The Library recently digitized three rare thangkas from the Tibetan collection. They are not only beautiful works of art but illustrate and disseminate key cultural teachings. This blog features the Srid pa ho, which wards off harm from all directions, illustrating basic Tibetan astrology concepts.
More than 400 newly catalogued Manchu books from the Asian Division’s Chinese Rare Book Collection offer researchers new sources for study of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in China.
This blog looks at Bengali publications from the Franklin Book Program, a translation program sponsored by the United States during the Cold War. It also examines the place of religion in books published for Muslim readers in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh).
A calligram of the Hindu god Hanuman, an 18th-century Nepalese astrological manuscript, documents from India’s princely states, and a rare edition of the “Arabian Nights” in Urdu are just some of the South Asian highlights from the Library of Congress International Collections Facebook page.
In a new acquisition by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Chitra Ganesh, a visual artist based in Brooklyn, retells the Indian feminist utopian essay, “Sultana’s Dream” by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, but in the style of a graphic novel through a series of 27 linocut prints.
This blog describes the provenance of a partial translation in Urdu of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s protest against the annexation of his kingdom by the British Empire. Written by his great-grandson, the Urdu translation is a record of the Indian princely state ruler’s response to British accusations of corruption that enabled their annexation of his kingdom, Awadh.
Allegedly created by astronomer-astrologers in the Tang dynasty (618-907), the book of prophecies known as “Tui bei tu” 推背圖 (“Back-pushing Pictures”) is the most renowned work of Chinese mysticism.
This blog announces the release of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s (IPLC) Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive, which features contributions from the Asian Division’s South Asian and Southeast Asian librarians. This web archive boasts of over 4,000 websites from over 80 countries, with captures and new sites added continuously.
Learn more about a unique collection of 80 biographies of Soviet Korean leaders sent by the Soviet Communist Party to help establish North Korea’s government in the late 1940s.