Tibetan farmers get rich by inheriting crafts tradition

Dawa, a Tibetan farmer, is in the midst of celebrating the Tibetan New Year and is making preparations to return to Lhasa, where he will rent a booth, and make of it a display in order to sell bronze works that their cooperative has made, thereby allowing more people to get wealthy.

Dawa is the head of the Bronze Processing Cooperatives in the Tuoga village of the Gangdoi Town in Konggar County of the Lhoka Cityof Tibet. Since the establishment of the cooperatives, they integrated resources, promoted the employment for more than ten poor households, and the Tuoga village per capita income has increased from less than 2,000 yuan (a few years ago) to the current growth reaching more than ten thousand yuan.

In recent years, organizations from different places in Tibet have been encouraging the local people to inherit and develop the traditional ethnic craftsmanship as a breakthrough approach, thereby promoting employment opportunities for surplus laborers found in the agricultural and pastoral areas, and all in all this is increasing cash income.

The 25-year-old Sangluo from the Tuoga village has become a “master craftswomen” within the cooperatives.

Before participating in the cooperatives, their family had quite a hard time earning a decent living. Today, she has a monthly average income of four or five thousand yuan, and has had a very successful year in the past year.

The day before theTibetan New Year's Eve, in Lhasa, Shigatse as well as in other cities, farmers and herdsmen from the Kangxung Township of Rinbung County were very active along the streets and alleys, selling Tibetan New Year essential offerings that every Tibetan family needs, that is, butter sculptures. Relying on this handcraft skill, more and more poor households in the Kangxung Town have been tossing at last away their "hats of poverty."

Butter sculptures are considered to be a pearl amongst world of skills found pertaining to traditional Tibetan handicrafts. Craftsmen firstly will pour into the butter many different kinds of colored mineral pigments, which makes up the material for butter sculpturing, then they will mold them by hands into different types of portrayals of Buddhist statues, figures, flowers, plants, birds and animals. In order to prevent the butter from melting, artists often need to put their hands into ice water to cool down during the production process.

In the Kangxung Township, the elderly artist named Basang is the most skillful at this. In order to encourage more young people to continue and further develop the butter sculpture production techniques, since 2008 the Kangxung Township has been organizing training courses regarding butter sculpture production skills, having applied for an amount surpassing 1 million yuan to fund training (of butter sculpturing) and also to support the poor, therein training nearly a thousand people.

Wang La, the Kangxung Party Secretary indicated that, on the occasion of the Tibetan New Year and major religious activities, every household needs to have butter sculptures to do offerings, "If more people in the township grasp the unique skills that the elderly man Basang has, then there will be more opportunities to increase the income of local people."

During the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, Tibet has identified 25 autonomous-region-level leading enterprises and cooperatives of farmers and herdsmen in the regard of poverty alleviation and has trained 32 leading enterprises, farmers as well as herdsmen to create specialized cooperation teams, amongst which are “the Tibetan-style professional furniture cooperative in the Nainying Township of Kangmar County of the ShigatseCity”, “the bug carving farmer cooperative in the county of Chanang", and " the professional ethnic handmade serge weaving cooperative of Nedog County" etc.; these cooperatives have been helping farmers and herdsmen by playing an important role in poverty alleviation.