Well the best general source on Tibetan blades is LaRocca's "Warriors of the Himalayas" the catalogue of the Met's exhibition of the same name. There is also the paper by Phuntsho Rapten "Patag-the symbol of heroes" which has fascinating cultural info on Bhutanese swords, but I checked it and there is nothing on etching. I have been looking at Google books for 19th C. stuff on China and Tibet, but it is mostly background with little information on swords.
As for kukri, this one came as a complete surprise to me. It was a blade type I had not even thought about in relation to Tibet, and so I have seen very few pictures of them. I tend to focus more on the Tibetan Chinese border area. The whole Tibetan thing started for me as a sideline to my interest in Chinese swords.
I have a couple of pieces in my collection of Chinese swords with Tibetan folding, so seeing the same thing at the Western border of Tibet would not surprise me. My suspicion is that Tibetan smiths, who were renowned for their ironwork, made pieces in the styles of bordering regions. What I would love to know is whether the smiths set up shop in the border areas, or whether they just exported stuff. I suspect that in many cases the smiths exported themselves, and used Tibetan techniques to produce blades in the style of the region they were living in, with the exception of blades actually made in Tibet for export. Usually what I take to be export blades are completely Tibetan in form, but with another region's fittings. On the other hand blades that I see in the style of a bordering region with Tibetan style folding I take to have been made in the border region by a Tibetan smith. I don't know how one could be sure though. It just seems like a reasonable explanation for what I see.
Josh
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