Asia InCH – Encyclopedia of Intangible Cultural Heritage – Open educational resource on the intangible cultural heritage of the traditional arts, crafts and textiles and their practitioners and transmitters in South Asia

The Asia InCH Encyclopaedia is a continually evolving, open-source educational and knowledge platform dedicated to material cultural heritage, with a particular focus on South Asia. Conceived as both an authoritative and accessible resource, the encyclopaedia brings together over 1,500 entries on heritage crafts, textiles, and ancestral arts, encompassing practices that are historic, forgotten, endangered, and emergent.

The Asia InCH comprises multiple interlinked components, including documentation of materials and techniques, a glossary of specialised terms, profiles of practitioners, and more than 10,000 bibliographic entries. The platform is supported by an expert network of contributors—scholars, researchers, and craft practitioners—whose insights and field-based research continually expand and enrich its growing corpus.

The encyclopaedia complements the Global InCH Journal of Living Heritage, an associated publication that presents new scholarship, critical analysis, case studies, and commentary on heritage practices, safeguarding frameworks, and cultural policy.

Developed by the Craft Revival Trust, Asia InCH seeks to make rigorous, contextual knowledge on material cultural heritage widely accessible to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the wider public.