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Though time-worn, kites still spur flights of fancy
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KITES are quintessentially Chinese. They originated in China over 2,000 years ago, when silk made for fine sails and bamboo was ideal for light frames.
Ancient Chinese sources describe how kites were used for measuring distances, testing wind direction, signaling and military communications. They were typically decorated with mythological motifs and fitted with whistles to make musical sound when flown.
The history of kite-making dates back to what is today Shandong Province, where the city of Weifang came to be known as the center of kite artistry in the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In fact, the city still holds its reputation today.
In Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden, Zhang Yu, a 30-year-old native of Weifang, makes kite-making look easier than it really is.
“I once believed, as many people still do, that there’s nothing to making a kite,” she says.
Born into a family of kite makers and sellers, Zhang studied logistics in college but kept her hand in the family tradition from a young age. She hadn’t thought to make it a profession of it until she tried out her skills in the Yuyuan Garden seven years ago.
“Our kites, with graceful handmade bamboo ribs and a variety of shapes, proved to be of great interest to visitors,” she says.
Standard triangular kites are relatively easy to make, she says, but to create one in the shape of a bird, butterfly, goldfish or even a human requires perfectly crafted ribs behind the painted surface of the kite.
Bamboo sticks, cut into thin, even pieces, are heated over a spirit lamp to be bent into ideal shapes for the ribs.
It’s a skill she has had to perfect over the years.
When Zhang first began learning the family art as a teenager, she could hardly cut out a perfect piece of bamboo, which is the first step in creating a kite from scratch. Bamboo is the preferred material for making kite ribs because it’s both light and pliable.
“Bamboo has a texture, but one wrong move with a knife can ruin a piece,” she says.
Learning how to gently bend a piece of bamboo into the desired curve is another skill. Zhang says it was a matter or trial and error over time.
“In principle, the ribs should be perfectly symmetrical and at the same time allow the air to flow under the wings of the kite, or else it could be easily broken when flying,” she says.
Besides the ribs, a successful kite needs the right proportion of spine to wings, balancing weight and flying angle.
Zhang says it’s simply a matrix of physical forces that are hard to measure because every handmade kite is different.
“I was never a good student of physics in school, but that hasn’t hindered me because kite-making is more about experience than about theories,” she says.
Often, adjustments have to be made after trial flights. Sometimes the weight needs to be reduced by thinning the bamboo ribs, by changing their angle to facilitate air flow or by simply adding a tail to the kite.
“The tail solution is really a panacea in many instances,” she says.
Zhang still remembers the first kite she ever made. It was an octagonal piece of cloth painted with the pattern of Bagua, the eight trigrams used in ancient Chinese Taoist cosmology.
“It was the easiest I’ve ever made, but it flopped when I flew it for the first time,” she says. “The bamboo ribs were not thin enough.”
Nowadays, she makes kites from recreational ones of about 10 centimeters to more sophisticated ones that are a few meters in size and can fly up to hundreds of meters.
For Zhang, the next challenge is the most renowned of Weifang-style kites — the centipede-shaped kite with a dragon head.
Such a kite, resembling the serpentine in the dragon dance, could be 5 to 6 meters long. It comprises a three-dimensional dragon head and a certain number of painted round pieces of cloth glued to bamboo sticks with feathers on the tips and connected by threads.
“It’s very difficult to create the complicated supporting structure of the dragon head, and every little detail in the body of the dragon has to be precise in size,” she says.
For painted surfaces, Zhang uses silk to make smaller kites and imitation silk fabric to make larger ones.
“Silk is finer and allows delicate paintings with milder colors, but large kites that fly higher require fabrics of a tougher texture,” she says.
In making a kite with a three-dimensional body, the sheet for the spine is glued to the ribs before being painted because it’s harder to glue this part of the kite.
At Zhang’s stand in the Yuyuan Garden, tourists can try their hand at kite-painting. Most are amazed at how hard it is to get the right touches of the brush to create delicate patterns.
“I spent a few months practicing all kinds of painting on silk before feeling confident enough to do kites,” she says.
Her childhood, like that of many older people in China, evokes memories of flying kites in fields with friends after school. Even in the large public squares of cities, kite-flying was once a common recreation.
But contemporary cities don’t afford that kind of open-air space anymore, and young people have moved on to different forms of recreation.
Most customers tell Zhang that they are buying a kite from her as a collectible or as a gift. Some say they wouldn’t think of trying to fly one for fear of damaging her artwork.
“The public today doesn’t really know much about kites,” she says. “But they somehow remain interested, if only out of nostalgia, so I don’t feel I am wasting my time.”
For those truly interested in kites, she points out that her hometown Weifang still holds its International Kite Festival every April, and the Weifang World Kite Museum remains a popular visitor attraction.
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