Suppose we are given a pair of marked closed Riemann surfaces S, T with the
same genus. We minimize the modified Dirichlet integral for mappings of S
onto T, which is endowed with some weight in terms of conformal metric on t
he target surface T. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the minimal har
monic map exists, and it proves to be Teichmuller. (C) 1998 Academic Press.