This book is a residency-based investigation and remaking of Manchu shamanism, a local belief system on the verge of disappearing. Shamanic culture is an oral and practical tradition that depends heavily on the body, objects, sound and the ritual site, and it resists being carried by a single printed language. The book therefore refuses a uniform standard of craft. It uses more than ten handmade papers and over ten methods of hand printing and binding, letting the heterogeneity of material and process answer the shamanic worldview in which people, animals, ancestral spirits and natural forces permeate and transform into one another. It restores the wildness and vitality of that world rather than taming it into a tidy academic archive.

The way colour is made is itself part of the content. Spot-colour letterpress lays down the ground tone of the papers, giving the red, blue, yellow and white chapters a heavy materiality and the marks of impression, like the patina left over years on the surface of ritual objects.

White ink is screen printed so that white figures rise almost in relief from dark papers, echoing the bones, feathers and spirit figures of shamanic dress that appear as white signs against darkness. Yellow ink is built up layer by layer in mimeograph, its grain and misregistration deliberately kept, recalling the traces of time and the errors of the hand accumulated as shamanic totems were passed down and copied again and again.