LETTRE-TDM-n°28: THE NEWAR GOLDSMITH’S TROUGH

By François Pannier

Marguerite Lobsiger-Dellenbach¹ mentions and illustrates two terracotta goldsmith’s troughs in the 1954 catalogue of the Nepalese ethnographic collection of the Musée d’Ethnographie de la Ville de Genève.

Called Lapa in the Newari language, troughs of this kind are used to hold water needed to chill gold while it is being worked. One of the two objects in the museum was acquired in Kathmandu² and the other in Banepa³.

They were placed on the ground by the entrance to a goldsmith’s workshop with the most elaborately decorated side of a trough facing the street.