The Gar Clan of Sonam Rinchen established the Derge estate in the 13th century in what is now Pelyul County, but the family's claim to legitimacy reached much further back. Their ancestor Gar Tongtsen served as minister to Songsten Gampo, the Tibetan emperor who unified the plateau and introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the 7th century. This genealogical connection gave the Derge kings a stature that transcended their geographic isolation. By the 15th century, under the reign of Lodro Tobden, the 31st king in the Derge line, the capital had been established in the town of Dege. It was Lodro Tobden who invited Thang Tong Gyalpo to the region, setting in motion the founding of Gonchen Monastery, which would anchor Derge's spiritual and cultural life for centuries to come.

After the 1630s, the Derge Kingdom entered its golden age as a center of Tibetan civilization. The kingdom was renowned for two things above all: metalwork and printing. Derge artisans produced metalwork of exceptional quality, and the tradition attracted skilled craftspeople from across the Tibetan world. In 1729, King Denba Tsering founded the Derge Parkhang, the printing house that would become the most important repository of Tibetan woodblocks in existence. The royal court supported artists like Situ Panchen, who served as the kingdom's senior court chaplain and made lasting contributions to medicine, religion, and the arts. Regent Queen Tsewang Lhamo, who died in 1812, championed the Nyingma school and commissioned the printing of the Collected Tantras of the Nyingma, ensuring the preservation of texts that might otherwise have been lost.

Perhaps the Kingdom of Derge's most significant cultural contribution was its role in fostering the Rime movement, the ecumenical approach to Tibetan Buddhism that sought to preserve and study the teachings of all schools rather than favoring one tradition over others. In a religious landscape often marked by sectarian competition, the Derge court's willingness to support multiple Buddhist traditions created an intellectual environment where scholarship could flourish across boundaries. The kingdom's geographic position helped. Kham was a crossroads where the Sakya, Nyingma, Kagyu, and Gelug traditions all maintained a presence, and the Derge kings' patronage of diverse schools encouraged the cross-pollination of ideas that the Rime movement formalized. The kingdom's borders stretched from Qinghai Lake in the north to Batang and Gonjo in the south, encompassing a territory where linguistic and religious diversity was simply a fact of daily life.

The kingdom's final decades read like a cautionary tale about the dangers of inviting foreign powers to settle domestic disputes. In 1895, the Viceroy of Sichuan sent forces into the region under General Chang Chi, who advanced into Derge and imprisoned the king and his family in Chengdu. The king died in captivity, leaving two sons: Doje Senkel, who had Chinese backing, and Djembel Rinch'en, who may have been illegitimate but had support from the neighboring state of Chantui. The brothers fought over the throne for more than a decade. In 1908, Doje Senkel appealed for help to the Chinese General Chao Eh-Feng, who was already on a military campaign to assert Chinese sovereignty over Kham. The general obliged, but the assistance came with a price: China retained direct control of Derge until 1918, and the kingdom never fully recovered its independence. The story of the Derge Kingdom ended not with a single dramatic fall but with a slow erosion, as the forces of a much larger neighbor gradually absorbed a culture that had sustained itself for seven hundred years.