ยกทอง (Yok Thong)
Complex supplementary weft brocade silk weaving producing interlocking geometric and floral patterns on a plain silk ground. Seven Surin provincial patterns officially designated as cultural symbols. Practiced at Ban Tha Sawang village, Surin Province, where Khmer weaving heritage survives. Fewer than 20 masters capable of full traditional technique.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not Listed
Thai bodywork in which practitioners use hands, elbows, knees and feet to work along the sen — lines understood to cross the body — aiming to rebalance body and energy and the four elements.
Making of herbal compresses — chopped fresh or dried plai, turmeric, lemongrass, kaffir lime, tamarind and camphor, sometimes with salt — bundled tightly in cotton or muslin, steamed and pressed and rolled over the body, often as part of…
Carving and piercing of large dried buffalo hide panels (1-2m tall) to create the silhouette figures used in Nang Yai shadow theater.
Carving and assembly of smaller (50-80cm), articulated leather shadow puppets for southern Thai Nang Talung shadow theater.
The hand-built, wheel-free earthenware tradition of Ban Chiang, Udon Thani Province — one of Southeast Asia's most significant prehistoric ceramic traditions, spanning a documented sequence from black cord-marked and incised ware dating to…
The hand-carving of ordinary bars of natural soap into delicate, lifelike flowers using only a few small knives — a technique that developed directly out of Thailand's much older tradition of fruit and vegetable carving, itself more than…
Bespoke songkok making: a shaped paper or cardboard inner frame is covered with fitted velvet or other cloth, lined, machine-stitched and finished by hand, each cap adjusted to the wearer's head.
The cutting and sewing of made-to-measure shirts, trousers and suits in Singapore by family-run shophouse tailors, a trade built by Chinese migrant tailors from the 1880s.
The making of mastate, a non-woven cloth beaten by hand from the soaked inner bark of milky-sapped forest trees, harvested by Bribri and Cábecar communities of the remote Talamanca mountains specifically during the full moon, and used both…
A regionally varied hand-sewn rag doll tradition practiced across Venezuela, most strongly associated with Anzoátegui and Sucre states in the country's east, with a historically and culturally distinct Afro-Venezuelan branch — the muñeca…
Mata ni Pachedi (Gujarati: 'cloth behind the mother goddess') is a hand-drawn and block-printed narrative textile tradition of the Vaghari community of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
The hand-weaving and tailoring of the bisht, a rectangular, open-fronted cloak that began as a traveler's garment offering warmth and protection before becoming the most prestigious garment in the Arabian world, a mark of formality and…