The City That Made a Festival of a Toy

The Chinese word for kite is fengzheng, and the word is younger than the object. In the late Tang people fixed whistles to the paper birds they flew, and the sound was like a zheng or a qin, which gave the thing its name. Older speech had two words: the south called it a yao and the north a yuan, so that people said south yao and north yuan. The modern word now covers the plain paper kite with no whistle at all. Weifang's own form is the dragon-head centipede, a long train of discs on one line, and the city's kite museum puts a ceramic dragon on its ridge in its honour. The city's other name is Yuandu, the kite capital.

The first Weifang international kite festival opened on 1 April 1984 with the support of David Checkley, president of the Seattle Kite Association, and more than ten thousand kite fans came to the opening; people from eleven countries and regions, among them the United States and Canada, took part and flew. On 1 April 1988 the presiding group of the festival passed a proposal designating Weifang the kite capital. At the sixth festival, in 1989, the International Kite Federation was founded with representatives from China, the United States, Japan, Britain, Italy and twelve other countries, and its headquarters were set here. The festival is counted with the Beijing temple fair, the Harbin ice lantern festival and the Zigong lantern fair as one of China's four great public cultural events.

A Weifang kite is three things put together: a frame of bamboo, a covering of good silk, and hand painting. The craft is counted among the intangible cultural heritage of Shandong, and it is the union of joinery and painting that makes the kites worth keeping as well as flying. From the 1980s the festival became one of a group of events, with the Shandong-Taiwan trade fair, the Shouguang vegetable expo and the Linqu red-leaf festival, through which the city opened itself to the outside. The kite museum opened on 1 April 1989 and keeps more than a thousand kites in five classes; after 2011 a new hall was added where visitors can try the work by hand.