Tonga Tapa cloth is or ngatu still a part of daily life in Tonga. In Tonga a family is considered poor, regardless how much money they have, if they do not have any tapa in stock at home to donate at life events like marriages, funerals and so forth. If the tapa was donated to them by a chief or even the royal family, it is more valuable. In
Tonga hiapo is the name given to the paper mulberry tree. It is not usually grown in whole plantations, but portions of a yam or other vegetable garden are often set aside for it. Trees are cut down and the bark is stripped off. The strips are about 10 cm wide and up to 180 cm long. The bark consists of two layers; the outer bark is scraped or split off from the inner bark. The outer bark is discarded, and the inner bark, named
tutu or
loututu, is dried in the sun before being soaked. After this, the bark is beaten on a wooden anvil (
tutua) using wooden mallets called
ike. In the beating the bark is made thinner and spread out to a width of about . The mallets are smooth on one side and have coarse and fine grooves on the other sides. First the coarse sides are used and, towards the end of the work, the smooth side is used. The continuous "thonk" beats of the tapa mallet is a normal sound in Tongan villages. A circular cut is made with a shell in the bark above the root of the tree; the tree is broken off, and in a few days, when the stem is half-dry, the bark and bast are separated from it. The bast is then cleaned and macerated in water, after which it is beaten with the ribbed club on a wooden block. This beating enlivens a village in Tonga as threshing does in Europe. In half an hour the piece will have changed in shape from a strip almost to a square. The edges are snipped with shells, and a large number of the pieces are drawn separately over a semi-cylindrical wooden stamp, on which the pattern, worked in coco-fibre, is stretched and smeared with a fluid at once adhesive and colouring. On each a second and third layer is placed; and the piece, three layers thick, is coloured more strongly in the parts which are thrown into relief by the inequalities of the bed. Others are annexed to it both at the side and the end, until pieces a yard wide, and 20 to 25 yards long, are produced. :— Friedrich RatzelThe
fetaaki is almost always painted. It then becomes
ngatu, the Tongan word for the final product. Painting is done over the whole length, but only the central in the width. On both sides there is an unpainted border of about wide, which in Tonga is called the
tapa. To paint the sheet, it is draped over a huge wooden drum or
kupesi (
upeti in Samoa) covered with stencils. These stencils are made from coconut front midribs (or any other sticks of a few millimeter thick) and made in the pattern which will be used. There are a handful of standard
kupesi designs, like the 'pine road' (the road from the palace to the royal cemetery), or the 'shield of Tonga', or the 'lion' (the king), or the 'dove' (the king as ruler), and more abstract figures like the 'Manulua' (two birds). Once the tapa sheet is put over the drum, the women rub with force a dabber with some brown paint (made from the
koka tree
(Bischofia javanica)) over the sheet. This work is called
tatai. Where they rub over a rib of the
kupesi more paint will stick to that position while very little will stick elsewhere. In this way the basic pattern is put on the sheet. Once a part is done, they lift up the sheet and proceed to the next strip and so forth. When the whole sheet has been processed, it is spread out on the ground and painted with a brush made from
Pandanus seeds. The women will accentuate the faintly visible marks with some more generous paint, this time made from the
tongo, the mangrove
(Rhizophora mangle). Both
koka and
tongo paint are always brown, but the latter is much darker. Black is not used in Tonga, although it is characteristic of Fijian tapa. It is customary that during the painting process lines are drawn on the
ngatu along the width every or more. The
kupesi are made to the size that will fit in the divisions thus made. Such a division is known as
langanga and they are numbered (on the blank
tapa) from one to as many as needed for the whole length. When a smaller piece of ngatu is needed, the sheet is cut along a
langanga division. A 4 to 6
langanga piece is called
folaosi. An 8-piece is
fātuua, while a 10
langanga piece of
ngatu is known as
toka hongofulu. Less common are the double
fātuua, named
fātufā or double of that again, the
fātuvalu. Nowadays for the tourist trade other sizes and designs can be made as well.
Samoa Tapa cloth is known as
siapo in the Samoan archipelago (Samoa and American Samoa). Siapo has traditionally been used for clothing, burial shrouds, bed covers, curtains and ceremonial garments. It is also often given as a gift at weddings, funerals and formal events. There are two forms of siapo: ''siapo 'elei
or siapo tasina
(the rubbing method) and siapo mamanu'' (the freehand method). Siapo mamanu (the freehand method) is newer than siapo 'elei and made primarily for tourists to hang up as artwork. It does not use an upeti. Formerly, pieces of u'a were stretched over boards using a temporary glue which allowed the artist to remove the piece from the board when completed. The u'a was then hand-painted with whatever design the artist wished. Modern siapo mamanu pieces are created by stretching and glueing the u'a over a piece of wood of any shape, which forms part of the art: the u'a is not removed from the wood after painting. but in the 21st century only a few people in American Samoa and some families in Samoa, especially on the island of Savai'i, produce work. Modern uses of siapo include jewellery, handbags, placemats and wall hangings, many aimed at the tourist market. File:Peeling bark to make siapo.jpg|Peeling the bark from a u'a trunk File:Making siapo - scraping with shell.jpg|Scraping the bark with a shell File:Scraping siapo.jpg|Using water and a shell to scrape and soften the bark File:Beating siapo.jpg|Beating the bark over an anvil File:Drying siapo.jpg|The fabric is laid out to dry before it is decorated. File:Design board.jpg|
Upeti File:Patching siapo.jpg|Holes in the rubbed fabric are patched before another layer is placed on top File:Darkened design of siapo.jpg|Powdered clay dabbed over the design darkens the pattern. File:Painting over the rubbed design.jpg|Painting details onto the dried piece.
Fiji In Fiji tapa is known as masi and is made only by women, although at Navatusila, men have been involved in decorating masi. with a square-sided wooden mallet (
ike). Up to four layers may be felted together to create a piece of masi,
Tahiti Tapa cloth production in Tahiti was meticulously documented by 18th century Western voyagers such as
Sydney Parkinson and
Joseph Banks among the entourage for
James Cook's first voyage around Polynesia in 1769. Cloth made from
Ficus tinctoria was water resistant and reserved for
ariʻi, while lower classes made do with coarser cloth from the bark of breadfruit trees. All materials were processed with beaters made of
Casuarina equisetifolia (
toa) wood: a piece of fabric was usually formed in three-ply. Patches on any gaps in the expanded fabrics were applied with
pia starch, also used for the finishing coat. Dyes were bound to fabric by soaking in an infusion of
candlenut tree bark. Tapa patterns original to Tahitians were simple and annular designs stamped with bamboo, but English cloth traded to them during James Cook's voyage led to an innovation of new patterns by imprinting leaves with dyes to reproduce the English patterns in a similar manner.
Cook Islands Traditional tapa manufacture in the Cook Islands was more complex than in other parts of Polynesia, and there were differences in style and usage between different islands. This reflected continuous contact with other island groups as well as settlement of the Cook Islands by groups from different homelands including Tahiti, Samoa and Tonga. Cook Islands tapa is created in one layer after
retting for several days, and the fabric is generally thicker and stronger than that from Tahiti. By the 1880s tapa was rarely used in clothing, replaced by imported fabric and clothing from locally-grown cotton. It was used until the 1920s for masks, dance costumes and ceremonies, particularly on Mangaia. Anthropologist
Peter Buck (aka Te Rangi Hiroa) described the following process of tapa-making on Mangaia in a 1944 publication. Cook Islands tapa was made from the paper mulberry tree, known as the
aute or
anga, or the breadfruit tree (
kuru). A coarse brown cloth was also made from the aerial roots of the banyan tree (aoa). Typically, tapa manufacture was women's work, although in Mangaia men made a special white cloth called
autea or
tikoru, which was used as a covering for the gods and as clothing for high chiefs and priests. Paper mulberry saplings would be cut when they were about one inch in diameter and the bark peeled off in one long strip. The inner bark was separated from the outer bark with a clam shell (''ka'i
) and soaked in fresh or salt water for 24 hours. Then the bark was beaten with a wooden mallet (ike
) made from ironwood or miro, which had grooves of varying closeness on each of its four sides. The ike was used with a wooden anvil (tutunga
). Several women might work side by side at a long anvil, chanting as they beat the tapa. Signals could be conveyed by beating the ike on the tutunga, for example letting the rest of the village know that a visitor had arrived. After the first beating, the bark strips were washed in fresh water to remove salt, sap and any green remnants of the outer bark. This differs from the Samoan process, where the bark is scraped with a shell. The cleaned strip of bark was then left for a day to drain before being wrapped in banana or taro leaves for three days in a form of retting to soften the fibres. A second beating then took place. Sections could be overlapped and felted together by beating to form larger pieces. This differs from the process in Tonga and Samoa, where tapa was made in two layers and pieces were glued together . After the second beating the cloth was spread out flat to dry. It could be used in its natural white state, or dyed. is presumably cognate with the Samoan siapo
and Niuean hiapo'', which are words for tapa or barkcloth in those languages. No tapa anvils have been identified in New Zealand, but some beaters have been discovered in the areas where aute was known to grow.
Experimental archaeology on reviving the techniques of aute production was pioneered in the 2010s by Māori artist Nikau Hindin, a former student of Hawaiian Studies at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Niue Niuean tapa is known as
hiapo. Samoan missionaries brought [Samoan]
siapo with them to Niue in the 1830s. In the 1880s a new style developed with a fine free-hand decoration, possibly created by a single community.
Hiapo has not been produced in Niue since the early 1900s. Surviving samples show that
hiapo was decorated with freehand painting, not rubbing or stencilling. Designs include rectangular or circular designs, with abstract plant forms, people, stars and fish. ==Gallery==