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Coppersmiths create traditional pieces of artwork
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EDITOR’S Note
The marketplace at the popular Yuyuan Garden tourism area in Shanghai is a potpourri of traditional Chinese folk arts. Shanghai Daily is running a series on the craftsmen who are carrying ancient culture into the modern age.
COPPER is one of the oldest metals used by man, dating back to 8000 BC. Time has diminished neither interest in the metal nor its versatile artistic uses.
In Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden, various craftsmen charm tourists with their wondrous skills turning the metal into art objects.
Craftsmen like Zhou Yuhua, a 50-year-old former cargo boat captain from Yancheng in Jiangsu Province. He makes miniature replicas of boats out of copper.
Zhou spent much of his childhood around boats, but when on shore, he loved watching coppersmiths producing their wares.
“I fell in love with copper,” he says. “At first, I just wanted to make small playthings out of it.”
At age 18, Zhou started to work on a riverboat and also began moonlighting as a coppersmith. He was earning 30 yuan (US$4.50) a month at the time, he says, and a third of that went to buying tools and copper to feed this hobby.
“My colleagues usually spent their spare time playing cards and drinking, but working on copper was my only pastime,” he says.
He mostly made items like candleholders and kettles, and was surprised one day when someone offered him 200 yuan to purchase his 15-centimeter-long copper vessel powered by batteries.
When some of his works proved good for exhibition, he quit the river and became a contracted craftsman at Yuyuan Garden.
The biggest sellers at his stall there are copper knickknacks such as Chinese weighing scales and gourds, which are traditionally considered to be auspicious. But in the back of his mind all along was a plan to make 100 copper replicas of the river junks he sailed on for years.
His junks are only 10 centimeters long, made of brass, an alloy of copper, zinc and aluminum that is ideal for pounding into shapes.
Zhou’s favorite junks are those known as “Xizhuang boats” in northern Jiangsu. They have hulls shaped like a Chinese yuanbao, the gold ingot currency of ancient times. Each boat could carry up to 10 tons of cargo and allow eight people to live onboard, according to Zhou.
“Unfortunately, these boats have been rapidly disappearing since the 1980s, replaced by vessels with larger capacities,” he says.
But the beauty of those boats still haunts his memories.
“Creating a copper boat is hard enough, but creating a perfectly elegant copper boat by hand is a hell of a job,” Zhou says. “However, there’s no greater satisfaction to me than completing one of them.”
The challenge starts when he first cuts pieces from copper panels 0.8 centimeter thick. The pieces are then pounded into the desired curves before they are welded to the hull.
“The beauty of a boat definitely depends on its hull,” Zhou says.
It takes him up to 10 days to make the hull and even longer to build the upper structure of the boat, which is about 13 centimeters high.
Zhou says an all-copper boat of this size is comprised of between 700 and 800 parts.
The thinnest part is the sheeting used for the sails. The thatched roof of the little cabin on the boat is delicately recreated with overlaying thin copper pieces. To faithfully represent life on the boat, he even makes little water bailers, buckets, stoves, stools and washboards for each vessel.
In his words, every little thing counts on a boat.
“If memory fails me as to the function of some detail, I consult experienced boatmen back home,” Zhou says.
Working with copper results in endless burns from the welding because copper has high thermal conductivity.
“When I started out, I was often frustrated by failures, but now making a boat is like writing on paper,” he says.
Boats with sails are auspicious to the Chinese, who believe they are signs of smooth passage to success. Even though customers are willing to pay tens of thousands of yuan for one of his boats, Zhou is reluctant to sell yet.
“My dream is to hold a solo exhibition of 100 copper boats that I have made, and I’m only one-tenth of my way toward that dream,” he says.
Steps away from Zhou’s stall, Sun Guoxing, 56, blows new life into Chinese copper seals.
The delicate sculptures of traditional totems and carved characters on the seals reflect the accoutrement of ancient royal courts and administrative governments. What were once the purview of high-ranking officials are now available in miniature at the metalworker’s stall.
The dragon, lion and the mythical creatures pixiu and qilin are the most common motifs of sculpture in Sun’s works. He replicates antiques such as royal seals on display at the Palace Museum in Beijing and those at the Shanghai Museum.
The seals, which are made from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, develop a greenish coat, like that of antique objects, after being immersed in a chemical solution for a week.
The smallest square surface Sun has ever laid his carving knives to was only 0.4 centimeter in length, while a larger one was about 4 to 5 centimeters. It means that the smallest Chinese character he has ever carved is only 0.2 centimeter in side length.
What’s more surprising is that he doesn’t use a magnifying glass.
“Good eyesight is what it takes,” he says.
Although much of this sort of artifact is now created by machines, Sun still believes that nothing can duplicate an artisan’s hand.
“Machines are precise, but craftsmen have ideas and character,” he says.
He says carving dazhuan, better known as the bell-cauldron script popularized in the late Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 BC), is the most challenging because there are very few scripts from that time to use as reference. He had to consult an expert to get the characters right.
“I’d like to think of myself as a scholar in performing this art,” he says.
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