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Established in 1871 on the outskirts of London, the Royal Indian Engineering College at Coopers Hill was arguably the first engineering school in Britain. For thirty-five years the college helped staff the government institutions of British India responsible for the railways, irrigation systems, telegraph network, and forests. Founded to meet the high demand for engineers in that country, it was closed thirty-five years later because its educational innovations had been surpassed by Britain’s universities – on both occasions against the wishes of the Government of India. Imperial Engineers offers a complete history of the Royal Indian Engineering College. Drawing on the diaries of gradua...
They may shave their heads, don simple robes, and renounce materialism and worldly desires. But the women seeking enlightenment in a Buddhist nunnery high in the folds of Himalayan Kashmir invariably find themselves subject to the tyrannies of subsistence, subordination, and sexuality. Ultimately, Buddhist monasticism reflects the very world it is supposed to renounce. Butter and barley prove to be as critical to monastic life as merit and meditation. Kim Gutschow lived for more than three years among these women, collecting their stories, observing their ways, studying their lives. Her book offers the first ethnography of Tibetan Buddhist society from the perspective of its nuns. Gutschow d...
This book is the last of three volumes in which the recent knowledge of the extent and chronology of Quaternary glaciations has been compiled on a global scale. This information is seen as a fundamental requirement, not only for the glacial community, but for the wider user-community of general Quaternary workers. In particular the need for accurate ice-front positions is a basic requirement for the rapidly growing field of palaeoclimate modelling. In order to provide the information for the widest-possible range of users in the most accessible form, a series of digital maps was prepared.The glacial limits were mapped in ArcView, the Geographical Information System (GIS) used by the work gro...
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, ...
Art and Architecture in Ladakh shows how the region’s cultural development has been influenced by its location across the great communications routes linking India with Tibet and Central Asia. Edited by Erberto Lo Bue and John Bray, the collection contains 17 research papers by experienced international art historians and architectural conservationists, as well as emerging scholars from Ladakh itself. Their topics range widely over time, from prehistoric rock art to mediaeval Buddhist stupas and wall paintings, as well as early modern castle architecture, the inter-regional trade in silk brocades, and the challenges of 21st century conservation. Taken together, these studies complement eac...
Climate change is producing profound changes globally. Yet we still know little about how it affects real people in real places on a daily basis because most of our knowledge comes from scientific studies that try to estimate impacts and project future climate scenarios. This book is different, illustrating in vivid detail how people in the Andes have grappled with the effects of climate change and ensuing natural disasters for more than half a century. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, global climate change has generated the world's most deadly glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, killing 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organiz...
Reveals how British imperial border-making in the Himalayas transformed a crossroads into a borderland and geography into politics.
The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism is one of the first publications to include scholarship on both the mainstream Tibetan canons of translated Buddhist classics, and the alternative canons of literature of the Nyingma sectarian traditions.
The Himalaya are world-renowned for their exquisite mountain scenery, ancient traditions, and diverse ethnic groups that tenaciously inhabit this harsh yet sublime landscape. Home to the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest, and some of its deepest gorges, the region is a trove of biological and cultural diversity. Providing a panoramic overview of contemporary land and life in the Earth's highest mountains, the Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya is the first full-color, comprehensive atlas of the geography, economics, politics, and culture of this spectacular area. Drawing from the authors' twenty-five years of scholarship and field experience in the region, the volume contains a s...
The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century onwards the spread of the Mongol Empire from the Western borders of Europe through Central Asia to China facilitated further exchanges. The significance of these interactions has been long ignored in scholarship. This volume represents a major contribution to the subject, bringing together new studies by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars. They explore for the first time the multi-layered contacts between the Islamic world, Central Asia and the Himalayas from the eighth century until the present day in a variety of fields, including geography, cartography, art history, medicine, history of science and education, literature, hagiography, archaeology, and anthropology.