A Digital Humanities Project on Inner Asian Monasticism
Religious Affiliations of Monasteries in Tibet
This map displays monastic affiliations as recorded in the source data. Composite affiliations are retained without assuming a chronological sequence. The dates and completeness of the records vary by source.
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. This version uses the readable main worksheet, containing 2,773 records, of which 2,770 have parseable coordinates. The difference between the original count and the current worksheet remains to be reconciled record by record. Unresolved fields in the available worksheet retain their original text. Parseable coordinates do not indicate that every location has been independently verified. The modern basemap provides geographical reference rather than historical administrative boundaries.
Recorded Monastery Foundings and Their Spatial Distribution, 600–2013 CE
The map cumulatively displays founding records with a single parseable year up to the selected date. Unknown, multiple, or unparseable dates are excluded from chronological placement; a single recorded year may still be approximate. The heatmap changes with the zoom level. These records support questions about monastery foundations and regional patterns. Establishing whether a monastery remained active, declined, was destroyed, or was rebuilt requires additional historical evidence.
Related Historical Research
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” [in Chinese]. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 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 Records of Amdo Monasteries
This map presents livestock records for Amdo monasteries drawn from the source literature, including the social and historical investigations of Tibetan society. The dates and counting conventions of individual records require verification against the original sources; publication dates are not necessarily observation dates. Comparisons also require attention to livestock categories, the scope of each count, and missing information. These records offer one source for studying monastic economies and should not be treated as a ranking of monasteries’ total wealth.
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.