ਥਤੇਰਾ (Thathera, from "that," Punjabi for plate or vessel)
The hand-forging of copper, brass, and kansa (a bronze-like copper-zinc-tin alloy) utensils by the Thathera community of Jandiala Guru, Punjab, in which cooled metal cakes are flattened into thin plates, hammered into curved vessel forms over small wood-fired stoves buried in the earth and worked with hand-held bellows for precise heat control, joined by brazing rather than casting, hand- and foot-polished with sand and tamarind juice, and finally decorated with tiny star-shaped dents skillfully hammered into the heated surface — a craft passed down orally from father to son across ten to twelve generations since a Sikh monarch invited skilled Kashmiri metalworkers to settle here in the 19th century.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · UNESCO Representative List (2014) — Thatheras Brass and Copper Craft
Bandhani (from Sanskrit: bandha = tie) is the resist-dyeing tradition of Gujarat and Rajasthan in which tiny points of fabric are picked up and tightly bound with thread before dyeing, creating a pattern of undyed dots on the dyed ground.
Varak (also waraq) is the Rajasthani craft of beating pure gold or silver into paper-thin leaf and hand-block-printing it onto textiles.
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.
Zardozi is a metallic thread embroidery tradition using real gold and silver wire (zar = gold, dozi = embroidery in Persian) worked onto velvet, silk, or satin ground fabric using a hooked needle (aari) or hand-stitching technique.
The classical method of cooking oil (or ghee) with a herbal paste (kalka) and a liquid medium over gentle, steady heat until set completion signs appear.
Risa and Rignai are the sacred traditional handwoven textiles of the Tripuri (Borok) people, the principal indigenous community of Tripura.
The hand-forging of Korean bronzeware (yugi) from a precisely alloyed copper-tin mixture into tableware, vessels, and — using the identical technique and material — traditional percussion instruments.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nuremberg, master goldsmiths turned rare imported natural specimens — nautilus shells, ostrich eggs, coconuts, rhinoceros horn, coral — into elaborate princely showpieces for the Kunstkammer, the…
The forging of the jambiya, Yemen's iconic curved dagger, and the elaborate silver ornamentation of its sheath, a craft specifically distinguished within the wider regional jambiya tradition by Yemen's long-standing expertise in silver…
The filigree jewelry making tradition of Lugano and the Ticino lake district — the construction of intricate open-work jewelry from twisted wire elements soldered together without any base sheet, a technique brought to Ticino through the…
The Sunar (goldsmith) caste of Patan maintains Nepal's finest continuous gold granulation tradition — unbroken since the Malla period (12th-18th CE).
Edo Bekko (江戸鼈甲) is Tokyo's traditional tortoiseshell craft, worked from the shell of the Taimai (hawksbill sea turtle) — prized for its transparent amber base and dark, irregular mottling, of which only about 10% of a shell's surface…