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Flights of kites
Updated: Apr 30, 2024
By Cheng Yuezhu
China Daily Global
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Flying into the future
Weifang, Beijing, Tianjin and Jiangsu province's Nantong are four major areas that are celebrated for distinctive kite-making techniques. They all boast their own unique features yet share the same dedication to preserving, inheriting and promoting traditional craftsmanship.
In Tianjin, there is a family known as "kite Wei", after late Qing Dynasty virtuoso artisan Wei Yuantai, who's widely known for crafting exquisite, lifelike kites. In 1915, 11 of his works were exhibited and won a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
The Wei family's fifth generation continues to inherit and perfect the "four techniques" — crafting the frame from roasted split bamboo, pasting such materials as paper and silk onto the frame, painting images on the body and finally flying the kite.
The Wei family is proud to display their raw bamboo frameworks, which are the very basic yet fundamental structures.
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