Mustang is a district in Nepal, but it lies north of the main Himalayan chain, on the Tibetan plateau. The kingdom of Lo, with its capital of Lo Manthang, was established in the 15th century and became a rich and powerful regional state. Its culture was Tibetan, and its architecture was Tibetan.
This book is the first study of that architecture.
Tibetan Buddhist temples were built in Mustang and adorned with magnificent wall paintings, and they survive today when much of the architecture and art of Tibet itself was lost during the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. We look at these temples, but also at the rich variety of vernacular architecture, of houses, villages and towns, palaces, ruined castles and domed stupas, and the medieval walled town of Lo Manthang.
The book is fully illustrated with architectural drawings and with photographs of the buildings in their setting in the wild bare landscapes beyond the Himalaya.
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 began to study the architecture of Mustang in 1993 when he joined the Nepal-German Project on High Mountain Archaeology, and has continued until the present day.
He is a research fellow at the Liverpool School of Architecture, and has published a number of books and papers, principally on Tibetan architecture in the Himalaya. When not in the Himalaya he lives in Snowdonia.
What is Mustang?
The name may bring to mind a feral horse of the American West, a classic American automobile of the 1960s (named after the horse), or a Second World War fighter plane (also named after the horse)'.
Much less known is Mustang the place.
This Mustang was once a Tibetan kingdom in the Himalaya', and is now a district in Nepal on the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The north of Mustang is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, and geographically it lies on the Tibetan plateau, north of the main Himalayan mountain chain. Cartographically it is a strange bump on Nepal's northern border, protruding into Tibet around the head waters of the south-flowing Kali Gandaki river. Until the border was closed by the Chinese army in 1962 there was constant trade and social and religious interaction between Mustang and Tibet. The closing of the border meant that Mustang lost that interaction with its Tibetan source, but it also meant that Mustang, within the state of Nepal, was spared the depredations visited on Tibet during the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The art and architecture of Mustang's Buddhist temples survived, whilst in Tibet much was lost.
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