On the third Tibet Expo a small booth grabbed people's attention. Inside of the booth there were customers sitting cross-legged writing with bamboo brushes. The look on their faces was serious, full of vigor and it was as though they were far away from the bustling feel of Tibet expo site.

"Star-wall" means writing board in the Tibetan language. It accompanied the Tibetan children born before the 1980s, during which students all had a slab in their hands to practice writing Tibetan characters and only after practicing well on the slab were they able or allowed to write on papers.

 

Along with the rapid development of Tibet, paper has taken the role of writing boards because it's not easy to carry. In fact, nowadays young Tibetan students do not even know what "Star-wall" is.

 

To resuscitate the traditional culture, 29-year-old Juelie established a company by the name of Tuogang Culture Publicity Co., Ltd., despite of his handicapped body.

 

"When I first started to study I practiced writing characters on to writing board. Yet later for about 2 decades there was practically no one using writing boards. So starting from last year I was considering writing boards was not being used all these years. Therefore last year during the Tibet exhibition I decided to make 50 of the star boards and do a market investigation after about 2 days I sold all of them. For this reason, I had a lot of confidence that it was not because people did not like writing boards but instead that there just was no one making them."

   

After that, Juelie started to investigate calligrapher professionals of Tibetan language and verified the benefits of the tradition. Writing characters with a brush on top of the board allows for a very nice and stable look of the characters. When writing you place the board on top of your knee while sitting and you must keep your hips and back very straight. Coinciding, this art is good for building inner strength and a good attitude.

 

In May this year, Juelie established his own company and opened a sales store near the Ramoche Monastery, Lhasa. He also opened a practice room nearby employing calligraphy teachers to offer night classes and also to broadcast for free teaching about how to use the Tibetan board to do calligraphy. Juelie said frankly that fans of his live broadcasts are gradually going up yet after 4 months he's only accumulated about 3,000 fans. Nevertheless, he plans to persevere and keep moving on.

 

According to the tradition there is only one side of the board while that can be used and it is necessary to cover the board with chalk powder and use a string to make a white line and then one can follow this line as their standard to write the calligraphy.

 

Juelie came up with several innovations for the writing boards, for example, he pre-installed a white line on to the board. Furthermore he engraved about 30 Tibetan characters into the starboard in order to provide for children models.

 

These Innovations allowed for great attention to be drawn to his booth during the exhibition, but really what grab people's attention where the feelings and passion and memory behind the writing boards.

 

There were an endless stream of customers coming to the star-wall booth and one woman after seeing the boards was particularly moved and sat down and start practicing with the board.