Tibetan Archives From Mustang: Reconstructing the Lives of “People without History” by Prof. Dr. Charles Ramble

Communist propaganda publications from the 1960s contain photographs of celebrating Tibetans standing around bonfires of burning legal and administrative documents. While such documents may have been symbols of social and economic oppression, they were also a window onto the daily lives and hardships of ordinary villagers, windows that were effectively closed for ever by these acts of immolation. More recently, the immense value of such documents for our understanding of the social history of Tibetan-speaking communities has been demonstrated by the discovery of archival collections in Himalayan areas adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and in particular Nepal’s Mustang district. These collections, which are the property of temples, private households or village communities, include a wide variety of documents such as wills, contracts, legal cases and even entire law codes. The difficulties of finding and deciphering such documents, which date mainly from the nineteenth century, are abundantly recompensed by the fascinating picture they offer of the lives of “people without history”.

Prof. Dr. Charles Ramble is directeur d'études in the History and Philology Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL University, Paris, and director of the Tibetan Studies research team of the Centre for Research on East Asian Civilisations (CRCAO).

24th September 2025
16:30 (Nepal Time)
Venue: Alliance Française (behind St Mary's school), Pulchowk, Lalitpur