Carving a story of skill
Chen Yishi's presbyopic glasses magnify the Buddha emerging from beneath his chisel as he taps the tool to whittle the image into the ebony woodblock he's holding. The septuagenarian retiree from Hangji town in the outskirts of Yangzhou, East China's Jiangsu province, still takes orders and is creating the Buddha block for a cultural company in Southwest China's Sichuan province.
The craftsmanship required for the folk art, which made the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006 and was inscribed on UNESCO's list in 2009, requires not only meticulous training but also great talent. Typically, 2-centimeter-thick blocks are hewn from fine-grained pear or jujube wood before they're polished and engraved. Drafts of the words and images are then brushed onto extremely thin paper and proofed for mistakes before they're pasted onto the blocks. These designs provide guides for the artisans, who scratch them into the wood to generate the raised borders of words that will be coated with ink and then applied to paper pages.
Woodblock printing was initially used to publish Buddhist texts amid the religion's zenith in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). It's considered one of ancient China's "four great inventions", along with papermaking, gunpowder and the compass.
Woodblock printing enjoyed unprecedented development in Yangzhou during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when Emperor Kangxi commissioned an official named Cao Yin to establish the Yangzhou poetry bureau. The bureau brought skilled artisans to Yangzhou, where many quality private woodblock workshops sprung up in the following centuries.
Celebrated artisans
Hangji town in particular stood out as a woodblock-printing hub. Chen's grandfather opened Hangji's biggest woodblock-printing business during the reign of Emperor Guangxu. Later, Chen's father took over the enterprise and produced many collector-grade classical books. Chen is particularly adept at the widely used Song Dynasty typeface known for its blocky, clear and balanced appearance.
" The most commonly used wood comes from wild fruitless pear trees," he explains. "It has a moderate hardness and fine grain, and its size doesn't change much when it's soaked or dried. These qualities make it relatively easy to carve and good for applying ink." Blocks are soaked in water for six or seven months to remove the sugar, so they don't rot or get eaten by bugs. Afterward, they're dried in the shade for a month before they're resized and reshaped.
Then , a light layer of paste is slathered on the dry blocks before pieces of thin paper with written characters or sketched images are placed atop the area that will be engraved once the adhesive dries. Brushstrokes are specially executed to enable precision cutting of the blocks to ensure every character is clear and graceful.
Images are the trickiest, Chen explains. "The wood grain runs horizontally. So, when carving the expression in a person's eyes, for example, you have to pick a place to etch vertical lines, so the eyes appear particularly dark when printed to make them vivid and lively," he says. "The lines must be smooth to present the face, the hands and even the motion of the fingers."
Etches of eras
When Chen's father was on his deathbed, Chen promised he would carry forward the craft. His daughter, Chen Meiqi, still marvels at some of the techniques her father has mastered that virtually nobody else can execute. Chen Meiqi initially worked as a jade sculptor before her father persuaded her to instead carve woodblocks as the number of practitioners of this ancient printing method dwindled.
Chen Meiqi started with Song-type characters. "The learning process is arduous. Different fonts require different levels of detail. The Yangzhou style is especially strict because it follows imperial standards." For example, the three pointed dots in the Chinese character xin (heart) are slightly different and should take on the respective shapes of a water drip, a kidney and a melon seed, she says. "Even the slightest mistake, a literally hair-thin margin of error, can result in significant differences when printed. One faulty character renders the entire block unusable," she says.
She says she plans to propagate this craft for the rest of her life — and beyond — ensuring its legacy remains inscribed across centuries past and yet to come. "I'll do this as long as I live," she says. "And history has shown that these works, produced with special ink and paper, will last for a thousand years."
