Kangding (), also called Tachienlu and Dartsedo (; ), is a county-level city and the seat of Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province of Southwest China. Kangding is on the bank of the Dadu River and has been considered the historical border between the Kham region of Tibet and the Sichuan region. Kangding's urban center is called Lucheng, which has around 134,000 inhabitants. Names Historically, the urban center was known by Chinese as Dajianlu (written also as Tachienlu or Tatsienlu) from the Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan name Dartsedo or Darzêdo. History Kangding was on the historical border between Tibet and the rest of China, from Kangding to the west lies Tibetan civilization where as to the east Han cultural areas; It was the capital of the Kingdom of Chakla. During its history, Kangding has witnessed many conflicts between Tibetan and Han polities. Kangding was for many centuries an important trading city where Han brick tea was carried by porters from Chengdu and other centres to trade for Tibetan wool. A dispute involving the sovereignty over the city between Tibet and the Qing was resolved when the Manchu forces took the city by storm in the Battle of Dartsedo in 1701. On July 1, 1786 an earthquake of 7.75 on the Moment magnitude scale ruined nearly the entire city. "Tachienlu is surely sui generis; there can be no other town quite like it. Situated eight thousand four hundred feet above the sea, it seems to lie at the bottom of a well, the surrounding snow-capped mountains towering perhaps fifteen thousand feet in the air above the little town which, small as it is, has hardly room to stand, while outside the wall there is scarcely a foot of level ground. It is wedged into the angle where three valleys come together, the Tar and the Chen rivers meeting just below the town to form the Tarchendo, and our first view of the place as we turned the cliff corner that here bars the gorge, was very striking, grey walls and curly roofs standing out sharply from the flanking hillsides." The city was renamed 'Kangding' in 1904. The American author Dorris Shelton Still, author of "Sue in Tibet", was born here. During time of the Republic of China administration, Kangding was the capital of the now-defunct province of Xikang. Dartsedo had a "reform through labor" prison or laogai after 1959.