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In ancient Tibet, the use of coins was insignificant.Tibet's main neighbours, India, Nepal and China had had their own coinage since time immemorial. Ancient Tibet however had no locally-struck coinage, although a certain number of coins from Nepal, Chinese Turkestan and China had reached Tibet by way of trade, or as donations to important monasteries.
In 1954, a silver coin was struck for distribution to monks. Although this coin was the last tangka issue, it was valued at 5 srang and was the last silver coin to be struck in Tibet. The last Tibetan copper coins (5 sho = 1/2 srang) were issued in 1953, while 100 srang notes were issued in large numbers until 1959.
The Tibetan tangka was an official currency of Tibet for three centuries. It was introduced by Lhasa Newar merchants from Nepal in the 16th century. The merchants used Nepalese tanka on the Silk Road. The Tibetan government began to mint the tangka in the 18th century. The first Tibetan tangka was minted in 1763/64.
The Tibetan skar was a weight unit representing a 100th part of one srang or the 10th part of one sho (i.e. about 0.37 g). The term was also used to refer to monetary units in the first half of the 20th century when copper coins were issued by Tibet (now People's Republic of China) which had the denominations 1/2, 1, 2 and half, 5 and 7 and ...
The Society publishes the journal China Numismatics 《中国钱币》. [2] The journal includes an annual summary of numismatic research, which in recent years has formed the basis of the China section of the INC's Survey of Numismatic Literature; see for example (the following are all in English):
Writing for the Economic and Political Weekly, Abanti Bhattacharya of the University of Delhi writes, "[The Book] stands out from the rest of the genre on Tibet’s history not simply because it makes an attempt to look at the status of Tibet as many other studies do, but because it essentially narrates the story of Tibet as it is."
Pico Iyer, in his book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, writes: “Thomas Laird’s book, The Story of Tibet, in which the author gets the Dalai Lama to travel through the whole of Tibetan history from his perspective, already seems to me one of the essential and irreplaceable books in the field, and allows one to hear and feel the Dalai Lama’s particular voice ...
A century later another Jesuit, the Italian Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) was sent to Tibet and received permission to stay in Lhasa where he spent 5 years (1716–1721) living in a Tibetan monastery, studying the language, the religion of the lamas and other Tibetan customs. [5] He published a couple of books in Tibetan on Christian doctrine.