卷四 · Volume IV
Craft
Objects are the joints between people and their mountains.
Every soil grows its own goods. Lin’an’s hickory nuts, Changhua’s chicken-blood stone, Tianmu’s tea bowls — none are museum relics; all remain livelihoods and daily objects in mountain hands.
Chinese Hickory
Hickory: the White Dew harvest
Lin’an is the home of the Chinese hickory; the nuts from the Tianmu range are thin-shelled and fragrant. At the White Dew solar term, mountain people climb the trees with long poles to knock the nuts down — “the opening of the poles.” For those days, the whole mountain rings with bamboo against branches.
It is the year’s most dangerous and most generous harvest. Hickory trees grow on steep slopes; striking them is skilled work, and a mountain family’s year hangs on it.
Changhua Bloodstone
Chicken-blood stone: cinnabar in rock
From Changhua town comes chicken-blood stone — a warm, fine-grained stone veined with cinnabar red as fresh blood, counted with Tianhuang and Furong among the “three treasures” of seal stones. Since the Ming and Qing, it has been the seal-carver’s prize.
Fine stones grow rarer; the carving craft endures. A bloodstone seal is cinnabar dug from the mountain — and an inch of landscape on a scholar’s desk.
Tenmoku Ware
Tenmoku: a night sky in a bowl
In the Song dynasty, kilns around Tianmu fired black-glazed tea bowls. Japanese monks came to the mountain for Chan study and carried the bowls home as “tenmoku” — to this day the word means black-glazed tea ware in Japanese. One bowl’s name became the name of a whole class of vessels.
Hare’s fur, oil-spot, yohen — the black glaze crystallises in the kiln into patterns like a night sky. The kiln sites remain on the mountain, and its fires are being lit again.
Villages
Villages: the mountain people
The terraces of Zhinan, the old street of Heqiao, the hot-spring hamlets of Tuankou — Lin’an’s villages lean against the mountains, each season with its own work: tea in spring, cool air in summer, hickory and torreya in autumn, cured pork and dried bamboo shoots in winter.
In the end, local goods are local people. The mountains remain, the people remain, and the order of the seasons remains.
Every village, every craft, has its season.