A wooden bowl covered in silver brings two materials into one familiar shape. The heritage record for Tashijicai gold, silver and copper work names a silver-covered wooden bowl among the representative works associated with Lachung, a recognized inheritor of the craft. A 2026 feature from the Tibet culture and tourism department describes a wider workshop tradition: artisans shape gold, silver and copper by hand, and a silver sheet becomes a rounded bowl through thousands of hammer blows. The finished vessel holds a wooden core and a bright metal surface in the same outline.
From the journal
A Wooden Bowl Given a Silver Skin
The silver-covered wooden bowl associated with Tashijicai metalwork brings two materials and two kinds of making into one everyday object.
In the same city · Shigatse ↗Two materials, one familiar form
Learning the sequence of the hammer
The department’s feature says that Lachung graduated from school in 1980 at age eighteen and then learned metalworking from his father. His grandfather and father had both been artisans in Tashijicai, so his training continued a family craft within a neighbourhood of workshops. The article describes a process that moves through preparing a blank, shaping, engraving, soldering, polishing, inlay and gilding. Each stage calls for a different kind of control: the vessel’s form emerges through repeated blows, while the engraved pattern depends on careful lines cut into the metal.
From a monastery workshop to daily life
Tashijicai’s metalworkers once made objects specifically for Tashilhunpo Monastery. The regional feature traces the workshop’s origins to the Seventh Panchen Lama’s period, when artisans brought from Nepal were engaged to produce metal goods for the monastery. After 1959, the workshop’s role broadened; its products came to include household goods for ordinary customers. A silver-covered wooden bowl sits naturally within that transition: it joins a practical vessel form to the refined surface work associated with a craft once closely tied to monastic commissions.
A craft that keeps finding new forms
The feature describes Tashijicai as a hand-making tradition with more than 150 years of history and notes its recognition as national intangible cultural heritage in 2011. It also follows the workshop into the present: artisans and apprentices continue the work, producing both household objects and new souvenir designs. That movement from temple commissions to bowls for daily life and gifts for visitors is part of the craft’s story. The silver-wrapped bowl offers a close view of its central skill—turning worked metal into a surface that changes how an everyday object looks and feels.