The Mapping of Tibet: A Journey through Different Mapping Practices

For many years I have undertaken extensive research on the maps in the British Library’s Wise Collection – showing the route between Lhasa in Central Tibet and Ladakh in the Western Himalayas over a length of more than ten metres (Lange 2020). They were made in the late 1850s by a Tibetan lama who was commissioned by a British official to draw up the panorama of a region which was practically inaccessible to Europeans at the time. Using the Wise Collection, I documented how and with what int...