The BDRC archive is growing and diversifying, in part through the acquisition of personal archives belonging to the founders of Tibetan Studies in Europe and North America. This month we have acquired and posted online many documents that were housed at the Moravian Christian Mission in Leh, Ladakh; founded in 1884 and  still active to this day. The documents, which include primers for learning Tibetan, annotated sutras, and administrative documents, can be found on BDRC as the Archive of Pierre Vittoz.

Pierre Vittoz (1926-1978) was one of the last Moravian missionaries from the early period and was stationed at the mission from 1950-1956. When the foreigners were expelled from the mission in 1956, Vittoz returned to Switzerland with the above mentioned documents. The intrepid Moravian missionaries in Ladakh and the Western Himalayas produced one of the first Tibetan translations of the Bible and a Tibetan-German/English dictionary that is still highly regarded. 

Some of the Moravian missionaries were polymaths and had applicable skills in agriculture, medicine, and technology. In this regard we can mention that Pierre Vittoz was the inventor of an early Tibetan typewriter in the late 1940s. His archive of Tibetan texts from the mission in Leh is still extant and we thank Martin Vernier for digitizing selected texts from the archive and sharing them with BDRC for open access.

The Vittoz archive, now available here on BDRC, contains a booklet for learning Literary Tibetan by Rahul Sanskrityayan and Eliyah Tsetan Phuntsok, a handwritten sutra with notes in German by H. A. Jäschke, several administrative documents from the govt of Ladakh (with interesting seals), a copy of the mission's monthly newsletter, and a small religious (Christian) booklet in English and Tibetan. These documents, which were not easily accessible to scholars in the past, will be of interest to scholars and historians of early modern Ladakhi history, missionaries in the Himalayas, and the first phase translations of religious literature between Tibetan and western languages.

While BDRC does not endorse missionization, we recognize that missionaries have been important figures in building linguistic and cultural bridges between Tibet and other cultures. Here are a few books and blogposts about this that might be of interest:

• The leading scholar of missionaries in Tibet is Dr. John Bray, former President of the International Association for Ladakh Studies. His dozens of publications about this and related topics are available here.
• The earliest Missionaries in central Tibet: Sweet, Michael and Leonard Zwilling. Mission to Tibet : The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S.J. Wisdom Publications, 2010.
• Missionaries in Amdo: Nietupski, Paul. Labrang: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Crossroads of Four Civilizations; With photographs from the Griebenow Archives. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1999.
• Missionaries in Kham: Wissing, Douglas. Pioneer in Tibet : The Life and Perils of Dr. Albert Shelton. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
• A resource on missionaries in Southeastern Kham (Yunnan) can be found here.