Introduction
Tibet has only been open to foreigners since 1985. On my first visit in May 1986 I reached Lhasa by hitch-hiking in on trucks from the north. Surprisingly, in the thirteen years since, no serious books have been written on the subject of Tibetan carpet weaving.
Weavers who can remember before 1959 are now very old and have poor eye sight. There has been however, a certain amount of knowledge concerning weaving passed down to the next generation.
Though the original books on this subject give no clue to the origins of weaving in Tibet or the meaning of many of the designs, in general their information is very comprehensive considering their authors did not have access to the plateau itself.
However more recently some speculative articles have been written which come to questionable conclusions. It is towards correcting these misconceptions that I have directed my research. Modern Day Tibet
Standing in the market place of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, or watching pilgrims walk around the main temple, one is immediately struck by the incredible diversity of people's features.
For thousands of years, nomads tending herds of yaks and sheep have lived on the high pastures while farming communities occupied the fertile valleys. When Peter Aufschneiter unearthed pottery from graves many thousands of years old during his stay in Lhasa during the 1940s, he showed conclusively that the region has had a relatively settled population for longer than many authorities had thought.
The Origins of the Tibetan People
The Chinese oracle bone inscriptions of the Hsia Dynasty (2205 - 1766 BC), show the pictogram for the Ch'iang people as a combination of the characters for sheep and man. From this it can be assumed they were nomadic sheep herders. Ch'iang people are mentioned later in Chinese records as living in present-day northwest China and on the eastern edge of the silk route during classical antiquity.
Opposite:
19th century flat-woven
"Nambu" with tye-dyed
design for use as
monastery seating.
These people reportedly paid tribute to the court of Chang'an in the form of flat woven wool cloth. This wool cloth or nambu is usually dyed using the plunging (or pulo) bunching and binding technique (see image left). Examples can be seen on the banners, gowns and seat-pads of the 11th century wall murals of the Tibetan monastery in Alchi Ladakh (see image below). Later pieces have block printed crosses and chemical colours which are easy to distinguish from these earlier examples. The pulo-dyed nambu is one of the oldest examples of Tibetan weaving.
