ཀི་ཤུ་ཐར་ར (Kishuthara)
Kishuthara (ཀི་ཤུ་ཐར་ར) is Bhutan's most prestigious silk weaving tradition — produced almost exclusively in Khoma village, Lhuentse District, eastern Bhutan, and constituting one of the finest supplementary weft silk textiles in Asia. The kishuthara uses a back-strap loom (thangtsen) with a supplementary weft float technique producing intricate geometric patterns — the meto kishuthara (flower pattern) and the thema kishuthara (striped pattern) — in silk against a silk warp ground. The defining technical achievement is the patterning density: Khoma weavers achieve supplementary weft floats of 5–7 warps at intervals of 2–3 warp threads, producing a surface where pattern and ground are nearly equal in visual density — a precision requiring individual warp thread selection by touch rather than by counting. The silk ground itself is produced in Khoma from locally reeled raw silk — one of the last village silk reeling traditions in the Himalayas.
Risk level: Endangered · Bhutan national ICH list; Zorig Chusum state designation
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