CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
She returns to the theme of Tibet again in her new project, having spent the three previous years working in a different project called ‘Coloured Maps’, in which she examined maps that originated in East Asia. Collaboration between specialists in the natural sciences and material science was of key importance in researching the coloration of such charts: ‘Our work together was the first time I realised just how beneficial cross-disciplinary research can be and how much the natural sciences and humanities can complement each other when it comes to understanding maps, their history, and materiality,’ says Lange. The aim of the new project is to combine these two areas – the thematic focus on Tibet and the methodological focus on materiality and cartography. Rather than restricting the study to a particular group of maps like those in the Wise Collection, Lange now aims to get a view of Tibetan cartography in its entirety.
But why Tibet of all places? By taking a look at this region, it becomes particularly clear how much mapping processes can vary from culture to culture and just how different mapmakers’ interests can be. Depictions of Tibet vary, depending on what perspective was employed. The contrast between indigenous, Chinese and European points of view is striking here. From a Chinese viewpoint, what was particularly important in documenting Tibet cartographically from the end of the eighteenth century onwards was mapping the region and its southern borders with China’s own defence policy in mind. Europeans, in contrast, were more interested in documenting one of the last blank areas still on their maps. Whoever intends to control a geographical region or make it capable of being controlled would want to document it as fully and accurately as possible – a mission pursued more ruthlessly in nineteenth-century Europe than anywhere else in the world. The fact that other aspects such as spirituality are more important to Tibetans possibly explains why their maps differ so fundamentally from Western ones – indeed, so much so that Westerners do not see them as maps at all, but as pictures. The need to distinguish things this way is a reflection of their cultural background, however. The Chinese have a different concept in this case: ‘These two terms are represented by the same character in Chinese. That’s why nobody ever thought of drawing such a strict dividing line,’ Lange explains. The various cultural and cartographic inventions developed by the Europeans, Chinese and Tibetans mean that they produced maps that are very different in terms of their content and appearance.
Over the next three years, Lange hopes to be able to read old maps of Tibet in a new way, compare them, and subsequently shed more light on the historical and social background of how and why they were made thanks to material science. The astonishing thing here is that, by carefully examining maps that seem totally unconventional, we can actually chart unknown territory.
