Paper drying in Tibetan village near Mt. Everest [Qomolungma] for the first time in many years.

Left:  Trainee from Qomolungma Nature Preserve forming sheets at the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School in Lhasa.  Right: Tsamdol checking printed cards at the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School in Lhasa.

For the last five years I have had the privilege of volunteering to use my experience as a paper historian, educator, photographer and artist to help some of the most wonderful people I have known, in Lhasa, Tibet. There are four of us working as the primary Paper Road/Tibet project members: Tom Leech, artist, marbler, printer and papermaker from Colorado Springs, CO; Carol Brighton, artist and papermaker from Berkeley, CA; Jim Canary, book conservator and Tibetan paper scholar from Bloomington, IN and myself, a curator/art historian specializing in printmaking, papermaking and the book arts. On our most difficult days, we ask ourselves how we ever became so involved. On the good days [most], we wonder how we are so lucky to have this experience. Our involvement and the project have evolved together over the years. The ongoing draw for all of us now is our relationships with our friends in Tibet.

Paper Road/Tibet is a project of the Crossing Over Consortium, Inc., a non-profit organization for the promotion of international education and exchange about the culture of paper, prints and book arts. The Paper Road/Tibet project [PRT] has three main goals:

•     to research the history of papermaking in Tibet

•     to revitalize the tradition of hand papermaking in Tibet

•     to encourage and introduce new methods of recycling clean wastepaper and alternative fibers

The project works in partnership with the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School in Lhasa, a school that houses and educates the orphaned and disabled and provides vocational training in traditional Tibetan crafts. In the summer of 1999, PRT conducted the third training workshop at the school, this time bringing participants from the Qomolungma National Nature Preserve — the area around Mt. Everest and one of the poorest regions of Tibet. After the training workshop was completed, Tom Leech went out to the nature preserve and negotiated agreements among the nature preserve, Rhongbu Monastery and the villages Chosum and PoZum — highest and closest to Rhongbu Monastery and Everest Base Camp, Tibet-side. PRT hopes eventually to make the training programs at the school selfsustaining through the sale of paper and value-added paper products made at the school, thus providing jobs for those working in the workshop at the school and supplemental income for other Tibetans who will sell raw fibers and finished sheets to the school for the production of goods. PRT has financed much of the project through the sale of tee shirts, paper and paper products. We have received grants from the Ambassador’s Fund, Embassy of Canada in Beijing; The Whirlpool Foundation Employee Matching Grant Program; the Cottonwood Foundation; the Threshold Foundation; the Vairocana Nunnery of Taiwan; Pikes Peak Community College; the Everest Environmental Project; an anonymous foundation and many generous individuals.

Tibet is one of the most sensitive and threatened ecosystems in the world. The project originated as a result of Tom Leech’s participation in the Everest Environmental Cleanup project starting in 1990. It was on the Everest project that the recycling of paper trash was first introduced to Tibetans. Tom and I met in 1992 when I invited him to submit an artwork of recycled paper from Qomolungma to Papier Kunst, the Fourth Biennial Paper Exhibition at the Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren, Germany, for which I was a juror. Tom and I decided to take an ongoing idea of mine: collaborative art projects along the Paper Road and adapt it to become a call for environmental concern by introducing the recycling of clean office waste to these sites so important to the migration, transformation and evolution of handmade paper. The PRT project aims to protect the fragile environment of Tibet by introducing the recycling of waste paper and promoting the use of agricultural by-products for making handmade papers. When we learned that hand papermaking had been nearly halted for the last forty years in Tibet, we had to revise our original plan. Gradually we redefined our project from an artistic collaboration among international artists to an international collaboration among traditional arts, environmental concerns and education, all working together to help some of the poorest people in Tibet. After years of working in the arts —considered by most Americans to be of peripheral importance, it feels good to be using the arts to very directly help people solve their basic needs for work and sustenance.

Introducing the concept of recycling at a point when the use of paper is expanding builds on Tibetan traditions of respect and cooperation with their environment and encourages ecologically-sound thinking. Schools in Southern Tibet historically made their own papers from natural fibers: we plan to reintroduce traditions like this; but adding the introduction of recycling waste papers and alternative fibers from agriculture. The combination of and distinction between traditional and recycled papers aims to respect the fragile status of the traditional fibers, their importance to the local culture and the need to utilize the waste created by man’s occupation of the planet.

There are two entities outside Tibet that have been extremely helpful to the project. dZi, the Tibet Collection in Washington, DC assists the project in the development of products and contributes a percentage of dZi’s sales of THI products in the US to the Paper Road/Tibet project. Tibetan Handicraft Industry, Ltd. [THI], in Kathmandu, Nepal is a group of Tibetan craftspeople living in Nepal using lokta papers made in the mountain villages to create value-added products at their factory near Bodinath. THI not only donates a percentage of sales to PRT, but the principals of the company have traveled with PRT project members to Lhasa to teach at the school. PRT works with both the school in Lhasa and with THI in Kathmandu to develop and promote products that traditionally were made of paper such as chulungta, prayer flags for hanging by rivers as well as new products that preserve other Tibetan traditions, such as traditional designs for decorating doorways block printed on paper for folders or book covers.

The Paper Road/Tibet project’s most urgent goal is to capture the historic information and the specific skills of the elderly generation of skilled craftspeople who learned these skills before the dramatic changes in Tibetan society nearly obliterated them. By documenting this valuable information and passing it on to the students, it will be preserved for future Tibetans, and adapted to incorporate current environmental considerations.

Paper Road/Tibet and Tibetan Handicraft Industry in Kathmandu, Nepal are working together to represent traditional hand papermaking in Tibetan Culture Beyond the Land of Snows at the Smithsonian Institution Folklife Festival from June 23-27 and June 30 - July 4, 2000. We and our Tibetan colleagues will be making and drying lokta paper on the mall and are also planning to have Tibetan kite making workshops and a traditional Tibetan kite festival. Plan to join us there next summer. Our THI colleagues will come to the US early and will be teaching a Tibetan papermaking workshop at Pyramid Atlantic the weekend of June 3-4, 2000. Contact Pyramid [301-577-3424] to reserve your place for that workshop.

Originally we had planned to honor other sites along the Paper Road with projects that combine the cultural uses of paper with environmentally appropriate uses of traditional and recycled papers. Each site would have a similar mission to ours in Tibet: to educate, honor and generate respect for places and the indigenous peoples who inhabit those places today and who frequently are living at a subsistence level. The more we get into it, the more we realize it may take more than our lifetimes to finish our work at our first site, Paper Road/Tibet.

Jane M. Farmer
Project Director, Paper Road/Tibet and President, Crossing Over Consortium