Silk, Bamboo and a Street of Shops

The craft's origin is a specific apprenticeship in a specific street. Wei Yuantai was born in Tianjin on 8 June 1872, the eleventh year of the Tongzhi era. At sixteen he was apprenticed to the Jiang family's Tianfu Zhai paper-and-colour shop inside the north gate of the old walled city, and four years later he opened the Changqing Zhai Wei Ji kite workshop on Drum Tower East Street. A paper-and-colour shop made the fittings for festivals and funerals; a kite workshop made something that had to fly. The move from one to the other, by a young man who had learned to cut and colour paper, is the whole beginning of the trade.

What distinguishes the kites is material and paint. The covering uses pure silk, satin and gauze, hand-painted with a technique the sources call graded shading, in which colour is built up in layers so that it fades rather than steps. The designs are named and specific: the gong-and-drum wild goose, the flying eagle, the dragon-eyed fish. The city's account of its own kites adds that Wei's kites can be folded to a fraction of their full size and are noted for portability, a practical property that matters for a craft whose product has to be carried. Bamboo frames are joined by piercing and pegging rather than gluing, which lets a large kite collapse into a small bundle.

The craft has passed through four named inheritors: Wei Shenxing, Wei Yongchangxue and Wei Guoqiu followed the founder. It is listed among Tianjin's first batch of national intangible cultural heritage extension projects, and the making technique appears on the national extension list with Pingju, Hebei bangzi and the Tianhou imperial parade. Among its documented honours are a Shanhua award in Chinese folk art and a silver award for folk craft. Tianjin also appears in a wider list: Kaifeng, Beijing, Tianjin, Weifang, Nantong and Yangjiang are together named the six great traditional kite production centres of China.