Publisher's Description: Since the occupation of Tibet by the Peoples Republic of China in 1959, former border principalities and feudatories of the former realm of the Dalai Lama have broken away and have developed sociopolitical and economic bonds with other states. Sikkim, Bhutan, Ladakh, and the Tibeto-Burman speaking regions of Burma, Nepal, and others have all developed strong ethnic identities apart from Tibet. Eleven well-known scholars working in these borderlands of Tibet present in this volume aspects of their current historical, linguistic, and ethnographic research. Originally presented at the Oxford University meeting of the International Association of Tibetan Studies in 2003, the volume provides a unique panoply of cultural diversity within the contemporary Tibeto-Burman speaking world. Illustrated, with introduction.