Tibetan religious art is made by hand, to rules, by people who train for years. Lhasa and its surroundings still have workshops producing thangka paintings, carpets, metal statues, butter lamps and carved wood, and several of them accept visitors who want to watch or to buy directly.
Thangka painting
A thangka is a religious painting on cotton or silk, mounted in brocade, made to be rolled up and carried. Traditional thangkas use mineral and organic pigments - malachite for green, cinnabar for red, lapis lazuli for blue, gold for highlights - bound with animal glue and applied to a prepared cloth ground. The composition and the iconography follow strict rules: the proportions of a deity, the arrangement of the figures, the number of arms and the objects held are all prescribed. A painter can spend months on a large piece, and the gold outlining is applied last. Some studios inLhasa accept visitors, and a small painted thangka bought directly from a workshop is both a genuine object and reasonable value.
Carpets and textiles
Tibetan carpets - known abroad as Tibetan wool rugs - are hand-knotted from highland sheep wool, with patterns usually based on the tiger, the lotus, the endless knot or the snow lion. Lhasa has a long-established carpet factory where the whole process, from wool sorting and dyeing to knotting and washing, can be walked through. Wool and yak-hair textiles are also sold as blankets and bags.
Metalwork and everyday objects
Workshops in the old town produce brass and copper butter lamps, tea pots, prayer wheels, bells and dorje sceptres, often by casting and then hand-chasing the surface. Prayer flags, printed with woodblocks on cotton, are cheap and sold in bundles. Beads are everywhere, and the material matters: some are bone, some are wood, some are agate, and the expensive ones should come with an honest explanation.
Buying sensibly
Ask what the piece is made of, ask who made it and how long it took, and ask whether the pigments are mineral or acrylic. In the Barkhor, prices are negotiable but not dramatically so in the shops; in the surrounding lanes there is more room to bargain. Genuine antiques and religious objects taken from monasteries cannot be exported, and Tibetan religious items are subject to specific rules - if a dealer offers something that looks old and sacred, treat it with caution.
