Tibet is one of very few places in the world where traditional wall painting is still a living activity, and every day new murals are being painted in monasteries somewhere in Tibet.

The more than 3000 monasteries that existed in Tibet before the destructions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution were all adorned with murals on practically every interior wall. Some of these murals were of outstanding quality comparable to the finest art works of the West.

Luckily a few of these murals still exist in the couple of hundred monasteries that survived saved by locals using different ingenious methods. However those few survivals are in constant danger of destruction caused by a number of attacks.

One of these is the difficulty of keeping the building and thereby the wall that carries the mural in good shape, not because it in itself is difficult but because the many monks who were needed to carry out this maintenance have been reduced to only the few that are allowed in each monastery.

If the flat roofs are not properly maintained they can start leaking rainwater a few drops of which can ruin a mural. Also the smoke from hundreds of burning butter lamps will cover the mural over time as well as grease from pilgrims touching the murals while walking along the walls.

This means that wonderful murals are practically lost or damaged every single day.

However conservation is carried out mainly by conservators from Mainland China, but unfortunately only on a small and far from sufficient scale. Tibetan artists are not educated in conservation and almost not used and those practicing conservation find that the Chinese lack understanding of the special Tibetan circumstances sometimes resulting in mistakes.

This book is a result of an effort the educate Tibetan artists in modern conservation techniques, to carry out the first ever scientific investigation of traditional Tibetan wall painting, to describe traditional wall painting techniques and to illustrate this by surveying some of the finest surviving murals in 14 different locations, monasteries and caves, in Central and Western Tibet.

Three Tibetan artists are writing on history, production of painting materials and practical painting technique.

The Danish School of Conservation conducted investigations on mural production in Lhasa and was host to two Tibetan painters who came to the school in Copenhagen to learn modern conservation and assist in carrying out the scientific research.

The book is extensible illustrated with more than 400 colour photographs, most of them by Roberto Fortuna from the Danish National Museum and by 18 new architectural drawings of monasteries and caves, most of which never surveyed properly before. The 350 pages also contain, in some cases extensive, descriptions of the sites by ten scholars of Tibetology. The scholars are Mainland Chinese, Tibetan, Swiss, German and American and their original manuscripts were written in Chinese, Tibetan and English.

Knud Larsen organized everything and put all the material together ready for printing with good help from David Jackson.

Wall Painting in Tibet: History, Technique, Survival and Environment; Knud Larsen; Tronfjell Publications; Hardcover; 2023; 350 pages; $145.00

Knud Larsen, a Danish architect living and working in Norway, runs his own studio as well as being a professor emeritus at the Institute of Architectural Design at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

His interest in cultural heritage originated in Greece in 1963 as a member of the team surveying Delphi for the French School of Archaeology, Athens. Two years later he designed the new Archaeological Museum at Mallia, Crete and supervised its construction.

A 1987 journey to Mt. Kailas in Western Tibet, inspired by Kanwal Krishna, the late Indian painter, included a month in Lhasa. While there he discovered a love for Tibetan traditional architecture. He and his late wife, Kari Christensen, the Norwegian ceramics artist, mounted an exhibition of Tibetan art, objects, photographs and ceramic sculptures of Mt. Kailas that toured galleries in Norway and Denmark. Larsen later was a co-founder of the Network for University Cooperation Tibet-Norway in 1994 and developed the idea of working with Tibetan architecture. He was a member of the network board for ten years.

Together with the Norwegian architect Amund Sinding-Larsen, he launched a research project on Lhasa's traditional architecture and townscape. During five years (1995-2000) they, with the help of a group of international students, collected data on all existing old houses and the old town within Lingkor, the pilgrim's route that encircles old Lhasa. About 300 traditional houses were measured and surveyed. After five years one third of them had been pulled down.

One of the results was a book published 2001 in London by Serindia Publications: The Lhasa Atlas. Traditional Tibetan Architecture and Townscape. Four years later a Chinese/Tibetan edition was published in Beijing and spread to universities, schools and libraries all over China by the Norwegian Embassy. The book was welcomed in Lhasa by the town planning authorities who uses it in their management of the Old Town.

Knud Larsen tried to continue research in traditional architecture and he arranged together with Sinding-Larsen and Tibet University an international conference in Lhasa called "The International Conference on Traditional Architecture and Mural Conservation 2004 Lhasa China".