(TibetanReview.net, May09’24) —Like all other things Tibetan, which are now being touted as China’s, The Dege Sutra-Printing House (Tibetan: Dege Parkhang) has just been included in UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Regional Register of Memory of the World as “China’s largest Tibetan sutra-printing house”.
The printing house has been included in UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Regional Register of Memory of the World for its significance in Tibetan culture at China’s behest.
The decision was approved at the 10th General Meeting of the Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific, convened from May 7 to 8 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, reported China’s official Xinhua news agency May 9.
The report cited the National Archives Administration of China as saying May 9 that “three items from China” had been listed as documentary heritage on the Asia Pacific regional register of UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MOW) Programme. It described them as archives relating to traditional teahouses in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province; genealogical records of the communities of Huizhou in Anhui Province; and printing blocks housed at the Dege Sutra Printing House in Sichuan.
China is actively pursuing a campaign of assimilating the living culture of Tibet in the name of Sinicizing it while seeking to boost its status as a protector of it by such propaganda measures.
China has already named Dege Sutra Printing House a National Protected Heritage Site.
The printing house is part of the Dege Gonchen monastery in Dege County of Kardze (Ganzi) Prefecture, Sichuan Province. It has suffered Chinese destruction in the past.
The printing house now preserves over 270,000 printing blocks inscribed with religious, historical, literature and art, medical, astronomical and calendar-arithmetical book editions in Tibetan and Sanskrit, noted the bastillepost.com May 9, reporting on the listing.
The wooden blocks, made of dense, hard birch, served as important tools for making scriptures. For nearly 300 years, generations of craftsmen at the three-storey building have used their exquisite skills to carve scriptures on wooden blocks, and then compiled them into books, making the printing ink and paper themselves.
The engraving of the printing plates for the Kagyur, a key piece of the “Chinese” Buddhist canon, took 100 calligraphers three years and 500 craftsmen five years to complete, the report cited local experts as saying.
The Kagyur texts are Tibetan translations of the original teachings of the Buddha and are complemented by the Tengyur texts, which are Tibetan translations of commentaries on the teachings of the Buddha. They together uniquely constitute the backbone of Tibetan Buddhism.
“These Tibetan classics play a very important role in the study of ancient Tibetan culture. Our government will continue to increase investment and provide important support and promotion for our reproduction project, which is crucial for the protection and inheritance of the important documents of the Dege Sutra-Printing House,” Yeshe Wonbo, a local Tibetan studies expert, has said.
The UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations founded in 1945 with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. Unwittingly, it has become a tool for China to propagandize its claim of Tibetan heritage and culture as nothing but a subset of China’s culture.