Under construction Genla is being built into the foremost learning platform for the ten fields of Tibetan knowledge. About the project
དགེ་ལ་ Genla

Discipline · in Arts

ཤིང་པར་

Woodblock Printing

shing par

The carved block and the printed page: how a text was cut into wood, how the printing houses worked, and Derge, which still prints by hand.

This page is a placeholder. It exists so that the structure does; the text will follow, and will be checked by a teacher of the field before it is called finished.

A Tibetan book was printed from wooden blocks, each carved in mirror-image with two pages of text, inked and pressed onto long strips of paper by hand. The great printing houses, at Narthang, at Lhasa and above all at Derge, founded in 1729 and still printing from well over two hundred thousand blocks, made the canon and the classics available across the plateau.

The pages here will present the carving, the paper, the printing and the houses.