After Winding Odyssey, Tibetan Texts Find Home in China

"Decades ago, the thousands of Tibetan-language books now ensconced in a lavishly decorated library in southwest China might have ended up in a raging bonfire. During the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976, Red Guard zealots destroyed anything deemed “feudal.” But an American scholar [E. Gene Smith], galvanized in part by those rampages, embarked on a mission to collect and preserve the remnants of Tibetan culture.....As part of the arrangement, Mr. Smith’s institute [Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, TBRC], based in Cambridge, Mass., provides salaries for the four archivists who spend their days scanning and cataloging texts that can be read free online. They aim to digitize the world’s known treasury of Tibetan literature within a decade....."