Two Woods and a Brush

The craft begins with the wood. According to the town's own account, craftspeople who had moved north from the Jiangnan region during the Ming found that pear and jujube timber took a cut cleanly, and began printing images of gods and door gods to sell. That is given as the origin of the Yangliuqing print. The technique that developed is described in the sources as woodblock over-printing as the main method with hand colouring as the supplement: the outline and the flat colour areas come off the block, and the shading, faces and detail are painted in afterwards. The result is a folk print with the finish of a painting, which is why the trade is treated as art as well as manufacture.

Prints sold because they answered something in the buyer's year, and occasionally that meant politics. After the Tianjin Massacre of 1870, when the Wanghailou church was burned, workshops in Yangliuqing produced a print on the subject of the burning of Wanghailou, and the sheet drew a diplomatic protest. The Tianjin county office later ordered the town's print shops to stop printing and selling that subject. The episode is a reminder that these were mass-produced images with a national market: a print could travel as far as a newspaper, and a government could treat it as one.

The trade's modern history is a record of dispersal. From the Xianfeng era the silting of the South Canal and the wars pushed production and sales outward into the surrounding districts. In 1900 workshops were destroyed. In the 1960s the Yangliuqing painting cooperative moved into the city and the town was left without private print workshops until 1987, when the cooperative returned to open a branch; individual work resumed in the 1980s when Huo Qingyou, sixth-generation inheritor of the Huo line, began again. Around 2000, redevelopment demolished traditional houses and abandoned or scattered the blocks families had kept. The 2006 national listing came after most of that damage had been done.