Lantern Festival, Gansu Pingliang folk craftsmen Wen Cunlin handmade lanterns to celebrate the festival. Photo by Guo Huimin
Lanzhou, February 15 (Guo Huimin) Tiger King, lotus lantern, monkey rolling lamp, long-haired rabbit lamp, pomegranate lamp, toad lotus lamp, etc., Lantern Festival, Gansu Pingliang folk craftsman Wen Cunlin, is also busy making lanterns by hand. "Lantern Festival, more orders, do more." He said.
In order to welcome the 2022 Lantern Festival, Wen Cunlin creatively designed and produced 5 types of innovative lanterns, including Tiger King Lantern, Toad Lotus Lantern and Red Strawberry Lantern, and 3 types of traditional lanterns to celebrate the Lantern Festival.
The picture shows Wen Cunlin and his family hanging lanterns to celebrate the Lantern Festival. Photo by Guo Huimin
This year is the Year of the Tiger, Wen Cunlin innovated the production of "Tiger King" lanterns, which means that the tiger is vigorous, and has been purchased by a company in Pingliang to celebrate the Lantern Festival. In the living room of his house, there are only a few lanterns on the shelves where lanterns are hung. Wen Cunlin said that in the past two years, most of his handmade colorful lanterns have been ordered in advance, and they rarely walk the streets and alleys to sell.
Since October last year, Wen Cunlin has begun to prepare the material and shape design of the 2022 lanterns, hand-tied lanterns, and has produced more than 180 lanterns, most of which are order-made.
Wen Cunlin glued the petals of the lotus lamp while introducing the process of the lotus lamp. There are many processes for making lanterns by hand, and there are seven processes to make a lotus lamp, five layers of petals to be glued, 72 petals to be glued to the large lotus lamp, and 56 petals to be glued to the small lotus lamp. If it is a more complicated monkey rolling lamp and a six-tooth watermelon lantern, there are 13 processes.
From choosing the bamboo with colorful lanterns, kidnapping, dyeing paper, pasting paper, painting, and sticking to the completion of molding and selling, he is his own job. This ancestral handicraft, Wen Cunlin has been doing for 46 years.
Wen Cunlin said that he was able to stick to this handicraft because he had a set of lamp-making tools to suppress the petals of lotus flowers, and the flower shafts and cones were "heirlooms" for making colorful lanterns, which were handed down from his grandfather's hands for more than 100 years.
At present, Wen Cunlin has received phone calls, WeChat custom-made Tiger King lamps, monkey rolling lamps and so on. The 73-year-old said that due to the complicated and manpower-consuming process of flower lantern production, he is too old to accept too many orders, and hopes that more young people will learn to pass on this skill. (End)