Notes from our fourth visit to Tashi’s workshop, on the lane behind the Jokhang.
Green paper is not aesthetic. It is so he can find the silver ends if he drops them.
On the third day of the spring order, I asked him why he always starts with the ring.
He laughed, quiet, hands still moving, the way the people in his workshop laugh, without looking up from the wire.
We have worked with Tashi for almost two years now. The workshop is on the second floor of a building two streets behind the Jokhang. There is no sign on the door. The window opens onto a courtyard where a cat sleeps on a stack of cardboard boxes. The cat has a name. I have asked twice, and twice forgotten.
Tashi is in his early fifties. He has been making jewellery by hand for thirty-one years, the last nine of them in this room. There is no machine here. A small bench. A coil of sterling silver wire. A pair of needle-nose pliers. A wooden mallet. A clay-coloured pot of black tea he refills approximately every forty minutes. He used to drink butter tea. He stopped because of his back. "Butter tea is for guests," he said the first time our marketing partner asked.
· · ·
He picks up the citrine. A rough crystal the size of a small grape, the colour of dark honey. He turns it once between his thumb and forefinger and sets it on a square of pale green paper.
Then he begins. The wire is 0.8 mm, sterling, drawn from a coil from Chengdu. He cuts six lengths and lays them across the citrine in a star. He pulls the first wire under, twists it three times, tucks the end. He does the same with the second. The third. By the fifth wire, the citrine no longer moves. By the eighth, it has a structure around it. By the eleventh, it has a band.
The first eight turns. He cuts six wires and lays them in a star.
He does not look at the wire. He looks at the stone.
From below, the band reveals its joinery.
A machine could make this more even. What a machine cannot do is pause on the eighth turn, tilt the stone fifteen degrees, and keep going.
The first time we filmed Tashi making a piece, our cinematographer counted the pauses. Forty-one in a single set. Each one different. Some lasted a second. Some lasted three. In each one, Tashi was deciding something he could not have explained if asked.
That fifteen degrees is what we are paying him for. Most of the wire could be done by a coiling jig. The turn of the stone, before the wire knows what it is doing, is the part that no jig has yet been built to replace.
His hands are cold in the morning. The ring takes more turns. By the time the ring is finished, the fingers have remembered. The pendant goes faster after that.
That is why he starts with the ring.
· · ·
The Face
A small silver disc hangs at the top of both pieces. It is the same on the ring and on the pendant. The face of a woman is pressed into it — eyes lowered, mouth set, hair flowing. The whole face is small enough that you can cover it with the pad of your thumb.
She is Tshakirama.
The disc is cast from a die that has been in use in Chengdu since 1998.
Her temple sits north, east of the Jokhang in old Lhasa. One of the smallest temples in the city and one of the most reliably crowded. People come asking for the kind of abundance that lets a household keep going, not a fortune, not a windfall, but the weekday kind. Devotees bring her butter, beer, and a particular sweet roasted barley. The temple opens before sunrise. Tashi’s mother went once a week for thirty years. She did not talk about it. She would wake before the rest of the house, light incense, and be gone by the time anyone else was up. By the time Tashi was old enough to ask her what she went for, the question would have felt like an interruption. By the time he understood why an interruption would have been welcome, she was no longer there to interrupt. He thinks the answer was always: the household. He thinks the answer was always: keep going.
"She is for the kind of luck you can count on. Not the new car. The thread that does not break."
The same die-maker in Chengdu has produced the disc for three Lhasa workshops since 1998. Tashi was nineteen when the first batch arrived. He has used the same die on every piece in which a disc has appeared since. That is twenty eight years of one woman’s face, pressed once into silver, then carried across the world on someone else’s neck.
· · ·
What Arrives at Your Door
A small black box. Inside, a ring or a pendant. Inside that, a stone that lived in the earth for some number of millions of years, found by someone whose name you will never know, brought across two thousand kilometres to a workshop above a courtyard with a cat.
What arrives. The mountain is on the outside of the box because the workshop already let it inside.
There, an older man named Tashi turned it once between his thumb and forefinger and chose which face would meet the light. He cut six wires — not because the count is sacred, but because six is the number that works. He wrapped it the way he learned thirty-one years ago. He let his hands forget the cold by way of the ring, then he made the pendant.
The whole set took an afternoon. He stopped twice for tea.
Photographed upstairs in the gallery, before the citrine ring pendant goes into its box.
The first morning, you will put it on at the kitchen counter. Probably with the kettle on. Probably without ceremony. That is the kind of morning the piece was made for.
The ring is small. After the first day you will forget you are wearing it, until you bring a hand to your face, or rest it on a page, and the silver passes over your skin.
Worn for the second week. The wire on the underside has just begun to slow.
The pendant is slower. It hangs at the chest, where the breath happens. You will feel it most when you laugh, when you bend forward to listen, when you reach out to comfort someone.
The pendant in its second home, on a body, in weather, away from any workshop.
This is what Tashi means when he says the ring is for the close work, and the pendant is for the long road. The ring goes with the hand, into the hours. The pendant goes with the chest, into the world.
Some people only need one. Some people need both. He makes them the same way either way.
· · ·
We placed our spring order for 24 pairs this year. Tashi has finished 10 so far. He is taking three days off in early June to attend a wedding in Linzhi, and then he will continue.
The pieces are the Citrine × Tshakirama Ring and the Citrine × Tshakirama Pendant. Commissioned in pairs. Worn as one or two.
The ring, photographed in studio before it goes into its box.
The Hands Behind is the moment her hands meet his — across a workshop she will never see.
