Ancient crafts give designers a heritage of creative ideas

Four packs of letters, with elaborate patterns, highlight the creativity of Yangzhou Guangling Ancient Book Engraving Co Ltd. CHINA DAILY

Early last year, when the production team members of the mobile game Canal Towns, which is set in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), were creating the scenes depicting Yangzhou in East China's Jiangsu province, they wanted to include ancient crafts that were associated with the city. This naturally directed their attention to woodblock printing and Yangzhou Guangling Ancient Book Engraving Co Ltd, which are well-known cultural legacies of the prosperous town along the Grand Canal in ancient China.

As a technique invented in China more than 1,300 years ago, woodblock printing was included in UNESCO's representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009. Yangzhou Guangling Ancient Book Engraving Co Ltd is one of the few publishers that can produce handmade books in the traditional Chinese fashion.

Since the production process is far more complicated than that of modern methods, and is time-consuming and expensive, limited precious copies are made each year for collection purposes.

How to employ the ancient printing technique to create products for daily use today is one of the key questions that the craftspeople of woodblock printing are mulling.

In the mobile game, there is a workshop in Yangzhou where sutras are manually engraved on wooden blocks, printed on traditional paper and the pages bound as in ancient times, and another workshop produces single-page calendars. By playing the game, people can learn more about the traditional craft of woodblock printing.

In cooperation with the Guangling printing house, designers of Canal Towns created a short video showcasing how the craftspeople at the printing house printed a figure from the game, starting from the carving of an image on a wooden block. A master of this skill introduces the cultural heritage technique. The video is embedded in the game so that when people play the game, they can learn about this ancient intangible heritage.

Posted on the micro-blogging account of the game, the video has been viewed more than 1 million times, with many viewers leaving comments that they wanted woodblock printing products. This prompted the second cooperation between the game's producers and the printing house.

"We thought the best product would be a single-page calendar, which is popular at the end of a year," says Gu Xiaoci, who entered the printing house in 2007 to study the craft and is familiar with the cooperation.

The game creators designed the calendar's pattern, in the middle of which is an image of the Lord Rabbit, as 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit, surrounded by figures from the game in addition to traditional propitious symbols, such as dragon and fish.

In total, there are eight colors on the calendar that were printed one after another on eight different blocks.

In a little over two months around the New Year of 2023, when COVID-19 hit many cities in China, one printer worked day and night to create the 1,200 copies of the calendar that quickly sold out on online shopping platform Taobao.

"Printing 1,200 copies is the limit for a set of woodblocks because every time you brush over the paper, it will rub away the lines that carve the details in the wood so that the lines printed on paper will appear thicker and thicker and some very thin ones will break," Gu says.

"When topping the colors, we need to let the woodblocks take a break because otherwise they will deform and the colors will not match the delicate lines," he says.

The calendar is just one of the efforts that the printing house has been working on to innovatively apply this ancient printing technique for use in modern times.

Innovation and dedication

In early 2010s, the printing house cooperated with film director Feng Xiaogang to create the subtitles for the movie 1942 that is about a disastrous famine in China during that chaotic year of war.

"Feng was not satisfied with the font of the subtitles, and he happened to see some of our products at an airport and came to us. After one of our calligraphers wrote the subtitles by hand, we stamped them on blocks, carved them, and printed them on paper. Then based on the printed version, they created the subtitles on the screen," Gu says.

They impressed a lot of people.

"The woodblock printing style added a sense of vicissitude to the subtitles", Gu says.

In recent years, the printing house has also created some cultural creative products for students who are going to attend college entrance examinations, such as framed pictures with patterns of bamboo and the four words jin bang ti ming (achieving high scores), which are very popular.

Apart from the Canal Towns single-page calendar, they also produce Yutu Xianhua Tu, a New Year painting created for the Year of the Rabbit, inspired by the pattern on apparel kept in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The production capacity is about 200 copies a month.

In May, more than 10 master carvers and printers worked together to reproduce a woodblock print that has been considered as the peak work of the craft in China — Qunxian Heshou Tu (congratulations from gods and goddesses to an elderly person on his or her birthday). They created a digital version of the work and uploaded it online. About 32,000 people snapped up digital copies of the work.

"As more people are becoming interested in traditional culture thanks to efforts of the government, they are willing to buy products with traditional cultural elements," Gu says.

Compared with the signature delicacy of woodblock prints created in Yangzhou, which used to serve the literati in ancient times, woodblock printing techniques applied to serve the needs of ordinary people have generated other printing styles. One of these is Jia Ma of Southwest China's Yunnan province.

Diverse delights

With simple rough lines yet vivid images printed on straw paper, Jia Ma prints used to be burned by people who sought to send a message to deities soliciting their assistance.

"When people were sick, they tried to get a sort of spiritual support in this way," says Li Mingjiang, who is in charge of developing cultural creative products in Librairie Avant-Garde.

In 2020, the bookstore opened a branch in Shaxi town of Dali in Yunnan, where the residents are mainly of the Bai ethnic group.

For the Bai people, Jia Ma prints can be grouped into three categories. Those displaying totems such as dragons, those depicting the deities of their religious belief, and those portraying idols or household gods, such as the God of Fire or the God of Happiness. In Dali, there are more than 600 traditional Jia Ma patterns, and the prints are used by people to ask for good luck, safety, happy marriage, good career, harmonious family life and so on.

It is the practice of Librairie Avant-Garde to develop cultural creative products with local features, and after investigation, Li decided to create Jia Ma postcards and framed prints, which have proved popular.

Zhang Shuo, a 30-year-old from Yunnan living in Beijing, observes that as more young people go to live in Dali, they are rediscovering Jia Ma and create interesting products based on the traditional printing form.

In April, when preparing presents for guests for her wedding, Zhang accepted her friend Yang Xiao's idea to print a Jia Ma pattern on brown paper in which she packed coffee. Zhang had bought a few Jia Ma woodblocks in Yunnan and they chose the one titled "good people meet".

"It's actually not for a wedding since usually at wedding there is a Jia Ma print of the God of Happiness. Instead, it is a blessing for meetings, so that no bad things happen when people meet," she says.

"We used it because Jia Ma looks both simple and interesting. ... They have the patterns of the god in charge of mountains, woods and grass, and even a God of the Toilet. Some are very funny," Yang says.

For Guo Yadong, 45-year-old founder of Yinqintang Woodblock New Year Painting Art Gallery in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, before innovation, people should first thoroughly learn the traditional skills.

While showing traditional Chinese New Year paintings to the public, Guo and his team have also given woodblock printing lessons in schools and in universities since 2016. They have also been trying to develop cultural creative products based on this tradition.

However, Guo says: "First we need to study the tradition very hard to grasp its spiritual essence, so that in our own creation, we can present it in the works from which people can tell that they are Chinese, not Japanese or American.

"It takes a lot of time to really know about our tradition and master its spirit, but after so many years of work, we are confident that we will finally make it," he says.