John Claude White was a civil engineer by education, a colonial administrator by profession and a photographer by vocation. His photographs of the Himalayas were taken from 1883-1908, during the time he worked for a year as an engineer at the British residency in Kathmandu and spent 20 years based in Gangtok, Sikkim as the first British political officer overseeing the British interests in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Wherever he traveled, he photographed the world around him: panoramas of the vast Tibetan landscape; mountains and glaciers of Sikkim; portraits of the royal court of the king of Bhutan; the monks and monasteries of Lhasa. Mules followed him on the rugged mountain trails bearing his photographic equipment, and ensuring that the fragile glass plates survived the long return trip south intact, to be printed by the Johnston and Hoffman photography studio. White spent his entire professional life working for the British Raj. In 1909 he retired to England, where he published his memoirs: Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887-1908. this book is a tribute to this extraordinary photographer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kurt Meyer
Kurt Meyer was born in Zurich, Switzerland and received his architectural degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He practised architecture in the United States for 40 years and received many design awards. He is a Fellow Emeritus of the American Institute of Architects. For over 25 years he travelled extensively in the HImalayas, notably Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, and is a collector of rare books on Central Asia and the Himalayan countries.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pamela Deuel Meyer
Pamela Deuel Meyer first travelled to the Himalayas in the 1970s. With a degree in journalism from Stanford University, she worked for the Sierra Club and other environmental groups both in California and Washington, DC. Meyer and Deuel Meyer lived for a decade in Nepal, where they were research scholars at the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. They travelled in Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet for their research on the life of John Claude White as well as the art and culture of the artistic Tharu people of Nepal's lowlands. Together they have published two books, The Kings of Nepal and the Tharu of the Tarai, and Mahabharata: The Tharu Barka Naach, and a documentary video on the Tharu Mahabharata.
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