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Book Review: A Historical Atlas of Tibet by KarlE. Ryavec
Following two decades of research, Karl E. Ryavec expertlypresents the historical and cultural transformations of Tibet sincethe Palaeolithic period through a series of 49 mapssupplemented by detailed keys, essays and accompanyingphotographs. The first work of its kind, A Historical Atlas ofTibet is a beautiful reference book of value to a range of scholarsand students including historians, anthropologists, historicalgeographers and digital cartographers, writes Tim Chamberlain.
A Historical Atlas of Tibet. Karl E. Ryavec. University ofChicago Press. 2015.
How to define Tibet today is ascontentious as it is complex. Alarge part of the problem derivesfrom the perception that Tibet hasalways been viewed, in one senseor another, as peripheral. Attemptsby outsiders to map Tibet onlyreally began seriously in thenineteenth century with thecolonialist paranoia of the ‘Great
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Game’ era, when the government officials of British India lookedwarily to the Himalayan border region, fearful of a possibleterritorial challenge from Russian Imperial encroachment enteringIndia through ‘unknown’ Tibet. Yet, even before this time, WarrenHastings, as the East India Company’s Governor General ofBengal, had looked to Tibet as a possible entry route into thefrustratingly impenetrable markets of Emperor Qianlong’s China.Hastings famously dispatched George Bogle, who managed toestablish arguably the first meaningful diplomatic contacts withthe Tibetan hierarchy through the court of the sixth PanchenLama during the winter of 177475, although the death of thePanchen Lama soon after meant that the venture never came tofruition.
Later attempts to know and map the reality of Tibet werefamously attempted by the Indian ‘pundits’ who were recruited,trained and secretly dispatched over the mountainousborderlands disguised as holy men on pilgrimage to the sacredsites of Tibet, thereby infiltrating a country otherwise forbidden toforeigners, making rudimentary route surveys as they went.Today this sense of mystery continues to pervade; the aura ofTibet as a faraway and largely unknown land, still closed off fromthe rest of the world, lingers on. Karl E. Ryavec’s A HistoricalAtlas of Tibet aims to rectify this situation by placing Tibet at thecentre, rather than at the periphery, of other cultural and historicconcerns.
Aside from being a work of impressive scholarship, A HistoricAtlas of Tibet is a beautiful book to behold – large but portablysized, with all maps and illustrations rendered in colourthroughout. It is the culmination of two decades of research by asingle academic geographer aided and informed by a host ofother noted scholars from a range of different academic fields.Ryavec utilises a wide range of primary and secondary sourcematerial, along with modern digital cartographic techniques, tocollect and render comprehensive datasets in easily readablevisual formats.
The book is comprised of a series of 49 separate maps which
Tibet byKarl E.Ryavec
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have been supplemented by detailed keys, concise explanatoryessays and contextually illustrative photographs as well as byinformative tables and graphs with clear scholarly notes andreferences. The maps cover a wideranging set of themes andtopics, some of which extend beyond Tibet itself to cover areas ofNorth China, Mongolia and Beijing. The maps which make up thecore of the atlas visualise the Tibet cultural region as a whole andfocus in on key central, western and eastern regions, illustratingthe historical and cultural transformations of Tibet from thePalaeolithic period to the present day. Divided into four parts,these core maps describe the Prehistoric and Ancient Periods,circa 30,000 BCE to 600 CE; the Imperial Period, circa 600900;the Period of Disunion, circa 9001642; and the Ganden PodrangPeriod (Kingdom of the Dalai Lamas) from 1642 to the twentiethcentury.
Image Credit: Tibet in 1734. Royaume de Thibet (‘Kingdom of Tibet’) in la Chine, laTartarie Chinoise, et le Thibet (‘China, Chinese Tartary and Tibet’) on a map by Jean
Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville based on earlier Jesuit maps (Wikipedia Public
Domain)
Eight introductory maps at the start of the atlas set Tibet in itsregional, geographical and cultural contexts, illustrating not justthe physical topography of the region, but also the historic tradenetworks and the time it would take to travel these longestablished routes; the growth of Buddhist temples andmonasteries throughout the core regions of Tibet between circa6001950; and the geographical extent of the various languagesand dialects spoken today by roughly six million ‘Tibetic’language speakers. The atlas concludes with a set of four maps,which details the presentday natural resources, land cover
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patterns and population distribution of the Tibetan Plateau as wellas the demarcations of the modern territorial administrationsystem within the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
As the first historical atlas specifically centred on Tibet, this bookwill undoubtedly come to serve as an invaluable basic referencework for both students and established scholars across a widearray of academic disciplines. It will be of essential use tohistorians, anthropologists, historical geographers, digitalcartographers, archaeologists and scholars of religion and otheraspects of Tibetan culture and society. The essaysaccompanying each map provide succinct descriptions of theinformation each map intends to describe or illustrate, whilst alsoproviding a comprehensive outline of the source material used toinform the map and how it might in certain cases be limited as aconsequence, with a full set of references provided for anyonewho wishes to look into these aspects or examine these areas inmore detail.
In his preface to the atlas, Ryavec modestly acknowledges that,in undertaking the first work of its kind dedicated solely to Tibet,there were advantages and disadvantages he encountered whencompiling the necessary information to draw up these maps. Inproducing a new resource, there was nothing of such detail withwhich to compare his efforts, and in some areas, both academicand regional, there is still a vast amount of data that does not yetexist and so remains speculative. However, his background as anacademic geographer with a particular interest in Tibet studiesmeant that he was able to begin the work of assembling therelevant datasets in order to attempt the task of creating such anatlas, and – as he notes later on in the book – a future revisedand expanded edition will hopefully be able to build upon thisvery admirable start. In the meantime, with regards to Tibetstudies as a topic that is both central to itself and set within thewider scope of Asian studies, there is plenty of informationexpertly distilled into these 49 maps. They will absorb anyonewith an interest in the cartographic visualisation of information, aswell as those seeking to understand and place the history andculture of Tibet.
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Tim Chamberlain has a BSc in Anthropology from the Universityof East London and an MA in World History from BirkbeckCollege, University of London, where he is currently undertakinga PhD looking at Western travellers in East Tibet in the early20th century, exploring themes of science and empire. He is alsoa Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and works as aproject coordinator for international touring exhibitions at theBritish Museum. He tweets at @waymarksblog.
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