Baigong Catalog

The four words "feelings of love but lightness of hands" are the words of the old paper craftsmen in Jingxian County passed down from word to mouth. The first time I heard this sentence was said by a master named Zhou during a field survey in 2019. His original words are actually longer - "When your heart aches, your hands become lighter; when your hands become lighter, the paper becomes alive; when the paper becomes alive, the words have somewhere to go." This is the craftsman's highest praise for his craftsmanship. When a piece of paper reaches the wall, it is about to "become a master". It is about to transform from a ball of paper pulp into a piece of paper that can hold pen and ink, a paper that can hold stories, contracts, epitaphs, and family letters. The moment the craftsman uncovers it, he lifts a new life from the wall. Cao Wenyuan said, "Treat this piece of paper as your own daughter." This is not rhetoric, but true feeling. "Cinnabar into paper" is an extremely rare craft in the middle and late Qing Dynasty. It was mainly used for royal edicts, religious scriptures and high-standard family genealogy. It is even rarer to put cinnabar-dyed silk into paper - silk fiber into paper will give the paper extremely strong toughness and a faint red light. However, the process is extremely difficult to master, because silk tends to clump when beaten, and uneven dispersion will cause patches on the paper surface. The Grandpa of the Cao family made 103 pieces of "Four-foot Alchemy Paper", and three of them were discarded - this ratio is actually considered a very high success rate. When I was interviewing the history of paper in southern Anhui, I heard a saying: There was a kind of paper called "Red Silk Xuan" in the late Qing Dynasty. A batch was only made in Huizhou. After it was made, the craftsmanship was lost. I transplanted this legend to the Cao family.

Reinforced leather paper is a paper product that actually existed. It was mainly popular in the mid-Qing Dynasty. The characteristic of the technology is that other tough fibers (such as kiwi vine, mulberry bark, etc.) Are mixed into the traditional green sandalwood pulp to enhance the tear strength of the paper. The use of cinnabar in pulp is a rarer process and is mainly used for writing royal edicts or specific religious scriptures. This kind of paper can currently be seen in small quantities in the collection of the National Museum of Classics. The setting of "Four-foot Pill Paper" in this article is based on this real craft, but with a literary treatment - connecting it with the story of "Mr. Baigong". I want to convey a concept through this chapter: the core of intangible cultural heritage protection is not to "seal" things, but to keep things "alive". If a piece of paper enters the glass cabinet, it changes from "paper" to "exhibit". Cao Wenyuan refused to send the alchemy paper to the museum, not because he was reluctant to part with it, but because he understood that the life of paper truly begins the moment it is used.

The process of adding cinnabar to pulp is even rarer. Cinnabar itself is a mineral pigment with coarse particles and is difficult to combine with plant fibers. To truly "enter" the cinnabar into the paper instead of "attaching" to the paper surface, it must go through a complete process of fine grinding - pulping - wrapping - and springing. This craft was basically lost after the mid-Qing Dynasty, and it can only be seen in the collections of a few institutions such as the National Classics Museum. The method described in this article of "adding cinnabar to rice paste and brushing the silk, then tearing the silk into silk and then putting it into spring" is a reasonable deduction based on real craftsmanship. The sentence "Words will fade, paper will not" is the core of this chapter that I want to convey to readers. In the work of restoring old paper, craftsmen often say something similar - "It is easy to mend words, but difficult to mend paper." The words are on the surface, and the paper is on the inside. A piece of ancient paper carries not only the words, but also the feel of the papermakers of that era, the weather of the dog days of that year, and the water and soil in the pulp. When all this is wrapped in fiber, the paper itself becomes the most faithful recorder. It will outlast the words. In the end, Cao Wenyuan coughed up blood - this stroke was not for the "knife", but to concretize the urgency of the "inheritance" matter. A knife of paper has been waiting for one hundred and thirty-seven years, but the person guarding it can no longer guard it.

The detail about the "fiber arrangement direction" of rice paper is the true principle of craftsmanship. The ancient rice paper adopts the "one curtain, one sheet" manual paper fishing method. The bamboo curtain picks up the slurry water at a specific water flow angle in the paper trough, so that the long fibers of green sandalwood bark and Shatian rice straw form a random arrangement of "well" characters on the paper curtain. This natural arrangement allows countless fine capillary structures to be formed between the rice paper fibers. After the ink penetrates, it can spread evenly along the fiber gaps - this is the technological basis of the "moistening ink without smearing" feature of rice paper. However, machine-made rice paper uses a mechanized molding method, the fibers are directionally arranged, and the capillary structure is destroyed, so the writing effect is completely different. This is the core reason why the ancient method of rice paper cannot be replaced by machines. It is also one of the important reasons why the national intangible cultural heritage project "Xuan Paper Production Technique" was included in UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The "listening to three sounds" mentioned by Cao Wenyuan in this chapter - clack, clack, and rustle - are the auditory criteria summed up by real paper fishing masters during long-term operations. If the slurry water in the paper trough is unevenly stirred, the bamboo curtain will make a dull "dong" sound when it enters the water; if the angle of the curtain bed entering the water surface is deviated, it will make a "crash" sound; only when the slurry water concentration is appropriate and the curtain bed enters the water at an accurate angle, the bamboo curtain and the slurry water will make a very light and very fine "swirling" sound. This is a judgment ability that relies heavily on experience and is extremely difficult to quantify. It is also why the identification of national-level rice paper inheritors still uses "complete teacher-inheritance pedigree and qualified practical examination" as the most important rigid indicators. As for what Cao Wenyuan mentioned in this chapter, "None of the men in our family can survive the age of sixty-five" - ​​this is not a creative exaggeration, but a practical issue that has long been concerned by the industry in the rice paper industry. The ancient method of paper fishing is a type of work that consumes a lot of physical strength and heart and lungs: bending down all year round, immersing hands in cold water for a long time, long-term high humidity in the tank house, volatile substances in paper medicine, etc., Causing a considerable number of paper fishing masters to develop chronic lung disease, arthritis, cardiovascular disease and other occupational-related health problems in their middle-aged and elderly stages. This is a rarely discussed but objective cost of intangible cultural inheritance.

The "kiwi vine juice" mentioned by Cao Wenyuan in this chapter is a crucial "paper medicine" ingredient in rice paper production. The function of the paper agent is to control the uniformity of suspension of fibers in the slurry water, so that the fibers can be stably distributed on the paper curtain when the paper is fished out - without the paper agent, the thickness of the paper fished out will be seriously uneven. Ancient rice paper still insists on using wild kiwi vine juice, because the mucilage composition of wild vines is stable and the content of soluble cellulose is moderate. The scarcity of wild rattan resources is one of the biggest non-technical bottlenecks in the current rice paper industry. The southern Anhui region has been exploring the artificial cultivation technology of wild kiwi vines for many years, and some progress has been made. However, traditional old craftsmen generally believe that paper medicine made from artificially grown vines still cannot completely replace wild kiwi vines. About "good paper has a sound, it sounds like cloth, not as good as paper" - this scene appears in this chapter as a "coincident point" between the remains of the Forbidden City and Cao Wenyuan's skills, but it is not completely fictitious. The Qing Dynasty calligraphy and painting mounting industry has always had the experience of "telling the authenticity by listening to the paper": the real ancient rice paper has fibers arranged in a tic-tac-toe staggered pattern. When the paper is gently shaken, the air passes through the fiber mesh, which makes a soft sound similar to the fabric being blown by the wind; while the imitation rice paper with directional fibers only makes a crisp "chuck" sound when shaken. This is a real criterion that is still used by calligraphy and painting restorers in the industry to assist in identification.

The layout of the "Si Chi Dan" reinforced leather paper with an older fragment of a page presented in this chapter was not a temporary idea. Chapter 008 The "paper hidden in pills" mentioned by Cao Xiaolu for the first time in the milk tea shop corresponds to the "paper hiding method" revealed in this chapter. The ancient rice paper craftsmen in southern Anhui do have the tradition of wrapping precious handwriting or documents layer by layer in their own ancestral paper products for preservation. The rice paper fiber is stable, insect-resistant, and moisture-resistant far better than other carriers. A considerable number of family contracts, teacher-teacher pedigrees, and recipe formulas have been preserved among the people in this way. The data excavation of the national intangible cultural heritage representative project "Xuan Paper Production Technique" is still ongoing - a large number of craft details do not exist in the form of documents in libraries, but in the form of "paper hiding paper" in old workshops everywhere. The "Ink seeker's record of the creek" on the remaining page will lead to the Hui ink scroll. Jixi is one of the core production areas of the national intangible cultural heritage representative project "Hui Ink Production Technique". From rice paper to Hui ink, this is the first extension of the Baigong catalog in the material chain: paper is the carrier, and ink is the expression. The two have historically been symbiotic - if good paper cannot meet good ink, the ink cannot penetrate into the fibers stably; if good ink cannot meet good paper, the ink cannot spread evenly.

The smell of tung oil smoke seeping through the window cracks when driving into Jixi is a unique environmental smell in the Huizhou ink production area. Tung oil, the core raw material of Huimo cigarette lighting, produces extremely fine and pure smoke particles when burned. It is the highest-grade "ultra-fine oil smoke" among ink-making raw materials. During the lighting process, the temperature in the smoking room is extremely high and the air is extremely poor. The older generation of smokers often squat in the smoking room for more than ten hours, and the smoke accumulates in their lungs for the rest of their lives. The saying that "the older generation of Hui ink craftsmen will not live past sixty" is still circulated in Jixi and She County. This is the most obscure aspect of the Hui ink art, and the least visible to the outside world.

The "mixing of materials" process involved in this chapter is the second core process of Huizhou ink production, and it is also a step that consumes a lot of physical and mental energy. In the mixing stage, soot must be repeatedly kneaded with warm animal glue (mostly cowhide glue or antler glue), and then auxiliary materials such as musk, borneol, gold foil, and pearl powder are added. The entire kneading process requires repeated beating with a wooden pestle tens of thousands of times, which is commonly known in the industry as "light glue with one hundred thousand pestles" or "ten thousand pestles into ink". The more fully the pestle is pounded, the denser the molecular structure of the ink will be, and the more stable and durable the ink will be. The physical hazards of this step are equally great. The soot particle size in the dry state is extremely small, and when kneaded, invisible and extremely fine black dust will be suspended in the entire room and material room. Female craftsmen in the ink-making industry have historically been concentrated in the process of mixing materials. Therefore, they have borne a heavy price on respiratory health due to long-term occupational exposure. The image of Aunt Hu in this chapter is a group photo of countless wives of old craftsmen in Jixi and Shexian who have spent their entire lives in the warehouses.

The sentence Ye Qingyan said at the end, "The greatest enemy of a craftsman is not time, but forgetfulness" is the core proposition I established for the entire "Baigong Illustration". This novel plans to have 1,200 chapters, 68 real intangible cultural heritage items, and 20 volumes of craftsmanship. It is neither a popularization book on intangible cultural heritage nor a policy report on intangible cultural heritage. What it wants to talk about is how the sixty-eight craftsmen protected their craftsmanship in the hands of the next generation under the erosion of time, and how this new generation of young people picked up these craftsmanship on the edge of oblivion. This sentence officially appears for the first time in Chapter 058, and it will follow Shen Nian's footsteps all the way forward, from the kiln fire of Longquan, to the purple sand of Yixing, to the blue and white flowers of Jingdezhen, to the day when the last fragment of the page is put together.