Tantou New Year pictures
Tantou New Year Painting
Dear friends:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to Tantou, a famous town in Longhui County in southern Hunan, for sightseeing.
Tantou is a well-known, mysterious and beautiful ancient town by the Zishui River in southern Hunan. It is said to have been named after three streams north of the town converged and, over time, deposited sand into a beach. This seems to be not merely a beach formed by nature's sedimentation and the rush of flowing sand, but rather a filtered accumulation of culture. The bamboo groves covering the hills, the crystal-clear cave streams, and the simple, honest folk customs here gave birth to a treasure of Chinese folk arts and crafts — Tantou New Year Painting.
Tantou is one of China's seventy-two ancient towns, with a profound heritage of folk culture, and was named a "Hometown of Folk Cultural Painting" by the Ministry of Culture. In particular, its paper-making culture has a long history. For hundreds of years, abundant bamboo resources have kept the traditional folk paper industry here flourishing and prosperous. Traditional handmade paper, hand-dyed colored paper, the world-renowned fragrant powder paper, and the ancient woodblock New Year paintings have been passed down and kept alive for generations in this today unremarkable small town. Therefore, Tantou New Year Painting, fragrant powder paper and colored paper are commonly known as the "Three Wonders of Tantou," enjoying fame at home and abroad. In today's Tantou, folk workshops for native paper, colored paper, fragrant powder paper, and New Year paintings still retain their old ways, and everyone in the town, young and old, men and women, knows the processing techniques. The ancient town of Tantou is a rare treasure garden of folk paper-art workshops. Here, you can feel the breadth and depth of ancient folk paper-art culture, gain inspiration from human wisdom, and experience the moving spirit of humanity's unremitting pursuit of civilization.
As a traditional form of folk art, New Year paintings absorb the excellent cultural elements of the Chinese nation, and through rich artistic forms, reflect the simple and kind thoughts of the working people, and reflect a plain and innocent cultural consciousness. The artistic forms of New Year paintings are extremely broad; they can serve both as a treasure trove of folk art culture and as a historical portrayal of the secular life of folk society. Through depictions of workers, peasants, fishermen, woodcutters, merchants, scholars, doctors, diviners, loyal ministers and capable generals, heroes and righteous men, virtuous wives and good mothers, talented scholars and beautiful women, as well as immortals, Buddhas, and Daoist figures, famous mountains and beautiful waters, flowers, birds, insects, and fish, they also reflect the pure and healthy primordial consciousness of folk life. The themes of New Year paintings can roughly be divided into: deity images and folk beliefs, myths and legends, secular life, auspiciousness and celebration, historical stories, humor and romance, and so on. Most take auspicious, festive, joyful, and beautiful things, or allusions and idioms, as their themes; they have plots and are easy to understand.
New Year paintings were called "door god paintings" in ancient times, and their earliest name was "door paintings." In the old days, during the Spring Festival, people liked to buy some bright and pleasing New Year paintings and paste them on doors, or in the main hall, bedroom, beside windows, in front of the stove, and on the shrines in the courtyard, to add a peaceful atmosphere to the Spring Festival and to pray to Heaven for happiness and the elimination of disasters and misfortune.
China's New Year paintings originated before woodblock printing and can be traced back to historical documents more than two thousand years ago. The earliest function of New Year paintings was to "drive away ghosts and suppress evil." Therefore, the oldest variety among New Year paintings is the door god. In ancient times, ancestors firmly believed that disasters were caused by ghosts and demons. If the door gods guarded the gate, ghosts and demons would not dare to cause trouble, and the household would be safe. The Book of Rites, in the "Monthly Ordinances," records the worship of door gods. From the Han Dynasty onward, door gods were given concrete images and surnames, and the most famous two door gods were Shenshu and Yulei. Wang Chong's Lunheng, in the "Ding Gui" chapter, quotes a lost passage from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, saying that Shenshu and Yulei were two spirits of Mount Dushuo in ancient myths and legends. They commanded all ghosts, could hold reed ropes, seize evil ghosts, and have tigers eat the evil ghosts. Therefore, the Yellow Emperor carved Shenshu and Yulei from peach wood and nailed them to the door to prevent ghosts. This myth is the reason for the later emergence of "door god" paintings. But in common folk legend, the prototypes of the door gods are generally the two generals under Emperor Taizong of Tang, Li Shimin: Qin Qiong and Yuchi Jingde.
Besides "driving away ghosts and suppressing evil," what other functions do door gods have? Feng Yingjing's Comprehensive Meaning of Monthly Ordinances says: door gods are painted in various forms such as generals and court officials, and are further supplemented with patterns such as jue, deer, bats, and xixi, precious horses, vases, and saddles, all taking auspicious meanings to welcome blessings. "Deer" is homophonous with "emolument," "bat" with "blessing," and "xixi" with "joy." What Chinese common people never forget throughout their lives, and therefore tirelessly seek, is none other than these few words. In Tantou New Year paintings, the command flags of Guan Yu and Ma Chao each have the character "fu" written on them, and their battle robes are also respectively written with the character "xi." The old door god Yuchi Gong holds an iron mace for suppressing evil in one hand, while in the other he holds a "jade ru yi." Jade ru yi means everything goes as one wishes. Qin Shubao holds a whip in one hand and also holds a "plum blossom branch" in the other. A plum blossom branch means the plum blossoms in five blessings, and boundless good fortune. There are also Yuchi and Qin, the two generals, carrying a qilin bringing children; that is a wish for many sons, and it is clear at a glance. These door gods, cleverly transformed to conform to the common people's psychological need to pray for blessings and children, on the one hand do not depart from the original meaning of door gods as "driving away ghosts and suppressing evil," and on the other hand inject the new concept of praying for blessings and children. They partially liberate people from the simple shadow of fearing ghosts and fearing evil, immerse them in longing for a beautiful and peaceful life, and enrich the original connotations of the door gods.
Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, China's woodblock printing industry has been very prosperous. While traveling north and south and passing through streets and villages, people discovered this kind of "New Year painting" with vivid modeling, brilliant colors, and printed figures and stories. During every New Year season, they were pasted on doors and walls to increase the festive atmosphere, and were deeply welcomed. No one knows on what day it began, but this trade quietly shifted toward Tantou, a small mountain town more than fifty kilometers away from Baoqing City, and once it moved here, it firmly settled down and put down roots. Also because of the development of the paper industry and paper culture, Tantou New Year paintings with local characteristics were cultivated.
There are indeed reasons why the New Year pictures could be transferred to Tantou. Nourished by the Zi River, this place boasts lush forests and beautiful bamboo, and the nan bamboo abundantly grown in its bamboo hills has been the best raw material for making handmade paper since ancient times. Tantou is famous for papermaking. As early as the Qianlong reign of the Qing Dynasty, its paper was a tribute to the imperial court, with varieties including Laoze, Caose, Tuohuang, and Jianshi, producing over fifty thousand dan annually and selling well in more than a dozen provinces and cities across the country. This place also produces a kind of fragrant powder paper, a unique traditional folk product first created during the Guangxu reign of the Qing Dynasty. A Shanghai capitalist named Xi Lanqing came to Tantou to open the "Qingji" paper shop, dealing in handmade paper and various colored papers. One day he accidentally discovered that "foreign" women particularly liked using the pinkish-white paper produced in Tantou to wipe their faces and apply makeup. A sudden inspiration struck him, and he immediately conceived the idea of making money. Upon investigation, he found that this pinkish-white paper was produced in Xiakou, a suburb of Tantou Town. It was made by grinding a local special white clay into powder and manually coating it onto nan bamboo paper with local characteristics. He then mobilized papermakers there to organize production, and from then on it sold well in Southeast Asian, European, and American markets. "Tantou Fragrant Powder Paper" can remove grease, stop perspiration, refresh the spirit, and cleanse and strengthen the skin, while also possessing the miraculous effects of delaying aging and preserving youthful beauty of the face. As a tribute to the imperial court in those years, it was favored by Empress Dowager Cixi; Prince Sihanouk's wife, Princess Monique, also showed particular favor to "Tantou Fragrant Powder Paper."
The main raw material of the so-called "powder" in this fragrant powder paper is a nearly white stone mud dug from rare vertical interlayered rock formations in the local mountains, called "white mud" locally. According to current historical records, this "white mud" exists nowhere else except at Xiakou in Tantou, making it a rare and unique mineral mud; and mixing the mud requires water—strangely enough, without Tantou's water, no matter how you mix it, it simply won't work. Just as purple clay teapots can only be produced in Yixing, Jiangsu, and the porcelain capital can only be Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, the greatest feature of Tantou New Year pictures is powder paper printing. Artisans process this local "soft stone" white mud—which is both stone-like and mud-like—into white powder, brush it onto handmade paper, and then paint on it. The printed New Year pictures have thick, moist, lustrous, and exceptionally brilliant colors, unmatched by other New Year pictures. There is a kind of jade-version paper made from pure bamboo grown on shaded slopes. After steaming, alum treatment, and drying, it has a pure white texture, soft and delicate. A thin layer of powder made from white clay is then brushed on it for printing New Year pictures, resulting in "rounded and moist ink diffusion, with an antique simplicity of penetrating marks," and "diffusing without stagnating, penetrating without blurring." It is especially durable, almost never altering the "thick and bright" three-dimensionality and clarity of the New Year pictures. Tantou also abounds in a kind of five-color paper, which can serve as commodity packaging, beautify living rooms, and be used as paper offerings for sacrifices. This colored decorative paper has been renowned far and wide for a long time. During the Qianlong reign it was already a tribute to the imperial court, and precisely because of this, Tantou once enjoyed the reputation of "Don't say Tantou's port is small; forty-eight coins flow in with rice."
Tantou New Year pictures originated in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties and have a history of over 300 years. Legend has it that in the late Ming Dynasty, a Changsha xiucai named Wang Dongyuan (nicknamed "Wang Monkey") was exceptionally clever and talented in painting. He and his wife fled the chaos of war and came to Tantou to seek refuge with relatives. To make a living, they took advantage of the unique local conditions and opened a New Year picture workshop, producing dozens of varieties including "Qin Shubao," "Yuchi Gong," "Harmony Brings Auspiciousness," "Kylin Brings Sons," "Dragon and Phoenix Bring Auspiciousness," and "Mice Marry Off Their Daughter." These were sold throughout the country by merchants dealing in handmade paper and colored paper, and Tantou New Year pictures immediately gained great fame. At their peak, there were 108 workshops with over two thousand people engaged in New Year picture production. The small town was densely packed with picture shops and stores, and famous engraving artists included Gao Fuchang, Liu Baonan, and Yao Yuzhai. Every year-end, large quantities of New Year pictures and decorative paper were carried by itinerant peddlers to Guizhou, Sichuan, Hubei, Guangdong, Guangxi, and more distant places like Shaanxi and Yunnan, even as far as Southeast Asia, with annual sales reaching over 30 million copies.
Tantou New Year pictures are the only handmade woodblock watercolor-printed New Year pictures in Hunan Province. From the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to the early Republic of China, Tantou New Year pictures gradually formed their own unique artistic style: brilliant and lustrous colors, antique, exaggerated, full, and individualized modeling methods, pure local materials, and unique craftsmanship, giving the works an artistic effect akin to relief sculpture. The engraving technique of Tantou New Year pictures is quite particular. For example, the famous engraving artist Gao Fuchang was skilled at a beautiful "steep knife and upright line" technique. This special skill not only made the lines of the works smooth and rounded, fine yet powerful, but also, because the carved lines were always uniform in thickness, firm and solid, the engraved blocks were durable. His handiwork includes such masterpieces handed down through generations as "Portrait of Miao Heroes" (door god picture), "Oath of Brotherhood in the Peach Garden," "Pearl Pagoda," and "The Daughter-in-Law Borrows an Umbrella."
Tantou New Year pictures take blessings for the New Year as their main content, reflecting the people's emotions, wishes, and aesthetic consciousness, and are well loved by the masses. The most numerous variety of Tantou New Year pictures is door god pictures, followed by themes from historical stories, myths, and folk legends. The designs here are simple in modeling, bold and exaggerated, and the pictures mostly use primary colors such as magenta, malachite green, yellow dan, and violet, with intense and vivid colors. Tantou New Year pictures are divided into three major categories: deity portraits, auspicious symbols, and opera story themes. Whether door gods, stories, or auspicious blessings, all are fully expressed on the small New Year pictures.
Tantou New Year pictures are printed using woodblock watercolor overprinting, combined with manual processing methods. That is, they undergo a process of drawing, engraving, overprinting, and retouching, using high-purity primary colors for overprinting, with a focus on warm tones, while emphasizing contrasts between large blocks of warm and cool colors, making the images simple, bright, and full of a festive and auspicious atmosphere. After printing is completed, facial features, such as the five sense organs and beards, are hand-painted to make the figures more complete. For example, the faces and lips of the characters are first overprinted and then hand-painted with rose red. This method indeed makes the figures more expressive and charming, achieving an artistic effect where the essence of wood, knife, and water complements one another. This handmade printing method also truly showcases a folk style that cannot be replaced by mechanical printing. For instance, in color application, Tantou New Year pictures generally use only magenta, green, yellow dan, and cyan as primary colors. The contrast of these primary colors is bold and passionate, bursting with a primal impulse that leaves a deep impression.
Tantou New Year pictures have concise compositions, simple shapes, prominent subjects, and bold exaggeration. Typically, a single subject is chosen as the center of the composition, with ample blank space in the image, resulting in conciseness, brightness, and focus. They use exaggerated techniques to make the images vivid and complete. From the selection of papermaking raw materials, paper manufacturing, and priming, to engraving, seven printings, and seven hand-paintings, the production of one New Year picture requires over twenty steps. The entire process, from handmade papermaking to the finished New Year picture, is carried out in one place, which is extremely rare in New Year picture production nationwide. Mr. Akira Kurozaki, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan and a world-renowned print critic, said: "The production of Tantou New Year pictures, from papermaking to the finished product, all in one place, is rare in the world."
Therefore, the characteristics of Tantou New Year pictures include bold composition, vibrant color use with striking reds and greens, and exquisitely detailed depictions. Particularly, the traditional New Year picture "The Mouse Wedding" is especially imaginative and amusing. Look at the mouse "groom" glancing back with secret delight, and the mouse "bride" sitting shyly in the sedan chair—so lifelike and vivid on the paper. Even more interesting is that, to ensure the wedding procession passes smoothly, at the very front, a group of mice is tasked with delivering gifts, carrying chickens and fish, bribing the cat that blocks the way, while the cat wears an ambiguous expression. The brilliance lies here: it uses humorous metaphor to reflect the subtle and simple emotions in people's hearts.
New Year pictures come from the folk tradition, and each one can be said to be a genre painting. But which New Year picture, like the Tantou New Year picture "The Mouse Wedding," contains such rich and profound connotations of folk customs and human feelings?
In front of the honor guard, are those two mice carrying chickens and fish really just bribing the cat? No! This contains people's beautiful blessings and wishes: the chicken is a homophone for "auspiciousness" (ji), and the fish for "abundance" (yu). This is the beautiful wish for auspiciousness year after year and surplus every year. In folk tradition, the images of chicken and sheep represent "auspiciousness," and lotus and carp represent "surplus year after year," which has long been a consensus, needless to say. Moreover, the chicken is the prototype of the "phoenix," and the "carp leaping over the dragon gate" becomes a dragon once it leaps. Thus, chicken and fish are also symbols of "phoenix" and "dragon." Phoenix and dragon represent yin and yang, heaven and earth, male and female, husband and wife, so "phoenix and dragon bringing prosperity" is an indispensable blessing phrase in wedding ceremonies.
Tantou New Year Pictures, originating from and rooted in folk culture, are a gem in the garden of Chinese folk art and are collected as treasures. In the catalog of New Year pictures collected by Lu Xun, a giant of China's literary world, the first is the Tantou New Year Picture "Newly Engraved Complete Version of the Mouse Wedding in Tannan Town, Chu South." In his prose collection "Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk," Lu Xun specifically described the Tantou New Year Picture "The Mouse Wedding" and treasured it as a collector's item. The river of time is the best test of the value of art. Having retained its splendor for over 300 years, Tantou New Year Pictures have traveled far across the oceans and are listed as important collections by major museums in many countries, including Britain, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.
As Hunan's only hand-printed New Year picture made with powdered paper and woodblocks, Tantou New Year Pictures were long buried in remote rural areas. It was not until 1995 that Tantou New Year Pictures emerged from their "secluded chamber" and appeared for the first time on the same stage in Beijing as the other three of China's Four Great New Year Pictures—Shandong Weifang New Year Pictures, Tianjin Yangliuqing New Year Pictures, and Jiangsu Taohuawu New Year Pictures—which had long been renowned internationally. They participated in the "Exhibition of China's Unique Folk Art" held by the Ministry of Culture, and with their ancient, simple forms, purely native materials, and brilliant, fiery colors, they left experts at home and abroad "staring in amazement." There is a "rumor" that during the award evaluation at the time, some experts and judges believed Tantou New Year Pictures deserved the gold award. Later, considering that the other New Year pictures had already made an international impact while Tantou New Year Pictures were exhibiting for the first time, the organizing committee worked on Hunan, and Tantou New Year Pictures had to "settle for" second place behind Yangliuqing and received the silver award. Although the story of "gold versus silver" is not found in official records, it is an indisputable fact that Tantou New Year Pictures "stunned" Beijing as soon as they emerged from their "secluded chamber." In 2002, Tantou New Year Pictures were placed on the first batch of the "China Folk Cultural Heritage" rescue list; in 2003, they won the Ministry of Culture's "Gold Award for Chinese Folk Art."
Compared with the four great New Year picture traditions—Tianjin Yangliuqing, Shandong Weifang, Jiangsu Taohuawu, and Sichuan Mianzhu—Tantou New Year Pictures display an artistic style that is more concise, simple, vivid, and passionate. Their figures are exaggerated and refined in form, with lively expressions. For example, in the modeling of door gods, in order to emphasize the head—"thick brows and large eyes, with a full divine presence"—artisans boldly reduced the height of the human body to four head-lengths and exaggerated the torso horizontally, filling the entire pictorial space and creating a sense of mass as square and thick as a mountain.
Taohuawu woodcuts come in many varieties, and their carving techniques are extremely fine and rigorous. Their gossamer-like fine lines still retain the lingering charm of the engraver's blade, leaving viewers in awe. They mark the high artistic level already achieved by China's ancient fine-line carving craftsmanship and are treasures among ethnic woodblock New Year pictures. Tianjin Yangliuqing New Year Pictures are elegant and gentle, with smooth lines and an antique, dignified quality, possessing strong appeal. Especially in New Year pictures depicting operatic themes, the characters' personalities, bearing, expressions, and actions are portrayed with superb vividness and exceptional skill.
Thus some have commented: Tianjin Yangliuqing New Year Pictures show the influence of literati painting, while Suzhou Taohuawu New Year Pictures have absorbed a slight Western painting style. Only Tantou New Year Pictures have not departed from their mother body and have preserved their original flavor. With their simple, unadorned modeling, rough carving, intense colors, concise lines, and natural spontaneity, their brushwork sweeps freely and expansively with unrestrained ease, expressing the simple, pure, and childlike beauty of folk art works. They are the crystallization of thousands of years of accumulated ethnic culture.
Tantou, a name that carries real weight. For 300 years, "Tantou" has always been placed before "New Year pictures," signifying a unique color and a unique culture. Looking at the smooth ancient post road, one can easily imagine how people back then used large baskets and small crates right here to push New Year pictures out to the whole country. Today, this centuries-old ancient town seems to live in memory. As an ancient Chinese folk craft, Tantou woodblock New Year pictures have lost their former glory, and Tantou no longer has the splendor it once had. Of the woodblock New Year pictures that once made Tantou famous, now only the elderly Zhong Haixian and his wife Gao Lamei remain as their last guardians. In the entire town, only Zhong Haixian and Gao Lamei's family still persistently guards this folk skill on which generations of their ancestors once depended for a living.
Like other precious cultural relics, today the most complete materials on the ancient city of Loulan are not in China, but in the British Museum; the most complete Dunhuang documents are not in China, but in Japan; the earliest discovered Tantou New Year pictures of Hunan are not in China, but with collectors in Germany and Japan. This is truly thought-provoking. After many folk arts disappeared in China, their only surviving materials and samples ended up abroad and were preserved there.
In order to rescue this precious cultural heritage, with the approval of the National Leading Group for the Planning of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Tantou New Year pictures have been officially included as one of the first batch of rescue and protection projects for China's folk cultural heritage in a specially commissioned national social science project. A working group composed of 10 experts in folk culture is currently in Tantou Town, Longhui County, Hunan, conducting a general survey, collection, and organization of the New Year pictures. This rescue project will use modern techniques such as written records, audio recording, photography, and videography to document Tantou New Year pictures in an all-dimensional way. It will also collect and preserve a large number of representative physical objects, comprehensively investigate, register, organize, and publish art works featuring Tantou New Year pictures, and produce related audio-visual products. It is hoped that Tantou New Year pictures, this brilliant treasure of folk art, will regain their extraordinary splendor, be infinitely charming, and be preserved forever.