Shelton had been stationed in Dajianlu from 1904 to 1908 and then moved to Batang, a town further west along the trade route. In December 1910, Shelton returned to the United States for a sabbatical on a steamship crossing the Pacific. In the ship's hold were the fourteen manuscripts and several hundred other Tibetan objects which Shelton had collected during his six years in the strife-torn frontier. A fortuitous ship-board meeting with a prominent Newark businessman, Edward N. Crane, led to the gift of the entire collection to the fledgling Newark Museum. It was indeed fortunate that at least these rare treasures from the royal library were saved, for in 1912, in the violence following the Chinese revolution (during which Zhao Erfeng was executed), the palace was burned. The king died escaping from prison in 1922, the same year that Shelton, who had returned to his mission in Batang, was murdered by bandits. The manuscripts as well as the rest of Shelton's collection have had, after their turbulent uprooting, a peaceful existence at The Newark Museum. Since 1935, the books have been displayed to the public in a re-creation of a traditional Tibetan Buddhist altar. In Newark Museum publications dating from 1912 to 1971, the manuscripts had been described as 'fifteenth to sixteenth centuries...probably written in Lhasa,' following Shelton's original information (based on his Tibetan informants?). When two folios were sent to Paris and Munich as part of the international loan exhibition of Tibetan art Dieux et demons de l'Himalaya in 1977, their date was given as '16th to 17th centuries?', but they were placed in the context of western Tibetan painting. While preparing for a new catalogue of The Newark Museum's Tibetan collection, this author sought to solve the mystery of how such a large and heavy set of books could have travelled from Lhasa in central Tibet, or even further, from western Tibet, to the easternmost reaches of Tibetan civilization, where Shelton obtained them. Small paintings of buddhas and monks in the folios were in at least two styles. Twelve of the illustrations appeared, after close examination, to be in an early style, that of the twelfth to thirteenth century. This style (first identified by John C. Huntington in his 1968 Ph.D. dissertation and later further developed and defined by Pratapaditya Pal) is exemplified by large scale Tibetan paintings on cotton cloth and is closely aligned with the art of Pala India (c. 750-c. 1250). Since the twelfth- to thirteenth-century style illustrations were on the same type of paper and accompanied by the identical type of script of the over 4,000 non-illustrated folios contained in these books, the importance of the dating became important. Each of the fourteen volumes contains 322 to 384 folios. Although they are all missing their original wooden and silk covers and, in some cases, their original title pages, perhaps the result of the abrupt dispersal of the Chala library, the thickness of the pages and the large dimensions (64.1 cm x 21 cm) give them a weight of nine to thirteen kilograms each. The paper is of a uniform type: a thick, pliable, layered paper with clay in-filling and horizontal striations and faint, chain mesh imprints remaining from the moulding/drying process (described below). Each folio has been dyed a deep brown and painted with a central glossy black rectangle on each side. The graceful and controlled dbu chan script is in either alternating gold and silver or completely in gold, seven or eight lines to each side. Two volumes have illustrated title pages (with cloth title flaps, attached at a later date), and one volume has ten illustrated pages, using the same layered and striated paper. It is not clear whether the other eleven volumes where originally illustrated as well, but several now contain illustrated title pages of a different type of paper and certainly of later date. The earliest surviving Tibetan book folios with painted illustrations are made of paper. There are the tenth- to eleventh-century Prajnaparamita manuscript pages found by Giuseppi Tucci in a ruined monastery at Toling, western Tibet and now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum. The Toling rectangular folios have large proportions (19 cm x 66.4 cm); horizontal orientation; fine, ivory-toned, burnished paper; black ink script; and polychrome and gold illustration---characteristics to be found in Tibetan manuscripts over the next nine centuries. Tibetans were in contact with paper producing civilizations from at least the seventh century. Paper technology had been perfected by the Chinese by at least the first century AD, and paper manuscripts were common in Central Asia by the third century. Thousands of paper scrolls, with writing, diagrams, and paintings dating from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, have been discovered at Dunhuang, Gansu province. It is remarkable, however, that the Tibetans chose paper so readily as the support for their scriptures, since two other materials with stronger roots in Indian Buddhist tradition also presented themselves: birch bark and palm leaf. Birch bark was readily available across the Himalayas and was favoured especially by the Kashmiris. It was known and used by the Tibetans from at least the eighth century. Most of the earliest surviving Indian and Nepalese palm leaf manuscripts with illustrations, dating from the eleventh to twelfth centuries, have been found in Nepal; in India itself, few books survived the Islamic invasions. Palm leaf continued to be used by Nepalese scribes (in company with paper) up to the eighteenth century. Both Indian and Nepalese palm leaf books follow a horizontal format, constricted by the very narrow and long proportions of the leaf itself. That Tibetans recognized the palm leaf manuscript as the pre-eminent sacred form for a Buddhist text is proven by the depiction of deities and historical figures holding (or associated with) these small, thin, horizontal books. Yet when creating their own translations of the texts, the Tibetans used paper in a large rectangular format. Palm leaf manuscripts bearing Tibetan script were exceedingly rare; a group which appears to be of comparatively recent age is housed in the library of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. Thus, the Tibetans could import blank palm leaf from India, as did the Nepalese, but the overwhelming number of surviving Tibetan books are on paper. We may postulate that the Tibetans, confronted by original sacred texts written on birch bark and palm leaf from northwest and northeast India, respectively, yet knowledgeable about papermaking technology from China, chose to write their own translations on paper because of its greater flexibility and beauty of surface. The Tibetan penchant for color and ornamentation may have influenced this choice, since smooth white or darkened paper, which could be made in large sizes, provided a perfect surface for the embellishment of the script with illustrations in polychrome and gold. Interestingly enough, the Tibetans rejected the Chinese writing system just as they rejected the Chinese writing form--- scrolls or folding books---for sacred literature, and instead used piled sheets of rectangular format, after the custom of India. The technology of Tibetan papermaking is well documented. The simplicity of the method and its link to early Chinese processes lead us to suppose that paper manufacture has changed little since its earliest introduction into Tibet. Pulp is derived from boiling the inner bark of the Himalayan shrub, Daphne cannabina or Daphne papyracea (also used for paper pulp in Nepal and apparently resistant to insect damage), although other vegetable matter is used in different areas of Tibet. After boiling, the pulp is beaten by hand and mixed with water. The resulting 'stock' is poured into a flat mould, which is floated on water either in a vat or a stream. Then the mould, with its damp layer of pulp, is propped up diagonally until the pulp dries and can be peeled off as a sheet of paper. The moulds observed in use at Gyantse, southern Tibet, in the middle decades of this century were wood frames, about one and two-thirds by two-thirds meters, with a woven cotton center. A study of the Shelton folios suggests, however, that at an earlier period the moulds were constructed of grass or bamboo, laced together with horsehair, similar to the 'laid' mould of ancient China. Such moulds are still in use in India. Laid moulds leave a faint watermark of vertical or horizontal, parallel striations on the finished paper. These are clearly visible in the paper used for the manuscripts. A woven mould yields smooth paper. Successive pourings and dryings can produce laminated, cardboard-like layers apparent in medium and thick Tibetan paper. A substantial amount of clay and other inorganic material has been found in Tibetan papers; this could have been mixed into the pulp stock before pouring or coated on successive layers. Whether laminated or not, semi-dry sheets would be piled together and dried under pressure. Chain mesh indentations observable on the Shelton manuscript folios seem to have been made when the laminated sheets were dried under pressure between coarsely woven wool or hemp. Later, this method was abandoned in favor of smoother paper achieved with finer cloth drying materials. Ivory to buff colored paper of varied thicknesses would result from the steps described above. Additional treatment depended on the final use of the paper. This paper was suitable for woodblock printing or stencilling, while medium weight paper, for black ink script or drawings, would be burnished and perhaps sized with animal-hide glue before it was cut and ready for use. Thick and fairly rigid paper intended for gold and silver lettering and opaque polychrome and gold decorations, as in the Shelton folios, would be dyed brown or painted black or blue-black and burnished. Tibetans must have been aware of the black and deep blue sutra scrolls of China, on which richly decorative gold and silver characters and drawings of deities were inscribed, when they first created the type of elaborate manuscript seen in the Shelton books. This type of folio, in which gold and silver script on a dark ground is embellished with rectangular vignettes of deities in the manner of Indian palm leaf folios, continued to be made into the twentieth century, when fine editions were commissioned. The type of paper and the style of the original illustrations contained in the Shelton books compare well to the few other examples of twelfth to thirteenth-century date. Similar striated paper was found at Dunhuang, used for odd 'doodles' with Tibetan inscriptions, and as the support for two drawings and a manuscript fragment found in a Tibetan reliquary mchod rten (chorten, stupa) in the Newark Museum which is radio-carbon dated (from its barley grain contents) to c. 1230. All aspects of the illustrations are consistent with eastern Indian and Pala-style painting found in or attributed to western, southern, and central Tibet, as well as in Karakhoto and Dunhuang: oval haloes, nimbuses, and back cushions with scroll patterning, vestigial triangular throne sides, five-leaf crowns with sashes or florets at the ears, and a nervous linear outlining. The odd, three-quarter view, crossed-leg position and short blouses that appear here are especially prevalent in subsidiary figures on Pala-style Tibetan thangkas and the Karakhoto woodblock prints. Although it is possible that this style persisted beyond the mid-thirteenth century, most later Tibetan painting shows an awareness of the Nepalese or Chinese stylistic elements introduced by the end of that century. Because paper is an organic substance, it was feasible to substantiate the twelfth- to thirteenth-century dating of the Shelton books, using radio-carbon testing. Such testing requires the sacrifice of at least ten grams of material. Although the fourteen volumes each contained over 300 folios, not a single blank sheet could be found and it was unacceptable to destroy any of the inscribed areas. After much consideration and the valued advice of conservator Abraham Joel, who had studied several of the folios previously at the Courtauld Institute in London, it was decided to trim off the plain borders from two folios in one volume, which contained most of the illustrations in the early style. The trimmings yielded fourteen grams of material to be sacrificed. Alpha Analytic Inc. of Coral Gables, Florida, performed the test. Because of the perhaps 30 percent clay (and other non-organic material) content and animal sizing in the folios, it was necessary for the laboratory to first extract the organic fibers. This was done with acetone solvent and then benzene syntheses. The resulting fibers were next incinerated to extract the carbon content. The carbon is examined for the amount of C-14 radioactive isotope remaining in it. Living organisms, such as the shrubs used to make the paper for the Shelton books, absorb C-14 while alive. Once dead, absorption is stopped and radioactive decay begins. The level of radioactivity can be measured to determine the number of years that have elapsed since the organism died. It is presumed that the shrubs used for making the paper were cut down close to the time of manufacturing and decorating the paper. The laboratory results for the pieces of the Shelton folios was a radio-carbon age of 790 years. When statistical error was taken into account, the adjusted age range was determined to be 1040-1335. This proof that the manuscripts were indeed as old as twelfth to thirteenth century has justified the decision to sacrifice a few page edges. A more complete study of the liturgical and literary content of the books must now be undertaken since the set pre-dates the codification of the bKa' 'gyur in printed editions. Questions remain as to the provenance of the books, although it is possible that they were originally commissioned in Kham. The geographic range of Pala-style painting in the twelfth to thirteenth century is vast, from Alchi in Ladakh to Gansu, China. Although little is, as yet, known about local noble and monastic establishments in Kham at such an early date, it had long been an area of economic power and wealth and of Buddhist fervor. The Chala/Shelton manuscripts are certainly a testament to the ability to commission or obtain, and then to treasure over a lengthy period of time, an important object of sacred art. This partial reprint of an article from Orientations magazine, July 1987, appears with permission of the original publishers.
