How One Tibetan Workshop Is Reviving a Village Economy and Reimagining Tradition

With half-frozen fingers, I googled “Do vultures attack humans?” on my phone. I was alone on a grassy hilltop in central China’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture when the birds, large as foxes and with beaks curved like meat hooks, appeared out of nowhere. Though this region isn’t part of modern-day Tibet, Tibetan culture is prevalent, and sky burials (in which bodies are left to be eaten by vultures) are still practiced. Fortunately, the birds are harmless to those still breathing, but, on this frigid November afternoon in a sparsely populated corner of China, the encounter got my blood pumping. 

Two hours earlier, I had left my room at Norlha House in the small village of Zorgey Ritoma to ramble in the highlands of Gannan. Once the village’s gold-roofed Ritoma Monastery and the last of its yak herds had disappeared into the distance, all I could see was the undulating steppe. For every ridge I crossed, another one, just as barren, emerged behind it. The closest large city, Chengdu, home to more than 20 million residents, was 400 miles away. Most international travelers connect through Beijing or Shanghai before flying in to Lanzhou, a city in northwestern China. I, however, flew in to a tiny airport in Xiahe County. 

Zorgey Ritoma is not a place where you’d expect to find a boutique selling $800 shirts and $2,000 bedspreads, but that’s exactly what I had come to find. Norlha—an atelier where artisans take khullu, or yak down, sourced from herders around the Tibetan Plateau and make it into velvet-soft clothes and home goods—was founded in 2007 by Tibetan-American entrepreneur Deien Yeshi and her mother, Kim. The brand now sells pieces in high-end boutiques such as Dover Street Market in Paris and La Garçonne in New York City. The atelier is next door to Norlha House, which Yeshi also owns. 

When I met Yeshi for tea in her light-flooded office, which was filled with the clatter of rattling looms and wooden spinning wheels, she spoke about the rapid modernization of rural China and the pressures pulling noiadic Tibetans toward cities. By creating jobs for the local community, Yeshi hopes that Norlha can provide an alternative, allowing families to sustain their nomadic identity while earning a stable income. 

Today the business trains and employs more than 100 craftspeople, offering a rare economic anchor in an area where job opportunities are scarce. “Keeping this culture alive is not just about preserving the past,” Yeshi said. “It’s about creating a future where tradition and modernity coexist in a meaningful and sustainable way.” 

The flagship store, on a paved street in Zorgey Ritoma amid grassy folds of mountains, opened in a timber-clad space above the atelier in May 2023. I browsed the collection of felted vests, fashionable coats, and silky shirts with mandarin collars inspired by traditional Tibetan jackets. There were cloud-soft baby blankets, yeti-shaped plush toys, and, on the mezzanine, a rack of burgundy robes and capes. While there are also Norlha outposts in Beijing and Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, the decision to open this location was deliberate. “By experiencing the region’s landscape and culture firsthand, customers really get to know the product,” Yeshi said.

A few hundred dollars lighter, but with a new khullu scarf to keep me warm, I set out to do just that. While the Tibet Autonomous Region is nearly 700 miles to Gannan’s west, Tibetan culture endures in this southern Chinese prefecture. The region’s relative isolation has played a role, but so has the resilience of its people. In Zorgey Ritoma, I started my mornings with a hearty porridge made of tsamba, a roasted barley flour, mixed with yak-butter tea, and lunched on chili-flecked yak-meat momos. At the Ritoma Monastery, I watched a young monk practice on his dung-chen, a long Tibetan brass trumpet. The instrument’s haunting wails seemed to fill the whole valley. 

Another day, I drove 40 miles north to visit the 18th-century Labrang Monastery, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist complexes outside of Tibet. Despite the morning chill, hundreds of pilgrims were already circling the kora, a two-mile prayer path around the cloister’s walls. The clothes of the most devout were covered in white dust, the result of the prostrations they made after every few steps; others fingered prayer beads and recited Buddhist mantras.

With its population of nearly 1,500 monks, dozens of temples, and a grid of roads and alleys, the monastery felt more like a small town. Tony, who hails from Gannan and is one of the few English speakers at the complex, guided me around the prayer halls. The air was thick with the sweet fumes from Tibetan oil-burning lamps, and golden Buddhas peered down on worshippers chanting in deep, resonant tones. We passed golden pagodas, shadowy rooms stocked with thousands of Buddhist prayer books, and a monk chasing a goat out of his humble living quarters. 

I asked Tony to explain the Buddhist philosophy followed by the Yellow Sect, to which he belongs. “Inside of you are two feelings, those of the body and those of the soul,” he answered after mulling it over for a while. “Most people take care of their body, but not their soul—the balance is off.” He went on to explain how the big-city lifestyle, driven by money and success, often leads people away from inner peace, rather than toward it. “People are always chasing happiness, but don’t know its true meaning,” he said. 

When I returned to Zorgey Ritoma, Tony’s words lingered. Out there, where the land stretches endlessly and the sky feels impossibly close, that balance between body and soul seemed less elusive. The dung-chen still rang, and the vultures still circled overhead. Not as harbingers of the past, I now realized, but as quiet witnesses to a culture that’s holding its ground. 

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Threads of Tibet.”