Mianzhu New Year Painting Village 绵竹年画村

About Mianzhu New Year Painting Village

Mianzhu New Year prints are traced by the Mianzhu municipal government to the Northern Song period, and were entered in 2006 in China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage; they are conventionally grouped with the prints of Yangliuqing in Tianjin, Taohuawu in Suzhou and Yangjiabu in Shandong as the country's four great New Year print traditions. By subject the prints divide into door gods, central-hall hangings, ladies and children, and by technique into 'red goods', worked mainly in colour, and 'black goods', taken mainly as ink rubbings. A Deyang municipal regulation on the protection of Mianzhu New Year prints came into force in 2020. The provincial government service portal records five national- and provincial-level representative bearers of the craft in the village, twenty-nine bearers at municipal and county level, and more than five hundred folk artists and practitioners.

The village is built of traditional western-Sichuan dwellings, white-walled and grey-tiled, carrying print images of varied subjects. Production is organised through a cultural-creative community called Xiangyu Huali, which the municipal government describes as a single chain covering making, supply and sale and says involves more than 2,400 villagers. Alongside the workshops the village has a display hall, a lane given over to the printing process, a hall for collective work, and the preserved house of a national-level bearer of the craft. The village was also included in 2021 in the first batch of Sichuan provincial bases for the protection and transmission of intangible cultural heritage.

What to look for

• The village display hall, which sets out the history, the technical sequence and representative works of the prints, and where block carving, rubbing and hand-colouring can be watched.
• Bai Shou Tu and Yingchun Tu, named by the provincial portal among the works held in the display hall.
• The preserved house of Chen Xingcai, a national-level bearer of the craft, whose descendants continue to carve printing blocks; his eldest grandson Chen Gang cut a set of Yingchun Tu woodblocks over three years.
• Nianhua Lane, where illustrated wall panels present the five stages that take a print from first drawing to finished sheet.
• The farming wall, a mural carrying the village's own formula about shouldering a hoe in the busy season and holding a brush in the slack one.

Location & getting there

Getting to Mianzhu New Year Painting Village

Identify the main visitor approach and any separately managed houses, museums or performances. Ask before entering residential spaces or photographing residents.

• Search for 绵竹年画村 with 德阳市 and 绵竹市.