ABSTRACT
The history of Tibet seen through Western eyes is that of a remote cross-roads. A place so remote, in fact, that its location on the extreme margins of European imperial enterprises (or of any other type of enterprise: national, economic, and so on) marks it, paradoxically, as a crucial location for the formation of Western discourses. In The Imperial Archive Thomas Richards has discussed the way in which, between the 1870s and the 1930s, Tibet came to represent 'the impossible space of archive and Utopia'.1 The country was seen as an unknown and uncharted territory which, in the service of the Empire, the British India Survey could transform into the perfect map, and also as a remote place which could be imagined as the mythical repository of 'exhaustive knowledge that was always in danger of entropy, loss or destruction' in the West (p. 12). A similar genealogy is traced by Peter Bishop, who analyses Western images of Tibet in terms of a gradual shift 'from a geographically grounded sacred place to a placeless Utopia'.2 Due to its mythical status as an endangered location of sacred knowledge, 'Tibet is still imagined to be one of the most crucial sites in a series of global struggles: between authentic travel and banal tourism; between memory and forgetting, between soulless modernity and a vital, spiritual culture; between place and placelessness'.3
