What Are the Most Popular Handicrafts In Suzhou
Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 2010
by Susan Yip
Susan Yip
What are the most popular handicrafts in Suzhou Suzhou , a city with 2,500 years of history, is situated in the lower reaches of Yangtze River and on the shores of Lake Tai. Famed as the "Venice of the Orient", Suzhou is renowned for its beautiful stone bridges, pagodas, and classical gardens. When talking about Suzhou, people would mention the old saying, "There is paradise in heaven; there are Suzhou and Hangzhou on the earth." (Hangzhou is another city in Zhejiang Province.)
Sandal wood fan Suzhou has long been one of the centers of fan production in China. Traditionally there are two major varieties of fans. One is a folding fan made of many thin slats of wood held together with thread or wire. Another is folding fans made of paper glued to wood, which fold neatly together. Folding wooden fans are often made of scented woods so that their breeze carries a light fragrance. The most precious are made from sandalwood, a dense and especially aromatic wood imported from tropical countries. While today some inexpensive fans are made by stamping out these patterns by machine, better quality fans are still made by hand.
Silk embroidery
Suzhou silk embroidery, often referred as Su embroidery for short, is one of the four major Chinese embroidery types. Honored as "Oriental Jewel", it is famous for its fine craftsmanship, elegance and purity. Early in Song Dynasty, it was already given the reputation of being "delicate and close in stitch and meticulous and wonderful in color"; and up to Qing Dynasty, Suzhou embroidery has developed into a period of great prosperity, and "embroidering fair" became one of the flourishing scenes of Suzhou. Nowadays Suzhou silk embroidery is widely acknowledged as the best hand embroidery in China, even in the world. The best place to see the highest quality of Suzhou silk embroideries is Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute, where there gathers the masterpiece silk embroidery artworks made by the most renowned silk embroidery artists from 1980's. But the pricing of silk embroideries in the institute is extremely high. Many of the embroidery artworks there are not for sale but to display.
Rosewood carving
The wood carving of Suzhou, especially rosewood carving, which dated from the Ming Dynasty, is one of the three main schools of wood carving in China. The Rosewood Carving of Suzhou is made of excellent rare materials, such as Padauk (Zitanmu), Indian rosewood (Suanzhimu), and jacaranda (Hualimu). It is elaborately produced with traditional carving skills like fleet-carving (Qianke), basso-relievo and standing-carving (Lidiao), and the traditional structure of tenon is adopted to restrain shrinkage, distortion and cracking; the color is modest and magnificent with the Chinese traditional lacquering method adopted during lacquering. The Rosewood Carving of Suzhou has a variety of categories, relating to various commodities of about 1000 kinds. Besides those decorative furniture like beds, cabinets, desks and chairs, there are many other kinds of rosewood craftworks, such as boxes, plates, seats, tea tables, screens, figures of man, beasts and flowers. The Rosewood Carving of Suzhou has high practical and aesthetic value. Its shape design, decoration style and carving patterns fully convey the oriental charm.
This article was written by Susan Yip from Su Embroidery Studio (SES), www.suembroidery.com, based in Suzhou China, specializing in creating high quality silk embroideries and custom hand embroidery.
This Article has been viewed 582 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.