Creating furniture for a modern era

What interests Liu most are the creations of mortise-and-tenon joints for family furniture. "They are used for projects, like table and chairs, which have frame construction among the strongest joints in woodworking," said Liu.

They come in several types - blind, through, angled, wedged and many others – but they consist of the same basic parts of a mortise (a recess cut into a piece of wood that accepts a tenon) and a tenon (a tongue at the end of a board that fits into a mortise), said Liu.

Unlike other carpenters, Liu tried to make his work more applicable to modern life. Citing an example about the heavy wooden chairs he designed for the leaders that attended the 2014 APEC in Beijing, Liu managed to install wheels to make them movable. Instead of using omni-directional wheels for uncontrolled rolling, Liu adopted the fixed casters for each chair which could also be easily hidden.

"Master Liu came to the factory everyday and helped train us shoulder to shoulder," Zhang Bingce, who served his apprenticeship as a toolmaker, told China Daily website.

These years, Liu focuses more on training the talented. He told the website that they just formed a system fostering the inheritor. "We pick up 30 trainees and train them for several month and choose some of the best for further learning," Liu said.

In addition, the factory tries to cultivate 50 technical carders to support the successor. More competition to hone their techniques will be held across China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, where there's an increasing demand for traditional Chinese wooden furniture, he added.