The world-famous Buddhist monastery of Alchi in Ladakh, India, is the best-preserved temple complex in the Himalayas. Proposed for inclusion in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list in 1998, the monastery's artworks reveal influences from India and Tibet across Central Asia and Iran, even as far back as Ancient Greece. Housing thousands of rare paintings and sculptures from the area dating back to the eleventh century, it provides fascinating insight into the spiritual and secular life of medieval Kashmir and Western Tibet. The Dalai Lama has authorized the publication of images of these Buddhist masterpieces for the first and only time. Beautifully photographed by Peter van Ham, the images in this volume capture the miniaturesque delicacy and broad range of color of these precious works. With essays by renowned Tibetologist Amy Heller, and a foreward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, this once-in-a-lifetime volume offers fascinating new insights--including a large panorama double gate fold--into one of the most beautiful monasteries in the Himalayas.

On the south bank of the Indus in Ladakh, facing a great trade and invasion route to the north, lies Alchi, a repository of magnificent Buddhist wall paintings and clay sculptures that have survived for over eight hundred years. This sumptuously illustrated book details the most impressive of the temples within the complex, the Sumtsek Three-Tiered Temple. The building itself is an impressive mixture of Tibetan and Kashmiri elements, which display some central Asian antecedents. The fresh and colorful wall paintings, in a sophisticated kashmiri style, appear to be a transposition of techniques intended for miniatures onto walls. The masterly vision of the creators of the Sumtsek has melded a profusion of teachings, artistic formats, structural possibilities and the demands of a donor's personal vision, into a unified sanctuary.

Exhibition catalog.

Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.

Mineral building materials and regionally related methods of processing are an essential part of building culture throughout the Himalayas. Based on transregional knowledge transfer, raw materials have been able to find an ecologically and economically optimised destiny in particular local applications. For this study, samples were collected as raw material or originated from certain building components. Samples were analysed according to their material properties and architectural application. Traditional building techniques were examined and their correlation with traceable material qualities studied. Clay-specific properties such as colour, grain size distribution, grain shape, hardness, plasticity, organic additives, or bulk and clay mineral properties were used as comparative parameters. This study gives fresh insight into the interaction between technical requirements, environmental resources and material implementation. It is the first scientific approach in studying the Himalayan earthen heritage in a wide scope and connecting material research and cultural heritage from various perspectives - in particular archaeology, architecture, research on materials and building techniques.

Ladakh, A Region Isolated For Centuries, Has Unique, Exclusive And Rich Cultural Base. This Magnificently Illustrated Book Provides A Comprehensive Account Of The Architectural Heritage Of This Unparalaled Landscape.