During your stay, you can visit the crafts shop, which offers a wide range of items made by Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal, in particular : silver jewellery, woven clothing and handmade carpets. You will find, in the following page, a non-exhaustive list of the available goods and their photographs.

We place to your disposal a large choice of jewellery issued from the Tibetan craft. Most of them are realised in silver, fossile coral, lapis lazuli and amber.
We also possess a wide variety of traditionnal articles.
(The avaibility of the articles and jewellery presented in the following list depend of our supplying)

All our porcelains, which are exclusive to our Cultural Center, are decorated by a craftsman named Benoit De Souza, a ceramist from Digne-Les-Bains, from original drawings of Dorje Sangpo, an acknowledged Tibetan artist. All used materials are noble fabrics like the porcelain from Limoges and the gold.

Tibetan carpets are very popular, now that they are widely known. Unlike the usual production from India and Nepal, our carpets are replicas of antique pieces, specially woven in Assam, in northeastern India. There, using richly decorated motifs, the weavers work with 80 knots per inch, compared to the standard 48 knots. If you like carpets, ask to see these fine items, sold exclusively in our museum.

Tibetan carpets are basically a millennia-old traditional art, resulting from contact with the Iranian world during the conquests of the Tibetan Empire in Central Asia in the 8th century. This origin is clearly demonstrated by the analysis of the very ancient techniques used to make the knots and loops. The so-called Sehna knot, the basis for Tibetan carpets, is found throughout Central Asia, in Turkestan, the Near-East and 11th-Dynasty Egypt (c. 2000 BC). This technique disappeared long ago in most of these regions and survives only in such remote areas as Scandinavia and Tibet. Technically, it seems to have almost no relationship with the techniques used in China and India, developed considerably more recently, without ever achieving the same degree of popularity. China's role was to provide the already well-established Tibetan carpet tradition a wide range of popular motifs and shapes.

Unlike Persians and Turks, who often covered the walls and floors of their houses and tents with carpets, Tibetans use them mainly as seats or beds. Having adapted the weaving techniques over the centuries, they also produced carpets for saddles and doors and for meditation.
Carpets were not always the most important woven items among the wide range of textiles Tibetans made. In Tibet, both men and women knit, make ropes and mats, weave narrow decorated bands; many nomads produce fine felt. Embroidery is also used for decorating clothing and religious images. In addition to these techniques, Tibetans also use the loom with a fixed frame. They make a wide variety of fabrics, mostly wool, but also cotton, silk and yak hair, ranging from crude sacks to serge and cloth.
Before World War I, most of the raw materials used were found locally. The warp, weft and pile were made of wool dyed with pigments from plants and minerals found in Tibet, except indigo and lacquer imported from India and Bhutan. The mordants, cleaning and other products for preparing wool were also locally produced. White, brown and black wool was included in addition to dyed wool. The dyes included rhubarb (yellow), walnut stain (brown), madder (reddish-purple), indigo (blue), lacquer dye (red).

Between the two World Wars, however, growing commercial contacts with India led to importing cotton for the warp, probably because it is less expensive, and synthetic dyes. The immediate result was an increase in the number and variety of colours in Tibetan carpets which, originally, had only four or five colours made from plant dyes.
To make their woven goods, Tibetans have three sorts of looms, one only for making carpets, while the other two are used only occasionally for this purpose. In Tibet, the most common is an upright loom used traditionally by both nomadic and sedentary populations to make fabrics with complicated designs, of a width not exceeding forty-five centimetres.