Handbooking inheritors in Hebei alone

Hebei Province has announced the list of representative inheritors of the first batch of provincial intangible cultural heritage items. Yang Yongan, the handicraftsman of Qian'an, is currently on the list.

45-year-old Yang Yongan is a native of Qian’an. After graduating from high school in 1987, he took this ancestral craft from his father and has been doing it for 27 years.

Qian’an has a tradition of papermaking. In the Sanlizhuang Elementary School in Chengbei, a stone carving couplet on the pillar of the temple’s front corridor has been written: “Since the beginning of the Han Dynasty, the scale began to be in the Qing Dynasty.” Muan produced mulberry as raw material. The paper is pure and tough, with white and smooth color. It is most suitable for painting and decoration, and it has long been known as “Nei Qiang of the North”.

“The handmade paper called burr paper, also known as mulberry paper, is the predecessor of writing paper. It is inherited from the kind of papermaking technology known as the “four great inventions”. It is used for grooves, skins, defects, and squash. Edge, sizing, papermaking... copying a piece of paper and going through 72 processes.” Yang Yongan introduced.

There are dozens of villages engaged in hand-made papermaking in the late Qing Dynasty from the northwest to the southeast across the Sanli River. During the Republican period, there were more than 800 Maotou paper workshops and nearly 2 million Nissan papers. The products sell well. North China and Northeast China. Yang Yongan said, “In the period of the Republic of China, there were more than 100 depressions in the village of Guangkang (depression pits, sinks in paperboard), and there were more than 20 at the time of the reform and opening up.” But now there is only one family left in the whole village. .

After studying the reason, Yang Yongan stated that since the birth of the mechanism paper, handmade torn paper was no longer popular, and the market share was getting smaller and smaller. There was also this work that was both bitter and tired and boring and monotonous. Young people were not willing to do it. . Even his two sons are reluctant to learn this craft and talk about inheritance. Yang Yongan is helpless.

In a pile of sacks, in the yard, a two-meter square beater sinks into the east of the courtyard. The adobe workshop in the west conveys the vicissitudes of hand-made papermaking techniques. The sill is full of drying paper, and paper is placed everywhere on the outside of the house. ... Looking around the courtyard of the Yang family, each item is related to hand-made papermaking. Now, his wife has become Yang Yong'an's only assistant. He makes paper and his wife hangs on.