A Blessing for the Land (The Architecture, Art and History of A Buddhist Convent in Mustang, Nepal)

In Nepal's Mustang District, on the right bank of the Kali Gandaki river facing the large settlement of Tshug (Chusang), is a low hill known as Gonpa Gang, the "convent ridge." Standing on the ridge are the remains of a Buddhist site, Kiinzang Choling. Until recently, nothing was known about the building beyond the fact that it had once been a nunnery, and it is hard now to imagine that a local ruler in the 17th century, awed by its majestic proportions and its exquisite paintings, exclaimed that it was "the jewel in the crown of the realm." This book brings to light a forgotten gem of Nepal's architectural and artistic heritage, while the archives of the community offer a window onto the lives of the lama who built it "as a blessing for the land," and of the nuns for whom it was a centre of spiritual activity for almost three centuries.

JOHN HARRISON is a British architect who has been travelling in the Himalaya since 1985, documenting and restoring historic buildings in Ladakh (India), Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet. He has been an associate of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and is a research fellow at Liverpool School of Architecture. He is currently writing a book on the architecture of Mustang, which he has been documenting since 1993.

CHRISTIAN LUCZANITS's research focuses on the Buddhist art of India and Tibet. He has published extensively on Gandharan, Western Himalayan and early Tibetan art and curated a number of exhibitions. Before joining SOAS as the David L. Snellgrove Senior Lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art, he taught at the University of Vienna, UC Berkeley, the Free University in Berlin, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford University.

CHARLES RAMBLE is Directeur d'etudes (Professor of Tibetan History and Philology) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL Research University, Paris, and a member of the East Asian Civilisations Research Centre (CRCAO, UMR 8155). From 2000 to zoio he was the Lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the University of Oxford. His publications cover the fields of Tibetan social history, the Bon religion, biographical writing, and Tibetan ritual literature and performance.

NYIMA DRANDUL is a native of southern Mustang and a member of the illustrious family to which the founder of Kunzang Choling belonged. He worked for the Nepal-German Project on High Mountain Archaeology (1992-1997), and since then has taken part in several research programmes, including the Franco-German project Social Status in the Tibetan World (2016-2020), of which he is currently a member. He has collaborated with Charles Ramble on four books and several articles on the history and culture of Mustang.

The project for this book originated with an idea for a short article by John Harrison. Harrison had made meas-ured drawings of Kunzang Choling in 2005 as part of a general documentation of historic buildings in Mustang, and asked Charles Ramble to contribute a brief text to accompany them: Charles Ramble and Nyima Drandul had photographed the archives of Tshug, the settlement on whose territory Kunzang Choling stands, in 1993, and of the several hundred documents contained in the collection there were a number that concerned the affairs of the covent over a period of some two centuries. In addition to the architectural and historical components, Harrison and Ramble both felt that murals in the temple were of such quality that they deserved more than a cursory treatment in the projected publication, and invited Christian Luczanits, who had visited the temple and photographed its interiors, to contribute a section on the paintings.

At this stage nothing was known about the origin of the temple, but this last piece of the puzzle was fitted in when the biography of its founder came to light in 2016, in circumstances recounted in Section 3. The decision to expand the projected article into a book was made with the encouragement of the people of Tshug, whose earnest wish is that Kunzang Choling might one day be restored to its former glory, and who felt that a volume devoted to the abandoned convent might stimulate the interest of a generous benefactor.

The authors of this book are by no means the first to have written about Kunzang Choling. The convent appears in several articles by Franz-Karl Ehrhard, a scholar who has done more than anyone else to disentangle the lives and activities of lamas in South Mustang in the 17th and IP centuries. It is to him that this book is dedicated in appreciation of his work and his generosity.

**Contents and Sample Pages**