The appliqued embroidery

Duisui embroidery is a sort of Tangka that is a kind of scroll painting mounted on silk. It has distinctive ethnic features and a strong religious flavor. Ta’er Lamasery is famous for its Tangka of unique artistic style.

Most Tangkas are painted on cloth, silk or paper, but there are also Tangkas of embroidery, brocade and applique. Embroidery Tangka is done with silk thread of different colors, depicting landscapes, figures, flowers, feathers, pavilions and towers. Brocade Tangkas are woven on jacquard looms, with warp-and-weft patterns. Applique Tangkas are made by pasting figures and patterns of colored silk on a background material; and kesi Tangkas are like relief sculpture, with a three-dimensional effect, something like a special handicraft combining the art of painting with silk weaving. These fabric Tangkas have compact compositions, fine patterns and bright colors. They are of close texture and very decorative. Some Tangkas are inlaid with pearls and precious stones. At first, most fabrics used for making Tangkas were made in the interior. Later, Tibet developed embroidery and applique Tangkas. There are also Tangkas made from woodblock prints, the working procedures including painting the original design, engraving the block, printing, color application and mounting.

Tangkas depict a wide range of themes taken from Tibetan history, social life, folk customs, astronomy, the calendar and traditional Tibetan medicine. Using paintings to reflect history is a remarkable characteristic of Tangkas. Tangkas depicting the general history of Tibet are composed of scenes of important events at various stages of Tibetan history, together with captions. Tangkas depicting dynastic history portray scenes of historical periods, reflecting relevant historical events. There is another kind of Tangkas portraying the life stories of certain personages (including religious figures). Ta’er Lamasery houses a Tangka of an atlas of celestial bodies. Each planet is in the form of an animal, symbolizing one of the 12 heavenly bodies moving in its own orbit. It is an important cultural relic for the study of ancient astronomy and the Tibetan calendar. Norbu Lingka houses a complete set of medical Tangkas, totaling 62 paintings and showing medical principles, the structure of the human body, acupoints on the channels and collaterals of the body, medical apparatus and pharmaceuticals. In the 17th century, during the reign of Sanggyai Gyaco, famous painters from various parts of Tibet were summoned to make a complete set of Tangkas illustrating the corpus of Tibetan medicine.

The content of Thangka has various subject matters such as historical incident, personage biographies, religion doctrines, Tibetan natural conditions and social customs, folklores, mythical stories etc. involving politic, economic, history, religion, literature and art, social life and many other respects. So Thangka is praised as a visual encyclopedia.

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