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Summary of THDL Porong Collection

Since the 1990s, a team of scholars have been working with Tibetan colleagues to document the environment and culture of the Porong region of southwest Tibet. The project examines environment-human interactions by focusing on the rangeland management practices of local pastoralists, as well as collecting demographic and ethnographic data. Team members are documenting other cultural traditions in the area, including musical and dance traditions. The project aims to integrate disciplinary studies in Tibetology using multiple media. The Porong region is largely nomadic and belongs to a number of Chinese administrative units centered on Zhabs ka township (xiang) in Shigatse Prefecture, Tibetan Autonomous Region. The ethno-linguistic region of "Greater Porong" corresponds to a pre-1959 principality, as well as a contemporary cultural region to which a wide range of Tibetans consider themselves belonging. The research focuses on a single township, Zhabs ka, and its five chief human settlements. The old capital of Greater Porong – a great nomadic tent from which the local ruler, called the rje dpon, administrated this territory – was called sbra chen, and is a natural village within Zhabs ka township. To date, the research has been done chiefly by Charles Ramble (Oxford), Hildegaard Diemberger (Cambridge) and Monika Kriechbaum (Centre for Environmental Studies and Nature Conservation [BOKU], Vienna). The team has relied on Porong native Kuthok Zla ba locally and Tibetan researchers from the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences (TASS). Ken Bauer (Oxford DPhil candidate, development studies) is now spearheading the organization of this data and its launching as a webpage through the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (THDL), an international digital publishing and archiving initiative run by a consortium of research institutions. Jill Sudbury (Oxford DPhil candidate, anthropology) is studying the revival of cultural traditions in Porong and will help the project create multi-media CD-ROMs of ritual dances. The project fits in with THDL's Tibetan and Himalayan Cultural Geography system by documenting a small-scale community in China with an ethnic Tibetan population. It provides international researchers access to collections of materials on the region and provides a value-added research tool to enhance information held in the collections.