W a y m a r k s ~: June 2023

Kalon Lama Champa Tendar, from 'China in Turmoil' by L.M. King (1927)

This post is intended to be a useful note for Tibet Researchers interested in the Kalön Lama Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

I noticed a photograph posted recently on Twitter (10 May 2023; see here) which mistakenly identifies the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Tenpa Jamyang (Bstan pa ’jam dyangs, 1888–1944) as Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923).

The photograph was sourced from The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950, which is a fantastic on-line resource jointly created quite a number of years ago now (c.2006?) by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London. It seems likely that the error was derived from the biographical record which is incorrectly connected to the image on the Tibet Album website. None of the eight images associated with this biographical record are of Champa Tendar, who died in 1923. They all appear to be of Tenpa Jamyang, who succeeded him as Kalon Lama, as the range of dates given for each photo (between 1936-1937 & 1940-1941) on the Tibet Album would seem to suggest. None of the records/transcriptions given alongside these images actually specifies which Kalon Lama they depict, although, the ‘Glossary of Terms’ which they all link to (see here) states: “Kalon Lama. He was the ecclesiastical Cabinet Minister in the Tibetan government. The post was held by Jampa Tendar at the time of the 1936 mission.” – which, given Champa Tendar/Jampa Tendar’s date of death (1923), is evidently incorrect.

I first noticed this error several years ago and I did mention it to Frank Drauschke, from whom the Tibet Album’s biographical information for Champa Tendar was derived, and also to my former colleagues at the British Museum, who were involved with the creation of the Tibet Album, but no one at that particular time seemed to know who was then maintaining the website.

So, having been reminded of it by seeing this error pop up again recently, I thought I would post some information here in the hope that it might act as a useful signpost to researchers who are interested in the lives and biographies of these two Kalon Lamas, mainly in order to point such researchers in the direction of a relatively recently published paper which gives the best information on these two individuals, and so thereby help to clarify their identities. The article is titled: Monk Officials as Military Officers in the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang Army (1895–1959), by Alice Travers in Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, Vol. 27 (2018), pp. 211-242 (See, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/asie.2018.1512 | JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26756586) – NB: the article is in English, and is freely accessible on-line (via the DOI link).

In posting this short research note here on my blog I do not mean to criticise or detract in any way at all from the hard work and great effort which many people far more qualified and knowledgeable than myself contributed to the AHRC funded Tibet Visual History 1920-1950 project. Indeed, the Tibet Album, as I have acknowledged above, is a truly fantastic and authoritative resource which is and continues to be immensely useful to Tibet researchers everywhere. And it has certainly been a great help to me in my own research. Nor do I wish to criticise the Twitter account that I have referred to above, which also posts very valuable information concerning the visual history of Tibet via that social media site. It is clear that the errors of association and attribution which I point out here were unintentional mistakes.

My own interest in the Kalön Lama (bka' blon bla ma) Champa Tendar / Jampa Tendar (Byams pa bstan dar, 1870–1923) derive from two angles; firstly, from my PhD research concerning Western explorers in East Tibet, and, secondly, from my family connection to Tibetan writer, Rinchen Lhamo (1900-1928) and her husband, British Consul, Louis Magrath King (1886-1949). King knew Champa Tendar personally and wrote about him in China in Turmoil: Studies in Personality (London: Heath Cranton, 1927) – Chapter 15: A Frontier Incident, as Travers discusses in her article, along with a number of other primary and secondary sources regarding both Kalon Lamas. Travers also correctly identifies the images of Tenpa Jamyang on the Tibet Album, reproducing one as part of her article, and includes three very clear images of Champa Tendar sourced from books by Eric Teichman, Rinchen Lhamo and Louis Magrath King. This makes it very easy to distinguish the respective visual likenesses of the two Kalon Lamas.