On August 19, morning light pierced the thin mist over the Qinba mountains and fell inside the Shaanxi Niuwang Guoqi Intangible Cultural Heritage Workshop in Longtou Village, Chengguan Town, Pingli County. On the workbench, a lacquer teacup, under Yuan Duanjiao's repeated polishing, gradually revealed the grain beneath its lacquer layers.
Key points of the report
- Yuan Duanjiao is an inheritor of the Niuwang Raw Lacquer Painting Technique. After graduating with a master's degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2016, she returned home to found a company;
- Worked with the expert team at Northwest A&F University to cultivate improved lacquer tree varieties, addressing shortcomings in raw material quality and yield at the source;
- Transferred more than 800 mu of lacquer groves, providing farmers with lacquer tree saplings and technical training in a unified way, and purchasing the harvest centrally during the tapping season;
- The 'enterprise + cooperative + farmer household' model brings stable income growth to several hundred lacquer farming households each year;
- A fine piece of lacquerware requires sixty to seventy coats of lacquer, and burnishing requires hundreds or even thousands of back-and-forth passes, until the surface becomes 'a mirror made of lacquer'.
Awards and inheritance
The report notes that the work 'Clouds Rising, the Dragon Soars' (Yun Qi Jian Long Xiang) uses the bodiless (coreless) lacquer technique and the original 'layered incised gold method', and won the 'Baihe Emerging Talent Award' at the 5th China Arts and Crafts Expo; the modular customizable Chinese lacquer eyeglasses developed jointly with Xi'an Jiaotong University received the 2025 German iF Design Award. She has also founded a training base and an intangible cultural heritage workshop, and uses livestreaming and short videos to show the whole process of tapping, making and applying lacquer.
The Niuwang Raw Lacquer Painting Technique covers three aspects — lacquer tapping, lacquer making and lacquer painting — and was included in the seventh batch of Shaanxi Province's representative list of intangible cultural heritage items in 2022.