Xuela Paper: Plant Fibres, Family Work and a New Generation

In Xuela village, papermaking begins far from a finished book. Roots of the plant known locally as langdu are collected and prepared, then cooked and beaten before the fibres can become pulp. A January 2026 profile of maker Gesang Denzin describes the repeated soaking, beating and drying that shaped his family’s working life.

As a boy, he helped his father and grandfather. He later chose carpentry, attracted by the chance to travel and earn a living beyond the paper workshop. His return to papermaking was a gradual assumption of responsibility for a skill his family continued to practise. A sheet of paper thus carries a history of work as well as the visible texture of its fibres.

The workshop supplies paper for writing, painting and archival uses, but its range has also expanded into notebooks, bookmarks, paper flowers and lanterns. A later 2026 report describes Gesang Denzin’s son helping develop coloured papers and lampshades. The sheet becomes a starting material for objects handled in different ways.

These changes require attention to how paper behaves. A page has to receive a mark; a lampshade has to take a form and work with light. The craft’s familiar preparation stages remain relevant, while the intended object introduces a different set of choices about colour, texture and finish.

In 2016, Gesang Denzin helped establish a cooperative involving village households. He also began experiments in cultivating the plant used for paper, concerned about continued reliance on wild material. The January 2026 report describes the expansion of this cultivation work.

Those trials connect inheritance with the future in a concrete way. Teaching a young maker is only one part of sustaining a craft; access to the material matters too. At Xuela, the workshop, the family and the growing plot belong to the same story. Paper is made through skilled hands, but those hands depend on plants and on the people willing to keep working with them.