India · Paper Cutting / Ritual Art
सांझी (sanjhi)
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 floated on water. The tradition belongs to the temple culture of Vrindavan.
Risk level: Endangered · Not inscribed
The Konyak Naga of Mon district are the last living community in the world where tattooed headhunters are still alive (in great old age, 80s–90s) — men who earned their facial tattoos and their most prestigious shawls through headhunting,…
Kerala coir weaving is a large-scale handloom cottage industry tradition using the fiber extracted from coconut husk (coir) to produce woven mats, rugs, and matting.
Sawantwadi is a royal town in Sindhudurg District, Maharashtra, with a lacquered wood toy tradition patronized by the Bhonsle kings of Sawantwadi.
Kalamkari (Persian: kalam = pen; kari = work) is a hand-drawn and naturally dyed textile painting tradition practiced in two distinct centers in Andhra Pradesh: Srikalahasti (pen tradition) and Machilipatnam (block-print tradition).
The Aranmula Kannadi is a front-surface metal alloy mirror produced exclusively in Aranmula village, Kerala, using a secret alloy composition known only to a small number of Vishwakarma craftsman families.
Leheriya is a diagonal-stripe resist-dyeing technique unique to Rajasthan, in which fabric is tightly rolled around a pole on the diagonal before immersion in dye to produce chevron or wave patterns.
The hand-forming of washi paper in Mino, Gifu Prefecture, along a 1,300-year tradition traced to a surviving 702 CE household register document, still preserved in Nara's Shosoin Repository, made from paper mulberry (kozo) fiber grown…
The Irish bookbinding tradition — the production of the hand-bound books in the Irish heritage style drawing on the Celtic interlace and knotwork vocabulary inspired by the Irish monastic illuminated manuscripts (Book of Kells, Book of…
Handmade paper produced from the inner bark of the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera — saa tree) using a fixed-frame floating sheet formation technique.
Huimò (徽墨) — Huizhou ink stick — is one of the Four Treasures of the Chinese Scholar's Studio (文房四宝 wénfáng sìbǎo), produced in Shexian County, Anhui, for over 1,000 years.
The making of rag paper (papier chiffon) in the Charente mills — a tradition that made Angoulême the center of French paper production for three centuries and supplied the Paris publishing and printing industry.
The Luzhou oil paper umbrella (泸州油纸伞) is a fully functional waterproof umbrella constructed from bamboo ribs, hand-made xuan paper, and tung oil — without a single nail or screw, held together entirely by silk thread lashing and the…