Gaomi

Gaomi is a county-level city of Weifang in eastern Shandong, with three subdistricts and seven towns under it. It became a city in 1994, when Gaomi county was upgraded. It is the home town of Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 and has set some of his stories in the region. The other thing Gaomi is known for is paper: the county makes paper-cuts in the Jiaodong manner, with a delicate style of its own, and it makes Gaomi ash New Year paintings, a folk art that appeared in the Ming dynasty in the Chenghua period and flourished under the Qing. Both are counted among the crafts of Weifang.