Thangtong Gyalpo Archive – Wolf Kahlen

The database ‘Thangtong Gyalpo Archive - Wolf Kahlen’ is developed and operated by CrossAsia. It comprises a total of 4957 photos taken by Mr Kahlen during his expeditions through China, the Himalayan region, India, Mongolia and Southeast Asia between 1984 and 1995. In June 2023, the State Library acquired his digital collection, which also includes digitised versions of his travel diaries and 28 documentary films. Further information on the entire collection can be found in the Thematic portal on the Kahlen Collection.

Structure of the database

The database was created by CrossAsia in MADOC in 2025 and published in June 2025. The photos were first deduplicated and then the existing metadata - deriving from the names of the folders the images were stored and the images themselves - was enriched with AI-generated keywords. This was done using the model llava:34b (https://ollama.com/library/llava) powered by ollama. The prompt used was: "Just provide keywords of this photo. No greetings and explanation." These AI-generated keywords were manually cleaned up in a second step. Still the results are too random to be displayed as metadata together with the image, but the terms are fully searchable so that "mountain" returns results although none of the displayed metadata contains that word.

A total of 3 photos were removed for ethical reasons. They can be made available if there is a justified research interest.

The database contains only the photographs from the Kahlen Collection. If you are interested in the travel diaries and the documentary films, please contact the following e-mail address: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de. An overview of the contents of the travel diaries and documentary films can be found in the Thematic portal on the Kahlen Collection.

Search the database

- Use the search in the upper right corner to search the metadata including the AI generated keywords. Or click here for an "empty" search showing all documents in the filter view.

- Narrow down the results by selecting terms from the filter on the left hand side for Place, Date and Subject. Select a filter by either checking the box and "Apply" or click "+" next to a filter term to directly activate the filter.

- You may in a second step search within this filtered result set using the "Refine result" search slot.

- You may also browse the collection by thumbnail overview.

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Further sources on the content

Wolf Kahlen has published some of the results of his expeditions. A complete list of publications can be found at the end of the thematic portal. The collection is still largely unexplored.

The collection and its images are protected by a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Commercial use is only possible after consultation with VG Bildkunst and Wolf Kahlen.

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