The prints come from a single village. Kaifeng's municipal government records that the tradition began in the Northern Song capital and that Shen Kuo's Supplement to Conversations records the court ordering carved prints of Zhong Kui in the fifth year of the Xining era. The craft is continuous rather than revived: it was listed among the first national intangible cultural heritage items in 2006, and the China Intangible Cultural Heritage web portal carries the name of Guo Taiyun, born in 1925, who led the ancient-block research room of the town's printmaking cooperative from its founding in 1983 and was named a national representative inheritor in 2007. Pigments are boiled from plants, and the images keep a distinctive proportion that the official descriptions call large heads and short bodies.
In the village of Zhu Xian Zhen south of Kaifeng, a printmaker still picks the wood, carves the block and boils the colour from plants. The craft entered China's first national intangible heritage list in 2006.