Inside the Potala Palace in Lhasa, a small group of people work on some of the most treasured objects in Tibetan art: the thangkas. They are the restorers, the ones who clean and mend a scroll that has dulled or torn. A documentary about the restorers of the Forbidden City brought this kind of working life to public attention: one person, in a closed room, giving a whole life to a single craft. The thangka restorers of the Potala belong to the same tradition.
What a Thangka Is
The word carries its own definition. Tang means infinite space and time; ka means the instant that fills infinite space and time. A thangka — also written tangka or tangkha, a transliteration from Tibetan — is a kind of painting that arose in the time of Songtsen Gampo. It is a scroll painting mounted in coloured silk, with a strong religious character and a style found nowhere else. Tibetans have long held it a treasure.
A thangka painting is made in many kinds and materials. Most are painted on cloth or on paper. Others are textile thangkas — embroidered, woven as brocade, worked in kesi silk tapestry, or appliquéd — and some have pearls, agate and gemstones sewn into the flowered patterns with gold thread, so that stone and silk lie joined in a single surface. Even after several hundred years the colours stay bright and vivid. That is why a thangka is counted a fine treasure of Chinese national painting, and an intangible cultural heritage of the highest value.
The subjects run across Tibetan history, politics, culture and social life. Most surviving thangkas are Buddhist or Bon works. The most common subject of all is the religious image: the figure of a buddha.
Painted in Stone and Gold
Drawing a thangka is hard work, and the materials are exacting. The pigment is entirely natural — ground from mineral and plant — so the colour is rich and lasting, and the finished scroll carries the look of the snow region. The composition is firm: balanced, full, varied, never slack. The two techniques at its base are fine-brush heavy colour and plain line drawing, and most thangkas are drawn on cloth or on paper.
The work follows a fixed order: preparing the canvas, laying out and drawing the figures, laying on colour, inking the lines, gilding, and consecrating the finished image. A simple thangka takes ten to a few tens of days. A complex one takes months, or decades.
How a Thangka Is Made
It begins with the ground. A smooth, slightly thick white cotton cloth is chosen and stretched tight onto a frame.
The cloth is then whitened, the white mixed with ox glue, and after the coat dries the thickness is checked, because the surface the painter will work on depends on it.
Grinding the canvas is done in two passes, coarse and fine. The painter works from top to bottom and from left to right, and lets the cloth dry between each pass.
Then the drawing is inked in and fixed. The lines must follow the strict measurement standards, to the smallest part — nothing off.
The pigment is traditional and precious. Gold, silver, pearl, agate, coral, turquoise, malachite and cinnabar are used among the minerals, and saffron, rhubarb and indigo among the plants. These are chosen to mark the image as sacred.
The painter lays the colour on in order. The large areas of clothing and ornament first, then the sky, the still objects and the ground. The face is left until the very end.
Outlining is the most important step of all. With a fine, sharp tip the painter goes back over the draft that the colour has covered and draws the lines again.
Gilding comes last. Gold powder is mixed with glue, and once it dries the gold lines hold their colour for years, so the finished thangka reads as rich with gold.
What the Painter Learns First
To learn thangka is not easy, and the study does not begin with the brush.
First comes memorising scripture. This is not the chanting of a monk in a temple; the text has to be engraved in the heart. Each morning the student commits one or two chapters, and across a year that comes to four or five hundred.
Then comes transmission — the passing on of the great Buddhist canon from teacher to student. From here the painter works under strict tradition, much of it fixed when thangka first began: the measure of a figure, the proportions of every part of the body; the hand gestures; the objects the figure holds. Each buddha has his own marks, and a painter who gets one detail wrong has not drawn that buddha. This is why the canon of proportion is a path a thangka painter cannot skip.
A Practice, Not a Painting
Here the real nature of a thangka shows. It is not, at bottom, a painting. It is a form of Buddhist practice — a way of understanding the teaching through the act of drawing it.
For Tibetans, every thangka is a sacred embodiment of a buddha or a bodhisattva, and a painter who does not understand the dharma cannot paint one. The painter's years of study run alongside chanting, meditation and practice; many who have retired from the work spend their days circling the temple, reciting, prostrating, and wiping the butter lamps. In Tibetan Buddhism each buddha has a mandala the way each person has a soul, and only a full inner life can take joy in it. The Tibetan poet Tsangyang Gyatso left the thought in a line: the little black words I write are washed away by water, but the inner picture I paint can never be wiped out.
Where to Go From Here
A thangka is one of the images Tibetans keep closest. Our thangka painting collection gathers hand-painted scrolls made in the same mineral pigment and gold. Where a thangka is kept as a shrine at home, the ghau box is its worn form — a small shrine carried against the chest. The same gemstones set into a thangka's silk also sit in Tibetan jewelry, where the images of the tradition become something a person puts on.