During my first extended research trip (ten months in 1984ñ85), I was narrowly focused on paper technology and had scant understanding of Nepal's or Thailand's history. By that time, the great disruptions to the papermaking traditions were already twenty to thirty years in the past. Fortunately, I was able to return several times to Nepal and Thailand, deepening my understanding of their cultural histories with each visit. More recently, I traveled to Tibet and Dharamsala, once each on separate trips. Only later, piecing the separate stories together, did I begin to see the larger pattern. Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, trade flowed freely over the Himalayas between Tibet and Nepal. In 1959, the Chinese crackdown sparked the Lhasa Uprising, forcing the Dalai Lama along with many of his followers to flee to Dharamsala, in northern India, where he established the Tibetan Government in Exile. Before the borders closed, Nepalese paper had moved north in exchange for Tibetan wool and salt. A Tibetan friend recalls seeing papermakers working beside the Lhasa River. He bought large sheets of paper from them which he prepared with calligraphy for his year-end exams. The paper would have been made from the roots of Wikstroemia (or Stellera) chamaejasme, a medicinal plant with poisonous properties. Paper was also made in the wetter regions of eastern Tibet from daphne and other fibers. In the drier region of western Tibet, where few papermaking plants grow, Nepalese paper was imported, mostly by monasteries, my friend thinks, to be used for prayer books. Government and ceremonial documents were also printed on Tibetan paper. After the Chinese invasion, with the overthrow of the Tibetan government and the persecution of the monasteries, the need for traditional Tibetan paper was drastically diminished. much of their market. They could still sell paper to middlemen who moved it from rural villages into Kathmandu, taking a large cut of the profits. On my first visit in 1984, Nepalese papermaking was in the early stages of a revival, aided largely by two international projects with very different approaches. Traditionally, rural farmers grew rice in the summer and made daphne, or lokta, paper in the winter. In 1981, UNICEF introduced slight changes to traditional village technology in western Nepal, hoping to improve the paper's quality. The UNICEF cooperative bought village paper and brought it to their factory in Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley, where single mothers and handicapped men were employed making it into cards, stationary, and other paper products for the international market. UNICEF's paper project was a means to increase the farmer/papermakers' income by cutting out the middlemen and creating new markets. They hoped the profits would trickle down in the form of better nutrition and education for the papermakers' children. In the mid-1980s, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) took a more entrepreneurial approach, bringing Nepalese businessmen and business-minded papermakers to the JICA center in Kathmandu where they were trained in Japanese techniques. The Japanese technology required higher start-up and material costs which in turn required year-round papermaking operations, a radical break from the tradition of farmer/papermakers. Over the next decade, new factories opened around Kathmandu, some founded by JICA trainees, some by ex-UNICEF employees. They used combinations of Japanese and Nepalese technology. Papermaking fibers included traditional lokta, and alternatives such as banana, cotton rags, and waste paper. Cut properly, lokta regenerates; cut unsustainably, it does not. The government introduced standards for harvesting lokta in an attempt to prevent deforestation. Each successive trip between 1988 and 1998, I saw a greater variety of paper products for sale, each with a card extolling its traditional technology and commitment to the environment, even when the products were entirely non-traditional and environmentally unfriendly. Paper and paper products ranged in overall quality and design from excellent to mediocre to dreadful. Unfortunately, tourists seem to find bad paper and poorly designed products folksy. I do not know how much lokta was cut when Tibet was a main market for Nepalese paper. I would guess that more is being cut now. Tibetans sought long-lasting lokta paper of good quality when the borders to Nepal were open. Now, novelty products and eyecatching disposability are ascendant. Although, the Chinese occupation of Tibet was the original threat to traditional Nepalese paper, the international marketing of Nepalese paper products is the current threat. One hopes that fair trade, good design, and environmental conservation will become the rule. In Thailand too, there was a spate of poorly produced handmade paper products for the tourist and international trade. In 1985, searching for good Thai paper, I came upon Ban Mai Mok Jam, a village north of Chiang Mai. The village, I discovered, was actually Burmese. It had been founded in 1966 by Shan people, an ethnic group of Theravada Buddhists, fleeing across the border from General Ne Win's 1962 "bloodless" coup. Ne Win, a Marxist- Stalinist, nullified an agreement promising Shan independence, killed off most of the Shan royalty, and sank Burma into poverty. The village, which began as little more than a Shan army camp, had evolved into a gracious palm-thatched community. It was not paradiseóthe opium bandits in the forests made the surrounding jungle unsafeóbut almost, and the paper I found there was excellent and traditional. The most knowledgeable papermaker, Chanda Photi, learned to make paper north of his home village. After fleeing Burma, he and his wife continued making Shan paper using hand-beaten bast fiber from large mulberry trees. After seeing his paper, the Thai royal couple invited Chanda Photi to teach others. On my first trip, This paper is made for sale to the international market using Nepalese technology with lokta plus alternative fibers and non-traditional inclusions. The factory was started by a trainee from JICA, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. Chanda Photi's wife demonstrates how to heat a large mulberry branch, called sa by the Shan people, to make it easier to strip the bark. This is usually done in the forest by Akha people from whom the papermakers buy the prepared bark. 40 - hand papermaking about twelve families were making paper in Ban Mai Mok Jam, but Chanda Photi was the only one making two-ply paper for accordion books for Buddhist writings. On subsequent trips, I noted that Chanda Photi's daughter, Kong Bodhi, was the only one still actively making paper. She was using a hard-to-calibrate Taiwanese Hollander and cooking with lye instead of wood ash. The paper was strong but knotty, and grayer, lacking the inner light of the earlier hand-beaten paper. Chanda Photi himself was making only enough paper to complete a large book of Buddhist scriptures for the queen. It is not impossible that Shan people continue to make paper inside Burma (now renamed Myanmar), but it is unlikely. Given Burma's recent years of upheaval, Ban Mai Mok Jam may be the last island of Shan papermaking. Kong Bodhi told me she would make paper as long as she had the strength but Shan paper will likely end or has ended with her. By the time Jane Farmer had her vision for Paper Road/Tibet, traditional Tibetan paper was close to extinction. In 1996, I joined the Paper Road/Tibet team in Lhasa, teaching papermaking at the Handicraft School for Tibetan Handicapped. By then, we were very aware of the larger political situation. Since the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Tibetan language, culture, and religion have been under attack. Though paper had a long history in Tibet, it had not been part of the school's curriculum. Paper Road/Tibet hoped to train the students to make non-traditional recycled paper, and to expose them to a few surviving craftsmen who continued to make traditional paper. We brought to the school one old man from Nyemo, west of Lhasa, who had never stopped making paper during the long years of the Cultural Revolution. We also introduced a group from eastern Tibet that was reviving hand papermaking after the craft had been largely wiped out. Our hope was that recycled paper would be used for ephemeral items, while traditional paper would be employed for more long-lasting uses such as printed prayer books. At present, the students continue making recycled paper for various products. Jane Farmer notes that they are also painting beautiful mandalas on paper made at the school or by Tibetan Handicraft Industry, a producer of lokta paper in Kathmandu. Specialized traditional Tibetan paper, however, is severely at risk. In Lhasa, we visited an artist who made ting shog, blue-black paper he hand-burnished as a substrate for gold calligraphy. At his home, he unfolded an enormous sheet of Tibetan paper, made at least sixty years before, that stretched to 4 x 8 feet. The likelihood of that paper being made now or ting shog continuing is slim to nil. Within Sinicized Tibet, Tibetans struggle to keep their language and culture alive, but pursuit of anything traditionally Tibetan is difficult to impossible. Any spark, such as the painted mandalas, is a small miracle. After witnessing the diminished state of papermaking within Tibet, I wanted to see the Tibetan paper project in Dharamsala, India. In 2003, I volunteered with the paper and book project of the Tibetan Welfare Office (TWO) for six weeks. Founded in 1994, TWO looks after the social welfare of Tibetans in Dharamsala. TWO also recognizes the deep strain put on Upper Dharamsala by Tibetan refugees along with the hordes of foreigners they have drawn. In an effort to repay the Indians for their generosity in granting them a home, TWO initiated Clean Upper Dharamsala, and hired staff, whom they call Green Workers, to gather the paper garbage that clogs muddy ditches along the narrow streets. One visitor suggested that they make recycled paper from the trash. Then TWO sent several workers to be trained in Indian papermaking technology, and a Swedish NGO upgraded their homemade equipment with a Hollander, two large deckle boxes, and a press. Another visitor taught them simple bookbinding. TWO now produces stationary and blank books for sale in their Green Shop and abroad. There is nothing Tibetan about TWO's paper or paper products except the workers themselves. During my time there, I had hoped to introduce paper products with a more Tibetan feeling. The workers were quick, inventive, and eager to learn, but it would have taken months, not weeks to make lasting changes. Unfortunately, I have not been able to return, and do not know of the project's current status. The survival and resilient spirits of the Tibetan refugees is cause for celebration, but traditional Tibetan paper is pretty much gone Papermaking technology followed the spread of Buddhism through Asia from the first century BCE onward. Paper was light, portable, and long-lived, the perfect medium for Buddhist texts. Buddhism had no particular allegiance to paper, but it created the impetus for its spread. In a strange parallel, though Communism had no particular vendetta against paper, its attack on minority peoples has been drastic for handmade paper. Shan papermaking is most likely in its last days or gone; traditional papermaking in Tibet is largely finished; TWO's paper and book project is a success but does little to continue Tibetan tradition. On a brighter note, Nepal lost one market but created new ones. With proper stewardship, the possibility of an ongoing, vital hand papermaking industry is very real. We live in a world awash in paperóutilitarian stuff, not strong, beautiful handmade paper. Maybe it is time to erect shrines to great papers that are gone or almost gone; to traditions that reflected ingenuity, invention, and the intimate knowledge of local plants; to those still with us, but not for long, who remember strings of donkeys, harness bells jingling, loaded with paper, headed over Himalayan passes; to villages resounding with the din of stones or wooden mallets beating cooked fiber; and to enormous sheets of white paper like sails set out to dry on the Tibetan plateau. The author wishes to thank Jane Farmer, T.C. Tethong, and On Yawnghwe for their input. In addition, she recommends the following articles and publication for further information on hand papermaking in Thailand, Nepal, and Tibet/Dharamsala: Jane M. Farmer, "Retracing Tibet's Paper Road," Hand Papermaking, Winter 1996; Dorothy Field, Handmade Paper in Nepal: Tradition and Change, limited-edition portfolio published by Hand Papermaking, 1998; Dorothy Field, "Papermaking in India, Bangladesh, and the Himalayas" and "Nepalese Paper Sample," Hand Papermaking, Winter 1992; Dorothy Field, "Shan Papermaking in Thailand," in A Gathering of Papermakers (Boston: Carriage House, 1988); Dorothy Field, "Volunteering with a Tibetan Papermaking Project in India," Bull & Branch, vol. 23, 2004. Sonam Narkyal in his Lhasa home is burnishing ting shog, blue-black paper he has dyed as a substrate for his gold calligraphy.