordinate to Hezhou Guard. After the campaign against the eighteen Tibetan tribes in 1379, a new fortified center was built at Donglong Mountain and Taozhou became a guard in its own right. The former Taozhou town remained a fort, leaving old and new administrative sites in the same district. Under the Qing, the guard was attached to Gongchang Prefecture in 1730, then replaced by Taozhou Subprefecture in 1748. A subprefect responsible for relations with Tibetan communities governed the district. These successive arrangements made Kedang's country a meeting place of county government, military colonization and negotiated frontier authority.