Completely handmade Tibetan knives. The patterns on the sheaths are never competely identical pattern with one another.

Polyandry used to prevail in the Hepo region and several brothers in each of 70% to 80% of the families share one wife. The reason is economics. If each brother married one woman, the family would be separated. How can a family with only one kettle and one cauldron be split up? But when several brothers stay together the property is collective and the family grows powerful. The brothers with one wife work cooperatively with a distinct division of labor: one purchases raw materials, another crafts them into knives and another sells them, or alternatively the knives are worked on jointly and sold by a third person. The wife is responsible for the finishing touches and for farm work.

In Hepo, handicraft production can be passed down in the family without taking gifts or apprentices. However, it cannot be passed on to a daughter, so the artisans are all male and women do farm work or other physical labor. In Zewu Village, where the best Buddhist articles are produced, only 5 of the 45 families do not produce the handicraft because there are no males in their families. When the fathers died, only daughters were left and usually men do not join such families, so with no man in the household, producing the handicraft was not feasible.

Editor: Liu Xiongfei