Kalmyk people (or Kalmyks) (Kalmyk: Хальмгуд, Halm'gud) is the name given to the Oirats, western Mongols in Russia, whose descendants migrated from Dzhungaria in 1607. Today they form a majority in the autonomous Republic of Kalmykia on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Kalmykia is Europe's only Buddhist government. Through emigration, small Kalmyk communities have been established in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.

The Kalmyks are a branch of the Oirats whose ancient grazing lands are now located in Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and the People's Republic of China. After the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, the Oirats emerged as a formidable foe against the Eastern Mongols, the Ming Chinese and their successor, the Manchu who founded the Qing Dynasty, in a nearly 400 year military struggle for domination and control over both Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia. The struggle ended in 1757 with the defeat of the Oirats in Dzungaria, the last of the Mongol groups to resist vassalage to China (Grousset, 1970: 502-541).

Tsem Tulku Rinpoche (born October 24, 1965) is a tulku, a reincarnate lama of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, and the founder and spiritual guide of the Kechara House Buddhist Association in Malaysia.

Tsem Tulku is the third in the line of tulkus associated with Ganden Monastery's Shartse college and the Gyuto tantric college. His predecessors were Gedun Nyedrak,^{[unreliable source?]} a Khampa who served as Ganden Shartse's 72nd abbot; and Kentrul Thubten Lamsang, from Drikung, who died in Phari during the 1950s. Since the former came from a family which owed ties of fealty to Tsem Monastery, which housed a tooth of Tsongkhapa as a holy relic (tsem being the honorific Tibetan word for "tooth"), the name "Tsem" came to be applied to the tulku lineage; hence Tsem Tulku's appellation. ("Rinpoche" is an honorific meaning "precious," which is customarily affixed to the names of lamas.)

Tsem Tulku was born in Taipei, Taiwan to Dewa Nimbo, an Old Torghut Mongolian woman whom Tsem Tulku describes as a "princess" (she was the grand-daughter of Prince Palta, a Xinjiang government official during the Qing and Nationalist periods; and the daughter of Mingyur Wang, briefly a member of the ROC National Assembly); and Lobsang Gyatso, a Tibetan from Ngawa with ties to the Tibetan exile government who, after fleeing to Taiwan, ran a school for Tibetan refugee children. According to Tsem Tulku's website,