The Tibetan collection at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences: on the history of its formation and cataloguing (1720–1917)

The article is based on little-known documents from the Orientalists’ Archives at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM), RAS, concerning the process of formation and cataloguing of one of the world’s biggest collections of manuscripts and xylograph (block print) books in the Tibetan language dating from 1720 up to late 1917, the emphasis being done on the sources of acquisition, the personalities of the major book collectors, such as Baron P.L. Schilling von Canstatt, the expeditions by some Russian scholars and explorers, such as G.Ts. Tsybikov, B.B. Baradijn, P.K. Kozlov. The author, however, points at the fragmentary character of the documentation in question which makes it hard to arrive at the complete and clear picture of how the Tibetan collection of the Museum of Asia (now The Institute of Manuscripts) was formed. The author concludes that by the mid-1910s this collection had already been a unique corpus on Tibetan Buddhism drawing the attention of both Russian and foreign academics. It contained complete sets of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, collected works of many important Tibetan authors and, moreover, some ancient and rare texts, such as manuscripts from Dunhuang and Khara-Khoto.