Construction Timber

Sherpa houses require lumber for beams, floors, rafters, window framing, doors, and furniture. Fir shake roofs, moreover, are the most common regional roofing, even though slate is preferred whenever there is a quarry site within reasonable hauling distance and corrugated iron is increasingly being used in Nauje, Khumjung, and Kunde. Typical two-story houses today require eighteen cubic meters of timber, not including wood for furniture (Hardie et al. 1987:38). A relatively modest house requires fourteen trees for beams and joists, twenty to twenty-five trees for rafters depending on the type of roofing (larger, more closely spaced rafters being required to support slate roofs), plus several dozen more trees for boards for floors, window framing, doors, shelves and cabinets, and furniture. Recently new fashions of domestic architecture have begun to become popular which require even more timber for ceilings, paneling, and interior walls. Hardie et al. (ibid.7:39) estimate that this can increase the amount of timber needed for house construction by five to six cubic meters, or a full third.

All timber, including shakes for roofs, customarily was cut inside Khumbu. In some forests there were restrictions about what kinds of timber could be cut, but in others there were not. Certain areas were traditional sources of boards, rafters, shakes, and beams for particular communities. During the twentieth century Nauje families, for example, were accustomed to procuring beams from an otherwise-protected forest adjacent to the village, rafters and other timber from the forest immediately outside the restricted area, and shakes from forest half-a-day's walk away on the far slopes of the Dudh Kosi. The Nakdingog, Chuar, and Zamnangma Parken areas south of the Dudh Kosi (shown on map 18) have been renowned sources of timber and shakes for families from Khumjung, Kunde, Pangboche, and Phurtse since early in the century whereas beams were procured from closer at hand. Both Pangboche and Phurtse villagers were also accustomed to obtaining rafters and boards from the forest at the Tengboche monastery both before and after its establishment. Relatively little restriction was placed on this until the early 1960s when the head lama began to direct villagers to fell trees only in the Nakdingog part of monastery land.^[15] It was usual to cut and saw timber at the site using simple hand tools, and there was some business in cutting and delivering lumber.

Demand for construction timber increased considerably in the twentieth century, placing new levels of demand on forests near villages. The major population growth since 1900 has meant that more structures have had to be built and rebuilt than in former eras. Khumjung, Phurtse, and Nauje have double or more the number of houses today than elderly

residents remember from their youths. Today's houses, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of sixty or seventy years ago which were nearly all one story. By the end of the 1980s increasing affluence had made single-story houses extremely rare throughout the region. Houses are increasing in size as well. There is a saying now in Khumbu that whereas once, when a Sherpa became rich, he spent his money on religion (thus accruing merit for his rebirth), he now builds a new house.

Historically forest use has been greatly affected by the availability of certain types of trees and by changes in local and national government regulations concerning tree felling. Changes in the types of trees used for beams, for example, suggest that the depletion of sizeable trees of certain types near some villages in the nineteenth and early twentieth century led to a switch from juniper to fir. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries juniper for beams was available in the immediate vicinities of Phurtse, Nauje, Thami Og, Thami Teng, Khumjung, and Kunde. Now fir alone is used at all of these places due to the absence of large juniper. Indeed, today at Thami Og and Thami Teng there are no trees of any type that are suitable for beams, and villagers from these two communities now cut and haul fir from sites lower in the Bhote Kosi valley such as Samshing and Phurte as far as five kilometers away from their homes. Government regulation rather than local depletion, by contrast, has affected the use of fir for building material. Fir was long the preferred building material for most uses, but in the 1970s national park policies banned almost all tree felling for building and forced Khumbu Sherpas to import pine from Pharak. In 1990 a major policy change at Sagarmatha National Park returned some authority in forest management to Sherpa communities and relaxed some of its forest-use restrictions. Village committees and the national park are now allowing slightly higher levels of tree felling for construction purposes. Although more Khumbu fir is being felled today than in recent years most timber continues to be imported from Pharak.