 Now we move on to a very different subject now. Dr Christian Luthernitz is the David Snellgrobe senior lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist art here at SOAS. His research focuses on Buddhist art of India and Tibet, and he's extensively published on Gandhar and Western Himalayan and early Tibetan art and has curated a number of exhibitions. Our email correspondence, when I was trying to persuade him to talk, was interrupted for a month while he was completely out of email range and reception, which doesn't happen in many parts of the world. That was in Mustang. I will restrain from asking you if you know where that is. He's published, let's say, a lot on these things, and he's talking to us today about challenges, opportunities and discoveries, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery collections in Mustang. Christian, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. How do we get the slides on this? Good question. That thing, of course. We'll have to work this out. Hopi had it set up. You were nosing up, so there we are. That's it. That's you. Okay. Perfect. Yes, I just was in Mustang in summer and I will explain immediately where that is. It's in Nepal. It's a Tibetan speaking area in northern Nepal. What you see here is a map of Nepal from Google with Kathmandu being the central one and then west of it, what is called western Nepal, the area where Mustang belongs to, and that's immediately north of that. Do you see that? Yes, up here. We'll zoom in in this. I think one thing one has to be aware is this is the only valley that cuts straight north south through the Himalayas. There is a huge river gorge in that area. On one side you have the Annapurna mountains and on the other side you have the Daulagiri mountains. Two 8,000 mountain ranges between. The direct connection made it an ideal area for trade. That trade is partly responsible for the heritage that I am documenting there. Here you can see a little airport and from here opens up a valley, a high plateau valley, which is restricted from approximately this area. It's relatively famous among people who are interested in the Himalayas because of its scenery for example. It's kind of beautiful villages that you can trek from one to another. It's some go there for wildlife, especially snow leopards, but you don't see them on historical field research, but you may see vultures or blue sheep. Some go there for adventure even if they have to carry their bikes up the mountain pass. It's centered on a fortified village, the fortification of which goes back to the 15th century. In the 15th century and in the 16th century there was a little kingdom that essentially organized or controlled trade between the Himalayas and the Indian plains from there. That surplus allowed them to build major monuments. The city is called Lomantang. In Lomantang there are two major large temples that are famous like this one, the Champalachang, with a big sculpture of Maitreya. It's an early 15th century construction and a slightly later construction. What is outstanding for this remote region is their size. They are of substantial size. You can usually see that in Tibetan architecture, on the basis of the number of pillars they have inside the hall, which of course is part of the construction technique. They preserve excellent murals. As we can see here, there is also one exceptional monument that many visitors would like to see when they go to Mostang. It's called Ludi. You see the red building and above the red building is a little window. Essentially it's in there, which is a kind of painted, probably a funerary chapel with a stupa in the centre, but the entire cave painted out in very, very high quality of the 14th century or even late 13th century. Then people go there for festivals. I especially the Tiji Festival in Spring where then their kind of horse riding is of course an old tradition in any Tibetan area. I however go there for monastery collections to essentially document monastery collections. This is one of the objects that was documented there. It shows a god of wealth called Vaishravana. Even if you are not familiar at all with sculptures of that type, I think the quality of the piece is undeniable, especially with the silver and copper inlay that we see on this particular object. Just to give a reference that explains why I'm kind of doing a project there, is if you would sell an object like this in Asian art in London, for example at an auction that took place this week, it's definitely more than half a million dollars, even considerably higher than that. You can imagine that these are very valuable objects abroad. Moustang is stunning in the sense that they have relatively much of those objects because the kingdom was so rich. I'll just show you one example, Namgyll Monastery, which is not too far from Lomondang. Here is the fortified city we saw before. Here is the monastery around 20-25 minutes walk from there. In 2010 it still looked like this with an older structure. Within the main temple you see that the more precious metal objects are behind class in the altar. The less precious ones sit outside. I'm also documenting the books which go back to the 14th century partially. Here are the sculptures in the altar. Because there are so many high quality objects, I created this research project, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery collections today. What I'm talking now is more some of the reasons for doing it, the challenges that one faces, but also the opportunities and discoveries that one makes. If I want to sing out some of the challenges, access is one, documentation another one, and management a third that I want to talk about. In this connection access is extremely important because there is essentially a similar thing happening all across the Himalayan range, but in many other areas as well. As soon as a region is open for tourism, and many of these regions were opened only in the 70s, 1980s, you could go there for the first time without special permission from the government. People knowledgeable in the quality of art in the objects may take photos from them. Some of them, not necessarily with good intentions, but they decide, or this is a precious object, it would be great to have it. What is usually happening is that photography is used to commission theft, because theft can always be easier done by locals than by foreigners. That essentially happened in all the Himalayan regions in the first years after their opening to tourism. The result of that is once thefts occur, objects get hidden, photography gets prohibited. If then a theft occurs still, there is no way they can prove the ownership that they ever owned the object. That's where my project jumps in and tries to document and create inventories for those monasteries that they have them themselves and they can prove the ownership. Of course the difficulty in this vicious circle is that I first have to break the prohibition for photography. Without proper photography there is no way that they can prove that they own the certain object. It's a long matter of negotiation to try to get access. In Namgila I was quite lucky with this very adventurous Abbot who also completely rebuilds his monastery as we can see in the background at the same time. But he actually allowed access. Documentation is another problem. This is a region where I can't be reached by email. It's also a region where there is no permanent electricity. You essentially have to apply or bring your equipment and if you're lucky you have a few hours of electricity in the evening to recharge it. You essentially have to improvise your little photo studio in every space that you come in. Obviously these objects have to be brought out and looked at, measured and documented. In this case of course once I have access the documentation is very comprehensive. It takes it from all sides and also from the bottom. The bottom sometimes is interesting because you can see if its seal is actually whatever the original one or had to be replaced at one stage. Or books sometimes documented as objects just with the beginning and the end of the actual manuscript. Some we documented in full pages so essentially every page. Which is sound amounts of course in a documentation that sums up to something like it's actually today 28,000 photographs from Namgell alone because of the many books that we documented there as well. The challenges that one may be less aware of is that my intervention so to speak with trying to document results in special handling of the objects. Which essentially means that they take it out but these are not people who are used to handling objects but do this carefully or have been trained in any way. So if you would compare that with whatever precious objects in the museum and how they are handled that's quite a different matter. Accordingly they also have religious value and for example this very ugly re-painting of the face that you see. It happened between 2010 and 2012 and it's a religious act that you finance for merits the re-painting of the faces of the images. Sadly the donor did not consider that the person who did the job actually couldn't paint and the colours that they were used were actually inappropriate for and they were more than kind of lacquer colours. It may also happen to you that the abode finds one piece so interesting that he wants to find out what's inside. So in this case he just opened up everything and started to look at everything read little inscriptions what was inside the box. It gave me the chance to photograph the inside as well and obviously that wasn't the intention. So what you trigger you may not always know or have control about what you trigger. The opportunities of that material is vast from a research perspective. First of all of course it's a huge amount of new material that you may document but much more important is that they have a context. In contrast to objects in western museums that we don't really know how they came and here and where they came from there you have a bulk that has a context and that context informs you about the piece in ways that you may not expect immediately. There are also curious objects that may simply be new like stupas that you can open up or lineages that are inscribed with the donor and that you can essentially place in time so they actually belong to sets and that's another important detail that essentially very often artworks are not considered or sculpture is not donated alone. But in western museums it may end up alone. But in actually in the original context it's part of a set and it's the different pieces of the set that communicate together that actually provide you much more information about the object. Here it's a triad that belongs together. If they would be sold here they would be split up and you would find them in three different museums and it would be extremely hard to reconstruct that they originally belonged together. And then of course the west is very often interested in bronze sculpture and other precious materials rather than for example clay or papier-mâché or stuff like that. So there is a lot of material or objects in other materials that can be documented and some of them are these ones of quite stunning quality but of course many of them also of lesser quality and they also have suffered over time. But altogether of course form a much more comprehensive picture of the history of the region. The context is also important of the objects because not only because they form sets but sometimes an object may actually tell you much more than you expect. Like in this case the dome of that particular stupa was a drinking cup made in the Chinese imperial court first. And so it tells you about the connections of the region to the Chinese court at that time. It also connects it to the West Tibetan region by the shape of the different stupas here. And you get sculptures of people about whom you can read that they were involved in the historical affairs of the place in historic times. So again you have a much more contextual relationship with it. Another important opportunity is that the project alone despite kind of bringing in a certain risk for the object it also helps in awareness building. In many cases the upwards of the places didn't know what they have and documenting it for them and creating inventories essentially makes them aware what they have and this becomes more important as the more the region opens up and it's only three years ago that the first kind of cheaper road was finished to the upper regions of the valley. And obviously the modernity sets in through that also visible at Namgyll Monastery itself which was essentially demolished in 2012 and is now being rebuilt in concrete. Which is of course kind of, yeah, that's already the reconstruction of the temple that the final blow for the temple was a damage in the earthquake of 2015. Among the discoveries there are a huge amount of them especially the manuscripts first of all the sets of sculptures were extremely interesting and there are some features which we probably would have a hard time to find out if we wouldn't have the documentation of the objects on site. Here for example one has a lineage of figures that belong together to a set but essentially the deities and the Tibetan figures this one or this one are done in a different alloy than the Indian figures. Those that are historically Indian are done in a dark alloy but still they belong to the same set and so there is a kind of attempt to differentiate between the two through the color of the alloy and we found that in the second set as well but we couldn't really, yeah, that's not as complete as this one in Namgyll. In Namgyll we also found a 14th century collection of manuscripts that precedes essentially the formulation of a Buddhist canon in Tibet that's depicted here with quite well preserved book covers painted in a unique manner on the inside and as you can see from this detail it's kind of a relief painting that I haven't seen before I documented this area so it's essentially the lines are in relief coming out of the surface and the rest is all gilded. That's the bottom cover. These covers are very often very richly decorated as you can see here. That's a part of Buddhist culture is of course and to make them as precious as possible especially a certain type of literature. They are also fairly large size and very often the first volume and what we see here is the volume signature and the content signature is very richly decorated. And some may have even more elaborate themes on it. Not everything is as well preserved because you have to imagine that these were essentially attached to the manuscript itself. They were wrapped whenever they were used so the usage essentially effects the preservation of these objects. That's the complete cover showing the Buddha with different audiences and surrounded by the Buddhas of the ten directions around him. Probably the most surprising one was that there was an earlier set that looked much simpler as we can see here with relatively simple covers but then with illuminations actually an illumination programme that is planned through an entire section. So for example through 30 volumes and we have a lot of that in later period but this is the earliest example of such an iconographic programme in a section or a collection of manuscripts. And so here we'll have some details of the life of the Buddha here in heaven where he's actually rebirth, where he anoints his successor, Maitreya, who now lives in that heaven. And again it's a huge amount of material and here it just gives you an idea of that particular 14th century collections that we documented 42 volumes of which only two missing in this case which haven't been documented before or even known before. And of course there are many other manuscripts of precious or high quality with illuminations that you find in that collection. Altogether we are documented by now 120 manuscripts from that particular place alone. One also may find completely unexpected objects like this one, a scroll that is beautifully painted on one side with goddesses, dancing goddesses, symbols on the other side with kind of a stylised ring of fire in different colour and a vouchers. So this was and we have a second object of that. Nothing of that is known from western collections but it probably has been used on the outskirts of a mandala kind of standing as part of the decoration at certain ritual locations. And the flames then would be on the outside kind of as protection and the paintings would be directed towards the inside of that particular mandala that is temporary. And the quality of the painting is quite stunning even though the preservation and the dirt partly on the scroll has affected it severely. Here just some details of this particular. And of course what it depicts is channel grounds. Very often Buddhists, especially esoteric Buddhists remind of the impermanence of life. And so the channel grounds are a very important topic and very often a very figuratively depicted topic. And one of the things the Himalayan areas are famous for is sky burial. That's essentially the data placed on exposed places where vouchers can eat them. And that's the only depiction of that that I've found so far. And partly that's of course also the case because cremation is not possible because there are no trees growing above 3,500 metres. The trees are very scarce, of course. You may also... This guess what is a museum in the local imagination at least the temporary one. And even among these you may find pretty stunning objects like this one in the middle is actually a thousand years old and comes from the western Himalayan region, Kashmir, and yeah, it's between 800 and 1,000. And so because they don't really know how to judge the age of these objects the project will kind of bring that to their awareness and will hope that will kind of make them better protected in future. And so essentially the kind of main result of course I hope is that by not only documenting one monastery in Amgyll but by documenting many that eventually we can also connect the different points together we can use whatever identified objects in another monument to identify objects in another monument and we can create that and link all this information together and eventually kind of display that online as a representation of the culture of the place. And in that sense it's hoped that the more public you make something the more protected it is because once everybody can find out where some object comes from it's market value when it's stolen is zero. Yeah, you can only sell it under the hand. And so these are the monuments that are documented so far from this year I actually would have to add one more. Thank you.