Uncovering the Secrets of a Tibetan Crown

This beautiful and colorful Tibetan crown can tell us a lot about the use of pigments in Tibet. It also has an invisible secret on the back side: The fragile crown was obviously stabilised by gluing thick sheets of paper to its back. The assumption that there was text on some of these sheets was confirmed by our methods of analysis: With the aid of the infrared reflectography imaging system, the writing can be reconstructed. However, many interesting questions still remain open: Which manuscripts were sacrificed for the production of this crown and does the text they contain have anything to do with the object itself?