Yangjiabu is located 15Km North of Weifang City. It is well-known for producing two elements from the vast Chinese cultural tradition: New Year engravings and kites.
New Year Engravings: It is a centenary tradition to decorate the house doors and windows with very colorful printed picture cards. The motifs usually represent scenes associated with prosperity: fatty children, the Longevity Buda, flowery landscapes full of birds, mythological or opera characters. There are thousands of designs, but the message is always the same: Good Fortune and Celebration.
These engravings are created with the xylography technique, a printing technique performed with a wooden plate. The desired image is carved by hand on the wood with a graver or burin. It is habitually used only one matrix (also called plug) for each color. It is then impregnated with ink and, by pressing it against a prop (such as paper), it is obtained the embossed printing. It is required to make as much plugs and subsequent printings as colors used in the final design. Even though xylography was used in the past for reproducing texts and images, today it is used for artistic creations. However, in China there’s a wide production of these picture cards, and they are manufactured in many regions throughout the country, though each one provides its own peculiarities, and there can be distinguished four types of well differentiated paintings: the Taohuawu ones –in the Province of Jiangsu (East)-; the Yangjiabu ones –in Shandong (East)-; the Zhuxianzhen ones –in Henan (Center)-, and the Yangliuging ones –in Tianjin (North). This type of picture cards are called Nianhua.
The Kites: Remember that the Chinese New Year is close to the beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. So, kites are also linked to both celebrations. Yangjiabu kites are built in bamboo and silk, exquisitely painted, and they reproduce insects, birds and fish. Some also print xylography on fabric and then use them for kite sails.
We enter Yangjiabu through a traditional gate, along an Avenue populated with kite factories on both sides. Most of these factories are family ventures, but with a great number of units produced, for supplying the local market as well as the international one. They employ between 10-50 persons each, most of them women who develop long working days –12 hs.-, six days a week. Considering the manual labor required for each kite and the selling price, we may suppose that the wage paid is considerably low and the working conditions, precarious.
The work process is similar to that of an assembly line: a group takes the bamboo, cuts it and molds it. Another group fits the kite structure, makes the joints and knots and leaves it ready for attaching the sail. At the same time, another group paints the silk that will be used for the sail, while, finally there’s a last group that assembles the kite and performs the ultimate details. In the images below, you can observe each one of the process stages. (Again, thanks, Claris!)
At the end of the Avenue, it is located the Folk Cultural Center from Yangjabu, a complex building that recreates the traditional Chinese architecture, where there’s a small museum, a kite craftwork factory, and where several engraving printing demonstrations and other handicrafts are performed.
The kites manufactured in this cultural center were -quite likely- the best quality ones we’d found along all the area factories/ shops. Of course, we didn’t deprive ourselves of buying some stuff to increase our cultural patrimony and encourage the exchange between nations. Too many temptations altogether. But, I must admit that it is a highly recommendable tour.
The visit to this town highly deepened that strange ambivalent feeling I had everywhere in China: On the one hand, observing people that work under such precarious conditions or in unnecessary activities. But working, after all. On the other, we tourists, eager to get quality things at low prices. Not so different from what we have in other latitudes, though.
Gustavo
