One of the shopping lists I found while perusing the many loose-leaf papers in the Van Manen Collection, written in Johan Van Manen’s hand and dated to the 25th of April 1922, shows that Van Manen requested “the Geshe” to buy several things for him from Lhasa. The list is as follows:
l.1 A list of Tibetan things
l.2 A pointed monk’s hat, a water flask, a monk’s undershirt
l.3 An upper robe, a lower robe, cloth boots
l.4. A Mongolian-style hat, an official’s hat (’bog rdo), an aristocrat’s summer hat (lcags mda’ zhwa mo)
1.5. A knife and chopstick holder (rgya gri), a pouch to hold a bowl (phor shubs), scales (nya ga), a grain measure (bre), a pail measure (zo ba)
1.6 A volume measure (’bo), an earthenware pot (khog ma), an earthenware kettle (khog til [sic]: khog ldir), a brazier (me lang [sic]: me slang)
1.7 Various kinds of wool: white, red, green, yellow,
l.8 cross-patterned (thig ma), a bowl for pag (lpar phor [sic]: spags phor], a tea container (zhags blugs [sic]: zhag blug)
l.9 A churn with a brass binding band (mdong mo rag gshan ma [sic]: rag shan ma), a wooden ladle (zar ru [sic]: gzar bu)
l.10 Various grains: barley, wheat, peas, beans (rgya sran ma)
l. 11 Rapeseed (pas khang [sic]: pad kha), flax seed (so ma ra tsa [sic]: so ma ra rtsa), ta chur (what is this?)
l. 12 Kham traditional clothing (kham chas [sic]: khams chas), Nomadic traditional clothing (’brog chas)
The subscript reads:
List of things proposed for attempt at acquisition by the Geshe leaving for Lhasa within a few days. Expected back about September. JvM 25/4/22
As with so many other things in this collection, we have no context for this little note. There is nothing in the box, filled with other miscellaneous papers, that tells us why it was preserved. We do not know this Geshe, nor why he was asked to buy rather mundane-sounding things like braziers and ladles.
One of the tasks I have burdened myself with is to try to find out what these ephemera can tell us about the rest of the collection, about the provenance of these works, about Van Manen’s motives for collecting. Van Manen himself does not tell us much: there are no diaries, no administration, and no well-archived bundles of correspondence. Fortunately, I came across another piece of paper – seemingly unimportant – that gives us some insight into what this shopping list is about.
B. Ethnographic Collections
By far the most important additions have been from Tibet and have been obtained through the kind offices of Mr. van Manen, mainly since he acted temporarily as Assistant Superintendent in the department. He was fortunately able to secure the assistance of several Tibetans, amongst others a monk learned in the magic arts, who constructed for the Museum a set of the peculiar spider’s web-like structures of woolen yarn which are set up outside Tibetan monasteries as the abode of important spirits and their attendants. He also obtained from Lhassa at a small price an extremely interesting collection of domestic implements, etc. including several primitive pieces of apparatus of a kind impossible to obtain through the ordinary dealers.
We are not sure who wrote the above, but it is found in the archives kept by his sister Charlotte Van Manen, meaning that it may have been of some importance (perhaps just because of the compliments paid to him) (Panthaleon van Eck, 230, p. 130). This single sheet of paper tells us that the Geshe did not buy the items for Van Manen himself, but on behalf of the Indian Museum in Calcutta. Van Manen worked there for six months in 1922, after which he left to work at the Asiatic Society of Bengal. While hardly any of the treasures on display in the Indian Museum nowadays are of Tibetan or even Himalayan origins, during Van Manen’s time, quite a collection was assembled.
Another fascinating detail (at least to me) is the fact that Van Manen had arranged for “the peculiar spider’s web-like structures of woolen yarn” to be set up for the Museum. These structures, also known as mdos these days more commonly translated as “thread-cross” (see Blondeau: 2022 [1990] and earlier, Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1975 [1956]: 369). This explains why wool (presumably yarn) in various colors was on the shopping list. Previously, I had always assumed that Nebesky-Wojkowitz had pioneered in commissioning one of these large thread-crosses on behalf of what is now the Weltmuseum in Vienna, in or around 1951 (pictured here, see Niebuhr & Widorn 2019, p. 4). The above information suggests, however, that the Indian Museum may have been the first to display such a ritual thread-cross, of course, quite out of its religious context. We have, however, no further information on its exhibition in the museum in Calcutta, in or around 1922.
Picture courtesy of the Weltmuseum Vienna, 134460_1_29
In the Van Manen collection itself, several ritual texts deal with mdos rituals, such as Gsang bdag dregs pa ’dul byed las tshogs las dam sri’i glud mdos, which only contains 5 folios (I.KERN Br.79/M58), or A ya’i mdos kyi zin bris (I.KERN 2740/M400). This latter text is a memorandum on the construction of these cross-threads. This text was, in fact, used by Nebesky-Wojkowitz in his Oracles and Demons of Tibet (1956, but also see Ramble 2007, 709-11). There are no indications that Van Manen made any serious study of these works, but they may have been used by the anonymous monk who constructed the cross-thread structure in Calcutta. Most of these ritual texts await further study.
If the reader now suspects there is a connection between Van Manen and Nebesky-Wojkowitz, they are absolutely correct. While they were not contemporaries, they did work in the same region, Darjeeling, but perhaps more significantly, Nebesky-Wojkowitz was employed by the museum in Leiden to create the first catalogue of the Van Manen collection in 1953, and appears to have read and used quite a few of these works for his 1956 masterpiece.
Once more, the ephemera in the Van Manen archives, such as the shopping list discussed here, lead us from prosaic items, such as peas and beans, to intricate cross-thread rituals, created for the Indian Museum. My impression is that there is still a lot more disentangling to do!
P.S. Do let me know if you happen to know what ta chur ( ཏ་ཆུར) could refer to..
