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So go and get some books. Hi, I'm Carla Nappy and this is New Books in East Asian Studies. Welcome and thank you for joining us. I just spoke with Agnieszka Helman Vajni about her new book, The Archaeology of Tibetan Books.
This came out with Brill in 2014 and it is a book that you can get a lot out of if you are an expert in Tibetan studies and you can get a lot out of if you know nothing about Tibetan studies. It's a book that is deeply and profoundly interdisciplinary and it's approached to understanding books as material objects. And what Agnieszka does is she brings together interviews with Tibetan craftsmen and artists, her own experiences and artists, and as a book and papermaker in terms of experimenting with techniques that she is studying. And also a history of and really close and careful and detailed work with book collections from various places across China, Tibet and Central Asia, including libraries and collections in Europe, in North America and beyond.
So it's an amazing depth of research that went into the study. What it does is it gives us not only a history of bookmaking and papermaking techniques in Tibet, but also a really fine-grained material analysis of everything from the pigments, the paper and the papermaking techniques, what kinds of fibers are characteristic of what kinds of paper use and certain kinds of books from certain kinds of places, the kinds of materials that go into the ink. It's just an amazingly detailed appreciation of and study of books as materials and as objects. And if you read the book, as I had the chance to do just a little while ago, it really does change the way you see books, the way you observe and appreciate them, not just as objects, but also as text.
So Agnieszka was really generous about making the time to talk with me about it. It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy. Thank you for listening. I'm here today to talk with Agnieszka Helman Vajni about her new book, The Archaeology of Tibetan Books.
Welcome to New Books and East Asian Studies. Agnieszka and thanks so much for making time to talk with me today. I'm super excited about this. I think it's a book that is really important, not just for East Asian studies, but also for the history of the book and for the history of material objects.
So welcome. Welcome. Hello, Carla. Thank you very much for inviting me here.
I'm really it's a great pleasure to go with you. So Agnieszka, can you start us off as a traditional for the channel? By saying a little bit about what brought you to the field. And specifically, how did you come to work on Tibetan and Tibetan studies?
First of all, I should tell you that I'm not a geologist really at all. I started as artist. So from that point of creation of the art, then I moved to the field of history and science. So I was I am a paper conservator.
And then I had a PhD on conservation science. But it was quite early when I got interested in Tibetan cultural area and started to work on Tibetan papermaking and yes, and for all, Asia and Himalayas. So in fact, it was at the moment I choose the subjects for my master, Tessis and Diploma, which was a conservation of Tibetan book from Nepal. So that was a I would say starting point.
And soon after I realized, when I started to search for information, so I would say curiosity, bring me here. So I met many interesting people, geometologists, scholars, Tibetans, and I realized that this part of knowledge, my discipline is really quite distant from the biology and also anthropological and historical studies. So I needed to build a bridge, so to get deeper into the field. So yeah, at that point, I started to do with my skills, so the conservation and material research on books.
And I just started to search for interesting collections, which could bring me more information on that subject, especially that I did not really have, it was, and even now it's not, it's this material side of books, it's rather very often neglected. So there are not many really reference literature and interest on the other side on this. So I think that's it. That's great.
Thank you so much. And that also speaks a little bit to how you came to produce this as a book link object as well. And the book itself really wonderfully treats books not just as repositories of text, but as material objects. And one of the terms that you use to talk about this kind of approach toward understanding and studying books in terms of the materiality and their objectness very early in the introduction is the term archaeology.
So maybe kind of start by bringing us into the book by talking about this term archaeology for you. What is the archaeology of the book and what do we need to understand about how you're using that concept to understand the work that you're doing here? Yeah, so in this field I had, I found many terminological challenges. And I use the term archaeology and I like to use this term as a, which I understand as a description of physicality and historical context of the objects.
So it's very relevant to the term of codicology, I would say in medieval, for example, books, European books. But since codicology comes from codex, and Tibetan books are in the loose, the least format. So I found it better to use term archaeology. So it's why.
Thank you so much. And so because the book really wonderfully takes us into the nature of the research that you did, the nature of the sources, and it's based on such a really fascinatingly interdisciplinary set of research methodologies. I'm going to be asking you a lot about that because I find it super fascinating. So let's dive in.
So early in the book, you talk about the nature of the various source material, so the collections of manuscripts and other books that you use as your kind of baseline set of our documents for the book. So I'd like to ask you to talk about just a couple of them. So for anybody who works on China or Silk Road studies or anything kind of in the context of global exchange or the medieval world, the term Dunhuang is going to rank some belts, right? Dunhuang being a really important site for a lot of recent studies of the Silk Road and beyond.
So one of the sets of books or sets of materials that you worked with are preserved Tibetan books from Dunhuang. So can you talk a little bit about those materials and the nature of that cash up to that and books as it influenced what you're doing here? Sure, of course, those are the most important and basic collection which I worked on. And I think that was the first collection of the Tibetan books, which was somehow noticed and described by other scholars as physical objects.
And of course, it's very important to find and it is in the British Library, but not only in Paris, in National Library and also in St. Petersburg. So those are collections. But mostly the Tibetan manuscripts are in the British Library and that collection allowed me to write about, to touch somehow this earlier, earliest part of historical Tibetan books.
Of course, the general idea for the book was to select collections which could give us insight into different periods of time. So to have some kind of chronology. I haven't really achieved this yet because I hope just I was able to give to the readers some ideas about particular periods, not really chronology, because it's a very problematic and part to date Tibetan books. So this Dunhuang Tibetan manuscripts, for example, what was important during the work, I was collaborating closely with Dr.
Sam Bansheik, curator of the Tibetan collection in the British Library. And we found out really many interesting objects, because this is a crucial part to select particular books for research. If you select them randomly, it's very difficult to interpret results. So we had to have some idea where they are from or who wrote them or about the context in general.
And for example, with my paper research, I was able to identify paper in those earliest dated Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, which was in the mid of 9th century. So it was a paper made of Daphne plants, for example. So this kind of information helps to build the reference for the history of Tibetan books. Thank you so much.
And these details, the fact that the paper was made from Daphne plants, this is actually something that becomes really, really important for understanding the history of these books as material objects, and we'll definitely get to some of that later in much more detail, I think. Sure. So you mentioned early in this chapter the importance of taking a statistical approach to Tibetan books, right? The sort of issue of representativeness or representation.
And you also mentioned a couple of other major groupings of kinds of books that you worked with. And I'll just mention these because I'll come up later, and I'll just briefly print out editions of Tibetan conjures and illuminated manuscripts from Western and Central to that. And so we'll talk about those. I'm sure in much more detail in a bit.
You also mentioned the importance of specific collections of Tibetan books in terms of shaping the research here. And some of them are really fascinating. So I'd like to ask you to talk about one or two. You talk about the ponder collection.
Am I pronouncing that right? Yeah. So this is Eugen Ponder's 865 books originally in Berlin, now in Krakow. And it seems like a really, really important collection in terms of the work that you did here.
So can you talk a little bit about that collection for listeners? What's so important about it for the ones that you're doing here? Yeah, sure. That was one of the most important collections, I think, which I was able to work with as well next to Dunhuang, of course.
But that was collection which was deemed to be lost during the Second World War. And that interesting thing about it is to contain one of the first printed editions of Tibetan conjures. In fact, it is one Lee Kundur, which is the reference of the Kundur, which was printed in 1410. But this one Lee Kundur was printed in 1606, but that was done from the same wooden blocks.
And this is extra ordinary collection since before we did not have originals. So we could not even be sure if it's really a reference. We just had mentions from before about it. And also history of this collection is very interesting because it was deemed to be lost during the war.
And finally, it was originally brought by a huge impounder to Berlin to ethnographic music. And then it was offered to the Trans-Bibliotheque. And then during the war, it was hidden during the last stages of the war during bombing. It was hidden in the lower side of the island in the Fierstenstein, in Polish castle.
And then after the war, the borders of the country were shifted and lower in Silesia immediately became the part of Polish territory. So after some time and 40s, this collection was found by Polish researchers and brought via Kshashu and finally founded its place in the Yagilonian University Library in Kraków. But for many years, it was not loudly told. So it was kind of secret that this collection was not damaged.
So nobody, even in 2000, the great scholars Dr. Eimer wrote that this collection is probably damaged. So really a couple of years later, I just during searching for feedback on books and poems for my PhD in this collection. So I found this collection.
So it was kind of a very exciting to work with this. And that needed to start from the beginning because we needed first to confirm that it's really one country what was expected. So I was working with S and the introduction really takes us into stories about, it really becomes a kind of mystery tale, tracking down, trying to track down the origins of some of the books in the collections. You talk about checking out Pandar's connection with the young Högung, right, in Imperial Monastery.
There's all these stories about other books. So there's a mysterious folio in the library of Congress, which is found by cleaners on the floor. This is just an amazing set of stories for any big legal file out there. Definitely listeners who are interested in this kind of stories about books and check out the interactions.
I have to admit that this book brought me a bit into the detective stories. Sometimes a bit like this, but this is also part of the history of the collections, which is also important because now there are so many questions about the how the collections are, and those collections, especially Tibetan collections, really, were brought from many countries, places, on earth. And now sometimes it's very difficult to answer such a question, who should be on or not or something like this. I hope also this kind of stories somehow contributes to better understanding of those kinds of problems.
Absolutely. So the research for the book included, and as we've been talking about, studies of the history of Tibetan books, the history of particular collections, but it also included other kinds of research that were not based on those kinds of methodologies. So the book, as we've mentioned before, is very deeply interdisciplinary, and the research brought together what we might consider to be historical methods and scientific methods. It brought together interviews, experiments, microscopy, all kinds of really diverse modes of research to put together the story.
So I'd love to ask you a little bit about that now. So in addition to you, the kind of research that we've talked about, you talk about the importance of interviews that you did with Tibetan craftsmen and artisans. So can you maybe talk a little bit about that for you? What were some of the most important contributions that were made from, or on the basis of your interviews with Tibetan artisans?
Were there any moments in those interviews that were surprising for you, or that dramatically changed or impacted how you were thinking about the topic? Yes, of course. First, what surprised me the most, the same, you know, how Tibetans can look at materiality of books in this case. So it was always very interesting for me to compare what information I can derive from books by scientific analysis, for example, or by observation, by descriptions in the library and confront this with interviews, which of course they usually refer to modern things, but tradition of bookmaking and Tibetan areas is still like, has not changed much, I would say.
So it's still relevant to go to compare this to the historical books, even from earlier a century. But the interesting point in all this was, for example, when I was, we were talking and I was asking about the paper, so they know these totally different properties. For example, for them it was just paper, Tibetan paper was poisonous because it was very good, quite and strong, because of, they know that it should be something special and not eaten by insects. From the scientific point of view, it is that the plants properties are really a bit insect repellent, but not really poisonous word for war.
Also, regarding materials, for example, like there are many myths in those information which are coming from interviews, like somebody told me that Tibetan scriptures is the best, the highest quite-to-work region with stone pen. Of course, in reality it was not possible, probably it was wooden, stick or bamboo pen, cart as a stone or something like this. So a lot of this kind of stories and differences in between interviews and material research, which I know these were really, I think, interesting. There's one moment in the book where you talk about a myth of the dark surface of paper being produced by what the use of ashes of llamas.
It's kind of an amazing set of stories. There's also some really interesting stories around the use of human blood as a pigment. Wow. So in addition to interviews with Tibetan artisans and craftsmen, you also conducted what it seems to me to be from the book and from the amazing images, in descriptions that you give us quite a bit of experiments.
You describe part of the practice of research here in terms of experimental manuscriptology, personally reconstructing some of the techniques and copying fragments in some cases of books. So that seems to be really, really important here. Can you talk a little bit about that? What were some of the most important moments of our aspects of that research for you, and were there any special challenges in reconciling that kind of research with the other forms of research that you did for the book?
Yeah, I think that is a very important part. For me, it was kind of, you know, this was like a kind of exercises to check really how far the information I'm getting from, for example, interview can be true, right? And also what was very helpful, of course, I started as artists, so it was kind of natural for me. If I was not sure what would be used, I could check, right?
So that's the same thing with types of paper, for example, when you write depending on how the plants' properties influence the final results of, for example, calligraphy, right? So, calligraph, in fact, everybody can talk about, for example, calligraphs or type of scripts or type of calligraphy, right? But it is very rare that some of the things really how materials influence this time. So, by exercising this, by trying to write with the same pen, for example, on the different types of papers, helping a lot to understand it, or how Tibetans can change the properties of ink.
In fact, we do not really have, it's very difficult to trace some products really to the beginning. So, we have some general, also by some degree results. We can also, for example, identify the name materials. But all the tricks, I would say, which helped really keep this ink good and possible to use, was just also by adding some other substances to have the ink more thick or more diluted on the present, better in the summer during or whatever.
So, this kind of things, I could make some experiment, I think, and that it would help a lot in many fields and far, just to add some practice to tarry. Thank you so much. And there is an entire chapter, so chapter two, that's devoted to exploring these methods and the importance of these methods for understanding the history and the materiality of the books as you're giving them to us here. So, in addition to talking about the importance of creating a kind of typology of Tibetan books, you talk in this chapter about the importance of the kinds of tools to, as you put it, read what's not written.
So, this includes understanding the preparation of book leaves, understanding inks and pigments, understanding the analysis of paper, and we'll get to that in much more detail, and also understanding date, right? So, how it is that we can go about creating a history that's based on even rough of dating of the books. So, because that last part seems really kind of challenging, right? And really important.
Can you talk a little bit about that? How did you go about dating these books? And what were some of the major challenges of that? Yes, as I said before, it was, I think, the most challenging part.
It was, of course, my general idea to find a collection for particular periods of time. But really to date a book by materials, it's rather rare. It is possible. Because when you have a refer, if we have references for the development of crafts like papermaking or other materials production, but the problem with Asia in general, and especially in this Hawaiian Regent, is that those things have not changed much, and definitely not enough to date books just on this basis.
But if we overlap this knowledge with some typologies of formats, of page layout, all material parts, which I would say materials are very important in the context of Reginald origin, that gives the space on chronology and geography, I would say. And the best thing, and what I found the most useful, it was just overlap as many information as possible, as many features as possible, and typologies of it. So this way, only, I think, work sometimes. So my research, I would say, are much more useful in the finding Regent of the origin.
A bit less about dating. However, dating, it was possible in further perspective. Mostly in collaboration also with other scholars, who study the texts and who could somehow end other hymns. So if we see in the end that this points to the same idea, so we could somehow also date in this way.
But if the informations are scattered and not clear, so it's just better to wait for more sources. Thank you so much. And you just mentioned something that's actually really important for what's happening in the next part of the book, which is using a study of the materiality of these books and the paper and the pigments to try to get at something about the origins of the books, where they produced, where these made. And so you talk about the importance of materiality in those terms in several different ways.
One of the most important ways, of course, is understanding the paper. So in identifying and studying paper, you talk here about several aspects of that material characteristic of books that are important, including the raw material that's used, the type of paper making mold that's used, the way that leaves are prepared before writing or printing on them. This includes sizing, which affects the surface, flattening, polishing, sometimes with a conch shell, sometimes with stone, right, the color of the paper. And so you talk about the different aspects that we otherwise might very much take for granted when reading a book.
Now, as we get to that, we get into the fourth chapter. So because it seems like one of the most important kinds of evidence that you're using here that you're showing us, for understanding where these books were made, has to do with the materiality of the paper, let's talk about that in terms of the books. So can you talk a little bit about the raw materials of this paper? What are some of the most important materials used into that paper making?
And how does understanding those materials help us understand where these books were likely produced? Sure. The most difficult raw materials for making Tibetan books are, first of all, Timelasi family plants. So at the level, and I can identify them, are mainly two types of components.
So one would be daphne or agar but on the other side, we have very interesting raw material, which is the lera homojasme, which is the red chakwa in Tibetan, which is the the basket of the root of the plant, which grows from above 300 or something like this, and it can allow up to 5000, sometimes it's going to be more. So it definitely differs comparing to the distribution of daphne, which grows, or at the world, which grows in the valleys, and definitely below 3500 or 3000, and so lower. So that's the important thing to know this and to think about it at all, because it is possible to clearly differentiate in between stanera and daphne and the daphne. So we can know by knowing the paper production and all the technology, and also quality, which particular plants give.
So for example, daphne is a loss to make better daphne and daphne and daphne are quite the papers and stanera. And the difference is somehow like daphne has a bit more rigid fibers, a bit more stable, stronger, and stanera. The fibers are a bit, we could say, in the through microscopy, it has some examples to cotton. So the properties of paper, not directly, but I would say in the way of properties of paper later.
So the solar are very soft fibers. So when you produce the larger sheet of paper, it's not stable enough in a large format. And also for monasteries, sometimes, paper becomes too absorptive. Since comparing to daphne, daphne has a natural sizing element.
So the fibers, in fact, are features that the paper does not really, it's not used any other glue for the singular sheet, for example. Because they then glue the leaves of the book of layers, so it's another technological development. But for example, stelera, with those properties, is much better for printing, because it gives the softness and possibility to take inks when you touch the paper leaves to the wooden block. Sorry, I was just going to ask you, since you just brought up, sorry for interrupting, since you just brought up manuscripts and also prints, right?
So that's something that you actually talk about in this part of the book in chapter four. For listeners who may not really be familiar with this aspect of what you're writing about, and because it's really, really important, more broadly speaking in terms of book history and book studies right now, can you talk in the context of that, or at least in the context of the materials you're working on, about how we should understand the relationship between these two forms of manuscript and print culture? Can you talk a little bit about that relationship between manuscript and print? Or it's, Tibet is very exceptional on this side, because it's just manuscript cultures and printing cultures are simultaneously, has been developed since until now, even.
So in Europe, for example, we have, you know, before Gutenberg, we have the manuscript cultures, and then we, when the printing culture started, almost manuscripts became very rare and not really any more useful in the same way. So in Tibet, both books, manuscripts and prints were simultaneously produced. It seems like they maybe developed this way for different proposals, for example. However, of course, we can ask questions and try to understand only why it developed this way.
My personal view on this is that simply manuscripts, as they sometimes were produced as a special offering object, very rich, very richly decorated with stones attached to it, with gold used for writing. So sometimes, yeah, they were offering objects or objects of rich wealth as well, and they were kept in the special libraries, or, you know, for special patrons and donors. So that's why probably they have been produced even in 20th century that way. And the printing culture, of course, it helped to disseminate world of the Buddha Quaker, as we know, but on the other hand, still, I feel like the printing project in Tibet, they were so huge.
So they involved hundreds of people sometimes, in particular craftsmen, like the scribes, papermakers, printers, collectors, editors, donors, of course, sponsor of the product. So they were really large projects. And in this context, we sometimes can have feelings that if somebody wanted to produce or gain spiritual merit, just from preparing one copy of the book, maybe just simple manuscript without involving expensive materials and special technologies, it could be easier than to organize big printing projects. So maybe that is the reason why this simply stick simple conditions in Tibet and the very specific needs of people created the situation that we have both printing and manuscript sculptures at the same time.
Thank you so much. I think that's really, really helpful. And also, I'll mention for listeners that in chapter four, you actually talk about the importance of patronage for book production and take us into some of the material aspects of some of these very richly illuminated and decorated manuscripts, including painted borders and frontest pieces, including the practice sometimes of painting the edges of a book and a particular color to ward off insects. So there's actually this really interesting material significance to some of the colors that were used to sort of ward off being eaten by insects.
And interestingly, and I think a really interesting contrast to some of the recent book studies from other areas of the world is you emphasize the rarity of doodles, right, of marginal drawings and doodle drawings. I think there's one doodle of a dragon on page 95 for listeners who are particularly interested in that. Otherwise, if you note that perhaps because of these special conditions you've mentioned, there really are not many surviving doodles and manuscripts, just scribbles on these drawings on these pages, right? You can see us, but you can find more within doing one collection in the British Lider, for example, but also on some, I noticed this on some ball manuscripts in Columbia University Lider.
So they are rare, of course, but still it's possible to find those kind of illustrations, like a doodles. Thank you. So the chapter where before I move on also mentioned has some really wonderful discussions of format and bookbinding style of the importance of particular styles of calligraphy, of ink, different materials used as payments, including blood, which is really interesting. And this is really important when taken together with the discussion of paper, in part because I think you're really helping us see these pages in a completely different way.
I mean, in some of these discussions, you literally help us see the text and read it in a completely new way by pointing out aspects of the shape of certain letters that you based on your experience or your experience. And your craft and your research, you know, were probably named with certain kinds of carving tools. And that's just amazing to help us really to change the way we see. So I just want to thank you for that.
Thank you for telling about it. It's just a, yeah, for of course, my reason as a researcher was somehow to try to say something more about origins and just the format things. But also of course, I wanted to show these books because we had very basic information before and the written sources are just, you know, the common view was just pretty books and not much more. And they are really, there's a great variety in everything and format and page layouts and decorations.
So, and all those elements are important. They are totally different from European, the culture, of course, but also different from Chinese and from all others. So it's really many typically to bat on elements in this. What are some of the most important aspects of the differences between Tibetan Chinese sort of production in this way?
I mean, you mentioned kinds of paper is being really different, but can you talk a little bit about that for listeners who might be China specialists who might be particularly interested in those distinctions? Of course. So the format papers, I would start from this. So, for example, this potty format of Tibetan books is loosely format.
So it's coming originally somehow from Indian culture, from the books on Palm leaves called a Pusaka. So Tibetans tried to resemble to keep the tradition of making books from that side. And it's just why we have those books form. However, of course, we did not have a palamis in Tibet.
So they had to use paper. So paper probably came from ability to make a paper, came from China or from central Asia. But it was no more limit of the format because that was no reason to make certain narrow leaves like palmis. So paper allows for a bit larger format.
It is why we have different sizes of books, which are very specific and characteristic for Tibetan book culture. Also, this is the fact of gluing of booklets of layers. And immediately here we can point a difference in paper and Chinese and Tibetan paper. For example, there are some Tibetan books on Chinese paper, quite many, especially those first edition of Tibetan countries, which were produced in Beijing.
So it's also a source of why on Chinese paper and materials. So for example, Tibetan paper is much thicker and stronger in fact. So Chinese paper was produced mostly. You know, Chinese were written with brush at the first of all.
So the paper had to be absorbent. The idea was different. Paper got quite as wide as well. So Tibetan paper because the production of paper was a simpler, much simpler.
So we have irregularities and thickness. So in fact, it was sometimes not nice and not stable enough to produce large format from just one layer. It is probably the glued leaves of books of layers of many layers. And also probably maybe they also wanted to make it similar somehow from families to make it thicker.
But this is just hypertases. But it would explain why they create a book this way. Of course, we have the main difference comes from raw materials. Chinese use totally different raw materials starting from rock paper, then paper mulberries, and mulberries, then rami, and hands.
So this creates different properties and different properties of paper. So this is writing to tools. I think this makes this difference in between. Thank you so much.
That's really helpful. I think it's really interesting to think about this and compare it to the framework. You alluded to several times already the importance of the country. We talked about this.
And you talked a little bit about in terms of the relationship between manuscript and print cultures, some of these major printing, like multi-year, just major, major printing endeavors that involve proofread. Scholars, wood collectors, and you talk us through the stages of production of some of these massive, massive printing endeavors from collecting the wood, carving the wood, whether with doctors on staff. I mean, there were many blocks of melted butter in the printing. So it's super fascinating and really, really interesting part of the book.
Now, can you, for listeners who are not as familiar with this notion of the conjure, or who may not understand why it would be so useful to look at editions of the Tibetan Buddhist canon for your purposes, can you talk a little bit about that? Why are editions of the Tibetan Buddhist canon so useful for studying what you're studying in here? For me, they were really useful to look at them as the significance in the printing culture and also character to see rigidity. So because they were produced to the Tibetan, particular editions of the Tibetan country were produced in different places.
For example, in Beijing, like the first one, the one we have, like, Chaunee, or in the father to the west, then we have the Lassar here, with the central and Tibetan, the Lassar country later. So we are moving geographically and also in time, and we can observe different developing technologies. And the technologies, in this case, are also in materials, especially, are reginal. And also this kind of study helps us, in some cases, to identify the workshops of printers, right, the printing projects.
So, by comparing, for example, all measurements in the page layouts, we can somehow group this, why all of this. Of course, if we know exactly what we are analyzing, it's not the point. But there are many, many prints and Tibetan books which are still scattered around the world in Western museums, library collections, which are simply not identified. And especially in the 20th century, after, you know, cultural revolution, and many books were really somehow detached from the places.
So, it's very often we really need to know what we are dealing with. So, my idea and my purpose was to build this kind of references. Because the text, in particular, addition, is very difficult to really somehow classify the addition on the basis of text only. And I think for many years, also, the pathologists have been working on the microphones.
So they've never really seen even originals. So that is the thing which I really, it was my main goal, main aim, somehow to show, to add this another layer of possibilities, of research. And that's actually really increasingly difficult to do, at least from the perspective of Chinese studies. More and more libraries and rare books collections and archival collections are not letting scholars use the original, like, see the originals.
In fact, they're transferring things to microform, at least in China, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that kind of research. Yes, exactly. And also, that's now we touched my another aim and goal. You know, looking from the point that digital culture, right, is now really very rapidly developing.
So, we are going in this direction. So the physical books somehow stayed behind. And with my book, I wanted to show that it is really important, and we may really add to our research, if we still look at those books. Did you have, I mean, in the course of your research, just, you know, the sense we're kind of on this topic, were there any cases in which there was a real challenge, or a particularly notable challenge in getting access to some of these physical materials that you needed to in order to do this research?
I think I was, of course, some places are more difficult than others. I would not like, you know, to point to the right. But I would say I was, I have been very lucky to meet right people, I love my work, which were really curators and librarians, which were really very helpful and supportive for my work. However, of course, when I tried to access materials also during the field work, right, in China or in Himalayas.
It's sometimes difficult. It's very accident. Sometimes everything works and it's great. And sometimes it's simply impossible because of course, libraries have our rules.
And sometimes you cannot simply see or talk original, right? Right. So in the books, as we kind of make our way through and come to the last part of the book, I'll just note for listeners that in Chapter 5, there's some really wonderful discussions of the production of and the kind of early editions and some later editions of some of these major printing endeavors, especially the Tibetan Buddhist count. So there was some comparative and really, really interesting detail discussions of the kind of early edition of the Tibetan conjure produced in Beijing, Mongolian conjures and Tibetan conjures that are produced in Tibet and the Tibetan borderlands.
So there's some really interesting stuff there for readers who are interested in that. And then there's also a whole chapter that I'm not going to ask you to talk too much about because we could easily spend another two hours on this. But there's a very detailed, very, very rich chapter that surveys Tibetan paper. And everything you'd ever wanted to know right about Tibetan paper in Chapter 6, which goes into some of the really important microscopic analyses that we've been alluding to.
It talks about the importance of Buddhist monks for spurring and spreading papermaking. It kind of talks about the differences and the relationships between Tibetan and Chinese papermaking and also talks about some of the really crucial tools and technologies of papermaking, including the collection of raw material, the boiling, the beating, the molding. So it's a really fascinating chapter for all of those purposes. But the final chapter is really important and interesting as well.
So I want to make sure we talk a little bit about that. And this is a chapter on conservation. Now in this chapter, you talk about the particular challenges posed to the conservation of Tibetan books due to the significance of these books as sacred and ritual objects. So could you talk a little bit about that?
What for you is important for us to understand about these challenges of conservation specifically with respect to the Tibetan books? Yeah, that was a difficult chapter to write and decide about the structure of it. But what was important for me, I wanted to show that since the approach to conservation and restoration in Europe and in Tibet is very much different. So just for those not familiar, I would say only that in European conservation, we mostly want to preserve historical substance.
And to add or just do not change it, do not add anything. But in Tibet, mostly people understand the conservation as replacement with new things. They all think with new things because it has to be useful. Of course, the books are sacred, so they are not true out.
They are often buried in the super, or they are burned sometimes. But it means totally different things in Europe. So even starting from this point, we have to think how to preserve those objects. And in my opinion, we should really think also about the Tibetan people.
It is not only that we want to do it our way. So it is necessary to somehow find a way which will be the most useful to preserve cultures as well. So I tried to somehow describe only a couple of mathematical methods, places where the books are, the preservation and storage problems. So I wanted to show in the chapter mostly the problems we have.
I did not try to give detailed and to everything. I still wanted to make a reader more familiar with this object. Also in the context that many books were really damaged in the 20th century. As I mentioned before, many are detached from the original places.
And we have Tibetan books almost now all around the world in museum and library collections. And those objects really need special care. We cannot conserve them as we usually do with European books or with other books from other cultures. So they are specific because of the materials, because of the technologies.
So we need to consider exactly materials and how those books were made originally to understand the process of deterioration. To decide also about the methods. So that was my goal I guess. Thank you so much.
And this chapter is useful not just because it runs through and describes many of the typical ways that Tibetan books get damaged, sources of that damage. And some selected procedures as you give us here in the book for conservation of these materials. It also really helps us think anew about what conservation means. You make the point I think very effectively early in this chapter that what it means to preserve an object for one group of people may look like destroying it to another.
And that's actually really, really important I think for how we think about what conservation means conceptually and how to sort of work across and with all of these different communities in the way that might be most productive. So now that we're at the end of the book, I'll just mention for listeners there are also a series of really useful appendices that describe the concept of conservation. There are also useful appendices that describe in detail some of the items from some of the major collections are working on some of the features of the paper in a lot of those items. There's transphonopendics that's just devoted to transcription of Yolula covers.
And there's also just a lot of that is to say material in just the appendices that we're not talking about in detail. That's just really rich archival fabric for many, many other studies. So the book is not just a report on your research but it also offers a lot of material to enable the research of others hopefully many years into the future. So Agnieshka, we've talked about a lot of the book but of course there's a million billion things we didn't talk about.
Is there anything in particular that we haven't talked about that you'd like to mention? Or listeners and perhaps especially for listeners who haven't had a chance to read the book? Yeah, I think the main thing I would like to mention here maybe just to summarize that at the present point where with the all development of digital culture, digital lore, digital books, so I wanted to really bring attention of people to those original objects. And also to write this book not only for scholars of tibetology or paper conservation but also for those who are not as familiar with the subject just to show how beautiful objects they are, those tibetan books and to somehow encourage people to look at this.
So I guess that's what it's like. I don't think so. And that's actually really helpful because it also reminds me to mention something that I really love about which is the images and illustrations. There's just tons and tons of beautiful color images of the paper that the fibers you're talking about but also the pages and the ways that these books are shaped.
So it's a really beautiful archive of images of tibetan books and paper as well. So I'm the actually now that the book is out and congratulations on the book. What's next? Thank you.
What are you working on now? Oh, I would mention here. I would mention two things. I'm completing now another book from my very recent project on the paper, the paper rolls a case for central edgium origins.
It is basically about the history of paper in central edgium. Those areas depart and I just try to put some more hypothesis into origins. So that is one thing. And the other thing is I'm starting also now project on material analysis of archival documents from Nepal, so that is another thing I'm going to work for next couple of years.
We'll best have left with that work. We'll look forward to coming out as well. And thanks again. I really was a pleasure and thanks very much for making the time.
Thank you very much to you, Carla. You've been listening to new books and Asian studies. Thanks very much for joining us and we'll see you next time.