After a strenuous week we completed the new staircase. Third layer of clay placed on the roof, dense red clay colored twigs made the finish of the porch and the wooden structure also got its red clay paint. >>>

Staircase walls and roof structure finished, short visit to Dzongkul

After some serious effort the new walls of the staircase are standing, and the wooden roof-structure is ready. Last weekend visited the Zangla nunnery school on their picnic at the riverside, and payed a short visit to Dzongkul monastery, the birthplace of the essays published by Csoma as Alexander books. >>>

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Saving Csoma’s Room

Since 2008 we spend 3 months every summer in Zangla with volunteers

In the remote fortified palace of Himalayan Zangla, Alexander Csoma de Kőrös a 19th century pioneer of Tibetology, the author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and Tibetan grammar of scientific standard. His room in Zangla Palace, identified by Baktay and the neighboring shrine full of valuable relics are about to collapse.

The building itself is built on a massive rock base. The lower stories are built of stone, the upper ones of sun-dried mud bricks. Since the building has been abandoned for decades, the leaking roof has split the walls and made holes on the building.

In the summer of 2008 a group of architects decided to do some emergency interventions on Zangla Palace, in order to save the room where Alexander Csoma de Kőrös started to write his dictionary in 1823.

The building can be saved using local materials, traditional methods, local labor and enthusiastic volunteers.

Initially the Royal Angkor Foundation provided a generous administrative background to the project, but in 2010 we registered Csoma’s Room Foundation officially in Budapest, Hungary, as a non-profit organization behind our activity. The first two years we got some technical support from the Field Service for Cultural Heritage of Hungary and financial support from the Hungarian Culture Fund through them.

Since 2008 every summer a group of international volunteers come to Zangla and join their efforts with local people to save the Palace from collapsing.

Apart from restoration we organize teaching and provide books and stationary supply to the local schools.

Our project runs on a micro-donation scheme that provides opportunity to a significant number of people to participate or support our efforts.

Csoma’s Room Foundation is focusing on the sustainable use of local materials, revival of traditional skills, promotion of local economic development and education. Most of us being an architect, we are also interested in developing sustainable contemporary architecture based on the local heritage, particularly in Zanskar.

Please find the actual state of our projects in the News section. Your participation as volunteer or donator is more than welcome.

Csoma`s Wheel

In 2008 the Kitchen Budapest media lab installed a contemporary artwork in the palace, thus ensuring a creative presence in Zangla, with respect for traditions, remembering Csoma, in a way that can be a motivating for everybody to visit the place and to donate for the restoration.

More about the Wheel

About Kőrösi Csoma Sándor