Charles Bell

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.