The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet [Hardcover ed.] 0226317471, 9780226317472

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BUDDHISM AND MODERNITY A series edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Recent books in the series

In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chapel, a Bilingual Edition,

edited and translated by Donald S. Lopez Jr. (2009) Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West, by Shoji Yamada, translated by Earl Hartman (2009) Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, by Anne M. Blackburn (2010)

Introduction to the History oflndian Buddhism, by Eugene Burnouf, translated by Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (2010) Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transfonnation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism, by Mark Michael Rowe (2011)

THE MUSEUM ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet

CLARE E. HARRIS

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Clare E. Harris is a reader in visual anthropology in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, curator for Asian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. She is the author of In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting affer 1959. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by Clare E. Harris All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America Portions of chapter 8 appeared in an earlier version as "The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts towards a Transnational Art History," Art History: Journal of the Association ofArt Historians 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 698- 720. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13, 978-0-226-31747-2 (cloth) ISBN-13, 978-0-226-31750-2 (e-book) ISBN-10, 0-226-31747-1 (cloth) ISBN-10, 0-226-31750-1 (e-book) The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harris, Clare E. The museum on the roof of the world: art, politics, and the representation of Tibet/ Clare E. Harris. pages ; cm. -

(Buddhism and modernity)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31747-2 (hardcover: alkaline paper) ISBN-13, 978-0-226-31750-2 (e-book) ISBN-10: 0-226-31747-1 (hardcover: alkaline paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-31750-1 (e-book)

1. Art, Tibetan-Appreciation-History.

2. Art, Tibetan-Museums-History. 3. Tantric-Buddhist art-AppreciationHistory. 4. Tibet Region-Museums-History. 5. Xizang bo wu guanHistory. 6. Tibet Museum (Dharamsala, India)-History. Buddhism and modernity. N7346.TSH37 2012 709.51'5~dc23

I. Title.

IL Series:

2012003231 @ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my son, Luke Gill

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

ix

1

17

1

The Tibet Museum in the West

2

The Younghusband Mission and Tibetan Art

3

Picturing Tibet for the Imperial Archive

4

Photography and the Politics of Memory

5

The Tibet Museum in Exile

6

The Tibet Museum in Lhasa

7

The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary Art

8

The Buddha Goes Global

Acknowledgments 265 A Note on Languages 269 Notes 271 References 297 Index 307

49

79 117

153

239

177

207

Illustrations

Color Plates (following page 180) 1

Cover illustration for Seabury Quinn's The Living Buddhess

2

(1937) Mannequins in the courtroom of the Gyantse dzong

3

(2007) Interior of the Anti-British Museum, Gyantse (2007)

4

Photographs of Tibetan aristocrats at Snow City, Lhasa

5

The sixteenth and seventeenth incarnations of the Karmapa

6

Tibetans examining the Photo Evidence wall in McLeod Ganj,

7

Stalls with Tibetan items for sale to tourists in the Barkhor,

8

The entrance to the Tibet Museum in Lhasa (2007)

9

Nighttime view of the memorial to the "peaceful liberation"

(2007)

India (2008) Lhasa (2007)

of Tibet (2007) 10

Gonkar Gyatso, L'Internationale (2007)

X

Illustrations

11

Amdo Chamba, Portrait of Mao Zedong (1954)

12 13

Jangyung, Tibetan Baby Doll (2007) Keltse, I'm Here (2007)

14

Gade, The Hulk (2008)

15

Gonkar Gyatso, My Identity: No. 1 (2003)

16

Gonkar Gyatso, My Identity: No. 2 (2003)

17

Gonkar Gyatso, My Identity: No. 3 (2003)

18

Gonkar Gyatso, My Identity: No. 4 (2003)

19

Gonkar Gyatso, The Shambhala in Modern Times (2008)

Black-and-White Figures 0.1

Postcard portrait of a Tibetan merchant and his wife (late nineteenth century) 2

1.1

Clay plaque depicting Palden Lhamo (mid-nineteenth century)

23

1.2

The main exhibition area, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (1900)

1.3

The "Skull of Confucius" with other objects, International Exhibition, London (1862) 35

24

1.4

Edward Tylor's Tibetan prayer wheel (late nineteenth century)

2.1

Tibetan illustration of the British looting a monastery during the Younghusband Mission (1995) 52

2.2

Page from Frederick Bailey's album (1904)

40

59

2.3

Front and back of a print showing the statue of Rolpai Dorje

2.4

Tibetans holding a petition against British looting, photographed by Frederick Bailey (1904) 67

2.5

The officers' mess at Ambala, India, photographed by Frederick Bailey (1905) 72

63

2.6

Harry Beasley's Tibet displays at the Cranmore Museum (1934)

2.7

The British Museum's Buddhism gallery, photographed by Donald McBeth (ca. 1908) 75

3.1

Portraits of A. H. Savage Landor before and after his trip to Tibet (1899) 81

3.2

A Tibetan monk, photographed by Benjamin Simpson (ca. 1860-62)

3.3

Portrait of a Tibetan woman, taken in the Johnston and Hoffman studios in Darjeeling, India (before 1884) 88

3.4

Prints annotated by L. A. Waddell (1899)

3.5

Postcard depicting a "Bhutia Coolie" (late nineteenth century)

3.6

Postcard depicting an itinerant Tibetan monk (late nineteenth century) 94

3. 7

Postcard portrait of a Tibetan woman (late nineteenth century)

3.8

The Treatment of the Dead, from Sarat Chandra Das's Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1902) 100

74

84

90 92

95

Illustrations

3.9

A Tibetan Temple, from Sarat Chandra Das's Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1902) 101

3.10 Postcard depicting a Tibetan layman receiving a blessing (late nineteenth century) 102 3.11 Troops from the Younghusband Mission entering Lhasa, photographed by John Claude White (1904) 107 3.12 Khampa dzong, photographed by John Claude White (1903)

112

4.1

John Claude White, The Nuns ofTaktsang (1904)

4.2

Portrait of Dorje Pagmo, taken at her monastery in Samding (1921)

121

4.3

A courtroom in Lhasa, photographed by Charles Bell (1921)

4.4

Portrait of two "Tibetan" soldiers, from the album of Lieutenant G. J. Davys (1903-4) 131

125

130

4.5

"A 'faked' battle" from the album of Lieutenant G. J. Davys (1903-4)

4.6

Card commemorating the martyrdom of Thupten Nima (2006)

134

4. 7

Scene in the streets of Lhasa (2008)

5.1

Tibetan aristocrats wearing the Yarlung Gems during New Year celebra-

143

148

tions in Lhasa, photographed by Hugh Richardson (1947)

159

5.2

Exterior of the Tibet Museum in McLeod Ganj, India (2008)

5.3

Portrait of Tibetan refugees at the Tibet Museum in McLeod Ganj, India (2000)

5.4

165

172

Pekar, detail from the memorial to the Tibetan dead (completed 2000)

174

6.1

Golden um at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa (2007)

6.2

The Potala Palace, Lhasa, photographed by Frederick Spencer Chapman

6.3

The Potala Palace, Lhasa, viewing platform (2007)

(1936) 6.4

190

193 198

Tibetans viewing photographic displays at the Residence of Pelshi in Snow City, Lhasa (2007)

200

7.1

Gade, New Century (2007)

7.2

Nortse, Endlessly Painted Bottle of Beer (2007)

221 223

7.3

Tsewang Tashi, Untitled No. l (2003)

7.4 7.5

Ang Sang, Miss Tibet (2005) 226 Gade, New Scripture: Mao, Buddha, Songtsen Gampo (2005)

224

7.6

Gade, Precious Items (2007)

230

231

7.7

Gonkar Gyatso, Bar Code Buddha (2006)

7.8

Zhang Huan, Three Legged Buddha (2007)

232 235

8.1

Gonkar Gyatso, Red Buddha (1989)

8.2

Portrait of Tsering Dondrup, photographed by Charles Suydam Cutting

8.3 8.4

(1937) 250 Gonkar Gyatso, Pokemon Buddha (2004) 254 Gonkar Gyatso, Reclining Buddha: Beijing Tibet Relationship Index and The Shambhala in Modern Times (2009)

244

260

xi

Introduction

Every Tibetan, high and lmv, is a curiosi.ty who ought to be in a museum. -Captain W. F. T O'Connor, chief intelligence officer to the British "mission"

to Tibet in 1903-41

If you behave well, we'll protect your culture and benefits. But if you behave badly, we'll take care of your culture by putting it in a museum

-Han Chinese blogger addressing Tibetans in March 2008

2

The Museum as Metaphor In March 2008 Tibet emerged from a long period of dormancy in the archives of international news agencies and in the conscious-

ness of the public. To the fury of officials in the People's Republic of China, photographs and film that had somehow evaded their censors appeared on millions of computer and television screens

C

2

Jntroduction

globally, and revealed that all was not well on the •roof of the world." The im• ages documented a wave of protest that had spread from the Tibet Autonomous Region into the other Tibetan-speaking regions of China, Kham and Amdo. For forty-nine years, March 10 had been the day when many Tibetans recalled the events that led to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama's exile in 1959. In 2008 this date also marked the onset of a display of Tibetan discontent. Since preparations for the Beijing Olympics were in full s wing, they knew that the eyes of the world were trained in their direction. This was the moment to express a long-s tanding grievance against the nation that was about to mount the biggest party on earth. Scenes of violence perpetrated by Chinese police and military forces shocked the global community and threatened to tarnish the image of China just when it most wanted to shine. Others depicting Tibetans a ttacking Han Chinese seriously undermined an idea long cherished

O.J Studio portrait of a 'fibetan

m~rchant and his wife with tMngka painting. Ute nineteenth· ,cntury po,:t(..a.M roa~ in India..

THIIICTAn IIICIICM/fr.

Introduction

in the West: that Tibetans were pacifists whose adherence to Buddhism made such acts inconceivable. These images exposed the gravest crisis in the region for decades and challenged many observers to rethink their preconceptions. It appears that the actions of Tibetans at this time also stunned educated urban Chinese. Their patriotic training had emphasized national unity and inculcated a belief in the peaceful coexistence of the many minorities of the motherland. Tibetans were assumed to be the grateful beneficiaries of the state's munificence. After all, millions of yuan had been spent on extending the technological and economic benefits they enjoyed to those in the remoter reaches of the People's Republic. But as a Han blogger wrote at the height of the troubles in March 2008, perhaps those gifts ought to be rescinded if their recipients behaved badly. He or she also threatened something worse: that Tibetan culture would be •taken care of" by being confined to a museum. A little more than a hundred years earlier, Captain W. F. T. O'Connor had compiled a report, The Present Condition and Government of Tibet, for his superior in the British army, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Younghusband. It was based on intelligence he had gathered while serving as secretary and interpreter to the Tibet mission of 1903- 4. This innocuously titled "mission• was in fact the closest the British imperial regime came to mounting a full-scale invasion of the southern regions of Tibet from its base in British India. Following heavy fighting and much loss of life on the Tibetan side, it culminated in the signing of a treaty between the Tibetan and British governments at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. O'Connor's report (published in 1905), in which he detailed the failures and abuses of Tibetan theocratic government, proffered a retrospective justification for the atrocities committed by Younghusband's troops. It also presented the case for greater British involvement in the future business of Tibet. Among the benefits Tibetans might receive from British colonial patronage would be the preservation and protection of their culture from the acquisitive grasp of China or Russia. Defining that culture as distinctively different from other parts of Asia (especially from China) thus became an imperative for the Tibet mission in 1903-4 and for British imperial policy for several decades thereafter. Therefore when O'Connor's report itemized the unique characteristics of Tibetan dress, adornment, architecture, and the paraphernalia associated with the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, it was no trifling matter. Identifying what has since become known as "Tibetan art" was a political issue in which the demarcation of an independent Tibetan territory was fused with the idea of defining an independent culture. Just as Tibet's borders were to be drawn by British surveyors, its topography mapped by imperial agents, and its monastic government penetrated by Younghusband and his successors in the diplomatic service, Tibet was to be framed by colonial-period museology as a distinct entity replete with treasures waiting to be harvested. According to

---

4

Introduction

O'Connor, not only were the material aspects of Tibet worthy of collection and documentation; the inhabitants themselves were "curious" and intriguing enough to be accessioned in a museum. Thus at the turn of the twentieth century, Tibet and Tibetans were primed to become exhibitions of themselves and to enter the archives of the imperial museum. One of the aims of this book is to elucidate how the metaphor of Tibet as a museum became increasingly pervasive and occasionally pernicious over the course of the twentieth century. Although they are separated by time and distance, it is possible to explain how an Edwardian Englishman and a Han netizen might share a common vocabulary and seek to deposit Tibetans in a museum for safekeeping. Their statements adopt an approach to Tibet that equates control of territory with the capacity to contain culture within a museum. O'Connor's comments reflect the late nineteenth-century mode of information gathering, in which objects and occasionally even living people were accumulated for scientific purposes and in the service of the expansion of imperial knowledge. The museum provided a site where these colonial assets could then be observed at first hand by the British public. The sentiment expressed from China in 2008 goes further: it imagines the museum as a place of incarceration, where "culture" is frozen, neutralized in a set of objects, and divorced from their owners, makers, or users. Most important, it points to the wider arguments that found expression in violence that year: to what extent would Tibetans be allowed to have a distinctive culture that was not subsumed by Sinicization? Did they have the freedom to enact their culture (in the more anthropological sense of the word) in terms of language, religion, education, and the quotidian practices of ritual and vernacular tradition? Or would Tibetan culture be reduced to a collection of ossified relics curated and controlled by the Chinese state? In fact the threat of museumizing Tibet was not an empty one. The process of transferring the most sacred, valuable, and historic objects of pre-1950 Tibet to the storerooms and exhibition halls of a museum had begun to be

implemented by the Chinese state well before 2008. In 1994 the Potala Palace, the chief residence of the Dalai Lama until his exile, had been listed by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site, and the majority of its contents had been removed. By 1999 the world's first Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa, where some of the most significant items from the Potala were prominently displayed. The purpose of this move was clear: it would define the accoutrements of power associated with the dalai lamas as defunct and position the period of Tibet's theocratic government firmly in the past. It would reclassify Tibetan objects according to Chinese categories as "Cultural Relics" to be viewed in glass cases, and redesignate the buildings they derived from as heritage sites to be photographed by tourists. The Chinese government deployed the famous "museum

Introduction

effect" to deactivate these things as dynamic markers of Tibetan religion and culture and convert them into inert objects of contemplation and consumption.3 The treasures of the Potala would no longer be seen as the possessions of the Dalai Lama but as the property of the People's Republic of China. As this book will demonstrate, however, the procedure for converting Tibet into a museum subject had been initiated in the West in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the European colonial nation with the greatest involvement in Tibet before 1947: Britain.

Doubly Colonial Although the British never managed to colonize Tibet, the increasing extent of Beijing's political control in the greater Tibetan region since 1950 and the mass movement of Han Chinese into central Tibet in recent decades indicate that China could be said to have achieved what the British could not. The People's Republic is therefore now in the ascendant when it comes to the ownership of Tibet's cultural patrimony and in the driving seat in matters of representation, especially in museums and other forms of display. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, both Britain and China aspired to the role of Tibet's "protector." They each professed the desire to act as custodian or curator to Tibet's material heritage. These and other offshoots from the museum metaphor have been used by both nations to cover their political and military intentions in the country with a blanket of soft, museumized power and as facets of "cultural diplomacy." Consequently, in terms of representation, the position of Tibet in the twentieth century can be described as doubly colonial. It experienced two major waves of colonialist intervention that enabled the acquisition of substantial collections of artifacts: the first at British hands, the second via the services of the People's Liberation Army and other agents of the Chinese state. At the end of the Younghusband Mission in 1903-4, hundreds of mules were packed with spoils for the return journey to British India. Between 1959 and 1976, the implementation of "democratic reforms" and the Cultural Revolution denuded Tibet of tens of thousands of objects as monasteries and other religious buildings were ransacked. As a result, huge numbers of artifacts are now held in museums in Britain and China, representing the country and its people in absentia. If we include the material accumulated by other nations and the substantial numbers of private collections around the world, we might conclude that the bulk of Tibet's portable cultural heritage has been retained everyvvhere other than in Tibet, and is now most readily at the disposal of everyone other than Tibetans. China and Britain are by no means the only putative custodians o~ Tibe~'s artifactual heritage, but in this book I argue that their role has been pivotal m

5

6

Introduction

determining how Tibet has been imagined within museums and onward into public consciousness. Examining the history of muse~m represent~tions in the two nations is important, since they have each been instrumental 1n defining Tibetan culture not only for their respective internal audien~es but ~~ernationally. (The global audience has become even more apparent 1n the digital era, with the rise of the "virtual museum" and the deployment of the Internet as a dissemination device, particularly in Chinese cultural diplomacy.) I will suggest that it is an early twentieth-century British formulation of Tibetan art that informs the prevailing attitude toward Tibetan culture across the Western world today and which is empathically positioned in opposition to Chinese representations of Tibet. The British imperial notion of a uniquely different country that must be preserved for the benefit of all concurs with the approach of the current Dalai Lama, millions of Tibetans, and many Tibetophiles around the world. For them, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed traditionalism and the sacred territory in which Tibetan Buddhism flourished for centuries. However, in the absence of a Tibetan nation under the leadership of a Dalai Lama, the closest most Western observers will come to that mythic place is within the halls of a major museum. There Tibet can be viewed in an atmosphere of reverential meditation, aesthetic pleasure, and nostalgic regret for the loss of "Shangri-La." 4

On the other hand, although it employs many of the same exhibitionary devices, when China displays "Tibet" it communicates a picture of the present through objects classified there as "relics." Paradoxical as it may seem, ancient Tibetan things are assembled to illustrate their redundancy and to demonstrate that Tibet is really not so different from the rest of China. For the Chinese government, museums and exhibitions assert national pride and are a vital tool in international diplomacy and patriotic education: they help to explain to foreigners and citizens of the People's Republic alike that Tibet is part of China and that Tibetan culture is no longer intimately connected to the old ways and the old objects. From this perspective, the Tibet Museum (as physical structure and potent metaphor) is therefore a powerful instrument of modernity that can be strategically deployed to contain its opposite: the past. Outside the museum, Tibetans residing in the People's Republic of China are encouraged toward cultural assimilation by purchasing the same consumer goods as their fellow citizens and enjoying the benefits of secular Chinese lifestyles. Tibetan culture may be performed: in song and dance, in celebrations of New Year and other state-approved ceremonials, in horse fairs, in televised pageants with exuberant displays of "traditional" dress, and even in prostration at religious sites-but all this is presented as confirmation of ethnicity or minority status within the motherland, rather than as a point of connection to the cultural history of Tibet. However, the events of 2008 indicated that being defined "ethnically" does not suit al] Tibetans and posed

Introduction

a question: what kind of culture are Tibetans at liberty to express? If the state classifies their architecture as heritage, defines their historic objects as "relics," and converts their most sacred city-Lhasa-into a museum in and of itself what remains in their control? '

The Museum in Principle and Practice In the first decade of the twenty-first century, many of the Tibetan objects gathered under the aegis of British and Chinese colonialism have started to emerge from their storerooms. They have been unearthed from an archival state to perform in displays that represent Tibet for contemporary audiences. They have also been enlisted to support the narratives of opposing sides in the highly politicized debate about Tibet's past and present. The following are just some of the examples generated since the start of the new millennium. After the opening of the Tibet Museum in Lhasa, a second Tibet Museum was inaugurated in 2000 by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in the so-called Tibetan capital in exile in northern India. In 2003 the Anti-British (or AntiImperialist) Museum was completed in Gyantse, southern Tibet. In 2005 Treasures from the Roof of the World, an exposition of material derived from the Dalai Lama's palaces in Lhasa, toured the United States but met with protests from Tibetans and their supporters. Just before the Olympic torch was due to make a triumphal visit to the British Museum in 2008, the terra-cotta warriors that were the star attraction in the museum•~ First Emperor exhibit briefly appeared with "Free Tibet" placards hung around their necks. In 2009 the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing hosted a major display, 50th Anniversary of Democratic Reforms in Tibet, illustrating how Tibet had been "unshackled from despotic theocratic rule." 5 All this suggests that the museum is no mere metaphor: it is a site of contention and a place where the very hard politics of Tibet's current status comes sharply into view. Some may argue that focusing on museums (as well as photography and art) is an indulgence when the difficulties faced by Tibetans in China or in the diaspora are so acute and the stakes are so high. On the contrary, I would argue that analyzing these forms of representation is crucial, precisely because the political dramas are also being played out in the arena of cultural institutions that are designed to shape public opinion. The fact that millions of dollars and yuan have been spent in the last decade on depicting Tibet in art, photography, websites, and museums implies that their ability to disseminate ideas has been recognized in powerful quarters. These cultural technologies communicate in tangible (and virtual) formats and have the capacity to capture the imagination of those who encounter them. They can also be readily adapted for the purposes of pedagogy or its reverse: propaganda. Interrogating the ways that Tibet has been represented in these modes therefore allows us to

7

8

Introduction

identify the logic of their deployment within a spectrum that ranges from positive to prejudicial. Since both art and photography are considered adjuncts of the museum in this book, let us stay with museums for the moment and ask what thinking about them enables us to do. In an influential essay published in 1992, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge made a powerful case for a critical examination of museums in India. They identified a number of previously neglected issues: museums are transnational cultural forms in which local and global agendas may be active simultaneously. Moreover, they may be charged by contradictory dynamics: sometimes they confirm and fix collective identities, but they may also be used to destabilize and disrupt established categories. Most important, Appadurai and Breckenridge proposed that museums are "good to think" with, because they are "deeply located in cultural history" and "are therefore also critical places for the politics of histofy." 6 Their call to arms has been heard by anthropologists, historians, curators, and cultural commentators working on South Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and elsewhere, but has not been applied to Tibet. This is a strange omission given that the politics of Tibetan history have been entangled with museums for a substantial period of time. It is also surprising since Tibet's position on the fraying edge of the British Empire meant that it was at least viewed "colonially" as a potential extension of that empire from the nineteenth century until 1947, when the British left India. In addition, until as late as the 1960s, information gathered by representatives of the British Empire constituted the archival bedrock for much of the scholarship produced about Tibet in the West. Even today, publications such as A Cultural History of Tibet, coauthored by the last British representative to Tibet, Hugh Richardson, remain in use as undergraduate text books at British universities. 7 However, as Tsering Shakya has observed, the legacy of this form of knowledge production has meant that "Tibetan Studies still continues along the lines of an Orientalist descriptive mode," and has often seemed immune to the kind of postcolonial critique advanced for other parts of the world. 8 Geopolitics is also partly to blame for Tibet's omission from the purview of postcolonialism. Between 1950 and the early 1990s, it was inaccessible for sustained anthropological research, and many of the brightest field-workers therefore concentrated on Tibet's borderlands rather than Tibet proper. Others focused on library resources or studied Tibetan Buddhism with the Tibetan exiles who arrived in the United States and Europe from the 1960s onward or who could be visited in the refugee camps in South Asia. As Peter Hansen notes in an essay, "Why ls There No Subaltern Studies for Tibet?": "The tradition of studying Buddhism through the translation and interpretation of religious texts, and the typical institutional location of Tibetan studies in

.. Introduction

Oriental philosophy or religious studies," may go some way to explain the absence of a literature on Tibet that adopts the position of those subordinated

by nationalist elites. Hansen also remarks that a major obstacle to more nuanced understandings of Tibet has arisen from the "polarized positions" of the Chinese government and the Tibetan government in exile, which have

"reduced the space available for scholarship that is not explicitly framed as political advocacy."9 An example of this problem arose in 2001, when the author of Prisoners of Shangri-La, Donald S. Lopez, was accused by another professor of Tibetan Buddhism of being an apologist for China. 10 According to Hansen, this incident demonstrated "the extent to which nationalism-Tibetan or Chinese-polices Tibet as an authorized subject of study, just as nationalism has defined 'Tibet' as an object of art." Hansen concludes that it is "precisely at the boundaries of such nationalist discourse" that a new form of analysis could emerge in which the study of Tibet would no longer be exempt from theoretically informed interrogation. 11 Continuing in the vein of the study of Tibetan art that I published in 1999 (and to which Hansen alludes), I hope to participate in this exercise. 12 I

will do so by tackling head-on the nationalist agendas that are played out in museums, while also drawing attention to the counternarratives they have provoked and the invention of new cultural forms that challenge the museum model. Thinking about these things allows us to critique the Orientalist conception of Tibet that was so bound up with its exceptional location (the "roof of the world"), and to consider how Tibet now appears in multiple places and various formats. Through museums, art, and photography, the idea of Tibet has been dispersed to appear anywhere and everywhere: from the World Wide Web to the land where some claim an independent Tibetan nation once existed. 13 Envisioning this expanded field means that we need not be so heavily reliant on the old cartographies of knowledge; we can instead begin to characterize the spaces of Tibetan culture in a more fluid and network-oriented manner. In an era when Tibetans themselves have used digital technologies to make connections across the political boundaries that mark their separation from the homeland, the delineation of their "culture" in academic analysis urgently needs to be reshaped to reflect these transnational and transcultural connections. This book begins by unpacking the contents of British museums in order to scrutinize the colonial construction of Tibet. Although similar endeavors have been undertaken for India, Africa, and other parts of the ex-British Empire, this has not previously been attempted for Tibet, for some of the reasons I outlined earlier. Another incentive derives from the fact that museums have agency: through arrays of objects, they have the power to seduce the viewer and to make distant places present. So at the most basic level, the museum

9

10

Introduction

simply provides a site for first encounters with Tibet where ideas about it are molded. For example, toward the end of the nineteenth century a Frenchwoman called Alexandra David-Neel began her Tibetan odyssey in the galleries of the Musee Guimet in Paris. Inspired by viewing statues of the Buddha, she set out to study the religions and languages of South Asia. On a visit to India in 1911, she became the first Western woman to meet a Dalai Lama (the thirteenth incarnation). Following that experience she resolved to travel to Tibet. The many books she wrote after years of exploring the country led the next Dalai Lama to proclaim that she was "the first to introduce the real Tibet to the West." Commenting after his departure from Tibet, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama also observed that "much of what David-Neel describes is now lost forever, which only increases the value of her account." 14 These remarks encapsulate the Tibetan refugee narrative, which suggests that the ureal" Tibet ceased to exist after 1959 and that the recuperation of "authentic" Tibet has since been presided over by the Dalai Lama and his followers in exile. The Dalai Lama has also alluded to the idea that what Tibetans have lost-in terms of their material culture-others have gained, but he has allowed them to act as custodians of Tibetan heritage and to recreate Tibet in museums, while a Tibetan nation remains an unfulfilled dream.

Beginning with the displays at the Crystal Palace in London in 1854, this book will show how museums in the Western world made it possible for the public to enter a simulacrum of Tibet. During the first half of the twentieth century, the resources for this kind of endeavor became more readily available and more numerous-often for all the wrong kinds of reasons. From the Tibetan exile perspective, after 1959 Tibet became a place that had been emptied of its significant things-in effect an antimuseum. The Dalai Lama has therefore given his support to the retention of Tibetan material in Western museums and to individuals and organizations that have sequestered their collections away from the grasp of China, most notably in the Tibet Repatriation Collection in New York City. He also gave his blessing to exhibitions such as Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet when it appeared in the United States and Britain in 1991-92, and to the creation of the Tibet Museum in McLeod Ganj in India, where he and his exiled government are based. These museological exercises echo those described by Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, who observed that the Jewish Pavilion at the 1930 World's Fair enabled a state to be "symbolically" constituted "before it was legally formed."" Similarly, recreating Tibet in museum spaces in India or America allows a nation to be imagined when none currently exists. China, on the other hand, presents Tibet as a museum precisely in order to illustrate its claim to sovereignty, and uses touring exhibitions of Tibetan art to proudly display the evidence that Tibet is its "inalienable" territory to

Introduction

the outside world. I will pursue this theme through a discussion of the two Tibet Museums (in Lhasa and northern India) where the nationalist rhetoric promoted from Beijing and the Tibetan "capital in exile" is most emphatically artiatlated. Examining these institutions not only divulges the narratives they aim to disseminate but also enables us to consider the kind of public they seek to address. In 1he Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett described the process in which Europeans became citizens in the "exhibitionary complex" of museums, world's fairs, and shopping arcades. 16 The recently invented Tibet Museums have a comparable intention: to create a public with a shared set of values and imbued with a strong national consciousness. But museums do not always have this effect. When Tibetans living outside India or China have become "museum minded," they have used them as a platform to assert cultural distinctiveness in the global contest for recognition.17 In the United States and Europe, this has led to protests against exhibitions and challenges to the pronouncements articulated through museums. Such actions suggest that although a Foucauldian analysis can help to identify the methods by which an elite seeks to control knowledge, it may overlook the ways in which their efforts are rejected or ignored by actual visitors. 18 This book therefore documents some of the museums designed by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans, and presents situations where the limitations of museum policies and rhetoric are exposed. Considering the museum as a metaphor and as a physical space in which ideas are enacted enables us to consider much-broader questions in the course of this book. We can ask, who owns Tibetan culture? If Tibet has been consigned to the storerooms and galleries of museums, who has the right to access it? We can also inquire about where contemporary Tibetan culture is located: is it produced by those who remain in Tibet as members of a "minority" group in the People's Republic? Or is it generated from the headquarters of the Tibetan refugee community in India? Perhaps it is simply embodied in the person of the Dalai Lama himself and his followers in the global diaspora of Tibetans? A related question concerns how Tibetan culture is produced. Must it be determined by religion and traditionalism, or can it embrace modernity, biculturalism, and global cosmopolitanism? Most fundamentally, we should consider what is Tibetan culture and how it is to be defined when the notoriously slippery word culture has entered the lexicon of Tibetan politics. The harshest criticism directed at the Chinese government by the Dalai Lama in recent years has been the accusation of "cultural genocide." With this expression he claims that it has consciously tried to eradicate all traces of what makes Tibetans distinctive by swamping the land he vacated with Han Chinese, removing the evidence of a specifically Tibetan history, and limiting the use of the Tibetan language. China responds by pointing to the ways that it promotes Tibetan culture: by endorsing the production of Tibetan contemporary art,

11

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Introduction

preserving "cultural relics," and lavishing expenditure on heritage sites and new museums. For China, it seems that Tibetan culture can be perpetuated, so long as it is safely confined to the domains of artworks and museums.

Outline of the Book Since this book aims to make connections between representations generated in the past and those produced very recently, it has been written using theories and methods drawn from art history, critical museology, and anthropology.

It is the result of ten years of research conducted in museums, where I have examined hundreds of objects and their related documentation; observations based on fieldwork in the Tibetan exile community in India; long-standing relationships with members of the Tibetan diaspora living in the West; two visits to Lhasa; and meetings with Tibetan artists and scholars in London, New York, Bonn, Oxford, and Beijing, where we have all been travelers. The book starts its journey in the West (specifically Britain), moves through India and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and ends by acknowledging the transnational dimensions in which Tibetan culture now operates. Chronologically, it begins in the mid-nineteenth century, with the :first three chapters devoted to the histories embedded in museum collections, displays, artifacts, and photographs. It then proceeds toward more contemporary issues, with chapter 4 providing a hinge between the discussion of the historic depiction of Tibet and its repercussions and reinventions in the present.

Overview of the Chapters From a contemporary vantage point, it may seem very clear that Tibetan art exists as a category of consumption, ownership, and display. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the present day, however, Western approaches to things Tibetan have been transformed. Where they once stood within an ethnographic project to document and represent Tibet as a potentially colonizable part of the British Empire, Tibetan objects have been reconfigured as art and now play a role in personalized narratives of spirituality and psychological improvement. Research in museums allows us to chart the course of this transition and to explain why Britain occupies such a pivotal role in the emergence of the interlinked concepts of Tibetan art and archival Tibet. Chapter 1 begins with the British public's first encounter with Tibet as a museum subject at the Crystal Palace in 1854, and goes on to examine how its status shifted within academic disciplines and their related institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century. Within British museums, material from Tibet was initially consigned to departments of natural history and ethnology, but it was also examined by antiquarians, philologists, and experts in

Introduction

Asian religions. In the hands of some of the leading intellectuals of the day, such as Edward Burnett Tylor, Augustus Pitt-Rivers, and Lawrence Austine Waddell, Tibetan objects were interpreted in the light of debates about evolution, diffusionism, and race rather than as art. By the close of the nineteenth century, Tibet was well established on the scholarly agenda in the colonial metropoles (Calcutta and London), but access to the country itself remained restricted. Therefore when Lord George Nathaniel Curzon pronounced in 1903 that it was the last great territory left for the British Empire to explore, he provided the inspiration and diplomatic clout for Francis Younghusband's Tibet assignment. Officially designated as a mission or expedition, Younghusband's activities were closer to an invasion when historic monasteries were looted and the corpses of Tibetans were pillaged for trophies. Chapter 2 describes the motivations behind this unsavory form of "collecting" and suggests that it was indirectly encouraged by the activities of the official Antiquarian to the Force, Lawrence Waddell, and his seniors in government and military circles. I argue that the Younghusband Mission was instrumental in creating Tibetan art as a class of consumption and connoisseurship by inserting it into British popular culture as a facet of interior design and public spectacle. This was achieved not only through the surge of Tibetan artifacts that arrived in Britain after the mission, to be exhibited in homes and museums, but also in displays honoring Younghusband's achievements in the national capital, most notably at the 1911 Festival of Empire and the Tibet showcases at the British Museum. These presentations ignited a frenzy of acquisitiveness among curators and private individuals. The invention of "Tibetan art'' should therefore be seen as a process enacted in a variety of settings where Tibetan exotica was gradually domesticated. When subjected to the "aesthetics of decontextualization," Tibetan things became more art-like at precisely the same time that popular publications, photography, and film 19

began to depict Tibet as a glamorously remote location. Museum curators therefore sought to fulfill the growing public demand for Tibet-related imagery and to translate the ethnographically informed research of colonial diplomats and scholars into stimulating museum experiences. Exhibitions such as The Art of Tibet held in London in 1946 also indicate that art was closely con-

nected to colonial politics. The Berkeley Gallery show was regarded as an opportunity to demonstrate the British government's serious concern for Tibet through art. In the following year, Indian independence meant that Britain's close connection to Tibet was severed. Shortly thereafter, the position of "protector" of its art and heritage was taken by China. In the third and fourth chapters, our attention shifts to the role of photography in the representation of Tibet. Due to the nature of the medium, it has enabled an image of Tibet first created by colonial agents to be recreated visually in museums and publications long after the British abandoned the

13

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Introduction

subcontinent. Chapter 3 therefore goes back to the groundbreaking attempts to photograph Tibet in the nineteenth century, and examines how it entered the taxonomies of the imperial archive as a corollary to the ethnographic project The People of India. This brief history profiles the work of British colonial officers and their subaltern assistants as they struggled to capture Tibet on glass plates and to straddle the notoriously tricky boundary between science and art that photography occupies. From the pioneering activities of Sarat Chandra Das in the 1880s and onward into the twentieth century, photographing Tibet posed a substantial challenge. Acquiring a "true" picture of the country itself, rather than a fictive version mocked up by studio photographers, became a priority for British travelers equipped with a camera. When they succeeded, their results were printed in mass-circulation newspapers, exhibited in museums, and utilized to demonstrate the uniqueness of Tibetan culture in debates within Government circles about Tibet's claims to nationhood. Photography and museums were thus instrumental in fixing a particularly British way of seeing the country for generations. Chapter 4 turns to the legacy of this period to consider the "afterlives" of Tibetan images once they were extracted from the imperial archive. The "actuality effect" of photography has meant that the archive has been trawled for material that can represent Tibet to contemporary vi.ewers and trigger "memories" of its earlier appearance. 20 However, the concept of photographic remembrance is problematized here and treated along with its antithesis, "organized forgetting," to explore how the meanings of photography have been shaped by politics. For example, the imperial archive has recently been mined by the Chinese government for use in propaganda directed at decrying the feudal system and the decadence of the aristocracy in pre-1950 Tibet. The chapter therefore examines how photographs have been transported into diverse public performance spaces, including exhibitions in Lhasa, the streets of the Tibetan refugee camps in India, and the virtual domain of the Internet. When dislodged from their archival homes, the digital avatars of historic photographs have become active agents in the debate about the representation of Tibet. Chapter 5 introduces the Tibet Museum in the Tibetan "capital in exile" and asks why such an institution was required and how relevant it is for Tibetans. Led by a team of outside experts and emulating some of the principles of Holocaust museums, this Tibet Museum is charged with the duty of explaining why more than one hundred thousand Tibetans now live as refugees in India. It is suggested here that since its pedagogy is primarily directed at non-Tibetans and its propaganda against China, the museum has struggled to become a culturally embedded institution in Dharamsala. Although it is premised on the concept of "postmemory," where a narrative of trauma is passed

Introduction

from one generation to another, the museum has yet to fully engage the imagination of Tibetan refugees. The other Tibet Museum is part of the wider discussion of monuments and materiality in Lhasa contained in chapter 6. The city has been rapidly converted from a location to a tourist destination, as the Chinese government has poured millions of yuan into its modernization and reorganization. Wide plazas have been inserted, streets have been straightened, and vistas created to maximize the potential for viewing Lhasa as a museum in and of itself. At the heart of the project is the Tibet Museum, where Tibet's history is most explicitly recorded according to the official Chinese account. Its impressive postmodern exterior tempts visitors to enter the galleries of spotlit Tibetan treasures. Ultimately, however, the museum cannot compete with the spectacle of consumption that now engulfs Lhasa, or with a five-star museum-cum-hotel where every Tibetan object it contains is for sale, or with the replica of the Potala Palace in digital high definition, now on display at the base of the Dalai Lama's original palace. Chapter 7 investigates the emergence of a novel phenomenon in the international art world: Tibetan contemporary art. Although Tibetans have been making "modern" art since the 1980s, their labors were either ignored or derided by many-including Tibetans-until the turn of the millennium. Shortly thereafter, a collaboration between a handful of Western art dealers and a well-organized group of Tibetan artists led to a flurry of exhibition activity around the world and a dramatic rise in the profile of art made by living Tibetans. Works by the leading figures in this movement now sell for more than

$100,000: a price comparable to what used to be paid for an antique thangka (scroll painting). Where the rage once was for all things old, some Western collectors, curators, and dealers have switched their attention to this new art form and to the idea of "contemporary" Tibet. This chapter asks why this has occurred. It also asks what is meant by the term Tibetan contemporary art, and critiques the process of its invention. Paintings discussed in this section illustrate how artists engage with the bilingual, bicultural, and hypermodern environment of the present-day Tibet Autonomous Region. The hub of this art movement is Lhasa, but it has outposts in Europe, North America, India, and Australia. Chapter 8 therefore maps the movement of art and artists along a global trajectory and posits some new ways of thinking about Tibetan culture. Considering art produced by Tibetans both within and beyond Tibet according to a transnational and transcultural model helps to articulate the ways in which persons (and their acts) are subject to influences well beyond the places they physically inhabit, giving due prominence to imaginative territories and their frequent disjuncture from the realities of daily life. For Tibetans born after

15

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Introduction

1950, the archival Tibet described in earlier chapters of this book is one of those imagined places. They cannot remember it and in every sense lack access to it. Yet the artists among them are attempting to devise new ways of creating Tibet beyond the confines of the museum. Much of this book is about how Tibet was curated, conserved, and imagined in the past. It is about the things that have been kept when much else has been lost. It is therefore also about the institutions and individuals who decide what will be retained and determine what is to be either remembered or forgotten in the present. In the process, it reveals many things that have been neglected in the bowels of museums for decades, along with the intellectual and political apparatus that placed them there. Pursuing this archeology of the archive and combining it with a study of more recent developments has been done to help make Tibet's visual and material history more readily available to all-especially for Tibetans, wherever they may be.

......

1

The Tibet Museum in the West

In this the twenty-first century, Tibetan art is a familiar entity. It can be encountered in the grand chambers of national museums and the living rooms of private collectors. It can be admired in the pages of glossy publications produced by art historians and curators. It can be purchased from auction houses, art dealerships, and the retail outlets of the virtual bazaar such as eBay. Funds permitting, it is still possible to buy a "genuine" seventeenth-century bronze from Tibet for perusal in the privacy of your own home. If not, a small, copper gilt Buddha crafted by

a contemporary artisan from Nepal can be acquired for as little as a hundred dollars. Should you wish to decorate your bathroom in Tibetan-style, a handbook with designs derived from Tibetan monastic architecture is available. 1 For those incarcerated in an American prison, where metal statues are not allowed, the Tsa Tsa Studio: Center for Tibetan Sacred Art in California can sup-

18

Chapter One 2

ply rubber Buddha images for inmates "who are practicing Dhanna." Today it seems that "Tibetan art" can be contemplated and consumed anywhere and everywhere. It is certainly displayed in all the major museums of the world, from Boston to Beijing, as well as in the city that was once the Tibetan capital: Lhasa. There the Tibet Museum presents the heritage of a place called Tibet despite the fact that no nation with that name currently exists. In this book I argue that the absence of Tibet as an independent political entity goes some way to explain the ubiquity and popularity of Tibetan art in the domestic and public spaces of numerous other countries. On one level this is simply the result of the large-scale removals of objects from the homes, monasteries, and shrines of the Tibetan plateau and the Tibetan-speaking areas of the Himalayas during the twentieth century. This process began in the early 1900s but was most dramatic during the period after Tibet's absorption into the People's Republic of China in 1950. As a result, the majority of the collections now held in the West (as well as in China) were obtained after Tibet lost whatever political autonomy it may have previously enjoyed. But acknowledging the transfer of large quantities of objects from the domain of Tibetans into the possession of others does not entirely explain why Tibetan art has become so desirable. Why would a rubber Buddha make an "invaluable gift" for an American convict? How can a sixteenth-century painting of a multiarmed Tibetan deity, garlanded with human skulls and fused at the genitals with his consort, be described as one of the loveliest icons imaginable? The answers may lie in a crucial definitional corollary to the term Tibetan art. The things the West deems examples of Tibetan art are almost without exception the material manifestation of religion: that is, the painting, sculpture, and ritual implements that the term encompasses are described in Tibetan as supports (rten) for the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. So Tibetan art, unlike, say, Japanese art or German art, might be more accurately described as Tibetan Buddhist art: that is, as an art form defined by its original purpose rather than the location of its manufacture (Tibet) or the ethnicity of those who make it (Tibetans). But there is a problem here. For the Tibetan adherents of Buddhism, rten are not just artworks but objects with many powerful effects and functions. These objects may enable adherents' engagement with the philosophical principles of the Buddha, portray his life story, or illustrate the vast panoply of beings (whether human, demonic, or divine) that exist within the complex cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism. They can also assist in the visualization of a mandala (a cosmological diagram) and reveal miraculous episodes from the biography of a Tibetan yogin such as Milarepa. Threedimensional items such as small stupas (shrines), bells, and tsa tsa (votive tablets) embody abstract ideas, but fundamentally they are tangible supports that facilitate the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Above all, once consecrated by a monk in a ceremony called rah gnas, a representation of the Buddha quite

L..--:~

The Tibet Museum in the West

simply is the Buddha. 3 All these things are certainly valued and appreciated by Tibetans according to their own aesthetic principles-in terms of style, quality, the correctness of design and manufacture, and so on-but they are not classified as art in the Western sense. 4 So this book begins by suggesting that what has come to be known as Tibetan art is a product of the Western imagination. It was invented over the course of nearly two centuries by people who were not Tibetan but who developed a passion for Tibet primarily through an encounter with the portable, material signifiers of Tibetan culture. Their interest was initially fed by the small numbers of objects that could be extracted from a closed land, but it was greatly increased when looting and colonization in the twentieth century created an artifactual diaspora that brought Tibet into closer proximity with the outside world. At first it was only the privileged few who could own the rare things that left the Tibetan plateau for distant lands. But as this chapter will reveal, it was not long before many others were encouraged to share in their astonishment at the peculiar features of these artifactual emissaries. When investigating the collection and display of things Tibetan in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century onward, it becomes clear that the idea of Tibetan art was forged in the classificatory systems of museums and the shifting academic fashions that informed them. What also becomes apparent is a dramatic contrast between the approaches of the Victorian era and those of the present day-a difference that reflects as much about attitudes toward Tibetan Buddhism, and to Tibet and Tibetans, as it does about art. For example, one of the most important displays of Tibetan art ever mounted was the exhibition Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet. Featuring more than 150 objects and augmented with the live creation of sand mandalas by groups of Tibetan monks, the show appeared in two prestigious venues on the East and West Coasts of the United States in 1991 and at the Royal Academy in London in 1992. This was truly a blockbuster exhibition in scale, ambition, and the number of visitors it attracted. It therefore required a substantial catalog. On its cover was a reproduction of the "lovely" icon mentioned earlier, in which the bodily forms of wisdom and compassion (also described as yab yum, or Father-Mother) are shown in what appears to be a passionate, sexual embrace. However, when addressing neophytes in the appreciation of Tibetan art, the authors of the catalog and curators of the exhibition, Marylin Rhie and Robert Thurman, were determined to ensure that this image was not misinterpreted as an example of "erotic art" or as a reiteration of "longstanding misperceptions of Tibetan Buddhism as a 'primitive mix' of Buddhism and an indigenous animistic religion." 5 Instead Professor Thurman suggested that "modern depth psychology" had revealed that such an image represents one of "the deepest archetypes of the unconscious, integrating the powerful instinctual energies of life into a consciously sublimated and exalted

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Chapter One

state." He proposed that by looking at an example of Tibetan art such as this, museumgoers could learn to overcome the most "dread-filled phenomena of the human psyche" and experience it "as Tibetans do." They might even be inspired to entertain the "possibility of enlightenment" for themselves. In this and several other passages in his introductory essay, Thurman emphasized the potential for Tibetan imagery to perform a kind of therapy on the viewer. Embracing the message of Tibetan Buddhist art would provide a panacea for the ills of Western individualism, an antidote to materialism, and an entry point into what Thurman called the "transcendent yet earthy aesthetic of one of the most spiritually developed of all the Buddhist civilizations." Tibetan art thereby supplies the illustrations for a self-help manual for the unenlightened, demonstrating how Tibetan Buddhist techniques could be used to control an unruly psyche and enhance the spiritual faculties of those dogged by the malaises of the modern, urban West. The Wisdom and Compas-

sion catalog appeared to suggest that the religion, derived from the teachings of a South Asian prince who had renounced his wealth and high station to seek enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago, could help solve many contemporary quandaries. Encountering Tibetan art in the ostensibly secular spaces of Western museums was therefore an act of veneration for the religion that had produced it, and the Tibetan rten had been converted into supports for the Western mind.

If the Wisdom and Compassion exhibition was designed to show that Tibetan art could train the mind and harness the power of the subconscious, the next major exhibition of Buddhist art to be held at a prestigious venue in the United States was aimed at tutoring the eye and warming the heart. In 2003

Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure was hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago. Although the show avoided referring to Tibet or Tibetan Buddhism in its title, the objects selected for it were mainly drawn from the regions of Asia where Tibetan Buddhist culture had predominated for many centuries: Nepal, northern India, Bhutan, and Tibet itself. As its curator, Pratapaditya Pal, informed readers of its catalog, There are two primary ways of responding to a work of art: seeing it and reading it. It has become much too fashionable these days to read about art rather than look at it, especially when the artwork belongs to another culture. This is particularly true of the religious arts that were created primarily to appeal to the heart rather than the intellect. The purpose of this catalogue and the exhibit it accompanies is to encourage the viewer first to look and enjoy the beauty of the objects and then to explore their spiritual import. 6 Dr. Pal recounted that his own "aesthetic adventure" had begun in Nepal in 1959 but had since been cultivated by working with "portable objects within

The Tibet Museum in the West

the confines of what is considered to be 'fine art' in American museums." However, to his regret, many of his requests to museums to borrow pieces for the Chicago exhibition had not been granted. He had therefore been forced to rely on loans from the private collectors who, according to Pal, had "outstripped and outbid the museums in the exploding Himalayan [art] market and formed extraordinary collections." Consequently, the resulting show was a celebration of the achievements of the fabulously wealthy in preserving Tibetan Buddhist art for the appreciation of others. Not only that, it would transmit the collectors' way of seeing without the encumbrance of an overemphasis on religion or any reference to the perspectives of those who first made and used the "artworks." As Pal put it, "It is gratifying that even though the scholarly world continues to concentrate on the religious message of the objects, there has been a significant movement since the 1960s, among collectors and connoisseurs in the West, to acknowledge their artistic brilliance." Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago would therefore be able to pursue an "aesthetic adventure" without being burdened by knowledge of their context within Tibetan Buddhism. Nor need they be troubled by the fact that the 1960s had marked the creation of the Tibetan diaspora and the mass exodus of objects from Tibet to the United States, a process that had enabled their elevation into the canons of Western art in the first place. Thus by the start of the present century, Tibetan objects were to be viewed in museums as a delight for the eyes or a balm for the troubled soul. Representations of Tibetan monks made from precious metals were deemed sculpture, while thangkas (scroll paintings) colored with finely ground mineral pigments had become examples of "fine art." Following principles of aesthetics first formulated in the eighteenth century by philosophers such as Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant, Tibetan things had been categorized as beautiful, spiritually uplifting, and available for ownership or contemplation by persons of suitably refined tastes. At the same time, Tibetan Buddhism has become a religion to be revered and even followed by non-Tibetans. Yet the difference between current appraisals of Tibet's art and religion and those that pertained a hundred years earlier could not be more marked. At the end of the nineteenth century, Tibet was presented to the public as a land of demon worship, superstition, and bizarre rituals. Museums in Europe and North America created displays focusing on their holdings of "devil daggers," "praying wheels," and amulets, along with a range of items made from human remains, including "skull bowls," "thigh-bone trumpets," and bone "aprons." Although some pioneering scholars of the period sought to characterize Tibetan religion as one of the higher forms of Buddhism, others saw it as a repugnant and degenerate version of the Mahayana school. Due to the influence of the proponents of the latter view and the nature of the objects gathered by collectors at the height of the imperial era, Victorian museum audiences were therefore usually

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Chapter One

presented with a depiction of a remote Tibet, where yaks roamed in a barren wilderness and humans occupied their time following a •primitive" religion that required the use of some decidedly ghoulish implements. Collecting Tibet Among the serried ranks of bronze and golden figures on view in a large Victorian case at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a rare object from Tibet (fig. 1.1).' This colored clay plaque depicts the goddess Palden Lhamo riding a mule through a sea of blood and brandishing the grim accoutrements associated with the "wrathful" forrns of Tibetan Buddhist deities: weapons, skull bowls, and necklaces of freshly severed heads. According to legend, the source of Palden Lhamo's anger was her failure to convert the people of (Sri) Lanka to Buddhism from their practice of cannibalism and human sacrifice. When even her spouse refused to abandon his bloodthirsty ways, she slaughtered their son in his presence and commandeered the child's flayed skin as a saddle for her mount. As she rode away, her husband shot a poisoned arrow at the horse's rump, but the wound miraculously mutated into an all-seeing eye that would, she declared, only aid her in promoting Buddhism in more receptive lands beyond Lanka. For Tibetan Buddhists, the elaborate iconography of Palden Lhamo encompasses her varied and apparently contradictory roles: armed with weapons she is Magzor Gyalmo (Queen of Armies), and yet she is also one of the eight principal protectors of Buddhism. She carries a sack of diseases to inflict on her enemies, but the bag also contains the remnants of a meal in which she devoured the bulk of the world's illnesses in an attempt to reduce the toll of human suffering. By the fifteenth century, the title of personal protector to the dalai lamas was added to her list of responsibilities, and she became firmly associated with the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. In more recent centuries, Palden Lhamo has acted as the tutelary deity of the government in Lhasa and defender of the entire Tibetan nation. To this day, a thangka depicting Palden Lhamo accompanies the Dalal Lama wherever he goes. The day plaque at the Pitt Rivers Museum therefore seems to bear all the hallmarks of a quintessentially Tibetan object, but for contemporary visitors to the museum this may not be immediately apparent- the case in which she resides has remained largely unchanged for more than a century. Palden Lhamo arrived in Oxford in 1884 along with some twen ty thousand other objects presented to the university by Augustus Pitt-Rivers. When the collection was arranged in the museum according to his specifications-by type and form rather than by region- the Tibetanness of Palden Lhamo was effectively suppressed. Exhibited among more than two hundred other items in case 123.A, Palden Lhamo became just one figure in a crowd of predominantly

The Tibet Mu$eum in the West

Hindu gods and demigods and a handful of Buddhas and bodhisattvas from different parts of Asia (fig. 1.2). Originally labeled "Idols and Religious Emblems Belonging to Various Countries," this case reflects the history of ideas in Britain in the second halfof the nineteenth century, when the race to garner knowledge about the religions of Asia was gathering pace. the fact that Palden Lhamo is vastly outnumbered by Hindu •idols• at the Pitt Rivers Museum is no surprise given the long duration of British involve• ment with the Indian subcontinent and the collecting activities of some of the

· · h cen tury) with bbel as currently exhibited at lI Cby pb,.,ue depicting Pa.Iden (.h;amo (mtd-mneceent ' Museum. Photograph courtesy Pitt · Rivers •• the Pitt Rivets 1v,useum. Univenltyof Oxford. Atcesslon no. 188459.31.

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Chapter One

chief protagonists in the colonial project. The onset of this process is datable to 1685, when William Hedges, governor of the East India Company in Bengal, donated a large siltstone figure of Vishnu to the newly founded Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.8 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the scholar• ship of India experts began to filter through to museums and informed staff concerning the provenance, naming, and iconography of the curious things that were arriving from that country. This meant that by the mid-nineteenth century, curators in British museums were already familiar with the imagery of Hinduism, but expertise on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism was compara• tively scant.

It is probably for this reason that before it reached the Pitt Rivers Museum, the subject matter of the clay plaque was regularly misidentified. When displayed at the Bethnal Green Museum in London's East End in 1874, it was labeled "Shiva;' one of the three primary male gods of Hinduism. Later, at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), the figure changed gender to become Kali, the •wrathful" consort of Shiva, retaining this

1

~ The main ex.h.ibi~n ~re:i at th~ Pitt Ri,.·e.rs Museum in Oxford (c.a.1900). Photogr.a.ph cou.rtesy Pitt Rivers Mu11ei.un, Unnre.rs1ty of Oxford. Act.ession no, 1998.267,95.5.

The Tibet Museum in the West

name on transfer to the Pitt Rivers Museum.' The curators at these establishmel)tS could be forgiven for their errors, since Hinduism and Buddhism (particularly in their Tantric forms) share many traits in depicting gods and

goddesses, and both have absorbed imagery that predates the emergence of ''organized,. religion. Confusion can easily arise since, as one commentator has put it, Palden Lhamo "may best be described as a composite of mystical personifications going back to very early practices and understandings of the Tibetan people, layered with imported Hindu goddess identities and Buddhist identities created to correspond to the Dharma. RegardJcss of Palden Lhamo's homeland, her ancient roots may go back as far as the period of goddess worship prior to the development of Hinduism or Buddhism."" However, although the personality and iconography of Palden Lhamo may be complicated, establishing the Tibetanness of the object in which she featuus at the Pitt Rivers Museum is easier when we focus on its substance. Historically, day was used in Tibet to make large-scale sculpture, vessels of various sorts, masks for monastic dance performers, and tsa tsa. The latter are usually described in English as votive tablets, indicating that they are mass• produced from molds to create inexpensive items for pilgrims to present at shrines and monasteries. They are also manufactured in large numbers to fill the interior spaces of stupas as part of the consecration process for those Buddhist monuments. The connection between stupas and worship of the Buddha's relics (which was the original function for such structures) explains why some tsa tsa are also said to contain ashe.s from the cremated bodies of monks of high renown. Such highly prized objects were then incorporated into portable shrines or preserved in a gau, an amulet box worn about the body to protect the owner against malignant influences. In the case of the Palden Lhamo at the Pitt Rivers Museum, a large tsa tsa by Tibetan standards, two holes pierced through the clay suggest that it was probably attached to a container of that ilk and lashed to its owner as a talisman. Another hole on its reverse is also revealing. A small aperture designed to contain a mantra written on a slip of paper is now empty, making this representation of the protector goddess inert and deconsecrated from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. The removal of sanctified substances (texts on paper, hair from the head of a revered monk, packets of sacred earth) for "scientific purposes" was a common practice in museums until relatively recently, and lllany Tibetan religious images in Western collections are now hollow, bereft of their original contents." More important for the discussion pursued in this book, the secularization of sacred Tibetan objects was part of the process that propelled them into the Westem canon of art, a process that, I will argue later, was accelerated by an encounter between British and Tibetan troops at the start of the twentieth century. In order to make this case, close examination of

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Chapter One

objects and consideration of the histories of their acquisition and display are required. Such a study can reveal some startling-even unsettling-results. Let us consider another Tibetan object whose efficacy as a pr6tective device has also been removed, but which contains an empty hole of a rather different type. In the storerooms of the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire is a set of material collected by an anonymous British soldier during the Younghusband Mission to Tibet in 1903-4. There is no documentation for this collection, but it features several bronzes of the size and quality of those typically placed on shrines in Tibetan monasteries. There are also some more personal items: spoons of the sort used by Tibetans to eat their staple food, tsampa (roasted barley flour), as well as iron keys and the miniature tools from a chatelaine. Along with some rusty arrowheads, these small and eminently portable objects exemplify the detritus of war, gathered as they were from the battlefield and the bodies of Tibetans who died during the combat with Younghusband's troops as they marched into Tibet. Although such pillaging was officially banned during the Younghusband Mission (and later denied), one object in particular at Cheltenham emphatically contradicts the official version of events in 1903-4. It is a silver-inlaid copper gau of the sort worn by Tibetans in the belief that its amuletic power could deflect any weapon. But this box has been pierced by a bullet, leaving a spray of splayed copper at the back to record its trajectory through metal and, very probably, onward into human flesh. 12 Even a modest grasp of ballistics indicates that this fissure was made by a weapon of some sophistication. When coupled with the knowledge that two Maxim machine guns (affectionately known to their operators as Bubble and Squeak, after an English dish consisting of two different vegetables) were used to full effect during British operations in Tibet at the time, the Cheltenham gau communicates a tragic message. Like the arrowheads that littered the battlefield, it proved to be an ineffective (religious) technology that was no match for the assault of Britis~ firepower. As a member of the mission observed, "Neither the lamas' chorus of curses, nor their charms had the slightest effect. On the contrary, as if in a bitter irony of fate, many at Guru received their death-wounds through their 13

charm boxes." As a graphic illustration of British imperial military supremacy over Tibet and Tibetans, it is little wonder that the Cheltenham gau has never been on public display. Although the military and diplomatic aspects of the British Mission to Tibet have received some attention from historians (and its leader-Francis Younghusband-has been the subject of popular biography), little consideration has previously been given to the tangible and visible evidence of this campaign, despite the fact that thousands of objects and photographs from this period now reside in museums throughout the British Isles. 14 From the

The Tibet Museum in the West

great national museums in London to the less well-known regimental and provincial collections, Tibet has a substantial artifactual presence around the country, but one that is largely concealed within the storerooms of these establishments. Yet this was not always the case. From the mid-nineteenth century, the British public had started to encounter the idea of Tibet within the galleries of museums and other display spaces. They began to develop a thirst for knowledge about Tibet and to cultivate some kind of understanding of its culture well before the Younghusband Mission set off for Lhasa in 1903. By examining the ways in which Tibetan objects entered the nineteenth-century taxonomies of museums and were classified according to those institutions' disciplinary parameters, we can demonstrate their transformation from exotic "curios" and colonial trophies into specimens studied by scholars in the fields of natural history, ethnology, and anthropology before the invention of "Tibetan art." Working with objects that had arrived on the London art market or reached Britain through the networks of colonial officers based in the Indian subcontinent, a small group of influential academics positioned Tibet within the racial and evolutionary hierarchies of nineteenth-century thought and determined how the country would be presented to museum visitors. Their research endeavors generated a demand for more, to the extent that by the close of the nineteenth century, no museum or connoisseur of Asian art could be without a substantial Tibetan collection. They also set an agenda that persisted well into the twentieth century, in which an inventory of exemplary objects was established and the nature of Tibetan society was defined in relation

to its religion: Tibetan Buddhism. Thus as late as 1970, Michael Ridley could still assert that by comparison to the rest of Asia, "the force of religion as a stimulus to art can perhaps best be seen in Tibet, where the whole of society revolves around religious and philosophical ideas." 15 His book Oriental Art for Pleasure and Investment provided advice on what was needed to create a comprehensive and valuable Tibetan collection. It should include prayer wheels, amulet boxes, clay votives, rosaries (preferably "some made from the bones of holy lamas"), skull bowls, skull drums, thighbone trumpets, and aprons made of human bone. 16 According to Ridley, this kind of material was prevalent in Tibet because "Tibetan Buddhism is probably one of the most mechanised religions the world has ever seen."17 As we shall see, the concept of mechanized religion had first been mooted in the nineteenth century and arose from a preoccupation with the accoutrements of Tibetan religion, particularly those objects fashioned from human remains and associated with its most esoteric practices. In the following pages I will argue that the interpretation of Tibetan objects in British museums and academia in the nineteenth century laid the foundations for the invention of

27

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30

Chapter One

nifi.cant that at this stage, no distinction is made between different types of collectables: the "natural productions" of Tibet are of as much interest as the "Manufactures." This was probably because Hastings, like the Tradescants before him, appreciated the scientific and commercial value of exotic flora, just as he saw the potential for the exploitation of fauna from the Tibetan plateau. He certainly knew that "Persons of Taste" in England would want to examine any curiosities that had been discovered in Tibet due to their sheer rarity and novelty. In fact it is with the strange tale of Hastings's yak that we can establish a connection between the first viceroy of India and Tibet's debut at a major exhibition in London. Among his many tasks in Tibet, George Bogle had been slated to purchase two pashmina goats. Hastings knew that these Tibetan creatures produced the wool for the high-value textile that was processed in India and known to Europeans as "Cashmere." Bogle was also asked to find a pair of yaks. Yaks' tails were a precious commodity in India, and they had been used in Hindu temples as fly whisks for generations. Whether Hastings intended to cut out the Tibetan middleman by breeding yaks in the plains of India is unknown, and unfortunately Bogle failed in this aspect of his mission. However, in 1784 Hastings's next envoy to Tibet, Samuel Turner, was more successful, and a pair of yaks was safely deposited in the viceroy's menagerie in Calcutta. When the viceroy left his post in India the following year, the animals undertook the arduous sea passage back to England. Unfortunately only the male survived, but his arrival at Hastings's Berkshire estate caused great excitement. While his owner was impeached for corruption, the yak became a cause ceiebre and had his portrait painted by the illustrious equine artist George Stubbs. When the picture was exhibited in 1791 with the title The Yak of Tartary (as the central regions of Asia were then known), Stubbs's depiction of the woolly Tibetan beast grazing in the English countryside propelled it toward further fame. By 1800 the image had been copied by William Delamotte to illustrate Turner's account of his travels in Tibet, and in 1854 it appeared once again in an engraving by a member of the next generation of the Delamotte family of artists, Philip. 25 Philip Delamotte was not only an engraver but also a photographer most noted for his documentation of the Crystal Palace when it was moved to Sydenham from central London in 1854. It was also there that Delamotte, along with hundreds of thousands of others, would witness the first reconstruction of Tibet produced for the education and entertainment of the British public, and Hastings's yak would become a star attraction.

The Crystal Palace The Crystal Palace was originally designed by the gardener-architect Joseph Paxton to present The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations

The Tibet Museum in the West

in London's Hyde Park. In less than six months, its massive wrought-iron and

glass halls are said to have accommodated millions of visitors. With displays covering the "arts and industries" of Europe and the British colonies, the Great Exhibition introduced a staggering array of material to the British public, from the latest technological innovations such as a prototype of the fax machine to the dazzling textiles and metalwork of India. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, the exhibition was not only

hugely popular but also highly profitable. Consequently, when it closed on October 15, 1851, it was decided that the entire structure would be transferred to the leafy suburb of Sydenham Hill on the outskirts of London." Samuel Phillips, director of the Literary Department of the Crystal Palace Company, explained the rationale behind the move to Sydenham: "To raise the enjoyments and amusements of the English people, ... to blend for them instruction with pleasure, to educate them by the eye, to quicken and purify their taste by the habit of recognising the beautiful-to place them amidst the trees, flowers and plants of all countries and of all climates, and to attract them to the study of the natural sciences by displaying their most interesting examples." 27 Phillips believed that the glories of nature and art would edify those who were suffering most from the moral and physical hazards of a crowded city like London: the middle and working classes. To that end, the Crystal Palace was to be expanded, with the creation of additional displays both indoors and out. Within these new arenas an emerging discipline with its roots in the natural sciences was to make its first public appearance. As curator of the British National Museum of Anatomy and Natural History, William Thomson, pointed out, "One of the most conspicuous and attractive sections will be that of Ethnology. No museum has yet ever attempted to show models of the varieties of the human race together with their national costumes, their domestic and agricultural implements, their armour, their dwellings, their modes of conveyance and other characteristic objects that appertain to them." 28 Using lifesize mannequins, living plants, and stuffed animals, the displays at Sydenham would abandon glass cases and the "monotony that attaches to mere museum arrangement" to bring these peoples to life and arrange them in "picturesque groupings" where harmony would "reign throughout" 29 • The drama of the diorama format would be used to create maximum impact on visitors so that the unlettered could be educated almost subliminally. 30 Thomson argued that these displays would also enable untraveled visitors to observe the "peculiar varieties of mankind" at first hand and to place themselves in comparison with the inhabitants of distant lands. In an extraordinary passage touching on the moral tenor of the exhibition, the Guidebook to the Crystal Palace made this assertion: If the visitor should feel astonishment in the presence of some of the phases

of human existence here presented to him, he may do well to bear in mind,

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Chapter One

that they are representations of human beings endowed with immortal souls; ... and that it is not yet two thousand years since the forefathers of the present European family tattooed their skins, and lived in so savage a state that late·archaeological researches induce us to suspect that they were not wholly free from one of the worst charges that is laid to savage existence; viz. the practice of cannibalism. 31 This statement fuses Christian ethics-the recognition that all living beings have a soul-with observations derived from archeology and the new "science'' of ethnology-in which the development of human culture was stratified from savagery to civilization-to arrive at the startling conclusion that Europeans were once really not so dissimilar from their contemporaries in foreign parts. Eight years before the publication of Charles Darwin's more celebrated

study, a leading pioneer in ethnology had already argued that human development had proceeded from "some species ... lower in the scale of Nature." 32 The author of Man and His Migrations (1851), Robert Latham, was a man of many talents who during the course of his career had been a physician, a professor of English literature, a philologist, and vice president of the Ethnological Society of Great Britain. He was also a collector. In fact, in 1846 Latham's interest in the material culture of different societies had inspired a caricature in Bentley's Miscellany, where he was described as a "travelling bachelor" whose "learnedly and fancifully decorated" lodgings in Cambridge contained the "hunting dress of an Ojibbeway [sic] Indian and the Sunday clothes of a German professor lying about promiscuously." 33 But Latham's focus on such "curiosities" had a serious academic purpose, and one that made him the ideal person to act as director of the Ethnological Department at Sydenham. Under his leadership, ethnologists from near and far would be encouraged to contribute material to Latham's new department so that the "Science of Man" could be illustrated by "a more extensive collection of objects than has ever yet been collected."34 Along with casts of human heads, hair, and other physical samples, Latham solicited specimens of "native manufacture" to clothe mannequins and generally ensure that the Crystal Palace ethnology displays were both sci-

entifically accurate and vividly lifelike. In this way, his subject would perhaps elicit the same level of interest among the masses as the "arts and industries" had done at the 1851 extravaganza. Conscious that few museums of ethnology existed and that his discipline was a novel one, Latham introduced it in simple terms in his 1854 guide to the displays at Sydenham. Ethnology, he explained, "means the science, not exactly of the different nations of the world, but of the different varieties of the human species." 35 His essay described some of the methods employed by ethnologists, explaining, for example, how racial variation

The Tibet Museum in the West

was to be established by comparisons of physiognomy, skin color, length of limbs, and so on. To do this, data were collected in the form of human remains, photographs, and casts made from live models. For Latham, the ethnology displays at the Crystal Palace presented an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the results of this "scientific" work on human types and to make "the extent to which they differ from each other" 36 manifest to thousands of visitors.

Rather startlingly, the Ethnology Court at the Crystal Palace therefore provides some indication of how Tibetans were classified within Victorian theories of race. As visitors entered it in 1854, a group of life-size Tibetan mannequins arranged in a suitably Tibetan-looking environment were the first figures to be seen. They had achieved this prominent position for two reasons. With his emphasis on populations "foreign to Europe," Latham had sought to demonstrate that "the most remarkable varieties are found under the extremes of heat and cold." 37 He had also oriented the displays according to nineteenth-century notions of geography: the "Old World" of Asia, Europe, and Africa occupied one side of the court, and the "New World" of the Americas filled the other. Within this scheme the Tibetans' position was assigned based on their physiognomy as examples of the Mongolian "variety," although Latham also acknowledged that they were similar to the Chinese in "form" and "creed" if "dissimilar in habits." 38 In addition, Latham was aware that some Tibetans lived within the boundaries of British India (in Bengal, for example), while the majority resided on the other side of the Himalayas and were "subject" to the Chinese. Since he believed that India and China had long been "civilised after their own peculiar fashion," this placed Tibetans within the upper levels of the stages of cultural development. 39 They were also an elevated community in the topographical sense, by dint of their propensity to live at high altitudes. Latham had therefore dreamed of recreating the highest regions of the world in a live habitat with "a miniature mountain encircled by belts of Alpine vegetation, amid which the characteristic animals of the zones might be placed in relative order of elevated dwelling places," but the logistics proved impossible. Instead he sought out an example of a remarkable creature that could survive in the highest mountains in the world: the "grunting ox" of Central Asia (as he called it). 40 In order to signify the Tibetan environment at Sydenham, Latham enlisted the services of a taxidermist, and either Warren Hastings's yak or possibly one of his offspring that had been mated with an Indian bull was stuffed and transported to Sydenham to supplement the plaster figures of Tibetans at the Crystal Palace entrance. 41 Thus, in Latham's exhibition British citizens could tour the environs of Tibet for the first time and examine its flora, fauna, and inhabitants without leaving the suburbs of London. Classified according to the criteria of ethnology and natural history, Tibet was imagined in 1854 as an elevated place occupied by a racially elevated people of Mongolian type.

33

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Chapter One

The "Skull of Confucius": Chinese Art or Tibetan Artifact? Through the endeavors of James Latham, the displays at the Crystal Palace had established Tibet as a legitimate scientific and museological subject for the first time. It bad yet to enter the hallowed chambers of Art, however. In the frenzy of international art exhibitions that began to grip Britain, France, and other Western nations in the midcentury, Tibet was not (knowingly) represented. Yet its two neighbors, India and China, were increasingly revered as sources of fine examples of Asian art. The magnificence of Indian design had been amply demonstrated at the Great Exhibition in 1851. A decade later the attention of London art connoisseurs turned to China as another Asian region from which extraordinary things were said to be emerging. In 1861 the l/lustrated Lendon News informed its readers that a display of •sacred relics" and "curiosities of the Chinese• had been shown at the Tuileries in Paris." These things, it declared, were examples of the "booty" acquired by French forces in Beijing during the second Opium War of 1860.43 When Londoners heard that the looted property of the Qianlong Emperor would soon be on show in their city, the news was greeted with eager anticipation. Although the Chinese section of the 1862 International Exhibition of Arts in London contained far fewer objects than had been the case in Paris, it did include a large carved screen taken by British troops from behind the emperor's throne as well as a very unusual item described as •the Skull of Confucius." This object caused a sensation in Victorian London. since it appeared to encompass all the essential elements of Chineseness: it was supposedly a relic from the body of China's greatest philosopher, it had been owned by a Chinese emperor, and it was sumptuously embellished in a setting of pure gold. According to one of the many who visited the 1862 exhibition, there was "scarcely anything more striking and interesting, of its kind, than (that] object in the ... Chinese Court" (fig.1.3)." The Skull of Confucius consisted of a human skull supported by a triangular base and covered with an elaborately crafted lid. Strange as it was, Victorian viewers marveled at the loveliness of this object.'-' For the eminent historian of Indian architecture, James Fergusson, it was simply "the most exquisitely beautiful specimen in oriental goldsmith's work he had ever seen:·•• (Fergusson was also impressed by the fact that it was for sale at the stupendous price of one thousand guineas.) For John Burley Waring, who illustrated it in his Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition of 1862, the skull bowl was one of the few objects from Asia that had earned a status equivalent to European masterworks.47

Since it had been presented in a gallery devoted to China, had apparently been removed from the Summer Palace of the Qianlong Emperor, and embodied an alien yet appealing aesthetic, no one who saw the Skull of Confucius

The Tibet Museum in the West

in 1862 had reason to doubt that it was anything other than an exceptionally valuable example of Chinese art. But like the misidentification of Palden Lhamo as a Hindu god (under the influence of South Asian scholarship), art connoisseurs' preoccupation with China rendered the skull's Tibetanness invisible. It took two decades for a more accurate appraisal of this object to be reached, a process that began only when the highlight of the Chinese Court at the 1862 International Exhibition suffered an ignominious decline in status. In 1864 it was offered for sale at the auction house of Christie, Manson and Woods along with other material listed as the property of Lord Elgin. It is not known who purchased the Skull of Confucius, but only six years later, readers of the anthropological handbook Notes and Queries were told that it had been found "uncared for at the house of a Jewish gold dealer in Houndsditch!••• According to the man who rediscovered it (presumably at a knockdown price), "With the most astounding stupidity the gold has been melted down for its mere weight as bullion, and one of the most interesting and curious relics of Chinese art and history has thus been irretrievably lost."49 For the paleontologist, zoologist, and ethnologist George Busk, however, the "naked" skull could now at least be used for scientific purposes.

l.3 The "Skull of Confucius" (ceuter) with other obje' GyedanuPeh(lt~P· . on the roofofthe Palkhor l O c. 0 O"-Landon On&>lo r.oj:ri) c;:in be seen st1nding

Library Board. All lUghts Reserved. Photo 1083/13 {204).

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reached the monastic town of Gyantse, for example, several "idols" were ripped apart as soldiers grappled to remove their innards. No longer satisfied with pocket-sized items, the troops also began to detach components of large-scale statues. Brass figures of the Buddha were dismantled in pursuit of the portable fragment, as Captain Hadow's hand list for his Tibet collection makes clear: "Item 57: Head of Image-broken off as image too large to carry away."" (The same list mentions "two daggers• taken from "some large idols at Gyantse.")"' The turquoise and coral stones attached to Tibetan religious objects were also picked off. As a result, a seventeenth-century copper and gilt representation of Maitreya (Buddha of the Future) collected during the mission was describe Waddell must have convinced the secretary of state that Britain could lead the world in the study of Tibetan Buddhism, as his proposal was successful and a substantial budget in Indian rupees (equivalent to around 700 pounds) was allocated." When he arrived in Tibet, Waddell soon found that "the almighty rupee worked wonders. There was nothing the people were not willing to sell in exchange for it. They would take off their turquoise earrings and other orna-

1'he Younghus.band Mis:sion and Tibetan Art

ments and press you to buy them as curios. Even the sleek Lamas or priests brought out their sacred scrolls and images and bargained them for cash, and everybody seemed supremely pleased, never having seen so much money in their lives before."S< Yet Waddell was not content to simply buy whatever Tibetans might offer him. His experiences in the bazaars of Darjeeling meant that he was already primed to dismiss mere "curios• and to seek out the "au• thentic" in religious institutions. 55 During the Tibet mission he would no Ion• ger feel "compelled to purchase" what "sleek Lamas" were willing to sell, for Younghusband bad enabled him to collect rare material "under exceptionally favourable circumstances."56 In Lhasa and Its Mysteries, Waddell thanked the mission leader for giving him full "access to the monasteries and edict pillars• of Tibet, as if the British army bad merely been engaged in a research exercise. But other passages in the book indicate that the "favourable" conditions for collecting were actually created by the implied or actual use of brute force. For example, Younghusband had instructed that an estate belonging to the governor of Gyantse be commandeered for British use. The Changlo Manor thus became a British barracks. and its shrine room was converted into the mission's

dining hall. In clearing this chamber of its contents, Waddell secured more than four hundred volumes of Tibetan Buddhist texts in one fell swoop.57 On other occasions the conditions in which Waddell acquired his material were less favorable; in fact, be claimed that they were often decidedly hazardous. Apparently Waddell was frequently required to dodge bullets and cannonballs as battles raged around him while he pursued Tibetan treasures. Luckily he discovered that the sturdy wooden covers of the "ponderous tomes• he was collecting could be used to construct a shelter to protect him from stray missiles. Thus Waddell presented himself as a heroic figure risking life and limb, and even entering buildings •·set on fire by retreating Tibetan soldiery• in order to "rescue" their contents.58 The suggestion that Tibetans had deliberately either burned or abandoned their own property allowed him to claim their goods as legitimate appropriations by the British and fortuitously his "almighty rupee[s)" were not required. In the heat of battle and its aftermath, the official collector had not needed to spend much of his Government budget. In addition, the loot re• covered by other members of the Younghusband Mission provided him with numerous items to choose from. The capture of Gyantse in particular had gen· "fcism in the erated many spoils, but it also provoked an outburst o f intense en i British press. Coupled with reports of massacres in southern Tibet, the news that British troops bad indulged in looting was a cause for further concern m • figures in the mission .was London and Calcutta. Toe response from senior . to • . · a veneer of respectability to use the concept of "antiquarian collecting to give _ . , ti le in the Times on Apnl 21, their actions. For example Perceval Lan d on s ar c 1904, announced that "val~ables or curios found in the fort · · · will be handed

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ChapttrTwo

over to the Government of India for distribution amongst British and Indian Museums."59 In reality a strict hierarchy had been observed for the division of the spoils, with elite members of the mission taking precedence. As Younghusband wrote to his wife from Gyantse, "There has been a committee today distributing brass images and things found in the fort. I have been allotted twelve things."•• However, the fact that collecting had been not only extensive but systematically administered in this way was not revealed to the public. Instead Younghusband and his senior staff attempted to place the blame for any inappropri· ate behavior on the lower ranks and subaltern troops. Hence Younghusband's trusty mouthpiece in the British press, Edmund Candler, told readers of the Daily Mail that "Two Sepoys [from the Indian regiments] were sentenced to two years imprisonment for attempting to rob a monastery. Another who took the earrings from a native of the country was severely flogged_,.., Landon similarly implied that it was the ignorant "natives" in the British army who were the wanton looters. After the taking of Little Gobshi, he wrote that "hundreds of thangkas were then found, but as they were of no interest or value in the eyes of the rlative troops, the vast majority of them were thrown on one side, and the heavy rain of the following night disfigured the majority almost beyond recognition."62 The mission leadership therefore differentiated between British officers of taste and discernment and those who, by dint of their class or ethnicity, were said to lack the ability to appreciate art. It was claimed that the former did not indulge in erratic and destructive pillage, for they were salvaging the rare and the beautiful for noble ends: the creation of a British national collection of Tibetan art. Younghusband's superiors in the Foreign Office in London were nonetheless still alarmed by "notices appearing in newspapers that loot from Tibet was reaching India in considerable quantities." They wrote to Younghusband, informing him that "to meet the possibility of this being correct, suitable ac• tion should be taken ... to prevent the loot being sent down, [though] bona fide purchases of curios [were] of course not prohibited."63 Younghusband was also instructed to ensure that the sanctity of Tibetan religious buildings had not been violated. Some efforts in this direction appear to have been made, as Hadow wrote that the "regular temples" of Gyantse contained •some magnifi· cent things but we are not allowed to loot them of course."64 But unfortunately not everyone observed this rule. British Museum documents show that Major lggulden collected fifteen items from the Palkhor Choede, the main assembly hall in Gyantse's monastery. The National Museum of Scotland's records state that Major Rybot also acquired twelve fairly large statues there. It is not known whether these were bona-fide purchases, but when A. R. B. Shuttleworth presented an impressive gold-embossed book cover from the Palkhor

The Younghusband Mission and Tibetan Art

Choede to the Victoria and Albert Museum, he claimed that the monks had wilUngly sold it to him. His letter of donation labors the point: ''The carved book cover in question was got from the large monastery at Gyantse in Tibet. It was paid for by me. The price asked by the lamas being given to them by me. It was purchased with the consent of the staff officer at Gyantse, Major Thomas of the Indian Army. Force orders were very strict with reference to looting and everything therefore had to be purchased."65 The events at Gyantse had several side effects. The "favourable conditions" for collecting that Waddell had boasted of earlier had clearly evaporated. The mission now fell under close Government scrutiny, and Younghusband was told that further incidents of forced entry into Tibetan monasteries or loot• ing were to be avoided. News of the British actions at Gyantse also circulated among Tibetans, and some of them attempted to dissuade Younghusband's troops from any more acts of aggression against them and their property. A photograph taken by Frederick Bailey at Nagartse on June 20, 1904, illustrates one of their tactics (fig. 2.4). It shows a twenty-five-foot-long petition against British looting, held up like a paper barricade in front of the invaders. Blocking

· · · · t British looting, u.ke.n at 2.4 Frederick Bailey's photograph of Tibet.ans holding a pct1t:10~ .-gams erved Photo 1083/11 (137). Nag.uue 0904). Photograph e The British Ubrary Soard. All .Rights Res ·

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Chapter iwo

their onward route to Lhasa, the document was a plea for the sacred build· ings and artifacts of the Tibetan capital to be left intact. Nevertheless, in July 1904 Waddell and two other members of The Committee on the Collection of Tibetan Books and Curios filed a progress report pleading with Government to be allowed to continue collecting in Lhasa, since "no official contributions other than books have been made to the collection since the first donation from Gyantse Jong on ts•• April last. ... The Committee therefore beg to rec· ommend that official steps be taken to secure for the Government and other Museums representative samples at the first opportunity.".. In order to makt such a ·representative• collection, the mission would have to transform itself from a ma.rauding invasion into an innocent shopping excursion.

The Lhasa Bazaar The Younghusband Mission had begun with the scavenging of Tibetan corpses. It then moved into a phase of ransacking buildings and property. Once the looting of Gyantse had come to the attention of the British and Tibetan ilU· thorities, such activities were to stop. Yet for many mission members. the passion for collecting did not cease. With its fabled monasteries, palaces, and temples, the T ibetan capital would surely provide the richest pickings. Ma· jor lggulden, for one, was not disappointed upon arriving in the city, as •the visible riches and treasures of Lhasa fairly made our mouths water..., Since Francis Younghusband was about to sign a treaty with the Tibetans, lggul· den believed that Lhasa was a "fair object to loot: but he claimed that "not a farthing's worth was finally taken from it by any of us .... Instead !ggulden trawled the streets of Lhasa, spending quite a few farthings in the market on brass statues, teapots, vases, cups, and Chinese jade figurines. Similarly, Fred• erick Bailey described how he visited "the Jo Kang [sic) where there were some very fine idol [sic) ... then went around the bazaar and bought some things.• No longer suffering from incomprehension of "funny" Tibetan things thanks to the presence of advisers like Waddell and Landon, Bailey evidently used the Lhasa bazaar to fill gaps in his collection, for by the end of the mission it con· tained nearly 150 items, including musical instruments, religious implements, chopsticks, book covers, thangka paintings, weapons, and armor. Several other officers procured things in a similarly concerted manner and apparently with an awareness of where they might end up. With its focus on Tibetan dress, including a pilgrim's sunshade and the hats wom by different grades of Tibetan government officials, Captain O'Connor's collection was ideally suited for accession at an ethnographic museum. However, touring the sites of Lhasa and indulging in some shopping was a privilege limited to the mission elite. Subalterns and "coolies· (porters) were ordered to stay in their tent encampment outside the city, reinforcing the racial and class hierarchies

The Yo unghusband Mission and Tibetan Art

of the mission and ensuring that only respectable officers with good taste could spend their remaining rupees or farthings in the Lhasa bazaar. The Government's rules on collecting in Lhasa seem to have been gener•

ally observed, as Tibet mission officers mainly purchased rather than stole from Tibetans. The mission leader

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Ch.apter four

Tibet, the contemporary vocabulary of Tibetophilia attributes spiritual purity and contentment to the Tibetan people and a glamorous remoteness to the Tibetan environment. By following the photographic performances of a group of Tibetan nuns in various public forums in the West, we can establish how their status was transformed from repeUence to radiance, and how an imperial document was converted into an iconic artwork.

In his autobiography, White recorded the arrival of the Tibet mission at the nunnery of Taktsang in southern Tibet. According to him, this was a "red letter day" for its residents, who were thrilled by their first sight of white 11

men. His own reaction to the encounter was less enthusiastic. White could

not bear to be near •the dirtiest lot of women• he had ever met. He fo und the odor from their woolen wigs nauseating and, having visited the interior of their convent, was "glad to be in the open air again." He therefore elected to photograph the nuns outdoors." Although White later conceded that they appeared to be "good natured" and that the abbess had a "good face," he failed to mention those qualities when he published his photograph of them. But in December 1903 the editor of the Sphere introduced it rather differently. Captioned as "The Nuns of the Lonely Tibetan Nunnery of Taktsang," the picture was presented as an opportunity to examine the physiognomies of Tibetan women and to evaluate them according to nineteenth-century racial categories. Readers were informed that Tibetans have "broad mouths, thick noses-which are, however, often aquiline-large feet, coarse hands, light brown skin, though frequently nearly white, and rosy cheeks are not unknown among the maidens. This points to a Caucasian element mingling with the 13 Mongolic: A happy conclusion could therefore be drawn: the more attractive features of Tibetans arose from a Caucasian genetic root, so Tibetan females could be gazed at with some pleasure by British newspaper readers. However, following this brief flirtation with the public in the pages of the Sphere, the Taktsang nuns disappeared from view for nearly forty years. It was only when a curator at the Liverpool Museum rediscovered their photograph in a museum store that they reemerged. In 1950 Elaine Tankard had decided to mount an exhibition based on a donation from the estate of Charles Bell. The museum had received a substantial consignment of material collected during his long tenure as a senior colonial officer in Tibet and the Himalayas. The Bell collection also contained some of the photograph albums he owned, including a copy of Tibet and Lhasa that John Claude White had presented to him after the Tibet mission. From among its many photographs of monasteries and dzongs, Tankard selected the portrait of the Taktsang nuns for her exhibition in Liverpool. The exhibition's opening date in 1953 is significant: Tankard would be displaying Tibet to the British public only a few years after the Chinese had begun their •peaceful liberation" of the country. Along with items from Bell's collection, Tankard featured objects acquired

Photography and the Politi

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The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary Art

visual codes and ideas in their work. Although this may still strike some as evidence of the impurity of the Tibetan present, where an unhappy hybrid culture prevails. the artists were attempting to make a more complex point. As each of them recalled in interviews, they aimed to show that Tibetans could sample from a range of sources and were evaluating many diverse infiuences.

arising not only from within Tibet or China but from beyond. A perfect illustration of this was provided by Gade's 2008 exhibition Making Gods at the Rossi & Rossi gallery in London. There he displayed twenty-four of his latest works where Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Communism, and the icons of global popular culture intermingle. Each image was presented in the style of "traditional" Tibetan painting and with pigments that appeared to be muted by age, but the central space previously occupied by the Buddha had been taken by a new cast of characters. Among them: Chairman Mao seated in the lotus position and making the Buddhist mudra (gesture) of teaching; Spiderrnan adopting the earth-touching posture (a sign of the Buddha's compassion for human suffering); and Ronald McDonald holding a hamburger in his lap, just as the •treasure vase" (bumpa) associated with the satisfaction of material desires is held by Buddhist figures with superhuman abilities. These paintings reference the benign Buddhas of the Tibetan past, whereas The Hulk capitalizes on the iconography of the wrathful forms of bodhisattvas such as Vajrapani (cha nak dorje in Tibetan), with his necklace of skulls, a tiger skin around his waist, and the bodies of his enemies squashed beneath his feet (plate 14). Although his appearance might seem aggressive, for Tibetan Buddhists it actually indicates that Vajrapani's power arises from his boundless compassion. His muscular physique (like that of the Hulk) embodies the strength needed to overcome the delusions that obscure the path to enlightenment, such as greed, ignorance, violence, and lust. (Precisely the kinds of vices illustrated by Gade in the scenes surrounding the central figure of the Hulk.) By inserting comic book superheroes, the icons of global corporations, and the founder of the People's Republic into this Buddhist context, Gade suggests that much like Chinese commodities, they have replaced the historical Buddha and are worshipped as he had once been. Gade's paintings thus sanctify the secular through the use of motifs and forms associated with sacredness in the Tibetan Buddhist past. They also encapsulate what Tibetan contemporary art aspires to create: a distinctively Tibetan style that can address a complex contemporary environment. What Is Tibetan Contemporary Art? ln attempting to fulfill this aspiration, Tibetan artists have been battling a set of potent contradictions. They acknowledge that China is the presiding force in their cultural environment, yet they also feel the need to disassociate

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themselves from it in order to make Tibetan contemporary art. They have been educated and enculturated in modern post-Maoist China, but they are conscious of a different, more ancient heritage. They have been plagued by the effects of rupture with the Tibetan past, yet they are also liberated from it, with the freedom to play with the rules and repertoire of their predecessors. The dissolution of the master-pupil system of art training after 1950 meant that they could not perpetuate their forebears' practices to preserve a traditionalist or '"ethnic'" style (as Aboriginal Australian artists have done, for example), yet they remain determined to make art that affirms their Tibetanness and represents other Tibetans as a collectivity. On the other hand, in my discussions with them, many of the key players in the Lhasa art world repeatedly asserted that their work is unique to them, and they had adopted a highly individualistic persona similar to that of the early twentieth-century European modernists (such as Picasso and Duchamp) they so admired. This emphasis on individualism is a creative strategy, a tactic designed to defiate essentializing constructions of Tibetanness imposed on them from outside as well as a method for resisting politicized readings of their work. Since the leading figures in Tibetan contemporary art were all born after 1950, came to maturity in '"China's Tibet," and have only ever known a bilingual and bicultural environment, they must contradict any notion of a simple Tibetanness or "pure" Tibetan art. However, this raises one final problem: aware of the risk of self-Orientalization as they promote their work in the West, these artists are also fully cognizant of the fact that the Buddha and Tibetanness sell. Perhaps we can now begin to answer some of the questions raised when trying to define Tibetan contemporary art. Does it refer to art made by Tibetans? Well, yes and no. Most of the principal figures in the Lhasa art world are Tibetan, but others are Han, Hui, or biethnic. (For example, Gade is the son of a Han soldier from the People's Liberation Army and a Tibetan who embraced Communism.) Is their work made for Tibetans? The artists clearly hope to communicate with Tibetan viewers, but as yet they have few Tibetan patrons and purchasers for their output." Instead, as we noted at the beginning of this discussion, the collectors, dealers, and audiences for Tibetan contemporary art are primarily based in the West. ls Tibetan contemporary art solely made in Tibet? Lhasa is undoubtedly the hub for the production of contemporary art, and substantial numbers of paintings have been created there; but some of the most adventurous work has been produced in the Tibetan diaspora (as described in the next chapter). There is, perhaps, only one question to which we might readily reply in the affirmative: is the content of Tibetan contemporary art Tibetan? There can be little doubt that what distinguishes Tibetan contemporary art from other types of contemporary art and what has thereby enabled it to capture the attention of a global audience from

The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary An

2005 onward is its focus on Tibet, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. Yet it seems that Tibetans actually do not have the sole rights to these subjects. They can also be "Made in China" and by others.

Return to the Royal Academy So let us return to the scene of President Hu"s encounter with The Three Emperors and the British monarch in 2005. Two years later, the neoclassical courtyard of the Royal Academy in London was filled with an enormous sculpture by Shanghai-based artist Zhang Huan (fig. 7.8). Renowned for his performance and installation art, Zhang had been responsible for some of the most innovative and provocative contributions to Chinese contemporary art in the preceding two decades. Having recently turned to making imposing

7.8 Zhang Huan's Thrtt Legged

Buddha in thecourty.ud of the Ro,•;il A,3-d~my, London (2007).

Author's photognph.

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three-dimensional works, his Three Legged Buddha was commissioned by the Royal Academy to straddle the approach to the chambers once frequented by Sir Joshua Reynolds and other distinguished figures of eighteenth-century London's cultural elite. Constructed from panels of welded copper, Zhang's Buddha contorted himself into a kind of triumphal arch, through which visitors could pass on their way to visit the academy's galleries. I was alerted to this impressive sight by Tibetan artist Kesang Lamdark, who had witnessed it during a short stay in London but found Three Legged Buddha rather offensive. The affront initially derived from the position of the Buddha's head, as it was being stepped on by one of his own feet. Tibetan culture assigns great significance and deference to the head (especially that of the Buddha), and disdain for the dirty and defiling aspects of the foot. From this perspective, bringing the two together was disconcerting, at the very least, for a Tibetan. There was also something troubling about the fabric of the sculpture. It appeared to have been assembled from the components of other, older metal objects. Since innumerable Tibetan Buddhist statues crafted in bronze, copper, silver, and gold had been crushed and removed from monasteries by the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, no Tibetan would enjoy being reminded of this in London, especially by a Han Chinese artist." So it was surprising to learn that Zhang Huan's inspiration for Three Legged Buddha had been his own disgust at the desecration of ancient religious artifacts across China in the 1960s and 1970s. Zhang stated in a press release about the piece that he had made it to bring "harmony to London and the world."43 His approach actually arose from respect for the Buddha and a desire to evoke the peacefulness associated with him. Fusing shards of metal to model the Buddha's body was intended to remedy the fragmentation of the past and indicate the revival of spiritual values in Chinese society and beyond in recent decades.

Zhang is among a growing number of young Chinese who are critical of the excesses of Maoism, increasingly drawn to Buddhism, and attracted to the culture of Tibet. They follow on from the artists who escaped Chinese cities in the 1980s to explore the landscape of Tibet and whose paintings reveled in the drama of the "wild" places to be found in the Western territories of the People's Republic." From the late 1990s onward, however, a new generation of Han artists began to approach Tibet from a critical, postcolonial perspective, as can be seen in several powerful works produced since then. In 2006 Qiu Zhijie created a multimedia installation, Railway (Tom Lhasa to Kathmandu. It was based on a performance in which the artist had retraced the journey of Indian pandit Nain Singh, who had walked to Tibet from British India in 1863 in order map the country for the Imperial Survey Department. Traveling in disguise and with his instruments concealed in prayer wheels, Singh had marched at precisely th.irty-three imperial inches per pace. Qiu Zhijie recre•

The Invention of Tibetan Contemporary An

ated this by shackling his own feet to mark the same distance as he walked into Tibet from China. By making such a work, he evidently sought to critique British imperial ambitions in Tibet and possibly to make a comment on Chinese colonialism as well. In 2005 an artist from Shanghai, Xu Zhen, had pursued a similar theme when exhibiting 8848 minus 1.86. It consisted of a pyramidal block of ice in a refrigerated case. The title of the work is intended to suggest that the artist had climbed the world's highest mountain (8,848 meters) and removed its frost-encrusted pinnacle to a measurement corresponding with his own height (1.86 meters). By apparently cutting the top off Mount Everest and displaying it in art venues in China and the West.Xu caused outrage. But it seems that he hoped to draw attention to the arrogance of British cartographers who in 1865 had named the mountain for the surveyor general of India, George Everest, and ignored the fact that for Tibetans it was the sacred mother of all mountains, Chomolungma. These examples point to the problem alluded to by Gade in New Century. Despite their innovations and inspired departures from the traditions of Tibetan art, contemporary Tibetan artists simply cannot compete with the economic and symbolic capital of artists from the powerhouses of Chinese art in Shanghai or Beijing. Supported hy a highly sophisticated art-world infrastructure and the "critical aesthetic modernism" that prevails therein, Chinese artists have been empowered to represent Tibet in ways that Tibetans cannot. When compared with their Han compatriots, there remain many subjects that

Tibetan artists must avoid, and both direct and indirect censorship control the possibilities open to them. They cannot make images of the Dalai Lama or subject their own history to the kind of critique that Chinese artists of the post-Tiananmen era have done with Mao. Nor can they possibly assault the icons of the People's Republic, even if only by fabricating the hacked-off roof of Beijing's Temple of Peace or making a multimedia installation about Chinese colonialism. So, although making contemporary art provides some respite from the ideologically charged spaces of a city like Lhasa and a commentary on its frenzied atmosphere of consumption, true freedom of expression has yet to be granted to Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Due to the restrictions of their local environs, Tibetan artists have therefore treated the international art world as a new Shangri-La, a place of peaceful coexistence with other artists, where ethnicity, politics, and nationality are irrelevant and talent is rewarded. By inventing the term Tibetan contemporary art, they could at least ensure that their artworks would escape to this distant utopia even if they could not.

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8 The Buddha Goes Global

In the summer of 1984, Gonkar Gyatso boarded a flight from Bejjing to Lhasa. He had completed his traming in the art depart· ment of the Central University for Nationalities (or •Minorities") in the Chinese capital and was returning to his home in Tibet after four years' absence. Halfway through the journey, Gyatso gazed out the aircraft window and saw a vast, flat plain, almost devoid of signs of human habitation. From this vantage point he grasped something that bad escaped him when earthbound: this was Tibet, a country whose topography was distinctly unlike China's and which demanded an equally distinctive response from a Tibetan who was also an artist. He realized that the ink-and-brush style of painting he had learned in Beijing could not capture this desolate landscape and the sharp, clear light that denned it. Toe lyricism of Chinese literati painting, in which cloud-engulfed lime cliffs

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or misty valleys were sketched in Buid forms, could not encompass the stark grandeur of his homeland. Following this airborne epiphany, Gyatso and a handful of other artists founded the Sweet Tea House art association and went on to pioneer a radically new type of art in Lhasa. Significantly, it was the experience of moving between locations that had transformed Gyatso's sense of what Tibetan art could become: not only had he literally adopted an altered perspective on the world he had known as "home; but his encounter with another place had helped to articulate its difference. In the decades that have passed since his revelatory flight to Lhasa, Gyatso has continued to travel, crossing a wide range of national, artistic, and political boundaries in the process. In each new setting his work has been reconfigured in response to the different cultural environments he has entered. The cartography of his career now encompasses three regions of Asia (China, lndJa, Tibet), several countries in Europe (particularly Britain), and in 2009 expanded to include the United States, when he set up his studio in New York City. For the art historian who seeks to follow Gonkar Gyatso's route through such diverse locations, his movements pose a substantial challenge, especially since academic training in the discipline is often still framed within geographically discrete definitions of art. Students may be well versed in the histories of art-making in France, the United States, or even lndia (and sometimes of several different nations at once), but such bounded conceptions of culture based on nationality or ethnicity will not suffice in an era when artists and their works are so highly mobile. The recent literature produced by cultural geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists in which "border cultures;' diasporas, migration, and globalization have been examined provides some helpful clues for deterritorializing art history.' Their emphasis on the networks in which people and ideas circulate provides a more dynamic model of the world as it is experienced by many contemporary artists who are frequently on the move for economic, political, or personal reasons.

For example, Arjun Appadurai's division of the global economy into ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes gives particular emphasis to the idea of cultural Bows.' His conception helps to articulate the ways in which persons (and their acts) are subject to influences well beyond the places they physically inhabit, giving due prominence to imag• inative territories and their frequent disjuncture from the realities of daily life. Arguably, art (and its history) has always been concerned with this kind of literal and metaphorical terrain. Artworks may be produced in very specific places, but as products in art markets or as mechanically reproduced objects, they regularly circulate far beyond their originating context. Once relocated in galleries, homes, museums, and offices, these portable things allow view-

The Buddha Goos Global

ers to pursue a cognitive exploration of spaces quite distinct from those they routinely inhabit. However, less attention has been given to the idea of the itinerant artist

and those like Gonkar Gyatso who have become long-distance cultural specialists traversing the globe in both physical and aesthetic dimensions. Not only does the mobility of contemporary artists demand an expansion of scholarship beyond regional expertise into potentially global dimensions, but it also requires an acknowledgement of the cumulative impact of contact with multiple locations. By this I mean that the cultural logic of one place is not erased upon departure from it: it remains embedded in the artist's memory and is an eminently transportable toolbox of art praxis that can be reused over space and time. When artists operate in a transnational context, their work becomes transcultural: that is, the transmission of visual information can begin and end in diverse sites and move in many different directions. Ac-

knowledging these factors has the benefit of disturbing the foundations of the long-running debate about modernism in which a "West versus the Rest" binarism has prevailed.3 It overturns the idea that only those artists who were located and trained in the West and were cognizant of the canon of Western art could participate in the modernist deconstruction of the past. It also rejects the notion that those living outside the "citadels of Modernism" were fated to produce inauthentic and inferior copies of the triumphs of European and American artists.' The concept of the transcultural highlights the interpenetration of diverse visual cultures and allows for a repositioning of the core/periphery model in order to point out that the West is not always the central axis around which all art activity rotates. Pursuing a transcultural form of analysis allows us to acknowledge the routes taken by artists and the cultural flows in which their works exist, while simultaneously acknowledging the particularities of the locations and communities where contemporary art is made and received. In doing so, we may

uncover a marked discrepancy between the visual language of the artist and that of those he or she seeks to address, for the transcultural artwork may not always be greeted by an interpretive community with the relevant knowledge required to decode its intended meaning. This may not matter when the principal objective of an international art exhibition (like the Venice Biennale, for example) is to celebrate diversity and congratulate an artist from a previously unknown region (such as Tibet) for making art at all. Yet if some kind of communication is the desired result of an artwork, how does a Tibetan artist

speak to a global audience that does not know his "language" or the cultural histories of the many places he has occupied? In what follows, I will therefore plot the course of Gonkar Gyatso's career according to the locations he has inhabited and the specific visual histories he references.' In order to bridge the knowledge gap between himself and the diverse range of viewers of his

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work, Gyatso has repeatedly turned to an icon that has gained global recognition. The Buddha has been his constant companion when traveling through countries in both Asia and the West. Lhasa: The Absent Buddha It is a matter of deep regret that Buddhist iconography achieved its greatest ubiquity in the global media in 2001, when the Taliban detonated the third• century-BCE Buddhas carved into the rock face at Bamiyan, Afghanistan. As an example of iconoclasm, this is by no means the first (or probably the last) occasion when a representation of the founder of a world religion became the target of a political campaign. During bis childhood in Lhasa in the 1960s and 1970s, Gonkar Gyatso had witnessed a similar battle for control of the imagery of Buddhism and the nation. As a newly annexed region of the People's Republic, Tibet was by no means exempt from the implementation of the Cultural Revolutionary policies that swept through China between 1966 and 1976. The demolition of the monuments of Tibetan Buddhism was followed by a campaign enforced by the People's Liberation Army to insert mass-produced images of Chairman Mao in their place. At the same time, the production of thangka painting was banned, along with many other activities traditionally conducted by artists. This was a period of rupture in which the bonds with past practice were broken. Earlier systems of art pedagogy were abandoned, and for those Tibetans with a desire to become artists, the only training available was within Chinese-run art schools. Hence members of Gonkar Gyatso's generation grew up in a world of Socialist realist propaganda imagery, and they were instructed to study the his• tory of Chinese art. In addition, the Buddhist heritage of Tibet was denied to them, because it had been either destroyed or ignored in the syllabi of art institutions in China. However, while studying at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing in the early 1980s, Gyasto escaped the strictures of that institution by visiting the bookshops, galleries, and museums of the city. They provided access to a multifaceted visual world in which examples of art from locations beyond China and Tibet were available. In the unofficial spaces of Beijing's art world, Gyatso first encountered the work of Western modernists (particularly the cubists and surrealists), and this experience proved critical to bis reengagement with Tibet upon his return in 1984. As Gyatso had concluded from his aircraft window, the physical properties

of the Tibetan landscape at first seemed to offer the ideal subject matter for inventing a distinctively Tibetan modernist art that emulated neither traditional thangka styles nor the exoticizing representations of the "wild"' Tibetan plains favored by Han Chinese artists. However, he soon switched his focus to another local source of iconography that could lay the greatest claim to rep•

The Buddha Goea Global

resenting Tibetanness: Buddhism. Arguably, it was precisely because Tibet as a nation and a cultural territory had been effectively colonized by China that artists like Gyatso turned to Buddhist symbols and subjects. But in doing so he was also perpetuating a long history in which Buddhist imagery had been circulating via a network of religious practitioners across the Indian subcontinent and through Tibet, China, and other parts of East and Southeast Asia. Although the iconography of the Buddha icon had traditionally been fixed, as a physical object it had been highly mobile for many centuries.• In the late 1980s, reviving the Buddha as a mobile icon for contemporary use enabled Tibetan artists to articulate a response to the increasing unrest that began to percolate through the streets of Lhasa. In 1987 and 1989 it found physical expression in demonstrations against Chinese rule that culminated in bloody encounters between Tibetan monks and armed Chinese police.' Gyat· so's political inclinations also began to shift when he, like many other residents of Lhasa, came across the tape-recorded speeches of the exiled Dalai Lama that were circulating illegally in the city. As he told me in 1992, they provoked a further round of questioning: of the history he had been taught in Chineserun schools, in which references to the Dalai Lama had been excised; and of the art training he had received, which bore no resemblance to the traditional education granted to pre-1950 Tibetan artists. The scorched Red Buddha that Gyatso created at that time is therefore both a statement about the obliteration of Tibetan Buddhism and a plea for its revival as a marker of Tibetan cultural identity (fig. 8.1). It is also a work that removes the complexity of historic Tibetan iconography to create a simpler shape for the Buddha body. The lessons Gyatso had absorbed from observing cubist painting and the works of Han Shull enabled him to pare down the Buddha's form so that he appears like an apparition- a ghostly presence in Lhasa and even, perhaps, an allusion to the absent Dalai Lama. The Buddha's abstracted silhouette becomes a tool to deflect crudely politicized readings of Gyatso's work in the local context of Lhasa while referencing the idea of a Bud• dhist world beyond the confines of that city. Gyatso and the Sweet Tea artists had begun to imagine new ways of characterizing life in Tibet in the 1980s, and had produced art that was Tibetan in subject matter but modernist in style. As detailed in the previous chapter, their experiment was short-lived and highly lo· calized. (At this juncture, the outward-looking phenomenon known as Tibetan Contemporary Art had yet to be invented.) But by the start of the 1990s, the blood-red Buddhas Gyatso had painted in Lhasa were on the move, out of Tibet.

Dharamsala: The lconometric Buddha For centuries, Tibetans had painted religious images on cotton cloth and framed them in silk brocade. When wound around wooden poles, they could

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be transported over long distances and positioned in shrines. homes, and even tents as their owners required. Manipa, or story-telling monks, carried such paintings from place to place in order to relate the events of the Buddha's life

with the aid of appropriate illustrations. The traditional thangka was therefore

8.1 Gnkar Gyatso, R" Bwldha (LhA.Sa, 1989), Reproduced with kind permission from the artist.

The Buddha Goe• Global

specifically designed to be a mobile type of artwork. Since Gyatso had painted his Red Buddha and a number of his radical reworkings of Buddhist imagery on cloth, in practical terms it was therefore not difficult for them to make the journey into exile with him.• He could simply roll them up and carry them out of Lhasa. It quickly became apparent, however, that both he and his work would be decidedly out of place in the Tibetan "capital in exile" in Dharamsala. In 1992 Gyatso had decided to flee Tibet, like tens of thousands of others before him, to join the Dalai Lama in India and escape the oppressive cultural and political conditions in Lhasa. Over the decades, the Central Tibetan Ad· ministration in Dharamsala had gained financial support from the international aid community, private donors, and various governments worldwide to enable it to reconstruct many of the institutions and activities that had been destroyed or proscribed in the homeland.• The exiles in India saw themselves as the custodians of Tibetan tradition and the perpetuators of Tibetan Buddrusm. For each of these agendas, artists were essential. The skills of those who had been trained in Tibet were sorely needed to paint murals for new monasteries and temples, thangkas for the commemoration of the dead, and depictions of the Buddha that would be placed in every school, orphanage, and office throughout the refugee community. As the living embodiments of longstanding artistic lineages, they were revered by other Tibetans for providing a link to the past and for malting images that replicated the old styles of Tibet to populate and Tibetanize the alien environment of India. These artists and their works therefore had a claim to authenticity of a sort Gonkar Gyatso could not possibly compete with. In the conservative atmosphere of Dharamsala in the 1990s, he entered a community that policed the boundaries of who and what could claim to be truly Tibetan. The paintings he had so carefully spirited away from rus homeland did not find favor with the guardians of Tibetan cultural identity in exile and triggered antagonistic reactions from Tibetan refugees, who questioned his understanding of Buddhism and his commitment to the exile cause. The modernist dissection of the Buddha body that Gyatso had pioneered in Lhasa was seen as sacrilegious, and the idea that this work could affirm a new form of Tibetanness was deemed dubious. Gyatso's response was to retrain in the "house style" of the exile community: a transplanted version of the Uri (central Tibetan) style patronized by the Dalai Lama, his govemment, and the Geluk monasteries of pre-1950 Lhasa.•• Under the tutelage of the elderly monk-painter Sangay Yeshi, Gyatso began to draw Buddrust deities with all their complex iconographic accoutrements and to master the iconometric diagrams that underpin them. For traditional artists, these linear grids were vital components of the design of a thangka. They ensured that the finished painting would be efficacious both in a religious and an artistic sense, but their existence should not be visible to the observer.

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Outside Sangay Yeshi's classroom, Gyatso performed a kind of archeology on these hidden substructures, unearthing them and making them fully evident on the surface of his work. In doing so, he adopted the position of a modernist outsider, exposing the techniques and aesthetic codes of Tibetan art to scrutiny and privileging the appeal of fine lines and spaces over dense pattern and detail. In Gyatso's Dharamsala paintings, the iconometric grid became a motif extracted from the repertoire of tradition, beneath which the Buddha appeared to have been internally fixed or imprisoned. After several years in Dharamsala, Gyatso himself began to feel constrained as well as displaced and rootless. Once again he resorted to travel in an attempt to find a more liberating atmosphere and to seek out inspiration for his work. Initially he made an artistic pilgrimage around other parts of India, most notably to Ladakh in the western Himalayas, where monasteries from the second wave of Buddhist diffusion (between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries) were still extant, and murals incorporating stylistic influences from Kashmir and Central Asia made a striking contrast to the central Tibetan styles preserved by traditionalist that1gka painters in Dharamsala. Yet even this excursion into a different aspect of Tibetan Buddhist cultural heritage could not solve Gyatso's twin dilemmas: how to model Tibetan modernity in art, and how to do so in a place or community where it would be well received. He had to move on.

London: The Buddha Abandoned (Temporarily) In 1996 Gyatso made another departure, involving perhaps the most drastic uprooting of his career to date and leaving Asia far behind. He managed to gain a sponsored place at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and the opportunity to live in one of the centers of the Western art world. Of course what he hoped to gain in terms of a sympathetic audience and access to the delights of a city that •illuminates world cultures," according to the British Museum's motto, also meant the loss of a Tibetan context for his work. He would no longer be part of a Tibetan-speaking place, and few Tibetan spectators would be present when he revealed his latest artistic offerings. Hence the theme of intercultural translation- already apparent in his Lhasa days as a problematic dialogue between Chinese and Tibetan visual codes-returned with a vengeance when Gyatso once again found himself the subject of a quizzical regard. How was bis culture-specific vocabulary to be understood by non-Tibetans? Would others define him as a Tibetan, a Buddhist, a refugee, or simply an artist? What effects might this taxonomizing have on his creativity? Although London offered an escape from the constraints of Dharamsala or Lhasa, Gyatso's fust few years there were troubling and confusing. The conceptual and installation art promoted at Chelsea was so dramati-

The Buddha Goes Global

cally unlike anything he had previously encountered that it initially provoked a crisis. He (temporarily) discarded the old tools of bis trade-the brush and the pencil-realizing that for the London avant-garde, these were considered the outmoded implements of a rejected academicism. Also abandoned was the primary icon of his earlier work: the Buddha. In an interview conduct~d in 2005, Gyatso responded to a question about a perceived lack of emotion in his work by stating, "You know the thangka artist is totally devoted to faith and religion, not wishing to put any of his personal feelings into the work, he serves the religion. Somehow I had also become one of them. Hiding my emotion and feeling behind the Buddha in the work." 11 He went on to explain that in both Tibetan Buddhism and Maoist ideology, the assertion of individualism or any kind of hypersubjectivity was outlawed. For Gyatso, this was one reason why modern art had a very short history in Tibet when compared to other parts of the world. It was only since the mid-1980s, be argued, that expressiveness and a personal dimension had been possible in Tibetan art. But his comment about ''hiding" behind the Buddha also reflects the experience of living for nearly a decade in the United Kingdom, where bis interlocutors frequently commented on the Buddhist imagery in his paintings, Gyatso had become entangled in preconceived ideas about his Tibetanness, as if this were the primary thing he had to offer consumers eager for a new flavor of exoticism. Aggravating the situation was the fact that among the first viewers of his work were those for whom Tibetan Buddhism was a newly discovered and fashionable New Age religion, and others who were supporters of the Dalai Lama, the agenda of the exile government, and the Free Tibet cause. In response, Gyatso oscillated between making art that confirmed the stereotypes of such viewers and trying to undermine them. His use of the Buddha image summarized these tensions: in some contexts of interpretation, he was

construed to be simply recycling thangka painting and replicating traditional Tibetan motifs; in others the use of Buddhist imagery was thought to be his most powerful and provocative asset. Just as in Dharamsala, London seemed to demand a particular type of authenticity on the part of a Tibetan artist (usually referencing religion) and to insist that a political narrative should always inform his or her work. Frustrated by the expectation that a Tibetan must be a Buddhist or a spokesperson for the exile cause, Gyatso turned his back on the Buddha icon and focused on his own body instead. From the point of view of the United Kingdom's governmental and administrative categories, that body was defined as •alien• when Gyatso applied for asylum status in 2000. Over several years of pursuing this protracted legal process, be fell into the orbit of British identity politics, particularly its relationship to arts funding in the closing decades of the twentieth century. At this time he developed an affinity with the "Black art" and multiculturalist

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agendas pursued by other artists in London, and attempted to affiliate himself with those who for reasons of ethnicity were marginalized by mainstream public institutions." However, unlike in the People's Republic of China, where Tibetans were an acknowledged minority group Mthin the nation, in the United Kingdom they did not feature in the categories of the British census. Since Gyatso's path from Tibet to London did not fit the established narratives of postcolonial migration to the United Kingdom, he was repeatedly unsuccessful when seeking sponsorship for his art. It was only when he associated himself Mth exhibitions referring to the generic concept of exile that he began to benefit. In 2003 he joined a Glasgowbased collective called Artists in Exile and participated in its first major project, Sanctuary: Contemporary Art and Human Rights, at the Glasgow Modern Art gallery. That same year he also contributed to Leave to Remain, an exhibition that was shown in three venues across London, including the Museum of Migration. For these shows, Gyatso submitted a piece called Soft Touch. It consists of a large cushion, bristling w;th pins, fashioned from textiles to form the shape of the British flag. The work is a verbal and visual pun on the expression commonly used by the tabloid media to imply that refugees treat Britain as an easy source of money and other kinds of benevolence. Borrowing from surrealist tactics, in which the viewer's senses are confused by the use of "inappropriate• materials (such as Meret Oppenheim's Fur Breakfast (1936], in which a cup and saucer are covered in animal skin), Gyatso's plump but evidently uncomfortable cushion disavows the notion that Britain provides a soft landing for new arrivals. Later in 2003 he made another statement about his new home by crafting the flag of the United Kingdom out of silk brocade, in emulation of the fabric canopies found in Tibetan monasteries, and suspending it from the ceiling of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. 13 Red, white, and blue ribbons dangled from it and connected to display cases containing artifacts collected for the museum at the height of British colonialism. Thus, a Tibetan artist living as a refugee in twenty-first-century Britain imagined the tentacles of nineteenth-century imperialism spreading out to grasp the riches of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific- the very networks that had enabled a Tibetan image of Palden Lhamo to reach the museum in 1884. In these works Gyatso articulated the sensibility of a stranger responding to the history of his new location, but he also risked becoming defined solely by his alien status. As Alex Rotas observes, the refugee artist •has the awesome responsibility of representing the displacement of someone in a community to which he/ she does not belong. But this responsibility is equally the limited responsibility of representing that displacement and nothing else."" ln exhibitions like Leave to Remain and Sanctuary, Gyatso was presented as a refugee rather than an artist. Instead of being a free agent, roaming at will

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through the landscapes of the international art world, he was (once again) fixed by the insistent logic and politics of a particular location. It was also in 2003 that Gyatso began to disentangle himself from the generalities of the migrant experience in Britain and set out to make an ex.. plicit statement about how he and other Tibetans came to be displaced. In a set of four photographically generated self-portraits, he recounts the stages he passed through in order to arrive in London (plates 15, 16, 17, and 18). Here the scope of identity politics has expanded into wider spatial dimensions to include Tibet, India, and Britain; moreover, it encompasses a longer temporal framework, as the figure of a Tibetan artist is seen to shuttle between the poles of pre-1950 Tibet and contemporary London. Using digital manipulation of his own image, Gyatso reflects on the transformative process of migration to different locations as well as the kinds of cumulative effects mentioned at the start of this chapter. The photographs m ust be read as a group, in which the artist's biography is divided into four sections that reveal the interplay among multiple states of being. Although each image is presented under the title My Identity, the viewer is clearly requested to question such a unified notion, and is presented instead with a series of adopted postures and performances of the self. Referencing the idea of studio portraiture in which the backdrop functions as an extension of personhood and a spatial signifier of imagined locations, only two elements in each composjtion remain unaltered: the body of the artist and a black wooden box. (We will return to this enigmatic object later.) Among the locations depicted, three are actual places inhabited by Gyatso in the course of his migrations (Chinese-controlled Tibet, Dharamsala, and London), whereas the first is an exercise in inscribing himself into a hjstoric space he had never witnessed or experienced. The sequence begins with a visjon of the artist as a thangka painter sur-

rounded by the paraphernalia of traditional art practice: an incomplete image of the Buddha on cotton cloth stretched onto a wooden frame, vessels containing mineral pigments, fine hair brushes, and a silver-lidded teacup placed on a small tepchok (folding table). Other finished paintings, concealed by their silk covers, hang on walls decorated according to the color schemes of monasteries and domestic buildings of pre-1950 Tibet. The result is an image that appears to delineate a quintessential traditional Tibetan•ness, but this is an idea that can be only a memory, an invention, or an aspiration for contemporary Tibetans. Given that this is a highly autobiographical work, the other three portrruts are therefore engaged in a complex dialogue with it. The significance of the first image fully emerges only when a very particular visual history (and its archival record) is acknowledged. Although many viewers of My Identity will be unaware of it, the • traditionalist" portrrut is di-

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rectly based on a photograph taken in 1937 by American ethnologist and botanist Charles Suydam Cutting at the Norbulingka (the Dalai Lama's Summer Palace) in Lhasa in 1937 (fig. 8.2)." The artist featured in Cutting's photograph is the Thirteenth Dalal Lama's senior court painter, Tsering Dondrup, one of the artists who executed commissions for the monastic assembly halls and shrines at the institutional heart of Tibetan Buddhism in Lhasa.•• This image is a rare example of a portrait of a named individual in early twentieth-century Tibet and is of evident documentary value in itself- a value only enhanced when its publication history is noted. Although the original copy of the photograph is kept at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, it has been reprinted in at least two Western books, and appears on the cover of David and Janice Jackson's Tibetan Thangka Painting. 17 This points to the impact of mass reproduction and the circulation of photography across geographic boundaries as crucial modes through which certain images attain ubiquity and greater iconic weight (as described in chapter 4). However, there are limits to this particu• Jar type of cultural flow, and to my knowledge the Cutting photograph is not available as a source of artistic inspiration in Tibet.

The transcultural artist such as Gyatso, on the other hand, has access

8.2 Cha.rle5 Suydam Cutting's portrait of the thangla painter Tsering Dondrup, ta.ken llt the Norbul· jngka (1937). Photograph ity of Califomu Press.. Goodman, N, 1978. Ways o{Worldmaking. Hassock,, UK: Harvester Press. Goodnow, K.. ed. 2008. MU#ums, th• Mtdiil and R.t{ugus: Storits ofCrisu. Control and C°"" .,.,...,. Oxford; Berghahn Books. Gosden. C.. and F. Urson. 2007. Knowing 'Things: Explorin1 tht Coll«tion.s ot the Pitt Riwrs Museum 1884-1945. Oxford: Oxford Uniwn1ty Pres,. Guh,. Thakurta, T. 1992. The Making ofa New Indian Art: Artist.s, Aesthetics and Notionali.sm in Bengal 1850-1920. Cambridge: Cambridg• Univen>ty P-. - - -. 2004. Monumfflt:S, Objects, Histories: Institutions ofArt rn Colonial and Post,olonial India. New York: Columbia UnJversity Prus. HanM~. U. 1996. T"""""rlns. Loodon, Routledge. Hansen, P. H. 1996, 1he Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientali.sm and Angl~ Tlbetan Relations in tht 1920s." Am,rlcon HistariOrary China.-" Compart: A Journal of Comporativ, Education 37 (3): 36S-82. WaddeJJ, L. A.1894. The Buddhism ofTibet or Lamaism; With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology and in Its Relation to Buddhism, London: W. H. Allen. - - . 1896. "'Description of Lhasa Cathedral, Translated from the Tibetan."' Journal of the

Asiatic Society ofBengal 64 (1): 259- 83.

- -. 1899. Among tht Himalayas. London: Archibald Constable. - - . (1900) 1986. The Trib,s ofthe Brahm,,putro Valley. New Delhi: Logos Press. - - . 1904. -ihe Living Mummies of far Tibet." leisure Hour (November): 30. - - . 1905. Lhasa and !cs Mysteries: With a Rec.ord of the Expedition of1903-4. London: John Murray. -

- . 1912. ·Tibetan Manuscripts and Books Etc. Collected during the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa.." Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review 3 (34): 80-97. Waller, D.1990. The Pundits: British Exploration ofTihtt and Central Asia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

References Wa.ring, J.B. 1863, Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International BJfflibition of 1862. London. Watson. J, F.. and J. W. Kaye. 1868-75. The People ofIndia: A Serfes of Photographic ITlustra• tions. with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes ofHindustan . 8 vols. London: Indian Museum. White, J. C. 1906. Tiber and Lhasa. Calcutta: Johnston .;ind Hoffmann. - - . 1909. Sikkim and Bhutan: Twenty•One Yea.rs on the Nonh·East Frontier, 1887- 1908. London: Edward Arnold. - -. 1910. "The Arts and Crafts o f Tibet and the E.astern Hirnalayas." Journal of the Royal Sodety ofthe Arts (May6): 584-91. - -. 1916. ·world's Strangest Capital." National Geographic 29 (March): 273- 95. Williams, P. 2007. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocitie-s. Oxford: Berg. Williams., R. 1960. Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell. London: Hogarth. Woeser, T. 2008. Tibet's True Heart. Ardsley, NY: Ragged Banner Prt-Ss. Wu, H. 2005. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Politfral Spa,e. London: ReaJction Books. Yan, H. 2005 ...Centenary Mernorial of Fighting against British Invaders by Tibetan People in 1904," Chi.na Tihetology 1, Online at http://www.tibetinfor.com.cn/eng.lish,2t/ Tibet; 86-88: ·Description of Lhasa Cathedral," 55;