cloud stone

Author: Li Yanyan (Vice Chairman of Chongqing Writers Association)

One

Sister, I have heard of Dongjiexi Street? In Yunfu.

The yellow-flowered campanula trees are in full bloom in spring, just like the kapok trees that line the streets of Guangzhou. I haven\’t seen it in the Southwest. In Yunfu, it was the first time I saw such golden trees. In my mind, red is warm and yellow is calm.

My sister answered me: I have seen a long street that connects east and west. Flowers are sold on the east side and tea is bought on the west side. Flowers and tea are innately connected. They are both elves of the land. Flowers are known for their beauty, while tea is known for its taste.

Sister, the yellow-flowered campanula tree grows at the intersection of East Street. When you walk in smelling the aroma of \”Second Spring Tea\”, the Lingnan-style arcade quietly hides the origin of the clouds.

\”Well, there are always things connected to a piece of land. Some people even say that the dream of a goddess thousands of years ago is buried here.\” Sister A said.

In the arcade, a girl said hello in Cantonese, come, sit down and drink a cup of tea, there is spring hidden in the cup. I inadvertently looked at the large jade relief on the side. There was an inscription on the top of the relief saying \”Fushan on the Sea of ​​Clouds\”. The girl told me that this is Yunwu Mountain, the tallest of the mountains surrounding the city – hence the name Yunfu.

Sister, everything about Yunfu can be expressed in stone sculptures in East Street and West Street. Yunwu Mountain is a relief sculpture on an entire wall. On the table, the cattle in the field appear vividly in the center of the marble disk, and the summer cicadas in the summer mountains lie on the branches and sing. The summer cicadas are green nephrite, but the branches are unopened dark brown jade. Nephrite and rough jade, in the hands of a skilled craftsman, turn into movement and stillness, complementing each other.

\”No matter how long the street is, it can\’t hold a craft. The overflow can be found everywhere in this city.\” Ajie said.

Okay, let’s look for it together.

Two

Some people say that Yunfu stone art began when there were stones in the mountains.

The Baili Stone Corridor may seem flashy, but any owner of a \”Luxury Stone\” slab shop can casually tell me a long and simple \”Stone Sutra\”.

Yunfu has nine mountains and two rivers. The mountains are the bones and the water is the soul, giving birth to all kinds of stones, such as marble (marble), limestone, dolomite, granite, quartzite, sand Rocks… I can’t count them on my fingers. Just like people have different temperaments, so do stones. Millions of cubic meters of marble are quietly hidden underground in Yuncheng, Gaofeng, Nansheng, Shicheng, Fulin, Zhenan, Baishi and other places.

Marble is beautiful after polishing and can be processed into various shapes. It can be used as walls, floors, platforms, columns of buildings, as well as monuments, towers, statues and other monuments. It can also be carved into crafts. Art supplies, stationery, lamps, utensils, etc. Some marbles are born with miraculous craftsmanship, and the texture is originally a vivid ink painting. Yunfu’s limestone reserves are several billion tons, mostlyIt is exposed on the surface and has an unspectacular appearance. It is mainly used to make high-quality cement. Granite with beautiful patterns is called the \”King of Rocks\”. It is used in construction from roofs to floors. If it is crushed, it can be made into cement or rock filler.

Some people say that the prosperity of Yunfu stone art is closely related to the unique climate of Lingnan.

People often hear about \”Xiguan House\” because there are stories about \”Miss Xiguan\” and \”Master Dongshan\” in Guangzhou. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, wealthy businessmen in Guangdong built unique large-scale luxury residences in Xiguan, Guangzhou and other places. This practice soon became popular in the Pearl River Delta region, and Yunfu in the Guangfu region was naturally deeply affected.

In Yunfu Yunan, I saw many ancient buildings that have withstood hundreds of years of wind and rain, including ancestral halls, large houses, and private schools. The buildings have murals, calligraphy, sculptures and other artistic elements. The grand local house is the same as the famous \”Xiguan House\”. The eaves board under the eaves of the front facade is carved with exquisite long scroll pictures, the walls are made of stone-footed water-polished blue bricks, and stone door covers are set. The main entrance has a stilt door, A set of three doors including a sliding door and a hardwood door.

Here, stone art can be seen everywhere, but the use of wood is much less than in other provinces I have seen. Even the window lattice is made of stone.

We have a lot of humidity here, and wood will decay quickly, but stone is still solid! the man told me.

It turns out that most of Guangdong belongs to the subtropical zone, with a humid climate and abundant precipitation. Yunfu is mountainous and watery, and the evaporation of water vapor is large, resulting in extremely high humidity. Just like the high temperature and high humidity weather in the south in spring \”returns to the south\”, it is particularly obvious in Yunfu – the outdoor temperature is as high as about 30 degrees and the humidity reaches 99%; the indoor temperature is about 20 degrees and the humidity is about 80%. Someone joked that in \”Back to the South\”, the teachers were correcting homework under umbrellas in the office. The water droplets on the walls of the room formed rivers. The floors were slippery and the hair could not be dried after washing. There were also hair that jumped out at any time to scare people. A jumping centipede and a cockroach.

It turns out that only stones in Guangdong can withstand years of moisture erosion.

Three

In Yunfu, stones with beautiful appearance are called \”jade\” by the locals. Such a title has nothing to do with whether the stone itself is a gem, but is closely related to the unique craftsmanship added to it by the master of stone craftsmanship.

The relationship between Yunfu and stone can be traced back to the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. During the Xianfeng period of the Qing Dynasty, Yunfu was famous for its \”Dongan Flower Stone\”. Some people mined and processed the stone in the Fulin Liantang area. During the Guangxu period, more than 500 people from 15 villages in the Yuncheng peak area mined stones and established an industry organization \”Yunshihang\”.

For centuries, Yunfu\’s stone craftsmen relied on their exquisite skills to carve various local stones into jade carvings, screens, screen walls, railings, and stone tablets. Cloud-floating stone carvings can be found in temples and palaces, such as the Xingxing Guoen Temple, founded in 683 AD by Master Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch; and the \”Yun-bu Stone Lion\”, the treasure of the Yongli court in the Southern Ming Dynasty. The composition of cloud pumice artPieces have been selected for architectural decoration in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the Potala Palace in Tibet, and can also be found in ordinary people\’s homes.

Walking around the ubiquitous stone carving market in Yunfu is like being in a wonderful world. I have to sigh that the stone art masters in Yunfu are like magic. The seemingly ordinary stones have been turned into beautiful pieces after eighteen kinds of crafts such as sawing, grinding, carving and engraving. Works of art may be majestic or delicate.

The hands of skilled craftsmen, like the brushstrokes of time, have engraved the vicissitudes of Yunfu on these stones bit by bit. They also inject poet-like feelings into it and compose the rhythm of life. Therefore, every stone art work carries a story or a family legend.

The colorful pheasants stand on the stone mountain, \”Spring is full of happiness in the world\”; the Great Wall winds between the mountains, \”The country is so beautiful\”… These are the \”jades\” pioneered by Kong Xiangxiong Colored carvings\”. Colored jade carvings are made of jade scraps and scraps, which save materials and resources. They can not only promote the prosperity of the jade industry, but also promote the development of abrasive processing, packaging, transportation and other industries. \”One stone, three carvings\” is also one of the values ​​of jade color carving.

The stone sculpture \”Shoubi Nanshan\” came from an encounter by Liang Weiwen. He was amazed by the strange-looking yellow wax stone at his friend\’s house that had been neglected for a long time. He got the stubborn stone and carved a statue of an amiable and smiling longevity star based on the stone\’s original shape, lines, textures and colors, and named it \”Shoubinan Mountain\”. The transformation of ornamental stones into works of art depends on the sculptor\’s whims.

In Yunfu, there are also people manufacturing European-style three-dimensional and realistic stone craft products. Pan Binqiang discovered that the elegant and soft artificial Sa\’ana stone has the characteristics of strong plasticity, so he tried to use the artificial Sa\’ana stone produced in Yunfu, and carefully created a high-relief sculpture \”National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance\”, using peonies as the object of expression. On the yellow artificial Shaana stone raw material, we borrowed the expression techniques of meticulous Chinese painting and used three relief techniques – shallow relief, deep carving (semi-circular carving), and hollow carving to create a graceful, luxurious, vivid and three-dimensional stone peony flower. The artificial stone carvings pioneered by him became very popular in Yunfu.

Mosaics are common in Yunfu. The patterns of gravel collages are lively and full of three-dimensionality. It is said that the judges commented on the mosaic \”Sunflower\” that Qin Jun won the Grand Prize for Stone Art Creation: The work is full of fun, using uneven stones to vividly express the pigment color and thickness texture of the original oil painting, and is unique in stone art creativity. .

The selfless gift of nature provides endless creative inspiration for Yunfu stone art. In Yunfu, stone art carries the wisdom and talent of the Yunfu people and shows the unique charm of Lingnan culture. Thousands of stone art works are like witnesses of history, quietly watching the vicissitudes of this land.

Four

The Yunfu quarrying industry, which lasted for centuries, gradually came to an end due to ecological protection.The Yunshi Heritage Park is left where you can look back at the production and labor scenes of the year. There is a corner of the mine exposed and a long scroll engraved on the park wall – the entire story of the Yunfu Stone. Oh, the word \”all\” is not accurate, because the wheel of time is still moving forward moment by moment. Just like the rapeseed sown by my sister and her friends in the fields of Xincun a few months ago, this spring has already bloomed, spreading out into golden patches.

The pace of quarrying can be stopped, but the Yunfu stone art that has been transformed into tradition and integrated into the bones is getting farther and farther. Raw materials are imported from India, Turkey and other places, then processed and decorated before exported. More than a thousand stone products are sold to more than 100 countries and regions around the world, including the United States, Japan, and Canada.

Today, Yunfu stone art has gone abroad. It has won praise from the world with its unique artistic style and exquisite production skills. The stone market in Yunfu has become a comprehensive market integrating production, processing and sales.

Here, you can see a variety of stone products, from large stone slabs to exquisite stone carvings. Yunfu’s stone market is not only a platform for commercial trade, but also an important carrier for inheriting and promoting Chinese stone culture. It has become a highlight of local development and pointed the way for the integration of mountainous economic development into the “Belt and Road” construction.

Oh, sister, I found it. Let us remember the floating stone and the splendor of this land.

\”Guangming Daily\” (page 14 on August 9, 2024)

Source: Guangming.com – \”Guangming Daily\”