An Encyclopedia of Tibetan Culture
The most prominent feature of Thangka is to record history and narrate stories through paintings. It mainly reflects the content of Tibetan Buddhism, but also includes the Tibetan people's understanding of the world, history, medicine, astronomy, poetry, art, etc. It can be said that Thangka is an encyclopedia of Tibet. Exploring the origin and development of Thangka is one of the important ways to understand Tibetan culture.
Origin of Thangka
Due to natural and historical reasons, there is still no definite conclusion about the exact era when Thangka began. But scholars generally believe that Thangka originated from murals. In the archaeological site of the Karuo culture in Tibet, which is about 5,000 years old, archaeologists found black-painted triangular lines and triangular patterns on pottery. These simple patterns can be regarded as the bud of Tibetan painting art. By the 7th century AD, Tibetan painting art developed rapidly and became mature with the rise of the Tubo Dynasty. At that time, the Tubo Dynasty successively built some magnificent palaces and large-scale temples, with unprecedented architectural scale. In order to decorate these magnificent palaces, a large number of exquisite murals were painted. The existing murals show the maturity of Tibetan mural art at that time, but this is not the Thangka in the true sense. Scholars have verified that Thangka may have evolved from Tubo murals, or it may have been influenced by the portable cloth and silk portraits of India, and gradually developed from cloth and silk paintings into Thangka. It is speculated that this development process may have been in the mid-10th century AD.
Development of Thangka
Early Thangkas, due to their age and the fact that paper, silk, etc. are not easy to preserve, are now very rare. Most of the surviving Thangkas are works of the Ming and Qing dynasties. During the Qing Dynasty, in order to build the Potala Palace, a group of excellent painters were selected to paint murals. These painters later established a special painting institution. Later, an official painting academy directly was established, namely "La Ri Bai Gu She". The painters in the academy were all outstanding figures who learned the excellent techniques of Han painting and created a large number of exquisite Thangka works. This period, that is, the 18th to 19th centuries, was the heyday of Thangka painting.