Nepal · Weaving / Textile / Paper Dyeing
गुरुङ बुनाइ (Gurung Bunai)
The Gurung people of Lamjung and Gorkha districts in central Nepal maintain a distinctive double tradition: a wool and cotton pattern weaving tradition and a lokta paper dyeing practice used for ceremonial packaging and religious offerings. The Gurung weaving is notable for its continuous warp float technique — warp threads (not weft) are selectively floated over groups of weft threads to produce the pattern. This warp float system is the inverse of most supplementary weave traditions in the database where the weft floats over the warp. The Gurung lokta paper dyeing uses natural plant dyes applied by resist-block printing using carved potato sections — the potato block absorbs the dye and transfers it to the lokta surface more consistently than a solid wood block because the potato's moisture maintains the dye flow during printing.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Nepal national ICH list
The extraction, spinning, and weaving of fiber from the Himalayan giant nettle (Girardinia diversifolia), locally called allo, into cloth, cordage, and functional objects — a wild-harvested fiber tradition distinct in raw material and…
The forging of the khukuri (kukri) — Nepal's iconic curved single-edged blade, internationally recognized through its association with Gurkha soldiers and, per Nepali blacksmiths themselves, described as the world's most famous knife.
Mithila painting is the women's ritual painting tradition of the Mithila cultural region straddling the Nepal-India border (Janakpur, Nepal and Madhubani, Bihar, India).
The Prajapati caste of Thimi (near Bhaktapur) produces Nepal's primary terracotta festival masks for Indra Jatra using press-molding into carved wooden molds — a Nau-Prajapati inter-caste collaboration (Nau carvers the mold, Prajapati…
Nau is the hereditary Newar carpenter-carver tradition producing the elaborate architectural wood carving of Kathmandu Valley temples — the peacock window of Bhaktapur, erotic temple struts, and the torana (door pediments).
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Kotpad handloom is a cotton handloom weaving tradition from Kotpad block, Koraput district, Odisha — on the Chhattisgarh border — practiced by the Mirgan community for the Bondo, Kondh, and Gadaba tribal communities.
Batik Cap is the stamp-printed variant of Indonesian batik, using hand-made copper stamps (cap) to apply wax to cloth in a repeated pattern, replacing the freehand canting of Batik Tulis.
Fine hand block printing of Sanganer, south of Jaipur, in which the Chhipa community stamps delicate floral and geometric repeats (buta, buti, jaal, bel) on white or cream cotton and muslin with small teak or sheesham blocks, one color…