Charles Alfred Bell

For other people named Charles Bell, see Charles Bell (disambiguation).

Sir Charles Alfred Bell K.C.I.E. (1870–1945), born in Calcutta, was a British-Indian tibetologist. He was educated at Winchester College. After joining the Indian Civil Service, he was appointed Political Officer in Sikkim in 1908. He soon became very influential in Sikkimese and Bhutanese politics, and in 1910 he met the 13th Dalai Lama, who was forced into temporary exile by the Chinese. He got to know the Dalai Lama quite well during this time, and he was later to write his biography (Portrait of the Dalai Lama, published in 1946). At various times he was the British Political Officer for Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet.

After travelling through Tibet and visiting Lhasa in 1920, he retired to Oxford, where he wrote his series of books on the history, culture and religion of Tibet. Some of his photographs that he took whilst in Tibet can be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Some of these can be found in a recently published book Tibet: Caught in Time (containing photographs by Charles Bell and John Claude White; Reading: Garnet, 1997).

His English-Tibetan colloquial dictionary was first published together with a grammar of colloquial Tibetan as Manual of Colloquial Tibetan in 1905.

Charles Alfred Bell died in Canada in 1945.

Works

• Manual of Colloquial Tibetan. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1905. (Part II, English-Tibetan vocabulary; later editions 1919 and 1939)
• Portrait of a Dalai Lama: the Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth by Charles Alfred Bell, Sir Charles Bell, Publisher: Wisdom Publications (MA), January 1987, ISBN 9780861710553 (first published as Portrait of the Dalai Lama: London: Collins, 1946).
• Tibet: Past and Present. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924
• The People of Tibet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928
• The Religion of Tibet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931

External links

• the Tibet Album, British photography in Central Tibet 1920 - 1950
• List of illustrations from 'The People of Tibet', Sir Charles Bell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928
• Photo

Referenced to by Peter Fleming in the introduction to the book "Seven Years In Tibet" by Heinrich Harrer,Flamingo imprint 1997 in connection to his surprisingly close relationship to the 13th Dalai Lama as a foreigner}

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Name	Bell, Charles Alfred
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Date of birth	1870
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Date of death	1945
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