The Tibetan literary corpus offers a wide array of (auto)biographical accounts; Tibetans have been recollecting – and narrating – life stories in earnest since the "later diffusion" (Tib. phyi dar) of Buddhism in the 11^th century. The hybrid essence of life writing, suspended between fact and fiction, finds a perfect expression in the text at the core of the present dissertation, i.e. the journal (Tib. nyin deb) of a 20th century Khams pa trader, Kha stag 'Dzam...