The Star Towers of the Himalayas

Tuesday February 24, 2026 conference by Frédérique Darragon, Independent Researcher. at 5:30 PM, at Maison de l’Asie, 22 avenue du président Wilson, 75016 PARIS.

In 1997, while traveling by bus through Danba, Sichuan, Frédérique Darragon first saw strange, star-shaped stone towers. Later, in Kongpo, other similar towers caught her eye. She quickly realized that the locals knew nothing about these structures and that they dynamited them to reuse the stones. Surprisingly, virtually nothing had been published about these towers, either in China or in the West. In 1998, she decided to discover when they had been built, by whom, and why…This presentation will attempt, in fifty minutes, to summarize her twenty-eight years of research on this subject. Frédérique Darragon bought a house in Danba, met her partner Gyalrong, and spent years exploring the mountains to locate hundreds of towers. Eighty of them have been carbon-dated. She created a foundation and an institute to preserve local cultures and has been a visiting professor at Sichuan University. With her students, she oversaw the cataloging of mentions of the towers in Chinese annals. But above all, thanks to a book and a documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K73i4dxiAUE) and photo exhibitions (among others, in 2004, at the United Nations in New York) the natives regained their pride by realizing that they were the descendants of exceptional builders and the Chinese government, understanding the importance of these towers, protected them.