Surveying a Sacred Landscape: First Steps to a Holistic Documentation of Buddhist Architecture in Dolpo

Dolpo is a culturally Tibetan region in the inaccessible parts of the Himalayas, where Buddhist and Bon traditions coexist to this day. Due to their religious significance, the temples and monasteries of Dolpo reflect the historical connection to the religious centres of the Tibetan area. Accordingly, a holistic documentation of the preserved buildings can provide new insights for the development of typologies of Buddhist architecture in the Western Himalayas. To shed light on the mainly undocumented Buddhist architecture of this region, we launched our first research project in 2018. As a result, the architectural documentation of eighteen Buddhist sites in Dolpo is now available for the first time, based on the on-site assessment and survey during four field missions between 2018 and 2023. It provides an overview of the location, descriptions and references, photographs, sets of plans and 3D models of the surveyed buildings, enabling an inventory of the region’s cultural heritage to be initiated. The results enable us to establish a comprehensive typology of Buddhist architecture in Dolpo that allows for comparative analyses with buildings already documented in previous projects. Last but not least, the documentation provides the basis for much-needed restoration work.