Folk toys

Toys exist throughout the human history. The earliest toys appeared in as early as the Neolithic Age. With a long history, Chinese folk toys exist in a wide range of areas, featuring many varieties and numerous materials By functional features, they can be classified into toys for festival, education, acoustic, fitness appreciation and utility purposes. By materials, there are clay, cloth, bamboo, paper toys, etc Toys for festival purposes are closely associated with the folk activities. Their application is limited to specific festivals, e.g, firecrackers and fireworks for the Spring Festival, trotting horse lamps and animal shaped lamps for the Lantern Festival, lotus flower lamps for the ghost festival, sachets cloth tigers wormwood puppets and ive-color thread whistles for Dragon boat Festival, clay rabbits for the mid-Autumn Festival and kites for the Tomb-sweeping Day. Educational toys are mainly for enriching the mind and stimulating the brain, and are functional in logicality mathematics, rivalrousness, and recreation, for example, seven-piece puzzles developmental diagrams, playing cards, Room Escape, Chinese ring puzzles, Kongming Locks, rearranging nine-grid patterns Acoustic toys can make sounds, and have a wide range of raw materials Being entertaining and stimulating, they are suitable forkids. They are clay whistles, porcelain whistles, diabolos, earth axis, rattle-drums, gongs, horns made of colored glaze, etc

Toys for appreciation purposes generally have no use but for decoration. With various patterns engraved on them, they are of somewhat educational significance, such as all kinds of sculptures like wood sculptures stone sculptures and kernelsculptures, and modeled toys like clay figurines, dough figurines, and wax dolls Bodybuilding toys are primarily the outdoor fitness apparatuses, having some functions of sports equipment and can be used for bodybuilding entertainment and competition. They are Cuju, Tiaobaisuo(skipping ropes), shuttlecocks, swings, pitch pots, etc. As for toys for utility, in addition for entertainment, they can also be used in costume, bedding and food, like tiger-head shoes, tiger-head hats, sugar man, and dough sculptures

Due to the great variety of Chinese folk toys, the following pages will focus on theclay toys, acoustic toys, and educational toys to show the craftsmanship of the folk toys. Clay toys are toys with the longest history, widest distribution, highest production and are the most closely related to folk custom in China. the emerging of clay toys can date back to the Neolithic Period, five or six thousands of years ago Small pottery pigs have been found in the Shandong Dawenkou Site, 5,500 years awayfrom now, and pottery toys in Qi’s Family Cultural Remains, 3, 800 years away from now. Clay toys and pottery toys were widespread by the eastern Han Dynasty. The existing earliest material clay toys are the clay figures of Tang Dynasty. In 1973, a set of four colored clay labor figures was excavated in an ancient tomb cluster in AstanaTurpan, Xinjiang. Those vivid and lively figures reflect the food making situation in local place in Tang Dynasty. Clay toys saw quick development after the Song Dynasty There were not only folk artists making clay toys for a living, but also clay toy products Appearing on the town market were stalls and travelling stands of clay toys, and almost every region had its own clay toys, which were closely linked with the local custom

Early Huishan clay figures were dominated by toys for children, and collectively referred to as “playing items. There were moulded and colored simply, with the “Da A Fu(great blessings) as the representative. The folk legend of the a Fu is still around Huishan region: Long long ago, wild beasts were on a rampage in Huishan and hurt children. There was a child call Shahaizi, who fought the beasts bravely, killed them, and saved the people people reflected his brave image with the clay in at the foot of Huishan Mountain in memory of him. Time has changed, and images of a Fu are different. But the basic image is always a chubby child or a pair, in the wufu”(five blessings) short gown, hugging a giant lion, quiet and mighty, dignified and blunt, everything from the content to the image closely connected to the word blessing Junxian County, Henan, is known as the hometown of clay toys the “Junxian Nigugu(small clay toys in Junxian), rated as state-level intangible cultural heritage in China, are still made in small workshops. In some villages, every family is a workshop of clay toys, with themes ranging from military officers, opera characters, war horses, chickens, animals for counteracting evils, livestock, monkey, etc. The figures are simple natural but elegant. the folks like to use red and green to them, with black and brownas the background color, on which various patterns with intense color contrast will be drawn. During the folk activities and temple fairs, they are so popular that people will rush to buy

Rattle-drum is a typical acoustic toy. It is composed of a drum, the main body, two pellets attached to two sides of the drum rim with a string, and a handle. When turning the handle, the pellets will hit the drum to make sound. The rim is usually made of wood or bamboo and the drum face sheepskin cow leather, snakeskin etc The typical rattle-drum is the wooden-rim and sheepskin-face one The first rattle drum was made in the Warring States Time, and was the music instrument in the rite After being popular among the folks, them lost the function them used to have in the rite, but evolved to be the folk acoustic instrument. They were used by the travelling retailers to attract customers for they made joyful sound which caught people’s attention. Besides, they are of some ornamental value. They were also good toys for the infants. They developed the strength of the infants to grasp and hold, and tested the growth of their auditory and tactile senses. Throughout the 2,000 years of evolution, they remained basically unchanged in shape and patterns

Diabolo, made of bamboo is so named for its hollow body it is also called the sounding maraca”or “pulling bell “in regions south of the Yangtze river and Taiwan Diabolos made in Beijing and Tianjin is the most famous. They are wheel-form(singlewheel or double wheels), with a wood shaft in the middle, which is twined by a rope which connecting two bamboo sticks in both ends. When people drag the sticks, to turn the wood shaft, they will make the buzzing sound. As the historical materials ofthe three Kingdoms Period proved, the diabolo rotating in the air is derived from the peg-top rotating on the ground Playing diabolos had become a popular acrobatics in Qing dynasty and generated lots of rotating tricks and difficult skills, such as golden chicken walking onto the shelf, tramping over hill and dale weaver doubling thread, watching the milk river at night, “etc. The skills of playing diabolos combine the body, the spirit, the idea and the pneuma. It has come down to now and become an athletic and body-building activity

Educational toys in China are rich in variety, including board chess, loop, card and chunk moving toys. Board toys, created primarily by the ancient scholars, have been mature and stable after the unceasing summary and modification, and have an enduring popularity among the folks. Also called the jigsaw puzzle, they are seven piece puzzle, educational diagram, sixteen -piece puzzle, twenty-one-piece puzzle, etc Seven-piece puzzle, the representative of board toys, composed of seven pieces of board which make up a rectangle, and lots of pictures. It is derived from the Yanjitu puzzle”(a kind of Chinese puzzle)(Yanji means the tea table for greeting the guest created by Huang Bosi in the Song Dynasty. It consists of six rectangular”tea tables and a small table out of which lots of patterns can be made Seven -piece puzzle is widely played, across China and even overseas. After being introduced to the West, it got the name Tangram, meaning the puzzle from china Artist making and selling diabolo on the street, originated in Nanjing, Jiangsu, 1990s Picture made up by seven-piece puzzle of the Qing Dynasty

Folk toys are usually made by hand, inextricably linked to the New Year pictures, paper-cut, embroidery, and other folk crafts Materials are ordinary items that are available almost everywhere, like clay, wheat straw, bamboo, palm leaves, waste cloth, leftovers, etc. Utilization of those cheap and easy-to-get materials fully shows the life style and wisdom that Chinese people make the best use of everything. Being easy to make, time and work saving and proper for production during the slack season, they help to extend the manual labor in a pleasant way. The artistic style of folk toys, succinct and exaggerating in shapes, distinct in colors, and vivid in images, are in accordance with the aesthetic habits of the laboring people in the agricultural civilization. The themes-opera characters, legends, auspicious patterns, poultry, faming seasons, are frequently heard in daily life and work

Sichuan”Jiaotangren(making human figures with melting sugar) performance on the street, 1990s. The main processes included (1) refining sugar; (2) pouring the sugar with a copper spoon on a piece of oiled smooth flagstone into different figures; (3) sticking a bamboo stick after condensation; (4) shoveling it off the flagstone

Monkey on the Back of A Horse, a modern toy, originated in Dali, Yunnan, 15cm in height, made of woodand feather In Chinese, Hou(monkey) is articulated the same as Hou(marquis), and”a monkey on the back of a horse”implied the good wish for “immediately-coming honor and fame Some traditional toys, such as pitch-pots, Cuju, Shenguantu(advancement diagram), zhaogu drum, Chinese ring puzzle, have already died out, but some othershave become an essential culture symbol and material carrier of folk life kongming lantern for praying, for example. New folk toys in contemporary era inspired by the artistic form of traditional toys are of strong ethnic features, local features, and are at high artistic level, like clay figures made by zheng yuhe in Beijing clay toys made b Pan Liansan in Shandong, cloth toys of Hao Guijun in Shandong and clay monkeys of Zhang Xihe in Henan