剪纸 (Jiǎn Zhǐ)
Chinese paper cutting (剪纸) is the folk art of cutting intricate designs from a single sheet of paper using scissors or a knife, creating negative-space patterns that are applied to windows, walls, and ritual objects for festivals, weddings, and New Year celebrations. UNESCO inscribed Jianzhi on its Representative List in 2009. The tradition has multiple distinct regional schools — Shaanxi and Shanxi are the primary surviving centers of the most complex single-cut traditions, where a practitioner cuts an intricate design from a folded paper stack of 6–12 sheets simultaneously, holding the composition entirely in memory without a drawn template. The procedural knowledge centers on the 'one-cut' memory composition skill and the scissor technique — a rotating motion of the paper (not the scissors) that produces smooth curves in a single continuous cut.
Risk level: Endangered · UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2009)
Tibetan woodblock printing of texts by a two-person hand method: one person inks the carved block, the other applies the paper and rubs.
The bumpa (བུམ་པ) is the ritual offering vessel used in virtually every Tibetan Buddhist ceremony — a vase-form copper or silver vessel filled with consecrated water and often capped with a peacock feather or precious stone stopper.
Tibetan butter sculpture (མར་གཟུགས — Mar Gyus, 'butter form') is the tradition of sculpting yak butter mixed with tsampa barley flour into elaborate ritual offering forms placed on monastery altars.
The Menri (མེན་རི) school is the canonical Lhasa court thangka painting tradition — the most systematized of Tibet's painting lineages, codified by Menthangpa Menla Dhondup in the 15th century and maintained as the official style of the…
Tibetan khaden (ཁ་དེན) carpets are among the most technically distinctive in the world because of the rod pile technique — unique to Tibet among all carpet-weaving traditions.
Tibetan pö sang (སྤོས་བསང) is the tradition of preparing the aromatic incense blends used in Buddhist ritual smoke offerings (sang), daily monastery burning, and traditional Tibetan medicine.
Gifu Wagasa (岐阜和傘) is the traditional Japanese umbrella of Gifu City's Kano district, built from a washi paper canopy pulled taut over 30-70 carved bamboo ribs radiating from a wooden hub (rokuro) atop a bamboo shaft.
A contemporary studio practice by Karine, working as La Dentellière de Carton near Mougins on the French Riviera.
Etching of text and pictures on seasoned palm leaves with a sharp iron stylus, the lines then blackened with lampblack or kohl paste, as practiced in Odisha, above all in Raghurajpur village near Puri.
The construction of ritual paper effigies and paper sculptures over lightweight bamboo or wire frameworks for Chinese funerals, temples, ancestor observances, and traditional festivals in Penang.
Nastaliq is a style of Islamic calligraphy formalized in the 14th century, traditionally credited to the master calligrapher Mir 'Ali Tabrizi, combining elements of two earlier styles, Naskh and Ta'liq ('hanging') — the latter naming the…
A ritual art of Mathura and Vrindavan in which scenes from the life of Krishna are cut by hand with scissors into paper stencils and then made as temporary floor patterns with colored powders, or, in the jal sanjhi form, with colors…