The town that makes fireworks

A Liuyang firecracker starts as local dirt and ends as light. The traditional recipe, still the basis of the trade, draws on the county's own materials: paper rolled hard into tubes, earth saltpetre, sulphur, iron filings, charcoal dust, and red and white clay for plugging and packing — assembled by hand into a shell that throws sparks when the charge catches. The invention belongs, by local memory, to a Tang-dynasty man of this valley, Li Tian, and a Song-era 'ancestral temple' to him still stands in a Liuyang lane, where the trade has honoured its founder for a thousand years. Coloured fireworks, the more expensive art, arrived by legend in the Qing: at the Yongzheng emperor's accession, a Liuyang maker named Li Tai is said to have produced colour bursts for the lantern festival, and in 1723 the county's fireworks formally became tribute to the throne. The craft is married to the calendar — fireworks are made to be burned at New Year, at temple fairs, at weddings and shop openings — so workshop production has always pulsed with festival dates. In 2007 the state listed Liuyang's making techniques in its first batch of national intangible cultural heritage, an official admission that this is an art with masters and not merely a hazardous-goods trade.

Festival fire is the town's oldest product. Liuyang fireworks are recorded as prospering in the Northern Song dynasty, and the trade's economy has always run on ritual demand: New Year strings of crackers to open the year loudly, lantern-festival rockets, temple-fair days, weddings and business openings, each with its preferred sizes and burn times. The industry learned to organise itself around that demand. In 1995 the state named Liuyang the 'home of Chinese fireworks'; in 2001 the city founded a firework-culture research society, a guild in everything but name, to collect the craft's history and uphold its standards. The festival economy reached deep into households: farm families could roll tubes in the slack season, and whole villages worked on commission for the bigger houses — which was also why safety was, for centuries, everyone's business. Honour and hazard travelled together through the calendar, from the first cracker of the year to the last. Modern Liuyang has partly converted that ritual schedule into public spectacle — staged city displays over the river, festival shows for tourists — while the household craft that filled the old calendar survives in the licensed workshops that remain, and in the ancestor-shrine lane where the founder is still remembered with incense rather than gunpowder.

The industry that grew from the festival is now planetary. Export began under the Qing — from the Xianfeng years the product went out through Hong Kong, Macao, Hankou and Shanghai, and from 1875 Liuyang fireworks shipped directly to Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Britain, the United States and Russia. In the 1990s they were the area's biggest export. Today the city accounts for roughly half of China's gross fireworks sales, and Liuyang is described as the world's top centre of fireworks manufacture, the seat of the International Fireworks Association. Growth ran through crisis. In 1998 the trade hit a bottleneck of obsolete technology and unsold stock; the city answered with consolidation and machinery, banning more than ten thousand unlicensed workshops and writing production-safety standards, later working with universities on safer compounds. The business went outward in unusual ways: a Liuyang company won a display contract in Brazil in 2003 and bought land there to build factories abroad, and fireworks enterprises from the city have listed on the Shanghai market. More than thirty fireworks companies operate in Liuyang today, inside a county-level economy that also hosts biomedicine and electronics parks — one valley's two faces, the ancient one loudest.