Paper, Scissors and Ash

Papercutting, the art of cutting designs out of paper, has a long history in the city of Gaomi, and the Weifang paper-cut is a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage item. The Gaomi work began as a branch of the Jiaodong paper-cut and developed a delicate style of its own. Its cutters work with strong contrast of colour, straight and simple lines and an exaggerated outline, and the figures come mostly from dramatic stories, from flowers and birds, and from fantastic symbols, which are the subjects a household already knows from the stage and the song.

The other Gaomi paper is stranger. Gaomi ash New Year paintings, the puhui nianhua, are an old kind of Chinese folk art that first appeared in the Ming dynasty, in the Chenghua period, and flourished under the Qing. Their Chinese name puts ash in the title, and they are the county's own version of the New Year print that Weifang makes in woodblock. They were approved by the State Council on 20 May 2006 and entered the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list. In October 2023 the list of protection units was reissued, and the Gaomi public cultural service centre was named in place of the earlier body.

Gaomi has a third export, and it is a writer. Mo Yan was born here in 1955 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, and he has set some of his stories in the region, so that the county appears in fiction. The combination is unusual: a place known for the delicacy of its scissors and for a prose that is not delicate at all. Gaomi became a county-level city in 1994, when the county was upgraded, and it now has three subdistricts and seven towns. Its crafts and its novelist are what the place is known for outside Shandong.