Zhaigui Village


Zhaigui Village is located in Bijiang District of Tongren City, Guizhou Province. It is famous for Chinese handmade paper with over hundreds years.

The land in Bijiang District is fertile, and the bamboo and hemp fibers used in papermaking are rich in resources. During the reign of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty, there were more than 200 paper-making households. The domestic papermaking industry has been in existence for hundreds of years, and it has been rising and falling. Has been followed by manual production, self-employed, self-produced and sold, traditional process operations.

In 1996, there were 706 households with 1,246 people in the city. In recent years, due to the merger of large-scale mechanized production, there are less than 100 households engaged in papermaking in hand workshops.

He Minggui, the founder of Bijiang Ancient Paper, said: "I studied this paper with my father,He Wenxue, when I was 14 years old. It has been more than 20 years now. In order to pass on the ancestors' craftsmanship, I have to overcome many difficulties because many people have not created it now. There are hundreds of homes on our stockade, and now I am only a family. Now the paper is not as good as before, and there are very few people who make paper. Now our village is making paper on my house, in order to let the ancestral crafts flow down. I insisted on doing it."

In the family workshop of He Wenxue, the quaint wooden tools, the stone troughs of paper pulp, and the sarcophagus of Shengli have a sense of passing through time and space.

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