Sixty works of reproduced drawings and paintings were recently found in the Department of Geography, Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University. They were drawn and painted with pencil, pen, or watercolor. On some of the works, short alphabetical notes include Tibetan place names and comments in Swedish. A preliminary observation of these works made clear that: (1) Four young art students made the reproductions. (2) They made copies from Sven Hedin’s original works drawn and painted in Tibet during his explorations in Central Asia (1905-1908). (3) The reproductions vividly depict mountains, lakes, Tibetan temples and monks, ethnic costumes and people of Tibet, etc. They are artistically very excellent. (4) After his explorations, accepting the invitation of the Tokyo Geographical Society, Hedin visited Japan for one month at the end of 1908. Hedin stayed in Kyoto from November 28 to December 12. (5) At the time when Hedin delivered a lecture at Kyoto Imperial University on November 29, 108 sheets of his original paintings, drawings, and maps were exhibited in an adjacent room. It is conjectured that the four art students may have reproduced some of the exhibited paintings and drawings in less than two weeks before Hedin left Japan.
This observation indicates that the reproduced works found at Kyoto University are evidence of international academic exchanges in modern Japan. Hedin was welcomed by people in many disciplines, and they had intellectual and cultural discussions. The reproduced works are also very important visual materials showing the Tibetan landscape and culture of about one hundred years ago, because field surveys by foreigners had been severely restricted or forbidden in Tibet for centuries. These sixty reproductions are extremely valuable as research objects for the study of the modern histories of geography, ethnography, Sinology, Tibetan studies, the arts, and their disciplinary interactions.
