The British Library preserves a unique collection of pictorial maps and descriptions of places and cultures along the route from Lhasa in Tibet to Leh in the Western Himalayas. But finding the people behind this collection and decoding it have been journeys of their own.
In this podcast episode, Dr. Diana Lange of Humboldt University, Germany, opens her book An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery published in Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library. Her research was supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, which provided a two-year fellowship and granted financial supported for this publication.
She talks about how she made these journeys, what her experiences were of travelling to the region in the modern day, and the differences between Western and Eastern art and cartography.