A condensed catalogue of 16th century Tibetan xylographs from South-Western Tibet

This contribution aims at presenting a condensed version of an online catalogue of 15th and 16th century Tibetan xylographs from South-Western Tibet which has been built thanks to two correlated projects, namely "Transforming Technologies and Buddhist Book Culture: The Introduction of Printing and Digital Text Reproduction in Tibetan Societies" and "Tibetan Book Evolution and Technology" (TiBET). The online catalogue contains information about prints preserved at the Cambridge University Library, the British Library (London), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the World Museum (Liverpool), the IsIAO Library (Rome), the National Archives (Kathmandu, Nepal), and several libraries in Tibet. Each entry included in the database contains the physical description of the xylograph and a description of its content, a transliteration of incipit and colophon, the mark up of personal and place names and dates in colophons as well as information on paper and pigment analysis, if available. The condensed version of the database showcased in this article includes information on seventy-one sixteenth century printed texts, which are only a part of those described in the database. Data displayed here was obtained from a study of colophons, an analysis of codicological features and an examination of biographies of masters involved in printing activities in the South-Western Tibetan areas.