Twelve lines we know properly

Nepal's tea grows on the same ridge system as Darjeeling and often at the same altitude — it simply had a smaller name for a long time. The orthodox gardens sit between roughly 1,200 and 2,000 metres in Ilam, Panchthar and Dhankuta; the CTC estates sit lower, in the Jhapa flatlands.

We buy leaf, not brand. Everything here is sold as a garden-level lot with its flush stated, because "Nepali black tea" tells a buyer almost nothing.

A hand-beaten bowl starts as a cast disc of bell bronze and is worked hot, in rounds, by a team of three or four. Between rounds the metal is annealed, because it hardens as it is drawn. That is what puts the hammer marks in the surface and the long sustain in the note.

Machine-spun bowls exist and are cheaper. We say which is which on the page, every time.

Churpi is not a pet product in Nepal. It is a hard cheese that hill families have made for centuries — milk soured, pressed, smoked and dried until it is closer to wood than to dairy. Somebody abroad noticed dogs would work at a piece for hours, and a small export line was born.

The ingredient list is the whole point: milk, lime juice, salt. Nothing else goes in.

Pashmina is a fibre, not a style of scarf. The real thing comes off the Chyangra goat at high altitude and measures roughly 12–16 microns, which is why it is warm without weight and why it costs what it costs.

We state the blend on every piece. Where something is 70/30 with mulberry silk we say so; where it is a viscose blend we would rather not stock it at all.

The Kathmandu Valley has been casting metal for a very long time, and the lost-wax method used in Patan today is recognisably the one described in mediaeval texts: a wax model, a clay investment, the wax burnt out, the bronze poured in, the mould broken.

Every casting is therefore a one-off. The mould does not survive the pour.

Himalayan incense is not a fragrance oil on a stick. Rope incense is dried herb rolled inside lokta paper; sang is loose powdered juniper and rhododendron burnt on charcoal; dhoop is a paste extruded and dried.

All of them smell of the plant they are made of, which is a lower, drier, more resinous thing than most people expect.

Lokta is a Himalayan shrub whose inner bark is cooked, beaten to a pulp and poured onto a frame to dry in the sun. The plant coppices — cut it and it regrows in four to six years — so the harvest is renewable in a way that pulpwood is not.

The finished sheet is strong, slightly translucent, and does not go brittle. Nepali land records were kept on it for centuries.

Felting needs no loom and no spinning — just wool, hot water, soap and a great deal of rolling. Most of Nepal's felt workshops run on imported New Zealand carpet wool because it felts faster and takes dye more evenly than local mountain wool.

It is a large employer of women in the Kathmandu Valley, and one of the few crafts here that scales without losing its hand-made character.

Allo is the giant Himalayan nettle. It is cut in the eastern hills, boiled in wood ash, beaten, hand-spun on a drop spindle and woven on a backstrap loom — a process that has not been mechanised because nobody has managed to.

The cloth starts stiff and goes soft with use, a bit like linen. Hemp behaves similarly and is often blended with cotton for drape.

Nepal is the world's largest producer of large cardamom, and most of it leaves the country in bulk without anyone abroad learning where it came from. Timur — the Himalayan Sichuan pepper — is the other one worth knowing: citrusy, numbing, harvested wild.

These are commodity lines, so we quote them per kilo against a sample rather than as retail units.

Bhaktapur's carvers still cut the same window and door patterns their grandfathers cut, in the same dense sal wood, with the same short-handled chisels. A single lattice panel is weeks of work.

We also carry plainer, more shippable furniture from the same workshops, because not every buyer wants a museum piece.

Nepal's herb trade is old and mostly invisible: raw material goes south in sacks and comes back as finished product with somebody else's label. The small workshops we buy from are trying to skip that step.

What we stock is deliberately simple — cold-process soap, pressed oils, salt, copper. Nothing here is a medicine and we do not describe it as one.