Collection of material belonging to the important American missionary Albert Shelton, including two extremely rare photo albums documenting his time in Tibet, circa 1920, and a first-hand account of his own kidnapping surreptitiously hand-written in the margins of a novel.

Tibet was a complicated place in the late 1910s and early 1920s immediately after the Qing Dynasty's collapse, existing in uneasy independence while both the British Raj and the Warlord Era of the fledgling Republic of China loomed on its borders. Uncomplicated though was Kansan Albert Shelton's faith in Jesus, and his conviction that it was his mission to spread the gospel in what was, until then, one of the world's least-visited-by-Westerners regions.

Born in 1875, Shelton was raised in Bourbon County, Kansas, and first traveled to Asia after becoming a missionary to China in 1903. Along with his wife and two daughters, for decades Shelton made his home in the eastern Tibetan town of Batang (today part of the Chinese province of Sichuan), after establishing a mission there in 1908. Trained as a doctor, Shelton utilized his medical skills to ingratiate himself with communities he traveled through on muleback throughout the Himalayan Plateau. He thoroughly recorded his journeys photographically as seen in the album included in this collection, creating a rare and unvarnished portrait of Tibet prior to its annexation by the People's Republic of China.

There area number of the photographs which presumably document the mission and hospital in Batang. In his 2004 biography on Shelton, "Pioneer in Tibet" author Douglas Wissing writes that by the mid-1910s, "The Batang mission grew to be a sprawling walled compound, anchored by the only hospital within 700 miles. It was a bastion of Western ideas in the heart of central Asia." One photo is captioned "Hospital in Batang," and there are numerous other photographs presumably documenting the same compound. Also present are views of soldiers.

Because of the violent skirmishes that took place in the area at the time, Shelton's mission provided medical service to Chinese and Tibetan soldiers, as well as those simply caught in the fray. Another intriguing aspect of the albums are the photographs related to the Dalai Lama and other important Tibetan spiritual leaders: one of the Dalai Lama's summer palace, Norbulingka, and another of his bodyguards, and another identified as "Panchen Lama's mother" a reference to the 9th Panchen Lama. Also present are images of stunning landscapes and architecture, Shelton's friends, and Shelton himself.

In 1920, while traveling with his family, Shelton was kidnapped by a band of brigands who intended to extract a ransom from the American government. Negotiations faltered and Shelton remained a hostage for more than two months. During his captivity, his captors didn't allow him to have paper unsupervised, afraid he would manage to smuggle a letter out. So Shelton secretly recorded a nearly-daily diary of his ordeal the only way he could: by scribbling in the margins of his first-edition copy of the novel "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush" by Scottish minister John Watson, who wrote under the pen name Ian Maclaren. The journal is a remarkable primary document of dangerous real-world adventure, created under the harshest of circumstances.

While Shelton survived the ordeal detailed in the secret journal, returning stateside to a hero's welcome, he was killed by a (presumably) different band of brigands shortly after his return to Asia in 1922. His makeshift journal was published in its entirety by his wife Flora Shelton in her 1923 biography, "Shelton of Tibet" penned shortly after his death.

Overall, an extremely rare and powerful group of primary artifacts documenting the last years of independent Tibet, and Shelton himself.

More images available upon request