Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism: Digital Resources & Maps

Digital Resources

Project Himalayan Art (PHA)

Himalayan Art Resources (HAR)
Online educational resource with over 25,000 images of Tibetan tankas from collections worldwide, searchable by image, data, and lineage, as well as links to other Tibetan art sites. Articles by Tulku Thondup, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Peter Della Santina, David Jackson and Moke Mokotoff supplement the images. Maintained by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation in collaboration with Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and Wisdom Publications.  An excellent online resource for traditional Tibetan art.

Treasury of Lives

Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly TBRC)

“Tibetan Buddhism and Political Power in the Courts of Asia” conference (2019) talks
List of conference speakers and topics: https://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/tibetan-buddhism-and-political-power-in-the-courts-of-asia

The All-Knowing Buddha: Visualizing Vairochana (animated visualization practice) (Rubin Museum)

Rubin Museum publications (free digital access)

Digital Dunhuang

The Huntington Archive
John C. and Susan L. Huntington online photographic archive of Buddhist and Asian art, including more than 30,000 images.

ExploreArt
This website, now hosted by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, brings an innovative experience to use interactive web technologies and elegant design to experience art and understand its role in expressing the human experience.

Dharmapala Thangka Centre: School of Thangka Painting
This site is a portal to many thangka images, as well as information on the art of thankga painting.

Exploring the Mandala
This page from Cornell University offers information and links to mandala-related resources. 

Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Art
Images and information on the early art and archaeology of the western Himalayas, curated by Christian Luczanits.

Digital Maps

Project Himalayan Art: Interactive Map (Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art)
Interactive map allows exploration through Himalayan and related areas. Includes Map Narratives: Cultural Regions, The Eight Great Events in Buddha's Life, and Kingdoms and Empires.

Wutaishan Interactive Map  (Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art))
A digital exploration of a 19th century woodblock print of a panoramic map of the sacred mountain Wutaishan (Five Terrace Mountain) which includes descriptions for ca 40 of the most important cites to Tibetans and Mongolians drawn from Chinese and Tibetan gazetteers, as well as photos of the cites, and related objects.

Treasury of Lives Custom Map Tool
The Treasury of Lives Database offers digital mapping tools to custom-design maps for individual research purposes. For assistance, write to contact@treasuryoflives.org , and mention that you are a student at Columbia University, which subscribes to such additional services.

China Historical GIS
The CHGIS project has produced a comprehensive series of datasets related to the administrative geography of Chinese History. The data layers include nationwide coverages (for the years 1820 and 1911), and time series (for the Dynastic period from 221 BCE to 1911 CE). The administrative features include Provinces, Circuits, Prefectures, and Counties as they changed over time. Supplemental datasets include G.W. Skinner regional systems, Buddhist sites, features from historic Russian maps of China, Tibetan townships, modern gazetteer layers for each province, and many others. All CHGIS data is published for free academic use, and the contents are made available for online searching and access via XML webservice.

The Columbia Gazetteer of the World [electronic resource] / Saul B. Cohen, editor. [New York] : Columbia University Press, c2001- This resource lists all county seats (mostly using Chinese names) as well as population and local products.

University of Virginia SHANTI Place Dictionary (formerly THL Tibetan & Himalayan Place Dictionary)

Tibet Map Institute  

Buddhist Digital Resource Center - search by Place   

See also: Tuttle, Gray. A Guide to the Use of Chinese Gazetteers* for Amdo

Photographic and Archival Images

The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet (1920-1950)
Searchable by photographers, dates, people, places. Includes a “Who Was Who” project for early 20th c. Tibet, also the day-to-day diary of Gould Mission in Tibet (1936-37).  Primarily photos by Charles Bell (1870-1945), Frederick Spencer Chapman (1907-1971), Arthur Hopkinson (1894-1953), Rabden Lepcha, Evan Nepean (1909-2002), Hugh Richardson (1905-2000), and Harry Staunton (1908-1945). Project of the Pitt Rivers Museum, British Museum.

Digital Himalaya
Ethnographic materials from Himalayan Mountain communities, including slides, videos, audio tapes, etc. Includes materials from the Williamson Collection (1930-1935, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet), the Fürer-Haimendorf Film Collection (1930s, North Eastern India and Nepal), the Naga videodisk created in the 1980s, the ThakVillage of central Nepal collected since 1969, and the Thangmi Archive of northeastern Nepal. Features sample images and video clips (.qt) from the collections.

Tibet, from the Collections of the American Geographical Society (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
This digital collection presents historical maps and images of Tibet from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. It includes includes a set of early photographs of central Tibet and Lhasa as well as images from Harrison Forman's expeditions to northern Tibet between 1932 and 1937.

A Glimpse of Another World: A Journey through Western Tibet (1938)
Photographs taken by F. Bailey Vanderhoef, Jr.