Murals of the Sutlej Valley

Tholing’s White Temple stands in Zhada County’s Sutlej valley. The east wall is a painted architectural surface inside a sacred building, not a detached collection of panels. A 2017 report from the Tibet Department of Culture and Tourism dates its paintings broadly to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and describes cross-regional artistic exchange. That account gives the wall a historical frame; the room itself supplies another kind of context, with 42 columns across a 555-square-metre interior. The wall’s scale and placement matter to how it was seen and to the work of recording it.

A Zhejiang University team documented the east wall with a camera system that moved across the painted surface under even lighting. The department’s report says the equipment took more than a thousand photographs of a single wall. Each frame captured only a portion; the team then developed a precise stitching system to combine them into one high-resolution image. This process turned many overlapping views into a continuous record. It allowed details of colour and brushwork to be reviewed together, while keeping the image tied to its original position in the temple.

The completed image also supported a physical reconstruction of the east wall for a museum presentation in Jiangnan. The report describes the reproduced surface as about four metres high and more than twenty metres long. Visitors could approach a continuous wall at near architectural scale, rather than seeing isolated details in a book or on a small screen. The replica and the White Temple remain distinct: one is a reproduction assembled from digital records, the other the original painted interior in Zhada. The route from temple to museum broadened access without relocating the historic wall.

Digital photography preserves a visual record, not the whole experience of standing inside the White Temple. The report presents the work as a high-fidelity collection and reconstruction; it does not claim that the image replaces the building, its rituals, or the local custodians who care for it. The distinction is important for conservation. Researchers can inspect a joined image repeatedly, while a visitor encounters paintings in a room with its own proportions, light, and religious use. The project’s achievement lies in making a detailed view portable while leaving the original’s location and meaning attached to Tholing.