Today's Female Newspaper Phoenix Network reporter/Zhang Qiuying
The man in front of him was thin and dark, with a square face, but he did not lose his enthusiasm. The bamboo curtain in his hand was rippling in a paper trough filled with water. Later, Liu Lan realized that it was called "curtaining paper".
Huang Longgen is a villager in the Guanchong Group, Shanghong Village, Zhangfang Town, Liuyang City. He is the only villager in the area who is still making paper with bamboo. In 2018, Liu Lan, who was in her sophomore year, came to Taoist zheng for a documentary assigned by the school. Now, four years have passed, 24-year-old Liu Lan has become a member of the village and serves as the director of the local ancient papermaking research center.
In the eyes of villagers, this foreign college girl is "capable" and "moderate". Just like the girl in the village, you can talk about it if you meet her. But what the villagers don’t know is that this young girl has a “ambition” that is unpredictable – to use the countryside to revitalize intangible cultural heritage and revitalize the countryside with intangible cultural heritage.
Children are also very interested in ancient papermaking.
thousand-year papermaking technology, only one "single seedling" is left
000 bamboo forests in Shanghong Village, Zhangfang Town, Liuyang City are densely packed with bamboo forests, and are well-known in the tradition of producing bamboo paper.
bamboo paper is exquisitely made. You must go into the mountains to pick bamboos around Xiaoman, dig a pond and soak it for three or four months to produce microorganisms. The so-called soaking for a hundred days can be done. Local women even sing mountain songs for the husband who went into the mountains to pick bamboo to express their thoughts.
Then, the paper material must go through re-cleaning, hammer paste, steaming and cooking. The five major steps of cutting bamboo floating ponds, boiling full fire, swaying materials into the curtain, covering the curtain and pressing paper, and baking through fire are consistent with the ancient papermaking process recorded in the Song Yingxing of the Ming Dynasty's "The Book of the Heavenly Gong and the Completed Things" of the Qing Dynasty.
What is different from mechanical paper is that the fibers of handmade paper are uneven. When used in ink, it can dye the unique elegance and freehand style of Chinese calligraphy and painting. Because it is alkaline, it has not been rotten for thousands of years. It was once evaluated: "Liuyang Ancient Mountain Tribute Paper is a pure bamboo raw material, environmentally friendly and pollution-free, fine and strong texture, long and strong fibers, suitable for calligraphy and painting, and it is indeed a time-honored brand."
Historical records at the end of the Qing Dynasty, because the paper was snow-white, Liuyang paper was used by the government during the Qianlong period, and the paper products here were also called "tribute paper". To this day, I can still find Liuyang tribute paper used for the Hunan imperial examination in the Qing Dynasty at the Changsha Examination Institute.
is the Hunan cultural context that has been continuously produced for thousands of years. This bookish skill has been passed down in the daily life of locals for thousands of years.
even so, with the reduction of traditional ink writing and the benefits of modern papermaking art production, Liuyang tribute paper has declined. The remaining companies used bamboo skin as wrapping paper for fireworks, and their income was small. In 2011, Li Feng, a volunteer in the protection of intangible cultural heritage, visited this point, and only one in the village was still making paper.
In 2016, under the promotion of local cultural departments and cultural volunteers, Changsha Library held an exhibition, "Spring and Autumn on Paper - Rescuing Liuyang Ancient Mountain Tribute Paper Exhibition", and a group of calligraphers and painters such as Yang Fuyin made a vigorous recommendation for Liuyang handmade bamboo paper.
Yang Fuyin is a national first-class artist and a visiting professor in the Department of Fine Arts of Hunan Normal University. He has been dissatisfied with some shoddy rice paper on the market for a long time. "Ordinary rice paper will not work if it is left for thirty or fifty years. It is tide and fragile. Look at this paper, the pulling force is particularly strong, and it will be fine if it is left for one or two hundred years." Yang Fuyin said in an interview. The senior painter told reporters that handmade paper from the mountains of Liuyang actually has amazing ability to display calligraphy and painting. After the exhibition of
, Liuyang's ancient papermaking became famous for a time, and calligraphers, painters, intangible cultural heritage enthusiasts, and tourists came to visit this small village that did not even have a mobile phone signal.
Liu Lan is also one of the visitors. She came here with Li Feng and wanted to shoot a documentary about the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage. At that time, she would not have thought that this visit changed her choice.
Liu Lan introduced the history of Taoist rinsing papermaking to reporters.
Use the countryside to revitalize intangible cultural heritage
When an ancient skill is far away from modern life, how can it survive? This is a common problem encountered by almost all inheritors of intangible cultural heritage:
relies on the media to build momentum? Relying on tourists to get lively? Li Feng, Liu Lan and many volunteers think it is not.
As a recorder and protector of filming and carrying out countless intangible cultural heritage activities, Li Feng found that although moving intangible cultural heritage to cities and neighborhoods can attract traffic, it is difficult to bring actual benefits to inheritors without the economic foundation and the internal vitality stimulated by the market, intangible cultural heritage is difficult to achieve sustainable development.
A new plan has been extracted - "Inheritance and Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Local Life". What does it mean? It is to allow intangible cultural heritage to truly develop locally as an industry, and also as a cultural and tourism project to attract traffic to the countryside. Use the countryside to revitalize intangible cultural heritage and revitalize the countryside with intangible cultural heritage.
Of course, this is not a strange idea, but most villages often turn intangible cultural heritage into a dead landscape. How to make it truly a living industry tests everyone who operates the project.
This is both a test and an exciting ideal. It ignited Liu Lan's "ambitiousness". Liu Lan grew up in a rural area in Jiangxi when she was a child. She liked a quiet and rural life. Later, her hometown changed and her style was no different from that of the city. On the contrary, the Taoist official who was thousands of miles away looked like his hometown in his memory.
"How great it would be if the villagers could not only have a better life, but also not destroy the high-quality cultural heritage and beautiful rural style of the village." Liu Lan said that Taoist Guan Chong has the potential of such a "water town in dreams" to a certain extent. Liuyang tribute paper itself has good market demand, which can be used as calligraphy and painting, ancient book restoration, wrapping paper, etc. The process of handicrafts and the original landscape resources of the village are also a kind of tourism resource. Combining the two may create a wealthy countryside that is both "old" and "innovation".
In October 2018, all villagers, village collectives and Hunan Canghaitian Intangible Cultural Heritage Culture Communication Co., Ltd. jointly registered and established Liuyang Daoguanchong Rural Tourism Development Co., Ltd., and began to build an intangible cultural heritage ecological village. "The villagers invested in land and idle houses and permanently held 20% of the shares in the company. At the same time, the village collective also owned 29% of the shares, which maximized the enthusiasm of the villagers." said Tang Yugen, secretary of the Party Branch of Shanghong Village.
Liu Lan, a journalism major at Hunan University, also plunged into this "second hometown" after graduation.
Ancient method of papermaking
Revitalize rural areas with intangible cultural heritage
pass, and the Taoist officials rushed to be closed and poor. Only one season of late rice is planted a year, and the per capita income is about 1,000 yuan. To build a vibrant intangible cultural heritage ecological village, infrastructure must be first developed.
"At the beginning, several people were stationed in for environmental surveying, design, etc., but there was no place to eat. They all cooked a meal at this person's house today and a meal at that villager's house tomorrow." Liu Lan said.
Relying on patience and determination, in more than three years, the village finally built a circular road and widened the original 3-meter-wide rural road to 6 meters; a public bathroom and a parking lot were built; the mountainous areas that were originally closed to signals also achieved the Internet everywhere; for natural landscapes, targeted protection, and manpower uses stones to pave a walking trail to the waterfall on the mountain; signed a cooperation agreement with the villagers, and transformed idle houses into a study and study hall through leasing, circulation and other means.
October 2020, "Spring and Autumn on Paper - Daoguan Chong Ancient Papermaking Research Hall" opened. Liu Lan, who graduated in June of the same year, officially became the director, with a monthly income of about 4,000 yuan. She was responsible for the planning, operation, reception and explanation of the exhibition in the museum, including daily water and electricity expenditures, and she also had to worry about it.
Liu Lan didn't know much about ancient papermaking. In order to plan the content of the study hall, she found all the monographs and papers on papermaking in China, watched related documentaries, and visited interviews with the old masters who had inherited papermaking in the village, collecting collections of local tribute paper from door to door.
Born in 1967, Huang Longguo was one of the villagers in the early response project. When he heard that Liu Lan was looking for a collection, he rummaged through boxes and cabinets on the second floor of the earthen house and found his father's camphor wood box filled with receipts recording local paper production records - his father was a village accountant in the 1960s and 1970s.
Villager Liang Yi made antique collections in his early years. He heard that his hometown was going to open a study and study hall, so he returned home and gave away a collection he collected for free - a letter from the Liuyang Third District Committee of the Communist Youth League of China celebrated the Fourth Congress of the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers in the District, a piece of Liuyang paper work.
On the day of the opening of the museum, it was the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. More than 5,000 tourists flocked to this place where intangible cultural heritage grows, communicate with craftsmen, experience intangible cultural heritage projects, and eat local food. The food was produced by Huang Longguo. He sold the truck in the town and returned to his hometown to open a "Six Canteen" farmhouse. The summer occupancy rate of homestays not far away also reached 100%.
"The team has formulated a five-year plan for this project." Liu Lan said that this plan includes continuing to build infrastructure; establishing more intangible cultural venues; expanding the reception volume in the village; allowing craftsmen to improve papermaking technology so that they can match the level of the previous tribute paper period, increase added value, etc.
What many people don’t know is that Liu Lan secretly assigns a task for herself. In her spare time, she will ask every villager to have a deep chat to understand their experiences and demands for the development of her hometown. At the same time, the process of Taoist officials revitalizing the countryside was recorded. After 5 years of observation, a documentary about revitalizing the countryside was released.
From her falling in love with this ancient art to choosing to stay in a foreign countryside, this girl born in the 1995 is obviously full of youthful idealism. Although this ideal is written in a slightly quiet and remote countryside, it is even more vigorous and more unwilling to be "ignited".
Editor: Yiyi
