Yangliuqing New Year prints

The Yangliuqing New Year print (杨柳青木版年画) is the craft that made the town's name travel. It carries on the Song and Yuan painting tradition and the Northern Song court style, is strongest in fine-line figure painting in heavy colour, and absorbs Ming woodcut technique; the sheets are printed from woodblocks and then finished by hand. The trade is recorded as running for more than four hundred years, and in 2006 it was placed on the first national intangible cultural heritage list. Its history is not a smooth ascent: it was pushed outward by the silting of the South Canal, damaged in 1900, and lost blocks to redevelopment around the year 2000.