In An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama, Diana Lange analyzes a nineteenth-century collection of watercolor illustrations, map-like paintings, and inscriptions. Taken together, these materials “represent the largest panoramic map of mid-nineteenth-century Tibet of its time” (p. 1). Based on Lange's assessment of a number of primary and secondary sources, this collection was produced by a still-unnamed Tibetan draftsman and cartographer, who, she suggests, was part of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and originally from Central Tibet (pp. 30–37). Lange's interdisciplinary study of this massive collection, now housed in the British Library as the Wise Collection, provides a social history and thorough annotation of the material. In terms of social history, Lange pursues questions related not only to the synchronic moment of the collection's commission and creation but also to more diachronic concerns about shifts in ownership over time.

Lange also provides an exhaustive ethnohistorical context for the myriad religious and secular festivals and locations depicted within the compendium. To do so, she draws on her own fieldwork, relevant secondary literature, and several primary sources related to pilgrimage. Lange also makes good use of archival resources from the Bodleian and British Libraries. The monograph, comprising twelve well-illustrated and detailed chapters, includes four removable picture maps of Central Tibet, each roughly 15.5 inches by 37.5 inches, which are scaled-down reproductions from the Wise Collection.

As there are few scholarly investigations of Tibetan mapmaking, Lange's monograph stands out as a substantial contribution to this emerging discourse. The first four chapters of the book are dedicated to charting the history of what has come to be known and catalogued as the Wise Collection. Lange traces the collection's history of patronage, stewardship, and scholarship over a 150-year period, spanning the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In this section, she shares her important discoveries about the original patron: William Edmund Hay—a British assistant commissioner of Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India—who was living in Naggar at the time he patronized the project (ca. 1857). Hay crossed paths with “the lama” in the Kullu region in 1857, when, according to a British source, the lama arrived in Kullu (p. 29). Lange speculates that the lama was on a pilgrimage to the western Himalayan region from Central Tibet but stopped his journey because of the brewing Indian Mutiny of 1857 (p. 29). Hays makes the acquaintance of this skilled draftsman and commissions him to “draw and describe” Tibet (p. 29). Later in the nineteenth century, the compilation of watercolor paintings and Tibetan inscriptions on paper end up in the hands of a Scottish polymath, Thomas Alexander Wise, who eventually bequeaths the collection to the British Library as part of his “cabinet of curiosities” (p. 21). And thus the collection became known by his name: Wise.

The fifth chapter focuses on the historical background of such a grand and private (as opposed to British government funded) commission of maps and informational diagrams about places, groups of people, and rituals from the broader Tibetan region (including Ladakh and Zangskar). This slim chapter (pp. 38–41) places Hay's commission within the larger sociopolitical context of British colonial route surveying and mapmaking of the nineteenth century.

When the chapter turns to Tibet's history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, however, it loses focus. In this section, Lange would have done well to provide substantive background on nineteenth-century Tibetan and Himalayan cartographic practices, which would have provided a much-needed counterpoint to the discussion of British-made Indian maps and a fuller context for this particular collection. Scattered throughout the book, Lange briefly references indigenous pilgrimage maps and “monument painting,” a newly coined term referring to eighteenth-century maps of Tibetan Buddhist sacred centers.Footnote ¹ She writes that “the style of representation in the Wise Collection . . . shows that the lama was familiar with the monument painting style; his own drawing style was probably influenced by such paintings” (p. 33). Illustrating the ways the mapmaker followed or changed nineteenth-century genre conventions would have helped Lange demonstrate how the lama/cartographer enjoyed “considerable personal discretion” (p. 342) in his mapmaking with regard to placement, directional orientation, internal scale, proportion, and architectural types. Lastly, it may also have been useful to consider this commission within a context of foreign-patronized Tibetan maps of the nineteenth century, a discussion that would have fruitfully extended and built on Joseph Schwartzberg's initial efforts.Footnote ²

In the last five chapters, Lange methodically decodes the artist's drawings and inscriptions providing a compendium of ethnographic and geographic information from Central Tibet, west Tibet and into Ladakh and Zangskar, though the materials largely focus on Central Tibet, the assumed natal home of the mapmaker. One of the greatest strengths of the book is the way Lange provides each set of illustrations with thick descriptions of the actual places, events, personages, and festivals they represent. Lange fills each page of these five chapters with exceptional close-ups of the maps and illustrations, which are often paired with ethnographic or historical photographs creating valuable one-to-one correlations between the illustrations and on-the-ground practices. Her explanations of religious dances do this especially well (pp. 174–219). There are other well-illustrated moments relating to more secular and lesser known events in Lhasa, such as rope sliding, opera performances, and wedding ceremonies.

As Lange decodes these layered images, she takes time to note wonderful idiosyncrasies, such as when the lama included a close-up of a thangka painting displayed in a procession. The artist paints the thangka to scale within the procession and then next to it paints a larger image so that the viewer knows the precise content of the thangka (pp. 139–40). Such a visual moment reveals the mapmaker's awareness of his patron's interests and the didactic nature of these illustrations for a foreign (that is, foreign to the mapmaker) audience.

At the end of her book, Lange considers her “research on the Wise Collection up to now as just a starting point” (p. 345); this is certainly a comprehensive and robust commencement. She has provided the field with rich and valuable documentation of this incredible resource that can continue to be mined not only for information about nineteenth-century mapmaking, but also for data pertaining to rituals and depictions of material culture and ethnic groups, among other interests. Consequently, An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama will have great appeal to anyone working on nineteenth-century Inner Asian and Himalayan geography, ethnohistory, visual culture, and cartography.