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Feng Jicai--Savior of Chinese Folk Culture
2006-05-08 15:25:12
CRIENGLISH.com
These achievements are the result of joint efforts by the government and individuals. Today we'll tell you about one individual who sacrificed personal interest for the protection of folk cultural heritage. His name is Feng Jicai, a very famous Chinese writer and painter who created several influential works on contemporary Chinese literary history.
Feng Jicai has occupied an important place in the Chinese literature world ever since the 1970s. His works are mainly about the life of intellectuals as well as recent and modern historical events and tales from his home city of Tianjin, an important port city not far from Beijing. His main works "Legend of Magic Lamp", "Tall Woman and Her Dwarf Husband", "Sculpted Pipe", and "Magic Whip" were fairly popular at that time. These works contains huge amount of rich and vivid descriptions of folk culture and traditions. In the meantime, he is also a professional painter whose works are popular among art collectors, as they combine the best of traditional Chinese painting and western painting skills.
Yet, as one who had an ardent love for traditional folk culture, Feng Jicai began to take notice of the impact of the country's modernization on the existence of folk culture heritage long before others. So ever since the mid 1990s, he has been focusing on the protection of folk cultural heritage. And one of his first major efforts was the preservation of his hometown, Tianjin. Tianjin is an ancient city with 600 years of history. Much of its rich local folk culture resided within its ancient city proper. But during the 1990s, there were some rumor that the city was planning to demolish the ancient city and build a new one in its place.
"I organized a number of scholars, including architects, anthropologists, historians, urban planners, local folk culture specialists and photographers and carried out a large-scale survey on the ancient city proper of Tianjin. We took photographs of every important architectural structure within the city. We took some 30,000 pictures and compiled them into four editions of photo albums. All of this was done with my own money. We gave one set of the book to each of the city governors, with one line on each book: 'This is your beloved city'. Because of this photo album, much of the ancient city has been able to preserve its original look, including folk-culture concentrated regions and former leased territories which date back to the Qing Dynasty, when foreigners built various styles of western architecture."
Tianjin was where Feng jicai began to focus on national folk culture protection work. In 2003, at the initiation of Feng Jicai, the China Folk Artist Association launched the "China Folk Cultural Heritage Protection Project", which aimed to carry out a large-scale national survey on national folk cultural heritage. Four years after the initiation of the project, much of the endangered national folk culture heritage was brought to the nation’s attention and thus preserved. Feng Jicai has been dubbed the Savior of Chinese Folk Culture. However, most people don't know of the difficulties he has encountered in the course of his work. According to Feng, the biggest challenge was the lack of money, despite some financial support from the government.
"Financial difficulty is a problem that has always troubled me. Just two years ago I sold a number of my paintings to collect funds for folk culture protection work. At the time we were in dire shortage of funding, as we were about to carry out a complete survey on national folk customs, folk art and folk literature. China is a country with 9.6 million square kilometers and has 56 ethnicities. So every individual program is a huge task. We can't always depend on government support. So at that time, I painted every evening so that I could sell my paintings and get the badly-needed funding. I need to get 2 million yuan or some 250,000 dollars to set up a fund."
Feng Jicai's deeds have touched many people. One of them is his friend, Taiwan actor Zhao Wenxuan, who had been a loyal reader of Feng's work. He has contributed 1 million yuan to Feng Jicai's projects, so with Feng's own 100 million yuan from his sold paintings, he managed set up the fund and carry out the national survey.
Yet Feng still felt the task on his shoulders was very heavy.
"This little sum of money is still not enough to solve much of the problem. Chinese culture is so rich, and many of it is so endangered, and this is a broad situation spread among different ethnicities. Our lifestyle is changing and people are easily giving up some of their traditions. But meanwhile they are giving up a memory of the past which is so valuable to me."
So while writing articles calling for national attention to be given to folk culture preservation, he is also pushing for government support. As a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top advisory body providing ideas for national development in every aspect, he has put forward many proposals in cultural protection. He proposed the National Cultural Heritage Day, which was approved and set to be observed on the second Saturday of every June. This June the country will welcome the first National Cultural Heritage Day. He also proposed the setting-up of a local ethnic museum to preserve diverse ethnic culture. This year, he'll put forward another proposal, with priority given to preserving rural folk culture amid rural development.
Over the years, Feng Jicai has contributed so much to cultural heritage protection that people have almost forgotten the writer and painter side of him. But Feng is still longing for the day when he can spare the time to pick up his writing again. He says, to him writing is something that can give him the best feeling in the world. Yet, regarding the current task of national folk culture protection, he has no choice but to keep on.
"How can I make a choice? To me, folk culture preservation is undoubtedly more important, because culture is something that you leave to your decedents. I believe in what the great writer Ba Jin said, that the only meaningful thing for a writer is for him to leave his name on his own books. The cultural heritage that's being preserved will not carry my name. Yet if you we can't have our culture continue, where can our names reside? So if we can help preserve China's great cultural heritage, that's enough for me."
As a result of the efforts by Feng Jicai and others like him, as well as government support, many of the endangered aspects of cultural heritage as well as ancient skills and craftsmanship have survived. Not long ago, some of examples of this have been brought to Beijing to be showcased for local audiences. Maybe we'll be enlightened with more of our ancestors' ancient cultural heritage in future, and when we marvel at it, please let us remember the name of Feng Jicai and others like him.
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