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December 9, 2016

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Reviving the intricate art of Chinese birdcage

By Xu Wenwen | December 9, 2016, Friday | Print Edition

GO for a stroll in the parks early morning and you will find middle-aged and elderly Chinese walking their birds. Kept in cages, the birds tweedle and chirp, competing with those on the trees and air, as a way to start their day.

A product of this unique bird culture is birdcage, which is considered a decorative art piece, is made up of porcelain, copper carving, filigree, bamboo weaving, tenon-and-mortise work, calligraphy and painting, and feng shui.

While a normal birdcage in the market costs a few hundred yuan, a nice one sold at auctions can cost millions because of its excellent craftsmanship. Surely the expensive one is not for use but strictly decorative.

Hangzhou birdcage collector Yu Bo is one person who has worked hard to sustain the Chinese art. He collects antique birdcages and reuses them, and encourages craftsmen to make modern pieces and then buys from them.

He is also the opinion leader on the China’s largest bird culture website.

“The only reason is that I like it. The technique, the history, the look, everything,” said Yu.

To get his first cage, Yu waited for more than a year so that the craftsman could use the best winter bamboo. Other crazy stuff that he did included driving down to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, to buy a cage. Another time, he flew down to Guangzhou in the morning and returned the same day to buy another cage.

The Hangzhou native, who started off as a photographer and was also a successful businessman, began raising birds since 2003. At one point, he had 32 birds. “During that time, I would spend five hours everyday to make feeding and cleaning the cages,” he recalled.

Going through books, he learned that the culture of birdcage almost disappeared because of wars and the “cultural revolution” (1966-76). Some craftsmen have tried to keep the culture alive.

Yu shows a red-sandalwood birdcage that was compiled by six craftsmen and headed by birdcage master Yan Hujin from Suzhou, who was the first modern artisan 40 years ago to keep alive the culture.

The cage consists of a hook, a roof, a cage, a horizontal bar for birds to perch, two small porcelain bowls to keep water and fodder, a baseplate, and some accessories.

Everything is handmade.

Yan made the cage first and then the rest of the craftsmen worked on the bronze hook, the gold-inlaying technique, the wood carpentry, the chinaware bowls, calligraphy and the painting inside the cage.

This magnificent piece took the six craftsmen five years to make.

The hook of the bronze is decked up in golden dragon while the branches have been carved in silver. The roof is a four-piece-combined gold-inlaid board depicting the four famous gardens of Suzhou.

At the four corners of the cage are four gold bats — in Chinese, the mammals represent fortune because the two characters are homophonic, pronounced as fu. So the birdcage is named “Five Fu cage.”

Each vertical wooden bar’s diameter is only 1.4 millimeters, but a vertical gold line is just 0.15 millimeter in diameter embedded in the middle.

Gold lines zigzag and patterns have been created on the wider horizontal bars.

“The craftsman responsible for the gold embedding told me that he spent so much time and energy on the cage that he did not want to touch it after finishing it,” said Yu.

At the bottom of one side, a calligrapher-written verse is gold-inlaid at the baseboard. On the other side there are paintings of Suzhou’s classical sceneries — bridges and rivers.

Suzhou is the main theme of the cage because it is Yan’s hometown — and the original place of nanlong, southern China birdcages. Nanlong is square and comparatively smaller, beilong (northern China’s birdcage) is round and larger.

Usually the nanlong’s bottom board is square with around 20 centimeters in diameter. The height varies between 18 to 25 centimeters.

This Five Fu cage looks like a cube but the top is slightly smaller than the bottom because the wooden bars are adducted a little at the top. A vital standard to judge a cage is the adduct — a good cage should be delicately adducted, not tilted, neither drawn too much.

Yu is a nanlong collector, and Yan is a nanlong master.

The 80-year-old Yan, who started making cages when he was 42 years old, is known for reviving the nanlong technique — iced plum roof.

Iced plum roof (bing mei ding) is a hollowed-out pattern of plum flowers and branches, similar to traditional Chinese window panel.

An old iced plum roof cage, believed to be the only one, is with a Hong Kong collector.

“I can say that birdcage nowadays is even better than the old ones,” Yan said. “Because we created new ideas and revived the old skills.”

A huge fan of Yan, Yu buys most of Yan’s work and helps him to promote and sell.

“Some people buy cages because they want to speculate, said Yan. “But not Yu. To encourage craftsman he keeps purchasing them while others quit the business due to the negative economic environment.”

Hangzhou


 

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