A Digital Humanities Project on Inner Asian Monasticism
Religious Affiliations of Monasteries in Tibet
This interactive map provides a database of 2,777 monasteries in Tibet. By pinning each monastery in different colors according to their religious affiliations, this map shows the diversity of Tibetan religious traditions and the spatial distributions of various religious affiliations.
Except for very few sporadic data, this map does not include Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia. In terms of Mongolian monasteries, the GIS project of “Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries” provides informative resources.
The original project reported 2,777 monasteries. The current map uses the readable main worksheet: 2,773 records, of which 2,770 have parseable coordinates. The difference between the two versions remains to be checked. Missing and unresolved records retain their original text.
Development of Tibetan Monasteries, 700-2013 A.D.
This dynamic map below demonstrates the long-term development of monasteries in Tibet from 700 A.D. to 2013. The red color shows the density of the clusters of monasteries. This map with a timeline bar demonstrates significant historical development of monasticism on the Tibetan plateau in many aspects. After the eighteenth century, monasteries in western Amdo grew substantial growth, whereas those in eastern Amdo gradually declined. This development was closely related to the rise of the Khoshut Mongols in Kokonor. (Kung, 2015, 2018) Furthermore, this map also clearly shows that there were significant clusters of monasteries in western Kham, which is a region that has been overlooked by previous scholars and therefore deserves further research.
Reference
Kung, Ling-Wei. “The Transformation of the Qing’s Geopolitics: Power Transitions between Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries in Amdo, 1644–1795.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 45 (2018): 110-144.
Kung, Ling-Wei. “The Development of Tibetan Monasteries in Amdo and the Mongolian Factors during Ming-Qing Dynasties: Study on Tibetan Monks in The Manchu-Mongolian Routine Memorials of Lifanyuan” (洮岷藏傳佛寺入清之興衰及其背後的蒙古因素──以《內閣大庫檔》與《理藩院滿蒙文題本》為核心). Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊 86.4 (2015): 855-910.
This map cumulatively displays founding records with parseable coordinates and a single year value, up to the selected year. The available timeline is 600–2013 CE. The heatmap changes with zoom and does not represent the number of monasteries surviving in a given year; it cannot by itself establish historical growth or decline.
Livestock of Amdo Monasteries in the 1950s
Between 1956 and 1958, the People’s Republic of China organized a series of social and historical investigations on the Tibetan society known as Zangzu shehui lishi diaocha (藏族社会历史调查). These investigations conducted by the Chinese Communist Party preserved statistical records of Amdo monasteries’ livestock during that period. By cleaning up and inputting these statistical records of livestock, the map below shows Amdo monasteries’ socio-economic scale in the late 1950s.
The current map contains 180 geolocated livestock records: 162 positive totals and 18 entries recorded as zero. Circle area corresponds to the recorded total; outlined circles mark zero values requiring review. The actual survey date for each record remains to be verified. A source publication year is not necessarily the survey year.
Credit
This group project entitled “Mapping Monasteries in Tibet” was accomplished by Ling-Wei Kung, Valentina Strokopytova, Norzang, Bart Qian, Yuchen Zhao, Tongtong Zhu, and Xiaoze Xu in the class of “Tibetan Local History” in Fall 2015 under the supervision of Dr. Gray Tuttle at Columbia University. The original data were from the Buddhist Digital Resource Center. In recognition of their efforts to bridge the gap between Tibetan studies and digital humanities, this research group was invited to present this group project in Data Science Day hosted by the Data Science Institute at Columbia University on April 6, 2016.
The project was originally completed collaboratively by a group at Columbia University in 2015. The original system is no longer operational. The current system was built and is maintained by the Ling-Wei Kung Research Lab at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.