Yangliuqing and the Shi Family Courtyard

National Intangible Cultural Heritage (Yangliuqing New Year Woodblock Prints, 2006); Grand Canal Print Town Holding The Qing Merchant Mansion Of The Shi Family And Its Indoor Opera Theatre · Tianjin, Tianjin

Yangliuqing sits on the Grand Canal twenty kilometres west of Tianjin, and for four hundred years it has made the New Year pictures that used to go up on doors and kang walls across northern China - one of the four great print traditions of the country, and the one that never went fully mechanical. The outline is printed from a woodblock; the colour is then put on by hand, face by face, which is why a Yangliuqing print has a softness the others do not and why the workshops still employ painters rather than pressmen. The archetypal image is a plump child clutching an enormous carp. In the same town stands the Shi Family Courtyard, the Qing mansion of a canal-trading family, eighteen linked courtyards and well over two hundred rooms of carved brick, stone and timber - and at the heart of it an indoor opera theatre built so precisely that a singer needed no help at all to fill it.

Yangliuqing, Xiqing District, Tianjin, Tianjin, China

The town streets and canal frontage are open at all hours and free. THE SHI FAMILY COURTYARD keeps daytime hours, roughly 9:00-17:00 with shorter winter opening and last entry before closing, on a modest ticket. The PRINT WORKSHOPS AND MUSEUM keep working hours and are best in the morning, when painters are at the benches - some are free and some charge modestly. THE WEEKS BEFORE CHINESE NEW YEAR are when the print trade is genuinely busy and the town is at its most interesting, if also its coldest. Little English signage anywhere.

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