THDL GIS - Iron Tiger - Documentation
Files
udzong coverage - ArcView shape file
59 points. Note: 58 points correspond to the administrative seats of Central Tibetan dzong (districts) administered by the Tibetan Government and listed in the Iron Tiger Land Decree from 1830. In addition, the Lhasa valley, directly administered from the Potala palace in Lhasa comprised a 59th district.
dzonpoly coverage - ArcView shape file
57 polygons. These polygons correspond to the approximate areas represented by Thiessen polygons of the 56 Central Tibetan agrarian dzong administered by the Tibetan Government and listed in the Iron Tiger Land Decree from 1830. In addition the Lhasa valley under the Potala comprises a 57th district polygon.
Two northern districts listed in the Iron Tiger land decree, Yangcan and Markyang, are wholly pastoral and so did not contain any kang land tax units. Because their taxes were based on livestock units, they are not included in this polygon coverage of agrarian districts.
Irontiger.xls - Miscrosoft Excel file
Data in this file are derived from a ca. 1830 Tibetan land decree pertaining to Central Tibetan areas. The Tibetan title of the decree is the lcag stag zhib gzhung, or Iron Tiger land decree, named after the Tibetan calendar iron tiger year of 1830 in which it was compiled. In 1991 the text was translated into Chinese under the title Tiehu Qingce. The decree lists the land tax units, termed kang, for estates in 57 districts in Central Tibet. (Note that data for Kharta and Rongshar, two small districts in Himalayan valleys along the Tibet-Nepal border, are listed together in the land decree. Although these two districts each have a unique Thiessen polygon in the GIS coverage, in this Excel file, the kang values are only listed for Kharta, polygon ID 142.)
GIS Projection Information
Spatial_Reference_Information:
Horizontal_Coordinate_System_Definition:
Planar:
Map_Projection:
Map_Projection_Name: Albers Conical Equal Area
Albers_Conical_Equal_Area:
Standard_Parallel: 30
Standard_Parallel: 36
Longitude_of_Central_Meridian: 90
Latitude_of_Projection_Origin: 33
False_Easting: 0
False_Northing: 0
Planar_Coordinate_Information:
Planar_Coordinate_Encoding_Method: Coordinate Pair
Coordinate_Representation:
Abscissa_Resolution: 0.000475
Ordinate_Resolution: 0.000475
Planar_Distance_Units: meters
Geodetic_Model:
Horizontal_Datum_Name: D_WGS_1984
Ellipsoid_Name: WGS_1984
Semi-major_Axis: 6378137
Denominator_of_Flattening_Ratio: 298.257224
Description of the columnar data in Irontiger.xls
Dzong ID
Unique record ID of each dzong in the GIS files.
Name
The names of dzong units that administered various estates, categorized by monastic, noble and government types.
Mon (dun)
The total land tax units, measured in dun, levied on monastic estates under the dzong listed in the corresponding Name column. A dun is a land tax unit calculated by the amount of barley seed normally sown in a given area. One dun is equivalent to two kang. One kang was a tax unit -- the average tax levied on 2.49 hectares or .025 sq km of cultivated land. Government estates were taxed based on kang, but monastic and noble estates were taxed by dun.
Mon -kang
The total land tax units, measured in kang, levied on monastic estates under the dzong listed in the corresponding Name column. See above for explanation of kang.
Noble (dun)
The total land tax units, measured in dun, levied on noble estates under the dzong listed in the corresponding Name column.
Total Noble -kang
The total land tax units, measured in kang, levied on noble estates under the dzong listed in the corresponding Name column. See above for explanation of kang.
Total Gov (kang)
The total land tax units, measured in kang, levied on government estates under the dzong listed in the corresponding Name column. See above for explanation of kang.
Tashilunpo (kang)
Within some dzong in the western Tsang region, additional land tax units were accorded to the monasteries of Tashilunpo and Sakya.
Sakya (kang)
Within some dzong in the western Tsang region, additional land tax units were accorded to the monasteries of Tashilunpo and Sakya.
Total Mon k.
Total monastic kang, including values for Tashilunpo and Sakya.
Total Kang
Total kang, including values for monastic, government and noble estates.
How the GIS files were created
Each dzong (district's) administrative seat was located on medium-scale US topographic maps (series 1501, 1:250,000) and digitized to create the "udzong" GIS coverage. Due to the lack of historical maps and related data pertaining to ca. 1830 district boundaries, approximate boundaries were derived using Thiessen polygons in the "dzonpoly" GIS coverage. For a given district seat location, the district is defined as the set of locations that are closer to that seat than to any other seat. This methodology creates a partitioning of the study area into "proximal zones," presumably by approximating actual district boundaries. Additionally, a combination of contemporary Chinese county and township-level boundaries were used to approximate an outer boundary to the study region. Finally, the boundary of Chusum county was employed as the best available approximation of the limits of the noble Lhagyari estate, an unstudied enclave, within the study region.
Formats
ArcView format in a .zip file containing .shp, .dbf and .shx files.