China · Paper craft; Ritual objects; Hong Kong heritage
紮作技藝 (Zaat Zok)
The making of three-dimensional paper objects on a bamboo frame, mounted with colored paper or silk and then painted and decorated. Common products are lion and dragon heads for dances, lanterns and paper offerings burned in rituals. The technique is on the first Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Hong Kong (2017).
Risk level: Endangered · Not listed by UNESCO. On the first Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Hong Kong (announced 14 August 2017).
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 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.
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.
A Boshan (Zibo, Shandong) lampworked glass tradition producing spherical glass "flower balls" -- solid or hollow orbs encasing miniature flowers, insects, fish, or other motifs formed from colored glass rods and worked over an open flame.
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.
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.
The conservation of the Heidelberg manuscript collection — centered on the Codex Manesse (c.1300–1340), the largest and most lavishly illuminated medieval German-language manuscript in existence, containing 137 full-page miniature…
The Turkish ebru water marbling tradition — the creation of marbled patterns on paper or other surfaces by floating natural pigments on a gum tragacanth size and manipulating them before transfer to paper, whose specific combination of ox…
The production of papyrus sheets from the pith of the Cyperus papyrus sedge, a technique invented in Egypt around 3000 BCE and used essentially unchanged for roughly 4,000 years until the eleventh century CE, producing the world's first…
The Turkish hat sanatı (calligraphy art) tradition — the Ottoman Islamic calligraphy tradition using the specific reed pen (kamış kalem) cut to the hattat's personal specifications, writing in the six classical scripts (sülüs, nesih,…
The Frankfurt bookbinding tradition — specifically the historical binding structures (Coptic bindings, medieval Romanesque bindings, early printed book bindings) maintained as a heritage craft in the context of the Frankfurt Buchmesse…
A colorful illuminated folk-art tradition combining an angular German blackletter script with hand-painted watercolor motifs — tulips, birds, hearts, and scrolls — used by Pennsylvania Germans primarily to create and decorate birth and…