Mêdog County

Mêdog County
County
Tibetan transcription(s)
Chinese transcription(s)
Location of Mêdog County within Tibet
Country	China
Province	Tibet
Prefecture	Nyingchi Prefecture
Capital	[[]]
Time zone	UTC+8 (China Standard)

Mêdog County, (Tibetan: ཀོང་པོ་རྒྱ་མདའ་ཏོག་རྫོང་ Wylie me tog rdzong; Chinese: 墨脱县; Pinyin: Mòtuō Xiàn) is a county of the Nyingtri Prefecture in the Tibet Autonomous Region of People's Republic of China. Chinese claims include parts of Arunachal Pradesh, south of the McMahon Line, what was casus belli for the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Geography

Medog County or Metok is located in the southeast of the Tibet Autonomous Region and at the lower branch of Yarlung Zangbo River. Medog County covers an area of 30,553 square kilometres. The average altitude of the county is 1200 metres above sea level.་Metok county is also called Pemakö. The route for hiking to Medog: Paizhen(派镇)-Songlinkou(松林口)-Lage(拉格)-Hanmi(汗密)-Aniqiao(阿尼桥)-Beibengxiang(背崩)-Modog(墨脱)

Highway

In December, 2010 the Chinese government announced completion of a highway to Mêdog County, the last county in China which did not have road access.

Economy and wildlife

Farming is the main industry in Medog County. It is abundant with paddy, soybean, cotton and gingeli, etc. Hairy deerhorn, gastrodia tuber, muskiness, and hedgehog hydnum, etc. are special products of the area.

The Medog National Animal and Plant Reserve Area is in the county. It has more than 3,000 species of plants, 42 species of rare wild animals that under special State protection, and over a thousand of hexapod species.

Demography

Medog county has a population of 9,200, and most people who live in the county are of Tshangla ethnic minority and Lhoba ethnic group. The most renowned part of Medog is known as Pemakö, one of Tibet's most sacred power places. Inhabitants of Pemakö call themselves pemaköpa and speak Tsangla language, closely related to that of sharchokpa of eastern Bhutan.They practice Nyingma tradition of Tibetan buddhism. Frank Kingdon-Ward was the first Westerner to penetrate the deepest gorges of Pemakö, chronicled in his 1925 tome Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges. In his 1994 "Tibet Handbook" Hongkong-born Victor Chan describes the extremely difficult trek from Pemakö Chung to the power-place and beyul of Gonpo Ne, one of the most remote spots on earth. A modern journey by Ian Baker and his National Geographic-sponsored team to Pemakö received book-length treatment his 1994 book The Heart of the World.