The Town That Painted for the New Year

Yangliuqing means Green Willows, and the name describes a bank rather than a building. The town sits in the north-west of Xiqing District on the north bank of the Grand Canal, fifteen kilometres from the centre of Tianjin, and it is the seat of the district government. It began as a settlement called Liukou on the border between the Song and the Liao and was made a town in 1214, in the second year of Zhenyou under the Jin. It took the name it still carries in the late Yuan or early Ming. More than four hundred years of continuous work in one trade followed, which is why the town is known abroad for its prints rather than for its canal.

Canal transport paid for the town's shape. In the Qing period Yangliuqing was laid out in what the sources call sixteen streets and seventy-two lanes, a grid dense enough to support workshops, drying yards, shops and warehouses within a short walk of the water. That prosperity produced three things at once, and they are usually named together: the woodblock New Year prints, the courtyard houses of the merchants who sold them, and the Gan Da Ying trading culture, the practice of following Qing armies westward to trade that carried Yangliuqing goods into the northwest. A town this small was able to specialise because the canal let it sell far beyond its own hinterland.

The twentieth century took the town apart in stages. In 1900, during the Boxer movement, altar sites were set up in Yangliuqing and part of the old buildings and print workshops were destroyed in the fighting. In 1923 the descendants of Shi Yuanshi left the Zunmei Hall residence for central Tianjin and most of the rooms were sold. From 1995 the district carried out redevelopment that changed the town's overall appearance while keeping some historic buildings, and around 2000 large numbers of traditional houses came down and the print blocks held by private families were scattered or abandoned. In 2002 the district removed the town park, re-excavated the riverbed and restored the old course of the South Canal.