John Claude White, 'Group of Nuns, Ta-tshang Nunnery' (photograph)

Photograph (b/w), taken by John Claude White, of a group of nuns from Ta-tshang Nunnery, Tibet.

John Claude White, a British engineer, spent twenty-one years in the Himalayan region, being appointed to government posts in the northern state of Sikkim and then in Bhutan. He published photographic albums of Himalayan landscape, just after the turn of the last century (for which, see RSAA/SC/WH/1 and RSAA/SC/WH/2). White was a member of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa (1903-04). The present photograph derives from the papers of Sir Charles Bell, who directly succeeded White as Political Officer of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet in 1908, which suggests how the photograph came to be amongst Bell's papers.

For a contemporaneous photograph taken by White of the same group of nuns, see the Plate ("Nuns from Ta-tshang Nunnery") facing p. 86 in White, Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887-1908 (1909). White notes (p. 87): "From this point almost the only habitation visible was the Nunnery of Ta-tshang which stood out against a limestone hill and across an apparently enormous plain. We often wished to visit it, but of course could not cross the boundary, though I subsequently did visit it when encamped at Khamba-jong with the Tibet Mission in 1903."

Some further light, perhaps, is shed on both photographs, in which the subjects are wearing shaggy wigs, by a passage in L A Waddell, Lhasa and its Mysteries (1905), in which a certain convent is discussed (p. 232-3): "In the next valley to this, about 2 miles distant, was a convent of thirty nuns of the yellow-cap sect. They were all shaven, some wore ordinary monks' conical yellow caps, but a few had huge fluffy wigs of curly wool, giving the appearance of the great frizzy, shaggy shock-head of a South Sea Islander." (Waddell was Principal Medical Officer to the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa. The copy of Lhasa and its Mysteries in the RSAA Library is Bell's signed personal copy, with marginalia, although not at p. 232.)