THF Staff

THF is more than a registration number. THF is pool of people and ideas focussed on preserving and creating beautiful things. People from four continents have joined, supported or in any other way helped this project and so have become part of THF. We can name here only few of them.

Project Participants

Staff:

Pimpim de Azevedo
André Alexander
John Harrison
Nyima Tashi
Yutaka Hirako
Ken Okuma
Nyima Tsering
Lhundrup Dorje
Kazuho Oka
Lobsang
Namgyal Drolma

Consultants:

Chimo Migmar-la
Gen Olo Chunchun
Gen Chuchok
Gen Loya
Ama Trasi-la
John Niewoehner
Margret Miller
Moritz Wermelskirch
Sylvester Kaben
Chibi-chang
Beate Heyne
Tomoaki Takeda

CONTRIBUTORS:

Other people who have contributed to some of the work projects featured in this website (many of them as unpaid volunteers):

Carmen Tsui (Hong Kong, architecture documentation),
Zara Thiessen (Sweden, architecture documentation),
Koichiro Ichikawa (Japan, architecture documentation),
Silke Gilbert (Germany, carpentry program supported by ASA),
Uli Eltgen (Germany, mural conservation),
Andreas Bruender (Germany, Water and Sanitation),
Julia Hartmann (Germany, architecture documentation),
Britta Uhlig (Germany, architecture documentation),
Esther Kehrer (architecture documentation),
Frank Ma (Hong Kong, architecture documentation),
Jonathan Perreault (Canada, water and sanitation),
Katja Virtanen (architecture documentation)
and Holger Senechal (structural engineering consultant).

Student groups of the Architecture Departments of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and of Tongji University Shanghai, Hamburg University and the Technical High School of Wismar have also participated in the architecture documentation program with the support of their departments.

THF Advisors:

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Freitag, FU Berlin;
Prof. Puay-Peng Ho, Hong Kong;
Prof. Janet Gyatso, Amherst College.

Friends of THF:

Gwendy Feldman, Carol Rattray, Mary Kilty; New York.
Hollis Brookover, Keiko Packard, Gerald Hatherly; Hong Kong.

THF's ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE AND HISTORY:

In 1993, the Lhasa Archive Project (LAP) was founded by André Alexander, Pimpim de Azevedo and Andrew Brannan. LAP is an international research project dedicated to the detailed study and documentation of the historic center of Lhasa, created as a reaction to the then on-going re-development of central Lhasa. LAP has worked with two German universities; and LAP's inventory of remaining historic buildings in Lhasa was introduced at the Seventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies in Graz 1995. Subsequently, LAP was invited to participate in a UNESCO evaluation mission to Lhasa in 1995. LAP also shared its inventory work under a cooperation agreement with Trondheim University's Atlas Project, which unfortunately has been published without any credit for our photos, survey maps and research contained. LAP/THF has since worked with a number of other universities in Germany and China (and Hong Kong).

We realised that documentation alone was not going to be enough to preserve any actual buildings in Lhasa.

In 1996 the Tibet Heritage Fund was set up as an international NGO in Lhasa with the help of Dr. Heather Stoddard and Dr. Enrico Dell Angelo. Dr. Stoddard's Shalu Association is an early pioneer of restoring historic Tibetan monasteries.

THF then set out to develop a feasible concept to rehabilitate the old city and its structures in a way that would not turn the area into a tourist Disneyland. In 1996 we began to implement a rehabilitation program that ran until the end of 2000.

In 1998, THF became a member of the Lhasa Old City Protection Working Group especially created by the Lhasa City Government to deal with the project of preserving the old town. The other members are the Lhasa City Cultural Relics Office, and the Lhasa Housing, Planning and Construction Departments.

This enabled us to carry out further studies and to expand the program range. The rehabilitation project presented a timely turn-around, reviving the old city center, and the pilot work in the Barkor area has since been extended to cover other parts of Lhasa and beyond.