Before the Spring Festival holiday, the Baisha Road Rural Revival Children’s Palace was crowded with people. Under the guidance of Sun Wencong, an inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, a group of cute kids were happily making dough figurine, enjoying the fun brought by traditional intangible cultural heritage culture.
This is one of the contents of the “Winter Vacation Package” presented by the Baisha Road Rural Revival Children’s Palace. In order to make the children of new citizens who stay in Cixi feel warmth in their second hometown, during this winter vacation, the subdistrict and villages (communities) jointly carried out various interest classes such as painting and handicrafts for all primary and secondary school students and preschool children in the jurisdiction, and opened up intangible cultural heritage courses such as paper cutting and dough figurine on the eve of the Spring Festival holiday, so as to make the winter vacation life of teenagers “full of knowledge and interesting”.
“Dough figurine making is a traditional intangible cultural heritage art. The history of Chinese dough figurine can be traced back to the Han Dynasty. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the development of dough figurine entered its peak stage…” After learning the history of dough figurine, the children scrambled to pick up the dough and carefully began to make the dough figurine in their hands by kneading, pasting, pressing, inlaying and other methods. Pieces of colorful dough become lovely little dough figurine in the skillful hands of the children.
With the theme of “the Year of the Tiger”, Sun Wencong combined the traditional image of “tiger head” with the skills of making dough figurine to create a charming, fresh and flexible dough figurine of “baby tiger”. At the scene, Sun Wencong also made a series of dough figurines for the Winter Olympics to welcome the Beijing Winter Olympic Games by means of the collision between intangible cultural heritage art and skating and skiing projects.
On the same day, Zhu Biyun, another inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, brought another traditional intangible cultural heritage art of paper cutting for the kids. In class, the children sat around and were carefully cutting paper. Under the guidance of the teacher, red papers were gradually cut out into round paper-cuts with the Chinese character fu (fortune, bliss) for window decoration in the children‘’s dexterous hands.
“The Revival Children’s Palace is really a good place for the kids to enjoy themselves during the vacation.” Feng Mei, a parent living in the Qingfang Village, said. This year is the second year that they choose to stay in Cixi for the Chinese New Year. It is reassuring for the children to be in the Revival Children’s Palace. Last September, the Baisha Road Subdistrict took the center for civilized practice of the new era as the main position, fully integrating the civilized practice resources to combine with its own characteristics, thus upgrading it into a new era rural “revival children’s palace” integrating functions of theoretical learning, specialty training and quality improvement.
