Malaysia · Wooden Schooner and Cargo Boat Building
Pembuatan Bot Tradisional
Pulau Duyung traditional boat building is a Terengganu wooden shipbuilding tradition centered on Pulau Duyung Besar, Kuala Terengganu, producing sekuci, bedar, and gelibat boats alongside the pinas (also called pinis) — an east-coast Malay Peninsula schooner type. This is distinct from the Perahu Payang fishing-boat tradition already documented in this archive: Pulau Duyung's named masters built larger cargo and schooner vessels rather than fishing craft, and one ran a workshop that trained government-funded apprentices from both federal and Terengganu state agencies. Two named masters anchor the craft's national recognition, appointed Adiguru Kraf in 2006 and 2013 respectively.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not inscribed
The Perahu Payang is the traditional Malay fishing vessel of the Terengganu coast — a double-ended wooden boat with a distinctive high prow and stern, decorated with carved and painted geometric patterns, built entirely by hand using adze…
Kelantan Wayang Kulit is the shadow puppet tradition of the Malaysian East Coast — distinct from Javanese Wayang Kulit (CRAFT-0136) in both puppet form and performance tradition.
The forging of the keris, the wavy or straight-bladed dagger central to Malay cultural identity, made by master blacksmiths known as Empu or pandai besi through repeated cycles of heating, hammering, folding, quenching, tempering, and…
Malaysian Chinese lion head doll making is a self-taught craft tradition producing the ornamented lion heads used in Chinese lion dance performance for Malaysia's Chinese community, distinguished by its named practitioner's use of batik…
Pahang contemporary woodcarving is a Malay woodcarving practice built on the same core technique vocabulary as other Peninsular Malaysian carving traditions — pierced (tebuk tembus), layang, half-pierced (separuh tembus), and fretwork…
Gambus is a plucked, oud-derived stringed instrument central to Johor's traditional Malay music, built by joining and pierced-carving (ukiran tebuk tembus) select hardwoods — sesenduk, seraya, and acacia — into a resonant lute body.
The Greek caique (καΐκι) boat building tradition — the production of the distinctive Greek wooden fishing and cargo boats whose specific double-ended hull form has sailed the Aegean and Mediterranean for over 3,000 years.
The Intha people of Inle Lake maintain two interlocking craft traditions central to their lake-based livelihood: the construction of the flat-bottomed teak dugout canoe (hkwe a-hkwei) adapted for the one-leg rowing technique unique to Inle…
The hand-carving, from a single massive hardwood trunk, of the dory — a dugout boat whose name derives from the West African word duri and which is technically distinguished from the plain hollowed-log canoes of earlier Indigenous…
The carving of single-tree-trunk dugout canoes (kanawa) from the gommier tree (Dacryodes excelsa / Dacryodes hexandra) by Kalinago master builders of Dominica's Kalinago Territory.
A traditional beach-seine fishing technique practiced along the Algarve and central Portuguese coast in which a large net is set from a boat just offshore and then hauled in by teams working from the beach, historically using oxen and now…
The Tao tatala is one of the most extraordinary craft objects in the Pacific — an outrigger fishing canoe assembled from 27 individually carved wooden planks joined without nails or caulking, held together only by wooden pins and the…