While historical trappings of that idyllic scene have given way to more utilitarian garb and setting, hand papermaking production has remained essentially the same in rural villages. It is extremely difficult to travel to Chinese papermaking villages and some locations are virtually impossible unless one is Chinese; the Japanese in particular are viewed with paranoid suspicion. China retains its xenophobic policy towards opening much of its self to outsiders. When I asked one of my hosts what would happen if I found my own way to a papermaking village, his unhesitating reply was "You would be arrested."  In order to provide tourists a semblance of life and work, including papermaking, in a rural village, the government has concocted a makebelieve site in Fuyang (Zhejiang Province), where historical farm activities are staged in the manner of Colonial Williamsburg. Unwary tourists are met at the entrance by children in costume playing musical instruments. Their music's clatter accompanies you as you sit in a bamboo cart driven by two recalcitrant water buffalos until you reach the "exhibition" village. Ersatz papermaking demonstrations are given, along with rice grinding and broom making. Admission is charged and unsuspecting tourists may think that they have visited a true papermaking village.   Paper drying on river banks.  As director of an artists' studio study program connected with China's National Art Academies, I was able to meet and establish a relationship with some paper officials who, after a few years, agreed to sponsor my request to further observe traditional hand papermaking at rural villages, and perhaps to bring my colleagues in the near future.  Most recently visited was a busy papermaking village on the banks of the Qiantang river. My hosts and myself boarded one of the small bamboo boats indigenous to this fertile Yangtzee area. We departed from a small port where the river is at its widest. Soon after passing a large, industrial paper mill and a striking golden roofed pagoda, we joined a flotilla of other working boats as they plied the river, either dredging its ubiquitous silt or. transporting every imaginable type of good, from unwieldy scrap metal or long bundles of bamboo to live oxen. Some were houseboats, with narrow curls of grey smoke coming from a pipe stuck out of the boat's reed roof, the family's laundry strung from the deck, attempting to dry under overcast skies.     After we had travelled 21/2 hours downstream past some distant mountains, the river narrowed and we veered closer to the shore. Configurations of village structures and sentinels of huge Monet like bamboo and rice straw stacks emerged in the mist. As the river banks became more distinguishable, I saw that they were covered with hundreds of flat squares that formed a glowing grid pattern over the undulating banks as far as the eye could see. Our party came ashore and followed this "yellow brick road" that led through the village. Covering every conceivable surface, yellow sheets of paper were set out to dry. Paper hung from some house porches like laundry, covered fields and gardens, and was even on top of erupting conical burial offerings. In a nearby field, goats munched around damp paper being spread quickly down by a village woman.  Our party of paper officials and myself were the lunch guests at the newish stucco home of Mr. Wang, who essentially ran the village. The political economy had already shifted from commune to work unit and, by 1989, to a sort of free enterprise system that allowed Mr. Wang to be wealthy by Chinese standards. He was the proud owner of a modest blue Honda, the only automobile in the county, although he depended on others to drive it for him.  What impressed me greatly were the hanging scrolls of very decent landscapes and calligraphy brush painting that covered the walls of the small first floor reception and dining room (all on good paper, of course). The meal, unlike city food, or even that consumed at Chinese art schools where I had lived, tasted of the earth, and some of the dishes were covered with a rich, yellowochre sauce.  We left by the kitchen door and walked to the papermaking sheds which consisted of a complex of grey brick rooms . One series of rooms held large concrete vats, a concrete tubbed beater, and a small fourdrinier. Besides producing utilitarian paper, Chao Zhi, for local distribution, this village also produced a finer bleached paper,  Bundles of raw material in paper workshop.  Summer 1990  used for books and printing. Although the pulp for this paper may have been processed in the beater, the long scroll size sheets were pulled, pressed, and then dried by hand on a manually heated wall.  To dry paper it is brushed on heated slate wall.  A young man in western clothes stood inside a shallow trough operating a foot-powered stamper that pounded rice straw, while several others standing at concrete vats pulled large sheets of pure white paper on bamboo moulds. In China, the same person pulls, couches, and presses. As in Japan, counter weights were used to lift large moulds but, unlike Japan, I did not see any women making paper, nor was I aware of any paper guilds or supply stores, as one finds in highly structured Japan. The flexible, black screens used here, however, were of a very refined quality.  Inside a narrow room of this grey, single story complex a Mao jacketed gentleman, a member of the village work unit, was delicately peeling individual sheets of damp white paper from a glistening upright stack set on a pallet. He skillfully folded the top of the scroll-size sheets over the bamboo bristles of a wide brush and then, as in a pirouette, turned and, in one swift movement, affixed the top of the flowing white sheet to a steamy black slate wall that ran the length of the room. With a few adept wide strokes he brushed the rest of the sheet, with nary a wrinkle, to the burnished drying wall. The technique of draping the paper over the brush had been demonstrated to me by an old papermaker I had met in Beijing on a previous year's visit.  During this and other procedures that I had observed at various places, it seemed imperative that a lit cigarette always be in the mouth of the papermaker. I wonder if there might be a correlation between the skill of the worker and the dangling cigarette (Marlboros preferred).  7 Directly behind the slate wall was another grey brick room, one wall of which backed onto the slate drying wall. A worker was tending a blazing fire in a raised oven built into this wall. The temperature was measured by a collection of cones. Bundles of bamboo, leaves still attached, were piled everywhere, and as the worker puffed on his cigarette and stoked the fire, his chubby three year old grandson played with twigs picked up from the dirt floor.    Huge mounded stacks of dried rice straw, like those bordering the river banks, were scattered around the village and its fields. Behind a "wall" of enormous straw stacks, a group of men in blue work jackets and high rubber boots were pitching forkfulls of straw into an ominous looking pond that was surrounded by piles and baskets full of chunks of white limestone, used in the retting of Chao Zhi. Further back, in a rubble filled courtyard in front of the lean-to cooking shed, another group of men and women crouched or sat on low stools, unraveling twine from burlap-like bags. Both men and women wore white or indigo visored bonnets that extended to cover their shoulders. This labor intensive recycling was a sobering reminder that China is still very much a third-world, developing country, that laborintensive endeavors such as this serve to employ its overwhelming population, and that any kind of mechanization is in short supply.  At the end of the day, we wended our way out of the village and back down a gentle slope to the river. I lingered and took a last look at Ling-Qiao, recapping its warm hospitality, way of life, and age-old papermaking procedures. Suddenly I was overtaken by a surge of villagers in indigo work jackets, rushing stacks of golden Chao Zhi to the riverbank by wheelbarrow and shoulder-yoke in  Barge carrying rice straw at a river bank.  what appeared to be a universal deadline. There the neatly tied bundles of paper were loaded on narrow, traditional bamboo barges that were transported upstream to villages and distribution points along an aqueous paper route. Eventually some would make its way to the city to be sold in stores and open air market stalls.  On a previous year's stay, I had observed procedures in another rural village, Li-Wan, where bamboo paper was being made. Getting there required crossing two rivers. Before touring the papermaking operation at Li-Wan village, we had to stop at the one room, low-ceilinged town hall, where tea, oranges, and cigarettes were laid out at tables, as they had been at the reception rooms of the industrial paper mill and the paper research institute I had visited. We sipped tea, bundled in    Loading paper onto bamboo barges for transport and distribution.   our down jackets, as the young, Mao jacketed,  baby-faced mayor of Li-Wan welcomed us with  the history of papermaking in his village.  In the middle of the village, from where misty  mountains could be seen in the distance, were a  uccession of neatly laid out pools and dams, necessary for the several stages of retting, soaking, and washing required to break down and process bamboo, stacks of which surrounded the pools, some in unruly piles and others in neatly tied bundles . Large, worn, round stones surrounding circular wells looked as though they had been placed there by Cai-Lun (regarded as the first papermaker, who lived in the first century A.D.). Papermaking took place outdoors under sheds. A time warp unfolded as a middle-aged, jeans clad worker, the standard cigarette in his mouth, never dropping an ash , dipped his mould into a large cement vat of murky water.  I was warned not to take photos of actual sheet  forming at that time, a directive whose reason  and origin I never could discern . Meandering  away from the papermaking sheds I saw that  ancient stone ovens were built into the side of a  building that was a drying room but, because of  the scarcity of fuel, the ovens were left unused.  Instead, damp sheets of once-pressed paper were  being air dried by hanging them over beams in    the loft of the dimly lit pressing room, in the  same manner as was done in the 18th century  European mills. After drying , the undulating  wrinkled s/1eets were dry pressed and then carted  to another low-slung stone building. Inside,  I watched in fascination as a teenage boy  shaved the deckles off the finished stacks with  something resembling a coarse vegetable grater,  this village's last step before distribution in this  age-old process.  I stopped and looked around this village that had  barely become part of the twentieth century and,  for a moment, time stood still.  The author has organized a November 1990 "Paper Delegation" that has been invited to visit several working rural papermaking villages, and to meet with Chinese officials from various paper  fields. Individuals interested in applying for this program or for studio study at China sNational Art Academy may contact her at: PO. Box 2458,  Providence, Rl 02906, USA.  .-.....  In order to break down and process bamboo. several stages of retting. soaking and washing are required.  Summer

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