Orientalistický Expres, z. s. je sdružením českých současných i bývalých studentů a dalších členů akademické obce, jejichž badatelský zájem se soustředí či soustředil na některý z regionů Orientu v nejširším možném významu tohoto slova.

Find the latest papers and research trends published in peer-reviewed journals across the social sciences (Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography, History, Communication, and Area Studies).

This page provides access to some of the resources incl. bibliographies formerly hosted on the now-closed website of the AHRC-funded History of the Chinese Maritime Customs Project. You may have been redirected here from that site (www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs) and its subfolders — so please rest assured that you are in the right place.

This website presents more than 4400 handwritten Tibetan legal documents with about 18800 images as results of two former research projects. I carried out these projects together with various colleagues between 1999 to 2005. In the first project, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), we had labors carried out on a project dealing with legal documents originally stored at Kundeling Monastery in Lhasa in collaboration with the Archives of Tibet Autonomous Region, Lhasa. During two years, in 1999 and 2000, more than 2700 documents of various formats, from very small to very large, including paper sheets with a length of several meters and book formats with many pages, were digitally recorded and are presented here as digital copies. The shooting of such a large number of images by the specially trained staff within the time available to us was made possible by the establishment of a digitization workshop and a standardized procedure. The technical equipment at that time already guaranteed a high resolution, which allows sufficient image details and enlargements for many investigations afterwards, including paleographic studies. However, the standardized procedure based on a fixed camera position and focal distance did not allow for time-consuming close-ups. Most of the documents were recorded with a Leica S1 Pro, a scanner camera for stationary use with a resolution of 26 megapixels. The scanning time for a full scan was 185 seconds. To speed up the work towards the end of the project, a second camera, a Nikon Coolpix with a resolution of 3.34 megapixels, was installed. It was used exclusively for small formats. A great portion of the digitized material has been transliterated in a Tibetan dBu-can based typed form in text files. This was done by members of the archives in Lhasa. The archives provided us with up to nine local staff members who were then paid by the project, including personnel for the technical maintenance of the equipment. Two German project members, Gregor Verhufen and Joachim Karsten, as well as myself were repeatedly on site for longer stays to carry out various tasks such as material procurement, hardware and software installation, maintenance work, technical inspection of the new computers, setting up the database, training of the staff, adaptation of the software, etc. Joachim Karsten also acted as German-Chinese translator when dealing with authorities and Chinese colleagues. At Bonn university, the German project staff was busy entering short descriptions of the documents into the database. This work still went on in 2001 after the cooperation in Lhasa had come to an end. At that time, Namgyal Nyima and Gregor Verhufen were working for the project at Bonn University. Gregor Verhufen did all programming work based on HTML code as well as the design presentation of the original website. Moreover, he extracted all seals stamps so that they could be viewed separately and accessed through a separate database. All other programming work to structure the website, including the implementation of the search options for the annotated information, the full-text search in the Tibetan texts and the conversion of the Tibetan texts from the proprietary Word format to Unicode, was done by Jan Ischebeck. Between 2002 and 2005 another project on Tibetan Legal Documents, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was initiated to digitize various collections, foremost the holding of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala, India. In addition, several German collections have been digitized: the private collection of the philatelist Kurt H. Dahnke † that contains correspondence between Nepal and Tibet mainly from the 19th century, the private collection of Andre Alexander (1965-2012) that contains private documents from Lhasa town, and documents of the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, which have been described in detail by Hanna Schneider (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland 11, part 16‒17: Tibetischsprachige Urkunden aus Südwesttibet (Spo-rong, Ding-ri und Shel-dkar). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). In sum, through this project almost 1800 documents became easily accessible. Several people contributed to the project. Saadet Arslan sifted through the documents and did the actual digitizing using a scan camera. Afterwards she did the graphical processing, numbering, labelling, corrections and so on. Namgyel Nyima extracted the essential information of the documents and transferred them to a database. Further he did some examinations on the terminology and the proverbs contained in the documents. Gregor Verhufen installed the digitization workshop, created the original design of the websites, looked for the technical equipment and extracted the seals imprinted on the documents for the separate database. Blo bzang skal bzang, Klu sgrub mang thos, and bsTan ’dzin bzod pa from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala transliterated the Tibetan handwriting into the Tibetan dBu-can script to make the documents searchable. The time and financial budget available and the personnel capacity of both projects did not allow the texts to be transliterated twice and independently by two different groups in order to keep the error rate as low as possible. It is therefore the responsibility of each user to critically review the transliteration and compare it with the document images. The same applies to the entries in the separate database, which contains a short description of the respective document. For many years the database was used by colleagues all over the world. It always operated smoothly without problems. Nevertheless, the programming of a database must be updated after some time. It was not easy to obtain funding for this. But it was even more difficult to find someone who was able and willing to do the job. The only thing that could be done was to regularly back up the raw data. Towards the end of 2018, a security gap in the database was identified during a large-scale scan of university websites, which led to the University Computer Centre of the University of Bonn taking the server with the database offline. The attempt to solve the problem by awarding a contract failed. Therefore, I am very grateful to my sons Robert and Sebastian for taking on the task this year. Without their great commitment and extensive programming knowledge the database could not be put online now. Instead of trying to close the vulnerability, they reprogrammed the database from scratch. Not only was the structure of the database changed and brought up to date. They also unified and merged different tables and linked them to the rest of the database. A unified search was added. The text search now also works with Tibetan characters and is cross-collection. Furthermore, the option to edit both, documents and seals, was implemented, as well as the possibility to add new documents to the database. To allow for future changes and additions, a user-system was created that assigns individual writing permissions to users. Finally, I want to thank Elin Kanstinger for creating the background image of the website. During the next years the content of the database has to be checked carefully and many corrections and supplements have to be made. It is my great hope that this can now happen step by step. Moreover, I plan to edit selected documents and publish them in book form.

The Tibetan Arts and Literature Initiative (TALI) supports projects that promote Tibetan culture and language in Tibetan areas within the People’s Republic of China. TALI is a non-profit, non-governmental organization with no political or religious affiliations. Project partners include artists, writers and educators, officials, and local community members, as well as Tibetan cultural associations and other non-governmental organizations. TALI is committed to supporting or implementing projects in the following categories: Tibetan-language children’s books; Tibetan-language children’s audiovisual materials of educational or entertaining nature; Enrichment programming aimed at promoting the early appreciation of Tibetan language, literature and the arts among Tibetan children; Short-term training for Tibetan artists, writers and educators; and Exchanges and collaboration between Tibetan artists, writers and educators and their counterparts in and outside the People’s Republic of China.

Wikistan, The Web Road to Oxiana, is a global collaborative, multidisciplinary community of research, expertise and communication on Central Eurasia. Led by a consortium of academia, it aims at offering an up-to-date, dynamic and interactive panorama of human, social, economic and political science research on the region.

The Asian Classics Input Project is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to the preservation of ancient Asian wisdom. ACIP conducts preservation projects in libraries, monasteries, and institutes throughout Asia. We are committed to creating a searchable digital database that provides scholars, academic institutions, and practitioners access to a virtual library of authentic sacred and classical texts. Founded in 1988 with a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Asian Classics Input Project is dedicated to locating, cataloging, digitally preserving, and freely distributing rare and precious collections of ancient wisdom. These surviving texts hold the philosophical, cultural, and religious heritage of Asian traditions dating back more than 2500 years. ACIP digitally preserves these invaluable manuscripts because we believe that authentic ancient wisdom should be available to anyone. Scholars, translators, and practitioners in particular will be interested in accessing this invaluable content, free of charge in the ACIP digital library.

The aim of our project is to create and guide a team of young translators to translate these great classics. We’re beginning by translating into English and from there, the work can be easily translated into modern Chinese, Spanish, German, Russian and many other languages. We have teams around the world already translating our work. On this site, you’ll find a description of the latest round of texts that we’re translating and an introduction to the translators on our team. The translations of these texts are still in progress and are available for your eyes and thoughts as we go. As we value the opinions of our fellow Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan enthusiasts, our work is posted together with the original Tibetan language and is enabled to receive your comments. Asian Classics Institute Asian Classics Input Project

Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI) is a cross-faculty Asia focus based at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. ADI's main objectives are to coordinate existing research and teaching on Asia and to create a common platform for new, interdisciplinary Asian studies and research at the UCPH.

Cindy Nguyen is a UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Literature Department at University of California, San Diego. She previously worked at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. in History at University of California, Berkeley (2019). She specializes in the history of Vietnam, Southeast Asia print culture, and libraries. Her book manuscript, "Misreading: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958" examines the cultural and political history of libraries in Hanoi and Saigon from the French colonial period through to the decolonization of libraries.

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) promotes and supports digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines, acting as a community-based advisory force, and supporting excellence in research, publication, collaboration and training.

The Interuniversity Research Group on Tibet and the Himalayas (Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur le Tibet et l’Himalaya, GRITH), funded by the FRQ-SC, brings together all of the academics in Québec province carrying out research about the greater Himalayan region. The aim of this group is to assemble their multidisciplinary knowledge and capacities, strengthen the synergy between all researchers, regardless of their level of advancement in career, and stimulate collaborations between all members - and beyond, with national and international partners. At present, the group comprises six professors based in five Québec universities, their twenty-or-so graduate students and several associate members, who all fluently speak or or more Asian languages. All are deeply involved, both intellectually and personally, in their fieldwork locations in High Asia and among the diasporic communities of their elective region in Canada and Europe. The team’s strengths rely on the multidisciplinary convergence of the experience and competence of the members across diverse regions of the Himalayas. Bringing in dialogue religious studies, anthropology, philology and history, the members wish to rethink the concept of power in this region along two main focuses : the instrumentalization of history and the analysis of ritual as power technology. The aim is to better document the political, religious and cultural upheavals of these diverse communities, combining historical depth with geographic breadth. Hopefully, this will allow for a more dynamic contribution of Québec-based Tibetologists and Himalayanists to global academic and public debates about the predicament of High Asia.

Object Lessons from Tibet & the Himalayas is a research community that brings together academics, museums, and Tibetan scholars, groups and cultural organisations to think about the roles of objects and images in knowledge production, loss and recovery. We want to ask new questions of Tibetan and Himalayan objects. Therefore, rather than focusing on the object’s religious significance we want to think about the ways objects enable us to understand historical, political and contemporary events and encounters.

The ERC funded research project BuddhistRoad creates a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia—the vast area extending from the Taklamakan desert to Northeast China. This region was the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its uniqueness was determined by complex dynamics of religious and cultural exchanges gravitating around an ancient communication artery, known as the Silk Road. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange; its transfer predetermined the transfer of adjacent aspects of culture.