The Village That Printed the Gods

Yangjiabu is a village in the Hanting district of Weifang, and it has been a workshop for a very long time. Weifang was the largest producer and distributing centre of kites and woodblock New Year prints in Chinese history, and this village is the reason: it is counted with Yangliuqing in Tianjin and Taohuawu in Suzhou as one of the three great homes of the New Year print. The trade began at the end of the Ming dynasty and reached its peak under the Qing, when the sheets went out from here as goods rather than as souvenirs. A folk art park in the village keeps the workshops and the blocks where visitors can see them.

The prints are called nianhua, New Year pictures, and their use is a household rite. On the eve of the Spring Festival, the most important festival in China, families took down the old sheets and pasted up new ones, and the new ones were a blessing for the family and friends for the year to come. The subjects were various: flowers, beauties, landscapes, and characters from myths and legends. The style carries the meaning. Concise lines and bright colours are what the makers describe as the character of the people of Weifang, and the block is cut so that the colour sits inside a hard outline and the figures read from across a courtyard.

What survives is a craft economy rather than an industry. The city counts other traditional crafts beside the prints: inlaid silver lacquerware, nut carving and cloth toys are named among the Weifang products known at home and abroad, and in the late Qing and early Republic the town's bronze copies of Shang and Zhou vessels were good enough to be taken for the real thing. The prefecture's reputation in the Ming and Qing rested on numbers that people repeated: two hundred furnaces, three thousand bronze smiths, nine thousand embroiderers and a hundred thousand looms. That is why the saying went that the south had Suzhou and the north had Weixian.