Last bow maker rides history’s arc
Even after half a century, Yang Fuxi can still remember the pungent smell of his grandfather’s bow and arrow workshop in central Beijing.
“There was the odour of glue and bullhorn when you grind it, almost a burning scent as if you are stewing something and run out of water,” Yang said.
“Worst was the snake skins,” he continued. “It’s a fishy, stinky smell. Even if a dog were walking by, he would try to avoid it.”
In ancient China, the craft was considered one of the six “noble arts,” along with rites, music, chariot racing, mathematics and calligraphy. Founded in the 1700s, Ju Yuan Hao, as the business was named, operated out of the Forbidden City for its first century, providing bows and arrows to the imperial court.
But as China’s Communist Revolution intensified, Mao Zedong’s administrators decreed that the shop be turned into a factory making sports equipment.
In 1966, when Yang was 8, Mao sent Red Guards house to house on a quest to destroy any vestiges of ancient Chinese civilization. One night, fearing for the family’s safety, Yang’s father and brother bundled up perhaps 100 of the traditional weapons and dumped them in the countryside.
They saved just one, made in the 1820s to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the shop’s founding. His father cut the bow in half, wrapped it and stashed it under a pile of firewood.
Decades later, those bows still called powerfully to Yang. Starting at age 21, he worked for 13 years in a Beijing chemical factory. Then, Yang drove a taxi. But at age 40 he needed a change.
A few years earlier, after the party declared the Cultural Revolution a grave error, Yang’s father had restored the bow he had saved.
Yang told his father he wanted to be a bow maker. Yang’s father agreed to teach him all he remembered.
Fashioning a bow entails about 200 steps, starting with shaping bamboo or other wood into an arc. There are no measurements, no schematic drawings — craftsmen like Yang work by intuition.
“None of the raw materials can be bought easily in the market,” Yang said.
Water buffalo horn and sinew. Fish skin, donkey skin, snake skin. The bark of birch trees. Pig glue. Silk. (The birch bark and snake skin are applied as decorative elements.)
Although he took to the work well, finding customers was hard. Then in 2003, a doctoral student writing athesis on Chinese weaponry visited Yang. The scholar’s paper won an award.
That attracted local media attention. Soon, a British collector in Hong Kong got in touch and bought some of his work, and word spread. Demand grew to the point where Yang raised prices and cut production.
Though Yang is often touted as the last known traditional bow maker, he’s worked to ensure that he won’t be. He’s taught son Yang Yi, 28, to carry on the tradition, along with two other students.