China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  Among the world's total population of 6.6 billion, China's 1.3 billion is a huge "unknown quantity". Knowledge about China is so small, it is a decimal fraction many positions after the decimal point.

  Some misconceptions about China: people in the developed world do not believe that we have had international airports for over half a century and swimming pools for more than a century; people in developing countries mistakenly feel that for us, as for them, military domination is necessary to achieve peace; undeveloped countries are grateful for the fresh milk we give them, but are not convinced that it is as fresh as it could be.

  As people all over the world learn to understand China, Zhang Yimou's films have made them aware of Chinese history and displayed to them the brilliant colours of its folk traditions. These films have also given audiences a taste of a 5,000-year-old cultural tradition, albeit on a level with mother's milk.

  So many foreigners with whom I have broached the subject have told me that their first impression of China was Zhang's Raise the Red Lantern. The majestic Qiao family compound, the refined elegance of its furnishings, the fascinating costumes of the women, the ceremonies and rules which governed the life of the family and the social class to which it belonged – everything in the film is so very different from anything else in the world. What foreigners say they find hardest to understand is the appalling jealous hatred between clan members; easiest to understand is the red lantern which symbolises their passions!

  Foreigners are amazed that Chinese people still use folk art in their daily lives, and confess shamefacedly that, to them, preserving folk art and customs means sticking them in a museum so that people can go and look at them. The Chinese, on the other hand, make folk art a part of living, a tradition which is preserved through family life.

  I remember, during the discussion after a lecture I had given, an Australian professor, overcome with emotion, standing up and responding to a journalist who had accused modern China of being confused about its identity and culturally reckless. He said: "I teach history in a university. National culture and folk customs will never disappear in a country which has a film director like Zhang Yimou, who can see folk culture as world culture. As people adopt an international language to interpret the world, they will see Chinese folk culture as a part of the spirit of the Chinese people, and it will also play an important part in convincing them that the world needs China, needs to respect and coexist with China."

  I completely agree with him. Thank you, Zhang Yimou!

  This is also why I chose Qin Huai lanterns, from among countless folk art forms, as one of the chapters for China Witness. Amid the ups and downs of Chinese cultural history, these lanterns stand out as a beacon of colour.

  As agricultural civilisations evolve into modern civilisations, many traditional ways of life and folk art forms are neglected and disappear. People always wake up to this fact when it is painfully obvious that it should not have happened, but by then it is too late to do anything about it.

  In recent years in China, calls to rescue old buildings and preserve old customs have grown louder by the day. "Worn-out old things" which survived the excited rush, in the last century, to tear down the old and replace it with the new and modern, are now respected by scholars and art experts as cultural relics of old China. Folk arts which bear witness to our past have been reclaimed from "silly old fools". Bright colours are no longer seen by the educated as peasant rubbish, and village-style flowered bedspreads have become fashion items for city people. Traditional red mandarin-style jackets are popular wedding gear, and time-honoured snacks and "big-bowl tea" for communal drinking can be seen again on the avenues and in the lanes of every city at dawn and dusk. What are generally called peasant-style lanterns once more hang decoratively in cities where their ancestors were born.

  The reappearance and growth in popularity of the Qin Huai lanterns of Nanjing is one of the signs of this trend.

  The Yuan Xiao Lantern Festival originated in the Southern dynasty (ad 420-589) in ancient Nanjing, capital of the Jiangsu province, on the south bank of the Yangtze River. From the middle of the Tang dynasty, which succeeded it, the lantern-makers settled in the area around the Da Bridge at the north end of Pingshi Street, forming the original "Yuan Xiao lantern city". The first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, who established his capital in Nanjing, was a huge lantern enthusiast. He gathered together rich merchants to build his new capital, and enhanced its splendour by decorating it with lanterns. At the 1372 Yuan Xiao Festival, 10,000 water lanterns were lit, at his orders, on Nanjing's Qin Huai River. He commanded that the annual lantern festival be extended to ten nights, making it the longest such festival in Chinese history. Mentions of Qin Huai and Nanjing lanterns in plays and novels can give us a glimpse of how spectacular they were then.

  Lanterns have always been popular among ordinary people because they are inexpensive, make good gifts when visiting friends and are symbols of good luck. With the political turbulence which followed the end of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic in 1911, the destitution of Nanjing's population brought a decline in lantern festivals. They almost came to a complete end during the period of the Cultural Revolution, and it was only in 1985 that the annual Qin Huai Lantern Festival was revived by the city government. Even though history had blown out Qin Huai lanterns several times, they were a traditional custom which the people of Nanjing refused to give up. Like a torch passed down through the generations, they enable this part of our cultural heritage to survive to the present day.

  There is a popular saying in Nanjing: "You haven't had New Year if you don't see the lanterns at the Confucian Temple; and if you don't buy one, then you haven't had a good New Year."

  With the aid of my old colleagues at Jiangsu Broadcasting, I tracked down some of those people who gave Nanjing people a good New Year – a group of old Qin Huai lantern-makers. We spent a few months doing phone interviews and then settled on four people. Two of these were the Huadeng brothers, who had at first worked together to carry on the family tradition of lantern-making, although, after making a name for themselves, they had chosen to go their separate ways. The other two, Master Li and his apprentice Gu, had been introduced and paired up by "government edict", but in the course of their work became friends and today are more like father and son to each other.

  The older Mr Huadeng politely but firmly said no to an interview in the end, so we could only visit the lantern workshop of the younger brother.

  On 24 August 2006, early in the morning on our way to the lantern workshop, our driver treated us to a tirade about the speed at which Nanjing's roads were being rebuilt. "You can see how hard it's making life for us drivers! You wouldn't believe it, I've been driving in Nanjing for twenty years and I don't know how to get you there! I tell you, I knew the way a week ago, but now I'm not sure! I heard on the radio that a small flyover that was being repaired over there hasn't been reopened yet, and the big flyover next to it is going to be rebuilt, starting this week, so it's shut to traffic. How are drivers supposed to choose a route, tell me that? You gave me an address which any Nanjinger knows, but how am I supposed to know which roads are up for repair, and which are open to traffic? Buy a street map? You must be joking! Street maps can't keep up with road repairs! Go to the city planning office and check their road-works programme for an up-to-date transport map? That's a bit naive. You really don't know anything about China today, do you?! The city planners keep being made to change things by their bosses. Haven't you seen it on the TV and in the papers, the way the planners just hand over the drawings for the politicians, who think they know it all, to draw in what they want? If it's a politician with a bit of brains, then Nanjingers might get some city planning which preserves those features which are typical of the Jiangnan region; but if they're just some dogsbody, you might end up living in a rubbish bin!"

  None of us dared argue with him, because it would have been adding fuel to the flames, and besides, what he was saying had a lot
of truth in it. I thought that probably anyone who's driven a car in China would agree with him.

  Strictly speaking, the younger Mr Huadeng's Jiangnan Dragon Lantern Factory was not really a factory, more of a workshop. It looked like an abandoned warehouse compound, or a car breaker's yard, with all available space filled with lanterns in the process of being brought to life. From the smallest – the rabbit lantern, about the palm width of a two-year-old child's hands in size – to the biggest dragon lanterns, they filled the compound's two hundred square metres. Half a dozen workers were absorbed in the painstaking task of making lanterns, and nodded to us by way of a greeting. Mr Huadeng led us into a cramped cubbyhole which served as his "office". Seven or eight documents which looked like report forms hung in a row from small clips at the bottom of the window above the desk. On the desk stood a telephone covered with a piece of embroidery, an electric fan noisy enough to stop us talking, and some old-fashioned photo albums with corner mounts that had been put out ready for us. Apart from these, the desk held almost no other office equipment. A display cabinet stuffed full of sample lanterns stood behind Mr Huadeng's office chair, and a dilapidated sofa, obviously intended for guests, faced the window, squeezed in next to the display cabinet. In the whole factory, this was the only place for guests to sit.

  The weather that day was forecast to reach a very hot forty-one degrees – the electric fan roared as if it was on fire. Because we needed to record and film, there was no option but to turn it off. Very soon we all began to pour with sweat, and Mr Huadeng looked like he was being interviewed in a shower of rain.

  ***

  XINRAN: Mr Huadeng, when did you start learning about lanterns?

  HUADENG: I was born in 1934, and all I remember is our home being made up of lanterns. The men of the family, my father and grandfather, when they weren't out selling vegetables, made lanterns; and the women, my grandmother and mother, did the cooking and the laundry, and then made lanterns too. Every corner of the house was full of lanterns. At festivals, they were what we played with, hung up, even what we talked about when guests came. Before I was ten years old, I probably thought everybody made their living from lanterns. It was only later that I realised the lantern business was seasonal. You couldn't sell them all year round, although they were my family's main source of income. For the rest of the time, we scraped by on the money my father earned from buying vegetables wholesale and selling them in the market. But it was the money from the lanterns which paid for clothes or things for the house or things for the old folks. So every Chinese New Year, the adults in the family would take the lanterns they'd been making all year to the Confucian Temple to sell. When I was ten years old, my father began teaching me how to make them. I started from the most popular kinds, rabbit and water-lily lanterns. Between the age of ten and now, I haven't stopped once.

  XINRAN: And when did your father start making them?

  HUADENG: I don't know. We children weren't allowed to ask grownups questions like that. I only know my father learned from my grandfather. As they used to say, we were a lantern family, we sold lanterns for money. All arts and crafts workers were considered lower than the smallest officials, along with beggars, and other artists, singers, acrobats, martial artists and suchlike. Of course, that's the old way of speaking. When I was ten, to give the family a bit more of an income, my father took me and my older brother in hand and taught us how to make them. He told us how the skills had been passed down through the generations. I still remember him saying, if you sell vegetables, you eat gruel; if you sell lanterns, you eat rice; and if you sell good lanterns, and lots of them, you can eat pork and duck.

  XINRAN: Did he tell you stories about your family and lanterns?

  HUADENG: Mostly what he talked about was how to make good lanterns. What we wanted to know was how to make lots, and make good ones, so we could eat pork and duck. Eating duck was what we dreamed of in those days. It's our most delicious Nanjing speciality! People nowadays would say: "How much can a ten-year-old understand?" But at ten, I was wise for my age. Isn't there a saying: "Poor children soon learn to be head of the family"? As we were learning, my father used to tell us how strict my grandfather had been when he taught him. My father said, if you don't follow the rules, you won't be able to do something well.

  XINRAN: Did he beat you?

  HUADENG: All the time, really, all the time. There were very few times when he didn't beat us. When we bound together the frame of the lantern, we used bark paper, not string. You took a long, long twist of paper and pressed it around the central part which was made of bamboo, like this. There was a rule about how many times the bark strips had to go around the frame but I sometimes cheated. I went round it ten times, and it should have been twelve. Then you put on dabs of starch to glue the lantern together. When my father came to check, he would pull the starch apart and count the layers. "I told you to do twelve turns, and you did ten, you lazy little git!" he would swear as he beat me. The other children would all shout: "Little Two's eating bamboo roast pork again!" (He beat our bottoms with bamboo slats.) My father often said: "To do a handicraft well means tempering both your hand and your will." In the old man's words: "Other people may sell one for 1 yuan, but if you make a good lantern you can sell yours for 1.5 yuan. Your lanterns have got to be made in the proper way." We used to make fan lanterns before aeroplane lanterns, and he said: "If the other sellers can't spin their fans and you can, you can sell yours for five fen more." So now, I've entered lantern competitions, I've even represented Nanjing in a national paper arts championship – because kites and lanterns, and paper cuts too, all of them count as paper arts – and my commemorative lantern got onto a national special issue of postage stamps. The reason why I've had such outstanding success with my lanterns is bound up with my father's strict teachings back then. And it's also because I've tempered my skills for so many years. It's not like I just got lucky one day.

  XINRAN: You've achieved unprecedented status as a great master of Chinese folk lanterns. Have you passed your skills on to anyone in your family?

  HUADENG: I don't know whether to laugh or cry when you ask me that. I'm passionate about lanterns, I set up this lantern workshop six years ago, but I haven't made a cent from it. I've retired now. I get my 1,000-yuan pension every month. I just want to make sure that this factory doesn't go bust, so I struggle along. When I was trying to find someone to take over from me, I talked to my daughter and son-in-law. I said to them: "You shouldn't go and work for other people, or sit in front of computers in other people's offices. If you do that, you're not as good as me. Only folk traditions are world traditions. My lantern-making is an art which foreigners would like to do but don't know how to. It's a world-class skill. Our folk arts are so outstanding that you should get foreigners to come and learn from us, we shouldn't be running after them." My daughter listened and then she just asked me one thing: "Dad, have you got rich? Do you live better than ordinary people?" There was nothing I could say to this. All these years, come rain or shine, through good times and bad, I've just pursued my love of folk art. It's also because I wanted to do something for my country, and to hand on the skills of my ancestors, but what have I got to show for it? Nothing at all. Even my children don't understand. Sometimes I think, times have changed – children have the right to run their own lives, life is modernised too. But traditional culture can't just be chucked into history books and forgotten. Sometimes I feel we've let down our ancestors, let down all those ancestors who've bequeathed thousands of years of folk culture to us.

  XINRAN: As I understand it, the government has tried to rescue these Jiangnan folk arts which were being lost, like lantern-making. For example, in 1985, they started up the Qin Huai Lantern Festival again after a long gap. In your experience, are these just slogans, or has there been any real action?

  HUADENG: What can I say? It's hard to explain. City officials have come to me and said: "Old Huadeng, we're delighted that you've set up this lantern workshop, we hope
that when it's going well, you'll dig up some even older traditions and use modern techniques to make even more beautiful and artistic lanterns." I've done what they said for six years, put my whole body and soul into it, but what return have I had? My lantern design has got onto national stamps, and the Chinese Post Office sent me 500 yuan. They deducted fifteen yuan for postage, so I just got 485 yuan. When people heard my lantern had got onto a stamp, they said to me: "Huadeng, old man, you've really made good now!" But no one knows I only got 500 yuan, less money than those cadres spend on a dinner. But those stamps were sent all over the world, and I think that that's an honour that can't be bought with money. If I had 200,000 yuan, I might buy a house with it and move out of our place, which is too small to swing a cat in. I might use it to buy a car, so I don't have to queue up for buses in all weathers to get to work and back. I haven't asked central government for money, or the local government. Why not? The lanterns I've devoted my whole life to, the Confucian Temple lanterns, have gone out to the whole world printed on our postage stamps. It's not just me that made them possible. They're the result of the years of hard graft put in by all those artists who make Nanjing lanterns. Why should I care about 20,000 yuan? My assets are not material things. They've been handed down to me by my ancestors.

  XINRAN: All your life, you've sweated blood to carry on this wonderful folk art, yet your daughter asks you how much you've earned from all that work. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, and all this has caused you real pain, a pain which you can't get rid of. Do you think all Nanjing's lantern-makers, all Chinese lantern-makers, feel the same way as you?

  HUADENG: I don't know about other places in China, and there are only a couple of others in Nanjing who've spent half a century making lanterns like I have. We don't have either the right or the power to make other people study this art – they've got to eat, and bring up their children, and nowadays people play mah-jong and go dancing too. There's practically no one willing to spend hours sweating away in a hole like this fiddling about with an ancient folk art. There are a few older people who are out of work, have no education and can't do any other job, who might work with us to earn a bit of money. It's a lonely business, what I do. People don't respect you, or even understand you. In 1984, for the Sino-Japanese Youth Congress, a lantern display was planned in Nanjing, and the City Cultural Department gave me the task of designing it. They wanted me to turn the traditional water-lily lanterns into more elaborate lotus lanterns. I went to Xuanwu Lake Park to see the lotus flowers because I wanted to give them a natural shape. At that time I couldn't afford a camera. It's not like now, with digital cameras you can take a few shots and bring them back to look at. We didn't have them then. I just had to go and look at the lotus ponds in the park, and once I nearly fell in the lake trying to get a good look at a flower bud. I got nabbed by the park keepers. They tried to fine me, but I said I wasn't messing around, I was designing lanterns, and where would I get the money to pay a fine? They said if the government had asked me to do the design, weren't they paying me for it? I said no, it was my patriotic duty. I just got a bit of money to buy materials at the beginning, but no fees while I was making the lanterns. And no one believed I was such a fool! Things like this have happened far too often, and I've suffered far too much grief over them, far too much. Sometimes when something like this has happened, I like to have a smoke and think about it, and sometimes I'm so deep in thought that the cigarette burns right down, and I don't realise it until it burns my hand.