A garden of cultural heritage
The famed Yuyuan hosts a month-long festival featuring diverse traditional Chinese crafts, immersing visitors in a multitude of activities, Wang Xin reports.
Boasting a profound history of over 2,000 years, Daoming bamboo-weaving was listed as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2014. The residents in Daoming town began planting bamboo and making household utensils out of it since the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), according to Xiao.
However, Xiao notes, there was a time when fewer people were passing on the craft due to economic reasons. Despite assisting her parents in bamboo-weaving since childhood, she also felt a bit reluctant to inherit the craft. She chose another career path to become a nurse until 2019.
"It was more about the responsibility when I returned to my hometown and started inheriting the craft, as you sometimes get bored with things you've been doing since childhood. Later, more young people like me added our ideas and innovations to the old craft. As it grows, it leads us to our passion and a new career," says Xiao.
Xiao explains that, taking the main installation at Yuyuan as an example, integrating the traditional bamboo-weaving craft with modern techniques makes it more exciting. Underneath the soft but pliable bamboo strips, a steel structure was placed inside the base to keep its form consistent all the way to the top, presenting an artistic expression of a "thriving bloom".
