In the court era, welding filigree was to take a blow pipe to the kerosene lamp, nose inhalation nozzle blowing, with their own breath to control the size of the fire and the length of time, often blowing dizzy, by the kerosene lamp smoked black. It continued to this day, with the introduction of gas blowing tools, that the old traditions in the palace began to keep up with the times.

"Filigree" process is a foreign product, in China we call it "filigree", the gold and silver or other metal filaments, pulled into filaments, braided and formed, is the key process in the process of making jewelry, it has achieved the jewelry of the palace and the traditional court art "filigree inlay".

Each part is pressed layer by layer, interlocking, skillfully braided, and sprinkled with solder weld into a device. Finally, the filigree is embedded with polished and smooth jade, gemstones, and pearls to scatter dazzling brilliance, which is called "gold filigree inlay". This intangible cultural heritage "unique work" from the palace is one of the "Eight Uniques of Yanjing" because of its valuable materials and long history. The above steps are just a glimpse of the complex process.

Things are made by people, and in Eastern philosophy, everything has spirituality, which is a kind of "qi" that can be sensed by people, and the strength of qi depends on people in the final analysis.

With a history of more than 2,000 years, the filigree inlay is a memory that was once active in the depths of the Forbidden City, and now the royal family is gone, and the gold silk soft belt is in the people's house, however, "it needs to be inherited more, especially the inheritance of the new generation of young people", Cheng Shumei, the inheritor of the national intangible cultural heritage, said sincerely.

In the late 90s, when the arts and crafts industry was declining and there was a lack of successors, he felt obliged to shoulder the burden of inheritance, so he established a studio. In the early days of its establishment, due to the lack of customers, it was once in trouble, and it cost to make works, the studio required rent, and the apprentices had to be paid.

In order to make the studio continue and let more people know about filigree inlay, I had to run the market by myself, and most of my energy was spent on business.

Due to the special period of the times, the Beijing Arts and Crafts School was cancelled, and there was no place to learn traditional arts and crafts. Nowadays, the entire arts and crafts industry is facing a fault line, and many traditional skills are on the verge of extinction.

In most of the arts and crafts industry, fifty or sixty years old is already the retirement age, but in the "Yanjing Eight Uniques", forty years old is considered a young person, and fifty or sixty years old is the main force. ivory carving, the youngest master is 47 years old; Carved lacquer, the average age of the 7 masters is 55 years old, and the employees in the studio are all retired and rehired old workers; Filigree inlay artists, the vast majority of whom are over 50 years old. In a few years, the skilled masters will also go home to retire.

In today's lack of tradition, the work of cultivating successors is imminent, but learning the craft is too hard, and the living conditions are getting better and better, and many children can't bear that hardship. Although more and more people now know filigree inlay, and there are not many people who come to study, Cheng Shumei only accepts one apprentice, her son.

"It's not that I don't want to pass on the craft, but filigree inlay needs to be achieved not in a year or two, or ten years, twenty years, or even a lifetime. And most of these young people have the psychology of curiosity. I hope that those who learn this skill can make filigree inlays for a lifetime, and can pass on this skill from generation to generation. ”

He Qing is the founder of Beijing Fangyuan Fine Gold Culture Communication Company and a jewelry designer. Stemming from the love of filigree craftsmanship, the collection of millions of filigree craft works from 2000 to the present has enabled a large number of filigree boutiques to be preserved. And the combination of modern fashion elements and filigree technology, the matching jewelry is novel and unique, full of design.

In 2000, by chance, I learned that Beijing's largest Beijing Tongxian filigree factory was about to destroy the inventory of all filigree inlaid jewelry and ornaments, and turn them into raw materials to pay off debts, so I used almost all the family property at that time, nearly 3 million yuan to buy all the inventory. Such behavior seems a bit crazy.

With China's continuous international attention to traditional crafts, filigree inlay was rated as a national intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2008, and has a high reputation in the world, and in September 2012, the Chinese government organized the Sino-German Cultural Exchange Year. Ten filigree inlay ornaments from He Qing's collection were selected by the Beijing Municipal Government to represent the Chinese government in the exhibition.

He Qing is now more like a propagandist of the filigree craft, seizing every opportunity to tell everyone he meets about the history and artistic value of the filigree craft. She also tried to help train the inheritors of the filigree craft, but unfortunately, like all intangible cultural heritage, young people were unwilling to endure the loneliness of learning and left one by one.

He Qing has a small filigree museum, which has thousands of various filigree crafts collected by himself. Nowadays, every time she encounters a jewelry exhibition, she has to take a part of the filigree handicrafts to the exhibition, so that more people can understand the filigree process. He Qing's biggest wish at present is to make the filigree process regain its value through the joint efforts of the government, enterprises and the market.

"Gold mining is silk, clever hand knotting, inlaid jade emerald, is a must." The filigree inlay technique, which was once in a lost predicament, was included in the "National Intangible Cultural Heritage List" in 2008, and finally ushered in an opportunity for recovery. As a court skill with a strong royal color, how should filigree inlay glow in the new era?

Filigree inlay technology, also known as fine gold technology, is the first of the "Yanjing Eight Uniques" (Yanjing Eight Uniques are cloisonné, jade carving, ivory carving, carved lacquer, gold lacquer inlay, filigree inlay, palace carpet, Beijing embroidery eight major crafts). Its origin can be traced back to the gold and silver mistaken craftsmanship of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period.

Later generations of improvement and development in the Ming Dynasty to reach a high level of art, especially weaving, stacking techniques are good, but also often with the point of cui technology, to achieve a brilliant effect.

The extensive use of gemstones and the improvement of the gem setting process are the most important contributions of filigree inlay jewelry to traditional Chinese jewelry in the Ming Dynasty, which has changed the tradition of heavy ornamentation and light gemstones in traditional Chinese Han jewelry. In the Qing Dynasty, gemstone resources were gradually depleted, so spot emerald and burnt blue were often used to replace the location of gemstones.

The existing crown of the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty represents the height of this craft - this crown is woven from 0.2 mm of fine gold wire, 24 centimeters high but as thin as light yarn, weighing only 826 grams, decorated with a dragon and pearl pattern, the most amazing thing is that there is no joint, which can be described as truly "seamless".

The filigree inlay process is often simply called the combination of the two crafts of "filigree" and "inlay", but the complexity and fineness of this court skill can not be summed up in a few words.

Step1.Pull the silk like a hair

The basis of filigree inlay is filigree. Precious metals such as gold, silver, and copper are used as raw materials. Before the filament is drawn, the precious metal must be repeatedly pressed on the rolling mill into a square strip of appropriate thickness before the formal manual drawing can begin.

A special hand-drawn tool called a drawing plate is lined with forty or fifty eyeholes of different diameters from thick to thin. The eyeholes are generally made of alloy and diamonds, and the smallest holes are thinner than a human hair.

In the process of drawing the thick filament, it must pass through each eye hole in turn from large to small, and it cannot be skipped, and sometimes it takes more than a dozen times to get the desired filament. At first, the surface of the drawn wire is rough and requires a lot of effort, and it gradually becomes thinner after several draws.

The surface of a single wire drawn from the drawing plate is smooth, which is called "plain silk" in the industry, and after a certain amount of processing, it can be used only when it is kneaded into a variety of patterned silk, from which the name "filigree" comes from.

The most common filaments are made of two or three plain threads, which is also the simplest and most basic style. There are nearly 20 kinds of arch lines, slub silk, screws, yard silk, wheat ear silk, phoenix eye silk, twist silk, small braid silk, etc., which are used in the creation of various products.

When precious metals such as gold and silver are drawn into filaments, the masters will use eight traditional techniques such as pinching, filling, saving, welding, weaving, and stacking to shape them into various shapes and styles.

One of the most challenging is the welding process, which involves welding hair-thin threads and weaving them into a net, and then creating a variety of different styles. Each step requires skilled and rigorous craftsmanship, and the slightest mistake can undo the entire work.

"Filigree is bone, inlaid for ornamentation". After the filigree, it needs to be inlaid by skillful hands. Using techniques such as frustration, mosmo, hammering, stuffing, beating, collapse, squeezing, and inlaying, the gold and silver sheets are hammered into vessels, and then the patterns are chiseled, and then the metal sheets are made into delicate brackets or claw-shaped grooves.

Then the jewelry, jade, etc. are inlaid and embellished, and then put together. According to the jargon, the setting requires "well-set, flat, and pretty", and the different angles of the same gemstone will directly affect the appearance of beauty.

Some filigree inlaid jewelry is also decorated with dotted emerald and burnt blue. The golden phoenix crown of the concubine of Wanli unearthed from the Dingling Tomb in Changping, Beijing, is recognized as one of the highest level of jewelry that embodies the inlay process because it is inlaid with more than 100 gemstones, more than 5,000 pearls, and adopts techniques such as dotting emerald and burning blue.

In the latter part of the last century, the trend of the times washed away the entire traditional handicraft industry, and filigree inlay was no exception. Poor demand, withering talents, lost skills, workshop closures, factory bankruptcy, and many tourist handicrafts in the name of filigree inlay, produce a large number of rough and inferior counterfeit products, destroying the status and impression of traditional filigree in people's hearts. The once-flourishing filigree inlay is on the verge of disappearing.

In June 2008, the State Council included filigree inlay production skills in the list of national intangible cultural heritage. People are beginning to pay more attention to the inheritance of this traditional skill. In 2014, the "Fanhua" filigree handbag produced by Beijing Gongmei Group became an APEC national gift, and the filigree inlay returned to the public eye.

The most powerful way to preserve and pass on cultural relics and revitalize this endangered traditional craft is to revitalize it in a modern way and breathe new life into it.

The phoenix crown of the queen of Ming Xiaozhuang, the golden step of the Qing Dynasty, and the crown of the tomb of Princess Li Qi of the Tang Dynasty...... These exquisite pieces of royal jewellery are the result of a common technique – filigree inlay. It can be said that a history of ancient Chinese imperial jewelry is a history of the evolution of filigree inlay.

Filigree inlay, as a royal stunt, is the first of the "Eight Uniques of Yanjing". In June 2008, the filigree inlay production technique was included in the national intangible cultural heritage list. The exhibition of intangible cultural heritage of Tianjin and Hebei is divided into five units: carving and sculpture, painting and embroidery, piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, traditional medicine and performance competition, including nearly 70 items in the categories of traditional art, traditional skills, traditional medicine, traditional drama, traditional sports and entertainment and acrobatics, including 40 national representative items, 17 provincial representative items and 5 items on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

The "Eight Uniques of Yanjing", represented by cloisonné production skills, Beijing jade carving, lacquer carving skills, ivory carving, filigree inlay production skills, and gold lacquer inlay decoration skills, etc., highlight the graceful and magnificent nature of the royal court art of "Jingzuo".

Tianjin's intangible cultural heritage projects, represented by Yangliu and green woodblock New Year paintings, clay figurines and Zhang Caifi, and kite Wei production skills, have brought the bustling market of "Tianjin Wei at the bottom of the nine rivers". The Hebei intangible cultural heritage projects represented by Weixian paper-cutting, Cizhou kiln firing skills, Fengning cloth paste paintings, etc., reflect the simplicity and boldness of the land of Yanzhao.

According to Fang Wei, there are many types of gold and silver fine work, which is more exquisite, taking filigree inlay as an example, the filigree process is also known as fine gold technology, which is to draw gold, silver, copper, etc. into filaments, and then rely on the pile, base, weaving, weaving, pinching, filling, saving, welding and other eight processes, the filaments into jewelry or works of art.

In this process, each craft is subdivided into a kaleidoscopic variety of shapes, and the final pattern varies according to the designer's style. Inlay is the formation of gold and silver flakes into vessels or carved patterns, in which gemstones are inlaid.

Filigree inlay, rare materials, complicated procedures, all by hand, so the jewelry made by this process has always been a royal thing in history, it can be called one of the craft characteristics of traditional luxury goods in our country. Even with the development of science and technology, it is not easy to make a filigree craft jewelry, and it takes 7 days to create a bracelet at the earliest.

"We see a lot of Chinese elements in the works, which are combined with world trends, which is impressive," said Zou Ningxin, director of the jewelry design department of Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. In addition to this, natural beauty, places of interest, abstract concepts, textual symbols, and even geometric shapes are all introduced into creative prototypes.

Li Hui, the host of Phoenix Satellite TV's "Complete Fashion Handbook", feels that the works of this competition are more designed and creative than those of previous years, "One of the works is called 'Buddha in the heart', and the middle of the jewelry is hollow, and the artistic conception comes out."

Their inspiration could be a childhood memory, or a photograph, or even a cartoon from their childhood. A designer combined the words "father" and "mountain" into a necklace to interpret the deep affection of "father's love is like a mountain"; Another author created a pendant with a prototype of hopscotch, nostalgic for a wonderful childhood.

"Filigree inlay" can be called the most delicate of metalwork. The filigree is made of gold, silver and copper as raw materials, and techniques such as pinching, filling, saving, welding, weaving and stacking are adopted; Inlay with frustration, whenium, hammering, stuffing, beating, collapse, squeezing, inlay and other techniques to make the metal sheet into a support and claw-shaped groove, and then inlaid with pearls, gemstones.

This process, on the one hand, makes the three-dimensional shape of the jewelry more vivid with the finishing of raw materials, and on the other hand, it also makes the gold and silver itself soft and light, and the light is restrained, which is more suitable for setting off the warmth of jade and the brightness of gemstones in the inlay process. Due to its intricacy and the fact that it is on the verge of being lost, it is extremely rare for heritage jewelry to be set with filigree inlays on the market.

It is a combination of the two production techniques of "filigree" and "inlay". The filigree is made of gold, silver and copper as raw materials, and traditional techniques such as pinching, filling, saving, welding, weaving and stacking are adopted; Inlaid with frustration, mosque, hammering, stuffing, beating, collapse, squeezing, inlay and other techniques, the metal sheet is made into a support and claw-shaped groove, and then inlaid with pearls and gemstones. The so-called "filigree ten thousand strands weave a golden crown, and the wonderful hand is inlaid with Qiankun", which is a high summary of this exquisite craft. Take a look at the latest chapters of "Dream Claw Book House in the Great Era" and read it for free for the first time.