Wang Xingji 王星记

The House

Hangzhou has been a centre of fan-making since the Southern Song dynasty, when the court moved its capital to Lin'an, present-day Hangzhou, and fan-makers and painters gathered in the city. By the mid-Qing the archive records more than fifty paper-fan businesses with four to five thousand workers, and the city's fans came to be counted, with silk and Longjing tea, among the three wonders of Hangzhou.

In 1875 Wang Xingzhai, born into a family of fan-makers three generations deep, opened the Wang Xingzhai fan shop in Fan Lane. He was known in the trade as a master of sanding and polishing; his wife Chen Ying was skilled at applied gold and gold-sprinkled decoration. The two worked to the principle that fine work comes of slow work and good material outdoes nature. The archive records that one of their fans, a black paper fan with gold decoration, was sent to the imperial court as a tribute item, and that the house's name spread from there.

Wang Xingzhai died in 1909 and his son Wang Ziqing took over. In 1929 Wang Ziqing registered the Sanxing trademark, opened a four-bay shop on Taipingfang under the name Wang Xingji, and entered the first West Lake Exposition; the shop, the archive records, came to rank first in Hangzhou's fan trade.

Fighting from 1937 forced the workshop out of the city. In 1956 the business entered joint public-private operation; in 1958 the city established the Hangzhou Wang Xingji Fan Factory, restoring the Sanxing trademark. In 1966 the factory was renamed the Hangzhou Dongfeng Fan Factory and switched to making televisions, and the old name returned in

1. It was restructured as a joint-stock company in 2000 and opened a cultural and

creative industrial park in 2010. The archive describes it as China's only integrated fan-making and sales enterprise.

What They Make

The fans use bamboo, wood, bone, paper, and silk, worked into ribs and faces and decorated by gold and silver application, inlay, cut-paper work, carving, painting, and calligraphy.

Folding fans are made in black paper and white paper types. For the black paper fan, bamboo ribs are drilled for the pivot and pasted with a face of handmade mulberry-bark paper. The ribs are shaped by nine operations the archive names as sawing, splitting, paring, braiding, sunning, dyeing, inspecting, firing, and forming. The black colour comes not from pigment but from steeping the bamboo in lime water, boiling it in copperas, and steaming the bundles, so that it enters the bamboo rather than sitting on it. Only then is the face pasted on, folded, sanded, trimmed, and lacquered.

A single black paper fan takes about three months. The archive gives it three tests it is said to pass: rain does not soak through it, sun does not warp it, and the paper neither tears nor fades.

Timeline

Passing It On

The archive does not give a continuous generational line. It records that the house has trained inheritors of the fan-making technique — one at national level and seven at provincial, municipal, or district level, with seven senior craft artists and eight provincial or municipal craft masters. Sun Yaqing, a national-level inheritor of the Wang Xingji fan technique, leads a master studio set up in 2017.

Source: China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Original record: lzhbwg.mofcom.gov.cn. Translated and condensed from the official Chinese archive; no information has been added. Statements of standing are reproduced as recorded by the source.

Historical facts on this page are compiled from China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Designation recorded 2006-11-07. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

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