In January 1981, Jaroslav Poncar brought his Alchi photographs to Goepper, and they decided to begin a joint project on the same day. The core team comprised Hans Wilhelm Siegel and Konchok Phanday, a former teacher at the School of Buddhist Philosophy in Leh, who assisted with inscriptions and negotiations with the monks of Likir Gompa, which owns the temples. Photography required car batteries to power the studio flash, as Alchi had no electricity.

In 1981, the first campaign produced the material for an exhibition at the Museum of East Asian Art in October 1982. In 1983, Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw joined the team and identified the paintings on the dhoti of Avalokiteśvara in the Sumtsek as a map of the Kashmir Valley. Goepper also examined the ceiling paintings for the first time, finding them to be imitations of contemporary textiles, and discovered the inscription in the Palden Drepung Chörten. In 1984 the team visited Tabo — access granted personally by Indira Gandhi — finding no stylistic connection with Alchi. That same year Poncar documented the inaccessible third floor of the Sumtsek, including the inscribed lineage, from which Goepper derived his dating of Alchi to the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries. A final comprehensive documentation campaign in 1989 covered the entire complex.

Roger Goepper’s research on the Alchi Sumtsek, was foundational. His monograph on the temple, with the photographs by Jaroslav Poncar, set a new standard for publishing an early Tibetan monument. When he passed the torch to me (Christian Luczanits) to write on the other monuments of the complex, reaching that standard was the main challenge.

Roger Goepper’s research on the Alchi Sumtsek, was foundational. His monograph on the temple, with photographs by Jaroslav Poncar, proposed a late twelfth and early-thirteenth-century chronology for the monument that has since been corroborated by subsequent research and additional inscriptional evidence.

Short Biography

Roger Goepper (1925–2011) was a German art historian, director of the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst (Museum of East Asian Art) in Cologne from 1966 to 1990, and Professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Cologne. He studied art history, Sinology, and Japanology, alongside Sanskrit and Tibetan, at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich, under teachers including Max Loehr, Herbert Franke, and Horst Hammitzsch.

During his tenure as director, Goepper led the design and construction of the new museum building at the Aachener Weiher, realised between 1967 and 1977 in collaboration with the Japanese architect Maekawa Kunio. As curator, university professor, translator, and intercultural ambassador, he shaped the European reception of East Asian and Tibetan Buddhist art across the second half of the twentieth century like few others in the field.