Changshu displays rosewood prowess
Overseas journalists were impressed with Suzhou-style woodwork and traditional Chinese culture during a visit to the East Rosewood Furniture Art Museum in Changshu, East China’s Jiangsu province, in December.
The visit was part of the “2021 Hi Jiangsu” media tour, organized by the Jiangsu provincial government and China Daily.
From Dec 14-18, 10 media representatives from seven countries toured the cities of Changshu, Taizhou and Huai’an to learn about the province’s remarkable achievements in industrial development, cultural preservation, environmental protection and rural revitalization.
Known as the “hometown of rosewood”, Changshu, a county-level city in Suzhou, has a history of more than 1,000 years of producing rosewood furniture. The city is now home to about 300 rosewood furniture manufacturers.
Yao Xiangdong, head of the East Rosewood Furniture Art Museum in Changshu, said Suzhou-style rosewood furniture is notable for its exquisite craftsmanship, elegant designs and high quality.
It has become incredibly popular in international expos and also a new “signboard” for the country’s international cultural exchanges, Yao said.
Overseas journalists toured the museum and enjoyed a close look at its centerpiece — a wooden replica of the legendary Chinese landscape painting Dwelling in Fuchun Mountains, created by Changshu-born painter Huang Gongwang in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).
The famous painting was saved from a fire in 1650, but in two pieces. Eventually, one of them was moved to the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou and the other to the Taipei Palace Museum.
To craft a full-scale replica with the finest rosewood, more than 20 woodcarving craftsmen on both sides of the Taiwan Straits gathered in Changshu in 2015, Yao said. They joined hands and adopted different woodcarving techniques to reproduce every detail of the original painting.
It took them half a year to complete the 36-foot-long artwork, reuniting the two halves of the masterpiece in a special way.
Tran Ngoc Chi, a journalist from Vietnam National Television, said he was impressed with the superb craftsmanship of the woodwork.
“We can even clearly see the ripples on the river and the shapes of the leaves,” Tran said.
The media group then participated in a carpentry workshop, in which they learned how to assemble a wooden stool with traditional Chinese mortise-and-tenon joints rather than nails.
“It’s much harder than it seems,” said Anwar Adam Hassan Osman from Sudan News Agency, who finally succeeded in making a stool after two failed attempts.
Daria Semykina from Russia has been in China for nearly three years. She said she enjoyed such an interesting hands-on event, which gave her a deeper understanding of the profound traditional Chinese culture.