SummaryTibetans live in Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau rising about 4000 m a.s.l. in south‐west China. Archaeological evidences suggested that there have been humans living in Tibet at least 5000 years ago. However, Tibetan earlier history remains elusive. In the present study, allelic distribution of human leucocyte antigen (HLA)‐A, ‐B and ‐Cw in 158 unrelated Tibetan Chinese was investigated using sequencing‐based typing methods, and a total of 25 HLA‐A, 45 HLA‐B and 20 HLA‐Cw alleles were identified. A*24G1 (27.2%), B*51G1 (16.8%), Cw*04G1 (13.3%) and Cw*070201G1 (13.3%) are the most common HLA‐A, ‐B and ‐Cw alleles. The most frequently detected haplotypes were A*24G1‐B*51G1‐Cw*140201 (3.6%), A*24G1‐B*51G1 (6.8%), A*02G1‐Cw*070201G1 (6.5%) and B*51G1‐Cw*140201 (5.0%). Chi‐squared test suggested that all three loci fitted the Hardy–Weinberg expectations. No evidence for a departure from selective neutrality at the HLA‐A and ‐B loci was observed. However, significant departure of the observed homozygosity from the expected values was found for HLA‐Cw. Though the contemporary Tibetans inhabit the south‐west China, Nei's genetic distance measure based on frequencies of HLA‐A, ‐B and ‐Cw indicated that Tibetans were closer to northern Han Chinese, Mongolian Chinese, Koreans and Japanese rather than to southern Han Chinese. The corresponding dendrogram constructed according to the neighbour‐joining method supported that Tibetans separated from southern Han and located in North‐East Asian cluster which included northern Han Chinese and Mongolian Chinese. These data were in good agreement with language classification and with a recent hypothesis that Tibetan might originate from northern China along Yellow river.