In a 2023 report from Waichong Village, Bolo Township, the woodblock carver Zepei is introduced as a ninth-generation practitioner. He began learning at twelve. The craft is not simply the transfer of a picture onto a board: the article stresses that a carver must understand Tibetan script, because every character has to match its model. A line cut too heavily or a stroke set at the wrong angle changes the printed letter.
From the journal
A Letter Cut in Birch: Bolo’s Tibetan Woodblock Craft
In Waichong Village, woodblock carver Zepei describes a craft learned from childhood and carried into a workshop with younger apprentices. The work joins careful material preparation to the exacting demands of Tibetan calligraphy.
In the same city · Chamdo ↗Learning to read a letter in wood
Preparing a board before the cut
The reported process begins with choosing red birch, then preparing and strengthening the wood. The source counts more than ten stages, including cutting and oil drying, before carving begins. These steps make the block a working surface that must hold fine marks through repeated pressure. The account gives no recipe for the oil or technical measurements, so the useful detail is the sequence itself: the carver’s precision depends on work done before the knife reaches the face of the board.
A workshop that makes room for apprentices
The 2023 report describes Zepei working with younger apprentices in a workshop and connecting the practice to a company that could take orders. This is a modern setting for a craft rooted in household transmission. It allows a reader to see continuity as work rather than as a label: a master demonstrates, a learner watches the relation between script and cut, and finished blocks can move beyond the village. Figures about orders and income in the report belong to that year and should be read as a dated snapshot, not a measure of the craft today.
What the block preserves
A carved block holds two kinds of knowledge at once. Its surface records the carver’s control of a tool; its mirrored characters preserve a written form for printing. Zepei’s reported insistence on matching a template makes the relationship between calligraphy and carving especially clear. The block is not an illustration added after the words. It is the means by which the words become reproducible. In Bolo, the account of one practitioner and his apprentices offers a close view of how a regional craft can adapt its workshop while keeping the demands of the written character at its center.