Hello Jim,
When you look at how the geography of a country can change over the century's, you start to grasp how profound the influences from neighboring areas are. From looking at the maps posted above, you can plainly see how immense Tibet was from 700-900 AD, even larger than China during that period and no longer land locked.
The attached photo's are of what in my opinion is a Chinese sword guard from the royal workshops of the 17-18th century. It is pierced iron, covered first with silver koftgari overlay followed by gold on top of the silver. If you look closely at the wear points you will see the silver showing through. The design has a dragon entwined in a vegetal circular motif.
http://chineseswordguard.blogspot.com/
(if anyone can resize and post these on this thread please do)
You can see how very similar Chinese and Tibetan art is at times. This type of similarity exists in many cross cultures, Indian and Persian, Poland and Hungary are other examples of this.
Do like Donald LaRooca's book, "Warriors of the Himalayas". It was an immense subject to cover especially over a time span of six centuries. Am sure future work will be done in greater detail to better define some of the time periods and LaRooca's work will most likely be the standard for others to build from. Even George Cameron Stone acknowledged that his work (Stones Glossary) would have flaws in places, that is was to be used as a guide, a rather poignant and knowledgable remark make undertanding the depth of such a mass subject.
rand