Dieter Schuh

Born on Decem­ber 14, 1942, in Delme, France, and grow­ing up in Ger­many in the Harz region and in Krefeld, after finish­ing school in 1963 Dieter Schuh star­ted to study Math­em­at­ics, Phys­ics and Philo­sophy at the Uni­ver­sity of Cologne. Unable to study Ancient Greek in Cologne, which would have been use­ful for his philo­sophy stud­ies, he and a fel­low stu­dent took addi­tion­al les­sons in Sanskrit from Prof. Klaus Lud­wig Jan­ert (19221994). This is where he first developed his interest in Indi­an logic (Navya-Nyāya). Klaus Lud­wig Jan­ert inten­ded to send Dieter Schuh to south­ern India with a sti­pend from the Ger­man Aca­dem­ic Exchange Ser­vice (DAAD), and the Indi­an gov­ern­ment. He had already begun to learn the south­ern Indi­an lan­guages Tamil and Malay­alam in Cologne from the vis­it­ing pro­fess­or Shri Krishna Sharma when Klaus Lud­wig Jan­ert was told by the Mon­gol­ist Prof. Walth­er Heis­sig (19132005), who had foun­ded the Cent­ral Asia Depart­ment at the Uni­ver­sity of Bonn in 1966, that it would be bet­ter if Dieter Schuh went to Dharam­sala, where he could learn about the almost entirely unex­plored fields of Tibetan math­em­at­ics and astro­nomy from Tibetan schol­ars. So, as a math­em­atician and without even hav­ing com­pleted a basic course of Tibetan, Dieter Schuh was ‘thrown into the deep end’ and sent to Dharam­sala with the sti­pend from the DAAD and the Indi­an gov­ern­ment in 1967. Armed with the Manu­al of Spoken Tibetan (Lhasa Dia­lect) by Kun Chang and Betty Shefts and ably assisted by Ye shes sby­in pa, a Lhas­aborn monk from the rNam rgy­al grva tshang who was instruc­ted by the Dalai Lama to help him and would con­tin­ue to do this for many years, Dieter Schuh quickly gained profi­ciency by con­vers­ing with the exiled Tibetans from Lhasa. Then he began his stud­ies of Tibetan astro­nomy and calendric­al cal­cu­la­tion (Tib. sKar rtsis kyi rig gnas) under the Amdo astro­nomer and astro­lo­ger Blo gros rgya mtsho. Dur­ing this time in Dharam­sala he also encountered oth­er Tibet­o­lo­gists such as Heath­er Stoddard.

One anec­dote will have to suf­fice here as an illus­tra­tion of Dieter Schuh’s time in Dharam­sala and how quickly he integ­rated into Tibetan soci­ety. Dur­ing a private meet­ing with Karl-Heinz Everd­ing in 1998, bsTan ’dzin dge rgy­as, the former private sec­ret­ary of the Dalai Lama, asked about the health of Dieter Schuh and then, without any prompt­ing, added:

“You know, when Dieter Schuh came to Dharam­sala, with­in one year he not only mastered read­ing Clas­sic­al Tibetan but also spoke Tibetan per­fectly. And one year later he had finished the com­plete study of Tibetan astro­nomy. We have nev­er seen a per­son like him here again. And when he was invited to the meet­ings of our soci­ety, he came and spoke hon­or­ific Tibetan (Tib. zhe sa) in a way that even we were barely able to under­stand. It was a level of eleg­ance in Tibetan we had hardly ever heard before. He was a really aston­ish­ing man!”

When asked about this later, Dieter Schuh revealed only that at the time he had read the bio­graphy of the 7th Dalai Lama and had mem­or­ised a few of its idio­mat­ic expres­sions to occa­sion­ally use in his con­ver­sa­tions with Tibetans as a sort of ‘party trick’. He knew full well that these Tibetan idioms are no longer com­pre­hens­ible, so he enjoyed teas­ing the Tibetans with their own culture.

Hav­ing returned to Bonn, he set about com­plet­ing his dis­ser­ta­tion, which was pub­lished in 1973 as Unter­suchun­gen zur Geschichte der tibet­ischen Kal­ender­rech­nung [Stud­ies on the His­tory of Tibetan Calendric­al Cal­cu­la­tion]. The issue he ini­tially set out to deal with was described as follows:

“The dif­fi­culty of an exact con­ver­sion of even the year with­in a Tibetan date still exists today and lies in the fact that the begin­ning of the Tibetan year not only dif­fers from the begin­ning of the Juli­an or Gregori­an cal­en­dar year but also changes in its rela­tion­ship to the ‘fixed’ begin­ning of the nat­ur­al year because of its depend­ence on the vari­able begin­nings of spe­cif­ic phases of the moon. Addi­tion­ally, the Tibetan calendric­al cal­cu­la­tion for the length of the nat­ur­al year takes as its basis a dif­fer­ent value to the Juli­an or Gregori­an cal­en­dar. This in turn leads to a not insig­ni­fic­ant dis­place­ment of the aver­age begin­ning of the year for the Tibetan cal­en­dar. For the exact con­ver­sion of any date includ­ing the month and day, one par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­culty lies in the inclu­sion of ‘leap months’ in the Tibetan cal­en­dar and anoth­er arises due to the pat­tern of leav­ing out or adding in cer­tain days of the calendar.”

In his dis­ser­ta­tion, he starts with a basic intro­duc­tion to the his­tory of Tibetan astro­nomy, divin­a­tion and calendric­al cal­cu­la­tion and goes on to provide com­pre­hens­ive con­ver­sion tables which allow any Tibetan cal­en­dar days from 1027–1971 to be con­ver­ted into the mod­ern European cal­en­dar. In 1972, he had writ­ten his own pro­gramme in the pro­gram­ming lan­guage For­tran on an IBM com­puter to cal­cu­late these tables. It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that this work revolu­tion­ised the sci­entif­ic insights into Tibetan calendric­al cal­cu­la­tions and con­tin­ue to form the most sig­ni­fic­ant ref­er­ence work for the descrip­tion of the Tibetan cal­en­dar and the con­ver­sion of Tibetan dates into mod­ern cal­en­dar dates, regard­less of which Tibetan cal­en­dar they were based on. The Korean Sokhyo Jo, who obtained his doc­tor­ate in 2016 in Har­vard with a work on Tibetan astro­nomy, made mul­tiple use of Dieter Schuh’s astro­nom­ic­al stud­ies and was there­fore well placed to offer the fol­low­ing praise:

“All in all, Schuh, being equipped with the best philo­logy and … astro­nom­ic­al know­ledge, has pion­eered the new ter­rit­or­ies of skar rtsis and nag rtsis. His mar­vel­lous schol­ar­ship has been, is, and will be an inspir­a­tion for the research of the Tibetan rtsis.”

After this pion­eer­ing study, which would later pave his way to receiv­ing a Heis­en­berg Grant from the Ger­man Research Found­a­tion, he then moved into a com­pletely dif­fer­ent sub­ject with­in Tibet­o­logy, whose fun­da­ment­al soci­opol­it­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ance made it very import­ant to him: Tibetan dip­lo­mat­ics. Hav­ing set him­self the task of edit­ing, trans­lat­ing and ana­lys­ing every Tibetan lan­guage leg­al doc­u­ment from the peri­od of the Mon­go­li­an empire that he could lay his hands as an ori­gin­al or copy, his habil­it­a­tion dis­ser­ta­tion Erlasse und Send­s­chreiben mon­gol­ischer Herrscher für tibet­ische Geist­liche. Ein Beitrag zur Ken­nt­nis der Urkun­den des tibet­ischen Mit­telal­ters und ihr­er Dip­lo­matik (1977, A5) [Decrees and Missives of the Mon­go­li­an Rulers for Tibetan Clergy. A Con­tri­bu­tion to Know­ledge of the Offi­cial Doc­u­ments from the Tibetan Middle Ages and their Dip­lo­mat­ics] could offer sig­nificant clar­ity on many key ques­tions related to the his­tory of Tibet in the 13th/14th cen­tur­ies. This work was later sup­ple­men­ted by vari­ous mono­graphs, some of which he authored togeth­er with Jampa Kals­ang Phukhang: Urkun­den und Send­s­chreiben aus Zen­t­ralt­ibet, Ladakh und Zans­kar (A3 and A7) [Dip­lo­mas and Missives from Cent­ral Tibet, Ladakh and Zans­kar], His­tori­ograph­is­che Dok­u­mente aus Zaṅs-dkar (A13) [His­tori­ograph­ic­al Doc­u­ments from Zaṅs-dkar] and Urkun­den, Erlasse und Send­s­chreiben aus dem Besitz sikkimes­is­cher Adelshäuser und des Klosters Pho­dang (A6) [Dip­lo­mas, Decrees and Missives Held by Sikkimese Aris­to­crat­ic Houses and Pho­dang Mon­as­tery], and also by offi­cial doc­u­ments from the Ladhakhi rul­ing house (A11) and Tibeto-Mon­go­li­an doc­u­ments from the Qing era (A12). He con­duc­ted fur­ther stud­ies at this time which focussed on indi­vidu­al doc­u­ments or leg­al issues (B2, B4-B7, B9, B11 and B13), but here we merely men­tion his pub­lic­a­tion Polit­ische Imp­lika­tion­en tibet­ischer Urkun­den­formeln (A14) [Polit­ic­al Implic­a­tions of the Word­ing of Tibetan Dip­lo­mas] and the two essays Zum Entstehung­s­prozeß von Urkun­den in den tibet­ischen Herrscherkan­zlei­en (1983, B18) [On the Pro­cess of Form­a­tion of Dip­lo­mas in the Chan­cer­ies of Tibetan Rulers] and Recht und Gesetz in Tibet (1984, B19) [Laws and the Law in Tibet], that dealt with the fun­da­ment­al ques­tions of judi­cial prac­tice and jur­is­pru­dence, chan­cellery and judicature in Tibet. The issue of the law in Tibet had pre­vi­ously been rather neg­lected, so this abund­ance of stud­ies put the field on an entirely new footing.

His work in dip­lo­mat­ics then received its – inter­im – crown­ing glory with his pion­eer­ing mono­graph Grundla­gen tibet­ischer Siegel­kunde. Eine Unter­suchung über tibet­ische Siegelauf­s­chriften in ’Phag­spa-Schrift (1981, A9) [The Found­a­tions of Tibetan Sigil­lo­graphy. A Study of Tibetan Seal Imprints in the ’Phags-pa Script]. In total, in a peri­od of no more than ten years, Dieter Schuh edited, trans­lated and ana­lysed more than 200 Tibetan roy­al charters from the 13th-20th cen­tur­ies which he had pho­to­graphed dur­ing his time in India, Sikkim and Ladakh. He was deal­ing with mater­i­al which is exceed­ingly dif­fi­cult to pro­cess due to the diversity of idio­mat­ic expres­sions, its ever-chan­­ging, lex­ic­ally more-or-less undoc­u­mented leg­al ter­min­o­logy, and many oth­er lin­guist­ic pecu­li­ar­it­ies. Indeed, trans­lat­ing the mater­i­al with almost no omis­sions was an almost mira­cu­lous achieve­ment and demon­strates his pro­found under­stand­ing of the leg­al struc­tures and judi­cial beha­viour of the Tibetan state, his famili­ar­ity with the Tibetan sense of justice, soci­et­al real­it­ies and cul­tur­al influences, and also his unique mar­riage of incred­ible intu­ition with logic­al thought, which was prac­tic­ally pre­destined to pro­duce a suf­fi­cient grasp of the leg­al state­ments. He set in place an almost ines­tim­able found­a­tion for the study of Tibetan law and diplomatics.

The works which deal with the study of his­tory and jur­is­pru­dence mainly appeared dur­ing the peri­od when Dieter Schuh was work­ing in a pro­ject fun­ded by the Ger­man Research Found­a­tion (DFG) from 1969 to 1978 which was later taken up by the Göt­tin­gen Academy of Sci­ences. It was inten­ded to com­plete the cata­loguing of all the Tibetan manu­scripts and block prints that he him­self had pho­to­graphed while fun­ded by the DFG in India or which were stored in the Ber­lin State Lib­rary – Prus­si­an Cul­tur­al Her­it­age. These com­prised the Col­lec­ted Works of rJe Mi pham rnam rgy­al (1846–1912, A2) and of Kong sprul Blo gros mtha’ yas (1813–1899, A4) as well as a large part of the doc­u­ments and scrip­tures col­lec­ted by Laurence Aus­tine Wad­dell (1854–1938) in Tibet (A8). By work­ing on the writ­ings of two import­ant lamas of the rNy­ing ma school and Waddell’s col­lec­tion of deluxe edi­tions and stand­ard works of Tibetan lit­er­at­ure, he opened up sig­nificant Tibetan source mater­i­al to fur­ther study which was of excep­tion­al exem­plary value and which, thanks to his numer­ous trans­la­tions and con­tent ana­lyses, presen­ted cru­cial aspects of Tibetan lit­er­ary his­tory. The pub­lic­a­tion of these three volumes, com­pris­ing more than 1000 indi­vidu­al descrip­tions, took place as part of the pro­ject Kata­logis­ier­ung ori­ent­al­is­cher Hand­s­chriften in Deutsch­land (KOHD) [Cata­loguing of Ori­ent­al Manu­scripts in Ger­man Col­lec­tions] with­in the Verzeich­nis der ori­ent­al­is­chen Hand­s­chriften in Deutsch­land [Uni­on Cata­logue of Ori­ent­al Manu­scripts in Ger­man Col­lec­tions]. This series of mono­graphs was pub­lished by the Indo­lo­gist Dr Wolfgang Vogt, Ber­lin State Lib­rary, who played a decis­ive role in the aca­dem­ic devel­op­ment of Dieter Schuh in this period.

Dur­ing his stay in India from Janu­ary 1967 to Autumn 1969, the jubil­ari­an had fol­lowed the advice of his Indo­lo­gist tutor in Cologne Prof. Klaus Lud­wig Jan­ert to carry out com­pre­hens­ive microfilm pho­to­graphy of Tibetan texts, for which he vis­ited vari­ous lib­rar­ies and mon­ast­ic­al insti­tutes in Dharam­sala, Dar­jeel­ing, Gang­tok, Kalimpong, Dehradun and Solan. In this way, his trusty Leica pre­served microfilm cop­ies of 6000 works with 350,000 pages of texts for the archives of the Ber­lin State Lib­rary – and as Dieter Schuh once noted, without any erro­neous ‘improve­ments’ by (overly) enthu­si­ast­ic edit­ors keen to enhance the faded parts of the pages for their offset print­ing, which would often res­ult in spelling mis­takes. A vivid image of these elab­or­ate efforts, often involving long and ardu­ous jour­neys but also lead­ing to encoun­ters with the Dalai Lama, Sa skya khri ’dzin, bDud ’joms rin po che, lJongs ldong Sangs rgy­as bstan ’dzin, Bya ’bral rin po che and oth­er high-rank­ing lamas, was giv­en by Dieter Schuh him­self in his research report (A2, Intro­duc­tion).

There fol­lowed his appoint­ment at the Depart­ment for Lin­guist­ics and Cul­tur­al Sci­ences of Cent­ral Asia (ZAS) at the Uni­ver­sity of Bonn, which gave him extraordin­ary free­dom in his research. In 1978 the DFG had awar­ded him a Heis­en­berg Grant for a peri­od of sev­en years, and then, shortly before this came to an end, the Uni­ver­sity of Bonn received fund­ing for two top-level research posts from the Fed­er­al State of Nordrhein-West­­­falen. Dieter Schuh was appoin­ted to one of these posts at the ZAS. He had already begun to teach Tibet­o­logy at the Uni­ver­sity of Bonn in 1976, and this loc­a­tion remained the base for his work until he retired. The pri­or­it­ies in his long years of teach­ing activ­ity were sem­inars in astro­nomy and calendric­al cal­cu­la­tion, divin­a­tion, Tibetan his­tory, his­tori­ography, emic gram­mar, logic, gen­er­al lit­er­at­ure and dip­lo­mat­ics. These inform­at­ive and inspir­ing les­sons were atten­ded by an act­ive circle of stu­dents, includ­ing Roland Biel­mei­er, Mar­gret Cause­mann, Chris­toph Cüp­pers, Karl-Heinz Everd­ing, Silke Her­mann, Joachim Karsten, Andreas and Monika Kretschmar, Shen-yu Lin, Klaus-Dieter Math­es, Petra Maurer, Hanna Schneider, Peter Schwieger, Weirong Shen and Tem­ing Tseng.

See­ing the need for an effi­cient, inex­pens­ive plat­form to pub­lish, present and pub­li­cise spe­cial­ist works in Tibet­o­logy, in 1976 he joined forces with col­leagues such as the Indo­lo­gist Dr Richard Oth­on Meisezahl and TibetoMon­gol­ist Prof. Rain­er Käm­pfe to found the Asso­ci­ation for His­tor­ic­al Stud­ies on High Asia [in Ger­man, Ver­ein­i­gung für Geschicht­swis­senschaft Hochasi­ens GmbH (VGH)] and its pub­lish­ing arm, the VGH-Wis­­senschaft­s­ver­­lag, which ini­tially had its registered office in St. Augustin, then in Bonn and later in Halle (Saale). The asso­ci­ation was imme­di­ately gran­ted char­it­able status for its object­ives of pro­mot­ing sci­ence and research. It was respons­ible for a range of seri­al pub­lic­a­tions, the most not­able of which was the Monu­menta Tibet­ica His­tor­ica (MTH), which was estab­lished in 1977 after a series of indi­vidu­al and group dis­cus­sions dur­ing the Csoma de Kőrös Memori­al Sym­posi­um. The found­ing com­mit­tee included Dieter Schuh along­side Prof. Luciano Petech (Rome), Prof. Wang Yao (Beijing), Prof. Rolf A. Stein (Par­is), Dr Geza Uray (Hun­gary), Prof. Hans-Rain­er Käm­pfe (Bonn) and Dr Richard Oth­on Meisezahl (Bonn) (B12). The aim of the MTH was to edit and make access­ible his­tor­ic­al mater­i­als from the Tibetan cul­tur­al region. Inspired by the Monu­menta Ger­mani­ae His­tori­ae (MGH), it com­prises the five sec­tions I. Scriptores, II. Vitae, III. Dip­lo­mata et Epis­tolae, IV Leges et doc­u­menta iur­is and V. Antiquit­ates.

In addi­tion, in order to pub­lish papers on the Tibetan sci­ences, on the geo­graphy and his­tory, art and cul­ture, soci­ety, and eco­nom­ics and mater­i­al cul­ture of Tibet, as well as on the reli­gion and philo­sophy of Buddhism and Bon, it set up the seri­al pub­lic­a­tions Archiv für zen­t­ralasi­at­ische Geschichts­forschung (AZG) [Archive for Cent­ral Asi­an His­tor­ic­al Research] and Beiträge zur Zen­t­ralasi­en­forschung (BZF) [Con­tri­bu­tions to Cent­ral Asia Stud­ies], Beiträge zur tibet­ischen Erzählforschung (BTE) [Con­tri­bu­tions to Tibetan Story Stud­ies] and Son­deraus­gaben der Tibet-Encyc­lo­pae­­dia (STE) [Spe­cial Edi­tions of the Tibet Encyc­lo­pae­dia]. The series Beiträge zur Tibet­ischen Erzählforschung, one volume of which was authored by Dieter Schuh him­self (A2), deserves a par­tic­u­lar men­tion here. The fifteen volumes pub­lished to date con­tain nearly 400 Tibetan fairy tales, fables and anec­dotes recor­ded and tran­scribed in the inter­na­tion­al phon­et­ic alpha­bet (IPA) in the dia­lects of Ding ri, sKy­id grong and Shig­atse, from nomads in Amdo, in Nang chen in east­ern Tibet and in south­east­ern Tibet, as well as in vari­ous regions of east­ern, west­ern and cent­ral Tibet. A lin­guist­ic ana­lys­is of the differ­ent dia­lects was also con­duc­ted adding to the benefits of this col­lec­tion of stor­ies from oral tra­di­tions which are under extreme threat from soci­et­al change and may very well soon be com­pletely lost.

Fur­ther­more, the well-known Zen­t­ralasi­at­ischen Stud­i­en (ZAS) [Cent­ral Asia Stud­ies], the journ­al pub­lished by the Cent­ral Asia Depart­ment at the Uni­ver­sity of Bonn, which has now become the Depart­ment of Mon­go­li­an and Tibetan Stud­ies with­in the Insti­tute of Ori­ent­al and Asi­an Stud­ies at the Rhen­ish Friedrich Wil­helm Uni­ver­sity of Bonn, benefit­ted from an ini­ti­at­ive of Dieter Schuh in 2003 and exper­i­enced a renais­sance after it was threatened with clos­ure: Volumes 1–31 (1967–2002) had been pub­lished by the Otto Har­rassow­itz-Ver­­lag, Wies­baden, and it was Dieter Schuh who ensured that its pub­lic­a­tion could con­tin­ue until the present day. This became pos­sible in part due to the estab­lish­ment of the Inter­na­tion­al Insti­tute for Tibetan and Buddhist Stud­ies (IITBS) in 2005 by renam­ing the Asso­ci­ation for His­tor­ic­al Stud­ies on High Asia (VGH). The new insti­tute was ini­tially based in Halle, mov­ing in 2010 to Andi­ast, Graubünden, Switzer­land, where it still serves the study of the cul­ture and his­tory of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism today. Thanks to this ini­ti­at­ive of Dieter Schuh, more than 100 mono­graphs and col­lec­ted volumes have been pub­lished, along­side hun­dreds of papers with research res­ults. It is this untir­ing com­mit­ment and effort to benefit the field of Tibet­o­logy which inspired the title of this present Fest­s­chrift: A Life in Tibetan Stud­ies.

In the 1990s, Dieter Schuh’s cre­at­ive abil­it­ies were primar­ily ded­ic­ated to the imple­ment­a­tion of a Pri­or­ity Pro­gramme from the Ger­man Research Found­a­tion (DFG) which he led togeth­er with Prof. Wil­libald Haffn­er from the Geo­graph­ic Insti­tute at the Jus­tus Liebig Uni­ver­sity Giessen: the research pro­gramme Sied­lung­s­prozesse und Staaten­bildun­gen im west­tibet­ischen Him­alaya [Set­tle­ment Pro­cesses and State-Build­ing in the West­ern Tibetan Him­alay­as], which com­prised numer­ous indi­vidu­al pro­jects: on pre­his­tory and cave stud­ies, archae­ology and set­tle­ment his­tory, pop­u­la­tion stat­ist­ics and loc­al his­tory, land usage and social com­munit­ies, hip­pi­atry, geo­graphy and topo­graphy, loc­al and region­al his­tor­ic­al devel­op­ment, dendro­chrono­logy and cli­mate change, his­tor­ic roads and lin­guist­ics, eco­nom­ics and trade, flora and fauna, and also art, cul­ture and archi­tec­ture. The open­ing-up of Mus­tang then offered a unique oppor­tun­ity to con­duct research in a largely unex­plored Tibetan-Buddhist cul­tur­al area with an inter­dis­cip­lin­ary approach net­work­ing between vari­ous aca­dem­ic disciplines.

This oppor­tun­ity was taken up by many stu­dents of Dieter Schuh along­side oth­er Tibet­o­lo­gists such as Katja Buffet­rille, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Helmut Eimer, John Har­ris­on and Charles Ramble. Indeed, this Pri­or­ity Pro­gramme alone, car­ried out from July 1992 to the end of 1999, led to 202 pub­lic­a­tions (B28) from more than 60 authors and co-authors. Along­side the man­age­ment of this Pri­or­ity Pro­gramme, in this peri­od Dieter Schuh also con­duc­ted stud­ies of the polit­ic­al organ­isa­tion of south­ern Mus­tang (B20) and the his­tory of the Muk­t­inath Val­ley (B22 and B23). Fur­ther­more, he was involved in sev­er­al pro­jects to explore the caves of Muk­t­inath Val­ley (B26 and B27).

Dieter Schuh was not sat­isfied with the details of the pop­u­la­tion stat­ist­ics being noted in tibet­o­lo­gic­al and anthro­po­lo­gic­al stud­ies. In his opin­ion they were based on poorly evid­enced estim­ates, so they were too impre­cise and unre­li­able. For this reas­on, when con­duct­ing field stud­ies he was always on the lookout for doc­u­ments that would help with demo­graph­ic research, along­side the his­tor­ic­al and leg­al doc­u­ments his oth­er research needed. In the early 1980s his search bore fruit in the archives of the Tashi Samten Ling mon­as­tery in Kath­mandu, loc­ated at the foot of the Swayamb­hunath Stupa: he was able to microfilm 190 dip­lo­mas, fun­da­ment­al leg­al doc­u­ments, and import­ant doc­u­ments for demo­graph­ic­al stud­ies, as well as the invent­or­ies and cata­logues of the mon­as­tery (A15). These dis­cov­er­ies enabled him to study wages, cal­cu­late prices for food and rent pay­ments, and estim­ate the life expect­ancy of Tibetans as well as the pro­por­tion of monks rel­at­ive to the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion. He could also look into the polit­ic­al and social factors behind the trans­fer of land and oth­er resources to Tibetan mon­as­ter­ies. One very illus­trat­ive example of these stud­ies is his long essay with the title: Kloster­feud­al­is­mus in Tibet aus his­tor­ischer und öko­nomis­cher Sicht [Mon­ast­ic Feud­al­ism in Tibet from a His­tor­ic­al and Eco­nom­ic Per­spect­ive]. By present­ing one par­tic­u­lar case study, it describes the land own­er­ship, the num­ber and size of the fields, farm­ers and her­ders belong­ing to the mon­as­tery, as well as the effects of the distribution.

In 2007, a year before the con­tro­ver­sial Olympic Games in Beijing (2008), he was invited by the Ger­man TV broad­caster ZDF to be a con­sult­ant trav­el­ling with their team fol­low­ing the foot­steps of Hein­rich Har­rer. This res­ul­ted in a two-part film Tibet — Reise durch ein ver­botenes Land [Tibet — Jour­ney through a For­bid­den Land] which was an enorm­ous suc­cess, not least because it delivered a visu­al impres­sion of present-day Tibet under Chinese rule along­side the many his­tor­ic­al ref­er­ences. Dieter Schuh pub­lished his own book illus­trated with numer­ous pho­tos taken dur­ing that trip entitled Tibet – Traum und Wirk­lich­keit. Chin­atowns und das Ende der tibet­ischen Zivil­isa­tion (A16) [Tibet — Dream and Real­ity. Chin­atowns and the End of Tibetan Civil­isa­tion] to doc­u­ment the rad­ic­al reor­gan­isa­tion of Tibetan cit­ies and the mar­gin­al­isa­tion of the Tibetan pop­u­la­tion due to the influx of Han Chinese people.

The year 2012 saw the pub­lic­a­tion of his four-volume Con­tri­bu­tions to the His­tory of Tibetan Math­em­at­ics, Tibetan Astro­nomy, Tibetan Time Cal­cu­la­tion (Cal­en­dar) and Sino-Tibetan Divin­a­tion, form­ing a com­pen­di­um on the Tibetan cal­cu­la­tion sci­ences. This included repro­duc­tions of all sig­nificant works that had appeared in this field before 2012, includ­ing Dieter Schuh’s out-of-print dis­ser­ta­tion. In the first volume this reprint was sup­ple­men­ted with the first sys­tem­at­ic, gen­er­ally com­pre­hens­ible intro­duc­tion to Tibetan astro­nomy (rtsis) and math­em­at­ics, encom­passing every explan­a­tion ima­gin­able that a Tibet­o­lo­gist unfa­mil­i­ar with these fields could desire, ran­ging from the aba­cus to the “slow and quick feet of the plan­ets” and the plan­et Engke. In the fourth volume he included a gloss­ary of all the spe­cial­ist terms appear­ing in the first three volumes, which was cer­tainly a mile­stone whose import­ance for this field of study will nev­er fade.

At more or less the same time, Dieter Schuh was invest­ig­at­ing the areas on the west­ern and south-west­­ern peri­pher­ies of the Tibetan high plat­eau. Here we will men­tion his study of the roy­al and private dip­lo­mas and doc­u­ments in the col­lec­tion of the Ladakhi intel­lec­tu­al Sonam Sky­abldan Ger­gan (A17). Dur­ing sev­er­al stays in Ladakh, Dieter Schuh had developed a close rela­tion­ship with S. S. Ger­gan, who had already offered to let him microfilm part of his archive back in the 1970s. With great pleas­ure Dieter Schuh had, of course, at the time selec­ted the dip­lo­mas in the col­lec­tion, of which there were 69 examples. Although the jubil­ari­an was once more return­ing to the West­ern Tibetan areas as the object of his study, par­tic­u­larly the Ladakhi area and his­tory, this then led his interest towards the Baltistan area of north-east­­ern Pakistan, which had formed part of the Great­er Tibetan King­dom in the 7th9th cen­tur­ies and where even today the dia­lect spoken resembles the Tibetan of that peri­od. In order to study and visu­ally and tex­tu­ally doc­u­ment the gen­er­ally unknown moun­tain­ous regions of this coun­try, its former minor king­doms, its monu­ments and early-era pet­ro­glyphs, between 2007 and 2011 he under­took sev­er­al jour­neys through remote ter­rain, involving con­sid­er­able dif­fi­culties. The res­ults were pub­lished in his four-volume Reise in die Geschichte Baltistans [Jour­ney into the His­tory of Baltistan] (2012, A18 and A19).

In the same way, he then devoted his efforts to Purig (A20, A22, A23, A25, B30, B33), Spiti (A24, A26) and the south­ern and north­ern regions of Mus­tang (A21, B20, B38-B40). While under­tak­ing jour­neys to these regions and look­ing for offi­cial doc­u­ments, his excel­lent Tibetan lan­guage skills and his open, friendly man­ner always rap­idly ensured he was invited into mon­as­ter­ies and the houses of the des­cend­ants of the fam­il­ies who once ruled the regions, and these then read­ily gran­ted him access to and per­mis­sion to pho­to­graph their archives of doc­u­ments, which nobody had ever pre­vi­ously shown any interest in. This res­ul­ted in stud­ies whose dens­ity and fac­tu­al­ity are unri­valled and whose aca­dem­ic import­ance can­not be under­es­tim­ated. They grant a com­pletely new insight into the polit­ic­al, leg­al and social rela­tions of these peri­pher­al and more loc­ally organ­ised regions, some of whom had them­selves abol­ished the feud­al sys­tem and replaced it with com­munity-ori­en­ted, demo­crat­ic types of admin­is­trat­ive structures.

The numer­ous offi­cial doc­u­ments which he had pho­to­graphed him­self over many years and which Peter Schwieger was able to digit­ise in 1999–2001 in the pro­ject Digit­al­iz­a­tion of Tibetan doc­u­ments in Lhasa, Tibet Autonom­ous Region, PR China with­in the Archives of the Tibetan Autonom­ous Region, enabled him to com­pile two cata­logues of seals repro­du­cing well over 1000 Tibetan seal impres­sions (B32 and B36) – anoth­er remark­able and aston­ish­ing achievement.

From June 8–12, 2014, to cel­eb­rate the 65th birth­day of Chris­toph Cüp­pers, he organ­ised a sym­posi­um at the IITBS in Andi­ast with the title Sec­u­lar Law and Order in the Tibetan High­land (D6). It dealt with a range of aspects of the his­tory of law in Tibet from the peri­od of the Great­er Tibetan King­dom through to the 20th cen­tury and encom­passed con­tri­bu­tions on Tibetan leg­al codices, jur­is­pru­dence and courts, pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion and pen­al codes.

His long essay on Land­wirte im tibet­ischen Hoch­land: Im Elend lebende Leibei­gene oder sozi­al und wirtschaft­lich sta­bile Säu­len feudaler Herrschaften? Stat­istische Ana­lysen zur Ver­mö­gen­sungleich­heit [Agri­cul­tur­al­ists in the Tibetan High­lands: Serfs Liv­ing in Hard­ship or Socially and Eco­nom­ic­ally Stable Pil­lars of Feud­al Regimes? Stat­ist­ic­al Ana­lyses of Wealth Inequal­ity] rep­res­en­ted anoth­er cru­cial study which, typ­ic­ally for him, was pion­eer­ing and cast a much-needed light on an under-researched area here, social life in Tibet. Finally, men­tion must be made here of his inter­est­ing essays Das Märchen von der Einkerker­ung ein­er ladakhis­chen Prin­zessin in der Burg von Kag­beni (B35) [The Fairy Tale of the Impris­on­ment of a Ladakhi Prin­cess in the Dun­geons of Kag­beni Castle], Politik und Wis­senschaft in Tibet im 13. und 17. Jahrhun­dert [Polit­ics and Sci­ence in Tibet in the 13th and 17th Cen­tur­ies] (B24) and Srid ohne Chos? Reflek­tion­en zum Ver­hält­nis von Buddhis­mus und säku­larer Herrschaft im tibet­ischen Kul­tur­raum (B25) [Srid without Chos? Reflec­tions on the Rela­tions between Buddhism and Sec­u­lar Rule in the Tibetan Cul­tur­al Area]. – papers which are cer­tainly well worth reading.

In addi­tion to these pub­lic­a­tions in book format, after years of frus­tra­tion attempt­ing to con­trib­ute to Wiki­pe­dia, Dieter Schuh began work on his own digit­al plat­form for the res­ults of his work in 2010: the Tibet Encyc­lo­pae­dia (http:// www.tibet-encyclopaedia.de/). In more than 100 entries, he com­men­ted on key terms that had formed the focus of his earli­er pub­lic­a­tions. Fre­quently illus­trated and gen­er­ally very com­pre­hens­ive, these digit­al art­icles con­tain a wealth of mater­i­al which can­not be found elsewhere.

The above over­view of the res­ults of Dieter Schuh’s research makes it abund­antly clear how his work has formed an essen­tial build­ing block for every­one inter­ested in a deep­er under­stand­ing of dip­lo­mat­ics, his­tory, pop­u­la­tion stud­ies, social sci­ences, lin­guist­ics and many oth­er research areas relat­ing to Tibet. The meth­od­o­logy, form­al­ity and con­tents of his research have always been firmly rooted in aca­dem­ic the­ory and crit­ic­al ration­al­ism. The approaches he took were con­vin­cing and pion­eer­ing, lead­ing to res­ults which are as fun­da­ment­al to the stud­ies of today’s research­ers as the works of Giuseppe Tucci, Rolf A. Stein or Dav­id Sey­ford Ruegg were to his own. He nev­er evaded crit­ic­al dis­cus­sion of the res­ults of his research and also did not hold back when he felt that cri­ti­cism of oth­ers was justified and neces­sary. For him, basic aca­dem­ic prin­ciples were bey­ond discussion.

Even though he revolu­tion­ised numer­ous fields of Tibet­o­logy, his works have still not achieved the level of wide­spread famili­ar­ity among Tibet­o­lo­gists that they deserve. This can surely only be explained by the reluct­ance of con­tem­por­ary Anglo-Amer­­ic­an Tibet­o­logy to engage more than super­fi­cially with Ger­­­man-lan­guage research – and Dieter Schuh’s pub­lic­a­tions are almost exclus­ively in German.

In the course of his life, Dieter Schuh always had an open ear for every­one who turned to him with spe­cial­ist ques­tions and research pro­jects. He was able to help many of them find answers to their dif­fi­cult ques­tions, give them import­ant impulses and open up per­spect­ives – all help­ing to sig­nificantly enhance the res­ults of their work. Access to import­ant source mater­i­al under his con­trol or ideas on the imple­ment­a­tion of pro­ject ideas were always will­ingly gran­ted, and he has nev­er ceased to sup­port the work of his stu­dents and col­leagues to the best of his abil­ity. More than a few of those seek­ing his advice or sup­port received an invit­a­tion to the IITBS in order to fur­ther dis­cuss the details of their dif­fi­cult ques­tions and problems.