A Road into the Past: Reading a 19th-Century Illustrated Map of the Himalayas

The British Library preserves a unique collection of pictorial maps and descriptions of places and cultures along the road from Lhasa to Leh.

But finding the people behind this collection and decoding it have been journeys of their own. In this latest podcast episode, Dr. Diana Lange of Humboldt University, Germany, opens her book “An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery” published in Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, and talks about how she made these journeys, what her experiences were of travelling to the region in the modern day, and the differences between Western and Eastern art and cartography.

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