Status: This repository is a backup of the original Tibet Research Project website as preserved in the Wayback Machine.
Timeframe: 52 captures, 28 Feb 2021 – 15 Aug 2025.
Purpose: To ensure the long-term availability of the research, reports, and datasets originally published online.
The Tibet Research Project was a volunteer-run human rights initiative dedicated to documenting and locating Tibetan prisons and detention facilities using open source investigation (OSINT).
The project began with a focus on Tibet, before expanding its scope to map prisons and detention centres across all of China. The aim was to provide researchers, journalists, and advocacy organisations with verified geolocated datasets of detention facilities—closing a major gap in existing open-source resources.
- Assign accurate coordinates to every detention centre and prison in Tibet and other Chinese provinces.
- Match known facilities to coordinates and verify locations through geolocation methods.
- Close gaps in published research on detention centres in Tibet and beyond.
- Ensure all research is accessible, transparent, and verifiable via open-source methods.
- Provide a dataset adaptable for future human rights and geospatial research.
- Support the OSINT and investigative journalism community by creating a large-scale open source case study.
- Facilities Analysed: Thousands of possible sites reviewed.
- Confirmed Facilities in Tibet: 80 verified detention facilities.
- Total Area Analysed: ~80 square kilometres of detention-related infrastructure.
- Sources: Publicly available satellite imagery, mapping tools (Google Maps / Google Earth), and open source reports.
The methodology deliberately relied only on open sources, ensuring transparency and reproducibility. The findings were intended as a foundation for further research, not a definitive statement on conditions inside facilities.
The project was coordinated and authored by a volunteer team of OSINT researchers, investigators, and translators. Some contributors chose to remain anonymous.
- Tom Jarvis – Project Coordinator, Author, Researcher
- Robin Taylor – Project Coordinator, Co-author, Researcher
- Josh Ryan – Project Coordinator
- Jenna Dolecek – Author, Editor, Researcher
- Chong XC – Researcher, Co-author, Translator
- Ernest P – Researcher, Translator
- Reece Morris – Researcher
- Basti – Researcher
- Jimothyyy – Researcher
This repository contains the preserved content of the Tibet Research Project website, including:
- Research Reports
- Google Earth / Maps datasets (coordinates of detention facilities)
- Methodology documentation
- Labeled datasets
- Articles, tutorials, and blog posts
- Project team and contributor acknowledgements
- This is an archival backup from the Wayback Machine.
- Some links, interactive maps, or media files may no longer function as intended.
- For the most up-to-date version of the data, users should reference the archived captures on the Wayback Machine.
The original project encouraged contributions from OSINT researchers and volunteers. While this GitHub repository is for archival purposes only, researchers can build upon the datasets and methods documented here.
Content © 2024 Tibet Research Project. This backup is provided for educational and human rights research purposes. Please credit the Tibet Research Project when reusing data or methodology.