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Qinghai

Qinghai · Map

At Ta’er Monastery, butter becomes a temporary sculpture. In the Hehuang valleys, painted clay, embroidery and temple murals hold other kinds of time. Northward, Qinghai Lake is crossed by fish and birds; westward, salt works and telescopes bring two different kinds of work to the Qaidam Basin. Farther south, painters, carvers, herders and river patrols bring the headwaters into view through particular places and tasks. Follow the material, the water or the work: each route opens another Qinghai.

Qinghai
Xining Haidong Haibei Huangnan Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Golog Yushu Haixi

Selected waterways · simplified geography

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From the journal

A Brocade Buddha for Labrang Monastery

A 2008 account describes Wutun artist Tashi and his women students making a 130-by-80-metre patchwork Buddha image for Labrang Monastery’s annual sunning of the Buddha.

1 min readHuangnan
Original editorial diagram, not a photograph or measured plan: A 2008 account reports a 130 × 80 m hillside textile and smaller hanging panels; the shapes are not to scale.
Original editorial diagram, not a photograph or measured plan: A 2008 account reports a 130 × 80 m hillside textile and smaller hanging panels; the shapes are not to scale.

A picture assembled from brocade

Regong barbola, also called guitang in Tibetan, is made by cutting colored brocade into pieces and joining them as a Buddhist image. A 2008 account describes the surface as shallow relief: seams and raised cloth contribute shape as well as color. In Nianduhu, the reporter found the artist Tashi working with a group of women students on brocade images, where the method could be seen in the pieces assembled by hand.

A hillside-sized image

The same account attributes a 130-by-80-metre patchwork image of Shakyamuni Buddha at Labrang Monastery to Tashi. It spread across a hillside for the monastery’s annual event, when a Buddha image is brought out for viewing. The size changes the work’s relationship to cloth: individual pieces form one figure meant to be seen across a slope. The account also notes smaller barbola hung in prayer halls, where a principal Buddha and two smaller figures make a compact composition. These are two scales of one textile form, described in a report from 2008.

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  1. Original editorial diagram, not a photograph or measured plan: A 2008 account reports a 130 × 80 m hillside textile and smaller hanging panels; the shapes are not to scale.© 2026 IFreeing · Rights information Photo source ↗ Proportionally resized and converted to WebP without cropping. No objects were added, removed or reconstructed.