Strandet i Kalimpong! Prins Peters Tibetekspedition 1950-1957

In 1950 the Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia was stranded in the small mountain town of Kalimpong in the Indian Himalayas at the gateway to Tibet – the country that the expedition leader Prince Peter hoped to explore, but which was closed off by Communist China’s advance into Tibet. Instead, Tibet came to Kalimpong through an increasing flow of Tibetan refugees who supplied Prince Peter’s now-stationary Tibetan expedition with an extraordinary wealth of ethnographic information, accounts and objects as well as a very large body of physical-anthropological material. The article recounts Prince Peter’s seven years of ethnographic work documenting and rescuing Tibetan civilization from the relentless advance of modernity and the Chinese army by collecting tangible and intangible Tibetan cultural heritage. His initial ethnographic approach embodied contemporary ideas about the expedition mode’s scientific suitability for collecting knowledge about foreign cultures and remote peoples. As Prince Peter could not gain access to Tibet, but had access to the many resident Tibetans as well as traders, travellers and refugees who were flowing into Kalimpong, he changed from a mobile expedition mode to localized fieldwork, and carried out ethnographic investigations and collections among the Tibetans who were staying in the town. Prince Peter’s fantastic Tibetan collections are today part of the National Museum’s Ethnographic Collection and give us fascinating insights into the life and work of the adventurer, ethnographer and expedition leader Prince Peter. Through the accounts and objects that he collected we also encounter the many Tibetans and other people who crossed his path in Kalimpong.