Wooden Bowls: Traditional Handicraft

"Taking my honey, I feel shy,
But lonely and worried if not.
She were my wooden bowl,
I shall take her in my bosom."

---An old Tibetan folk song

This is a Tibetan folk song, reflecting the importance of wooden bowls to the Tibetans.

Once as a daily necessity of the Tibetans, wooden bowls are a kind of traditional handicrafts of the Monba, an ethnic minority on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in southwest China.

Due to geographic and historical reasons, the productive forces of the Monba have always grown at a low speed.

Living in an area with rich wood and bamboo resources, the Monbas are good at basketry and making woody crafts. Most of their tools for production are made of wood. In particular, their traditional wooden bowl crafts are reputed for exquisite workmanship and beautiful meaning on the plateau, in China and even in the world at large. It loved by many people travel to Tibet.

For a Tibetans, a wooden bowl is as precious as his or her lover. A Tibetan man always likens his sweetheart as wooden bowl, wishing to take her in his bosom wherever he goes.

Today, old people are still used to have only one wooden bowl,  but as the living standard is rising and times is changing, young people usually buy new bowls every year to replace the old ones. The 'one wooden bowl for one life' tradition no longer exisits.

There is a legend about the wooden bowls. Long ago, The Tibetans were accustomed to use bowls made of earth. One day, a Monban carpenter broke his bowl when he was cutting woods in the forest. The clever Monba made himself a wooden spoon to replace. Later, finding that wooden spoons are more portable, people began to make wooden bowls.

The Monban wooden bowls are usually in red-orange with covers and made of paulownia wood, mulberry wood and birch wood.