Forty Centimetres of Painted Clay

The craft has a founder and a date. Clay Figurine Zhang was founded in the Daoguang era of the Qing, and its founder was Zhang Mingshan, born in 1826 and registered as a native of Shaoxing in Zhejiang, which means the family was not originally Tianjin at all. At eighteen he took the art name Clay Figurine Zhang and ran a workshop called Shigu Zhai. The move from a personal name to a trade name at that age is worth noticing: the craft's identity was commercial before it was official, and the family name entered the language as a description of the object. It is now among the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage items in the city.

The international recognition came early and is documented. In 1915 Zhang Mingshan's painted sculpture Weaving Female Workers won first prize at the Panama international exposition, while the second-generation inheritor Zhang Yuting received an honourable award. An award at that exposition is a specific kind of evidence: it tells you the work was seen by an international jury, and it dates the craft's arrival in a worldwide frame rather than a local one. Five generations of inheritors have passed the art on since, which is why the sources describe it as the essence of clay sculpture in Tianjin and northern China rather than as one workshop's product.

The physical facts of the object explain its character. A typical figure is about forty centimetres tall, made for indoor display as a painted sculpture in simple, bright colours. Forty centimetres is a shelf scale: large enough for a face to carry expression, small enough that a household can own several. The painting is not decoration applied afterwards but part of the modelling, which is why the sources call it painted sculpture rather than figurine. Guo Moruo, then chairman of the national federation of literary and art circles, wrote an inscription for the craft that reads, in his compressed phrasing, that yesterday one family made figures and today the peach and plum fill the world.