China's bird-feather pictures, once regarded by foreigners as "an art of wonder", are in danger of being lost as many factories producing the artworks close down.
Feather pictures vividly depicting birds, beasts and other wildlife as well as all kinds of flowers, have a long-standing history in China.
They were included among cultural relics unearthed from the Mawangdui Tomb, where a well-preserved body of a woman dating back2000 years was found.
With vivid characteristics of China's traditional paintings, sculptures, woodcuts and watercolors, feather pictures can be divided three techniques -- flat, bas-relief and two-dimensional.
Many provincial Chinese arts and crafts factories used to produce feather pictures. Worth up to hundreds of US dollars, they have been exported to more than 30 countries worldwide, including Japan, Singapore, Canada, America, France, Spain, Greece and Australia.
But these days a large number of factories have stopped producing such pictures for a range of reasons. And few young workers are devoting themselves to the genre.
"We can't sit back and see feather pictures disappear," said Zhou Yi, a senior craftsman at the Yulin Arts & Crafts Factory in China's southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Aware of the lack of expertise, Zhou said: "The most important thing for us is to resume production and to train more qualified craftsmen before we retire."
(Xinhua News Agency October 21, 2002)
