Along the Yellow River down to the southeast of Qinghai Province, Tongren County has been familiarized as the "home of Regong art". With a history of more than 700 years, this unique Tibetan cultural legacy is called "the flower on the Tibetan Plateau" and "a magnificent pearl of Chinese art". Almost every man here inherits the art as his occupation, and almost every man here is an artisan.

The golden valley: cradle of artists

Lying in the southeast of Qinghai Province in Northwest China, Tongren County is the center of Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, 188 kilometers south of the provincial capital Xining.

Regong, which means "golden valley", is the Tibetan name of Tongren. In the 15-16 century, the Tibetan Buddhism of Gelukpa Sect (Yellow Sect) came to Tongren area, where the Regong art sprang up along with the rise of Tibetan Buddhism and the construction of monasteries. By the mid-17th century, Regong (Tongren) had become a village where nearly everyone could paint and every family was engaged in the art.

Tongren has under its jurisdiction two towns, ten villages and 75 hamlets. The five villages nearby Longwu Town are known as the "birthplaces of Regong art", namely Wutun, Nianduhu, Gasairi, Guomari, and Tuojia, each with a monastery except Wutun, which has two. Tongren together with its villages has become a hotspot for travelers who swarm into Qinghai for the mysterious Tibetan cultural legacies.

In the small Tongren area, the Red Sect monasteries and the Yellow Sect monasteries are everywhere. Quite a number of monasteries are built in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The complex here is a typically Tibetan group of pagoda-roofed monastic buildings among many more prosaic flat-topped dwellings for the monks, all within a walled compound scattered up a hillside.

Almost every village has its own monasteries that are the Buddhist centers as well as the cradle of artists. Children here, influenced by Regong artists, will go to the monasteries when they grow a little older to learn the art. When they are 15 years old, they have to make their choice, either to resume secular life or to become lifetime monk. It's this open and free atmosphere that makes the Regong art popularized and develop continuously.

An ordinary rural area with high mud walls and narrow lanes, Tongren would be totally unremarkable were it not for the fact that almost every house can lay claim to a resident artist of some repute.

Characteristics of Regong art
In the early period, Regong artworks were crude and unsophisticated with monotone colors, featuring typical Indian and Nepalese styles. In the mid-17th century, artisans mastered better techniques and the painting styles became more elegant and exquisite; they also paid more attention to decorative effects in their works. Thus, the art entered a prosperous period of development.

The 19th century was the heyday of Regong art, when gold, silver, pearl, agate and other precious stones found their way into the works, featuring beautiful colors and an exquisite touch. The artisans of this period paid special attention to the decorative interest in their works and employed a great amount of gold to make the works resplendent and magnificent, creating an ardent atmosphere. The works not only look harmonious in their arrangement of different subjects, but also are lifelike and lively, displaying outstanding artistic effects.

Over the past several centuries, Regong art artisans traveled to many different regions to create different works, such as Qinghai Province, Tibetan Autonomous Region, Gansu Province, Sichuan Province, the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and other places in China, as well as India, Nepal, Thailand, Mongolia and other countries in the world, leaving behind numerous exquisite art works. They assimilated artistic nourishment from Tibetan paintings, Dunhuang murals, and foreign similar works and then combined them with local folk arts of Qinghai Province to gradually consummate the techniques of Regong art.

The unpretentious painting style, even and harmonious color arrangements and realism of Regong artworks fully reflect Tibetan culture, making the art a curiosity hard to come by in China's cultural heritage.

A ubiquitous art roots in Tibet

As an important genre of Tibetan Buddhist arts, the Regong art includes paintings murals and scrolls called "thangka" in Tibetan), barbola, clay and wooden sculptures, color paintings on architectures, designs, and yak butter sculptures, etc, which can be found almost everywhere in Tongren -- on the walls, bricks, stones, clothes and buildings. Its content ranges from Sakyamuni, Bodhisattvas, Buddhist guardians and fairies, to Buddhist stories. But telling more worldly stories, including local practices and customs, has become the latest trend. It's given the ancient genre some fresher life. The major types of Regong art include:

1. Thangka

The unusual art form of thangka is intended to nurture humankind's path toward enlightenment and from the mundane world to sacred reality. Cotton canvas and linen cloth are the common fabrics for thangkas, while silk cloth is reserved for important subjects. Before painting begins, the fabrics are stitched along the edges with flax thread and stretched on a specially made wooden frame. Then a paste made of animal glue mixed with talcum powder is spread over the surface to block up the holes in it.
After the paste is scraped off and the cloth gets thoroughly dried, the artist works out the sketches of the images with charcoal sticks. Coloring comes last. The pigments are mixed with animal glue and ox bile to make the luster stay. The whole process usually lasts a month or more.

2. Barbola

This is a special art that employs the techniques of "cutting and piling" to portray objects. In terms of specific techniques, barbola can be subcategorized into "jian dui" (literally, to "cut and pile") and "ci xiu" ("embroidery"). The barbola works in Regong are mainly of the jian dui style.

To make jian dui barbola, artisans select silks and satins of different colors according to type of expression desired, cut them into human, animal, flower and bird shapes of a certain size, and then paste the patterns onto the pre-cut paper models. After that, they are stacked from dense to light colors.

Since the middle of the barbola is slightly convex, the work creates a strong three-dimensional effect that looks like a colored embossment made of silk material. Barbola subjects generally come from Buddhist stories, and most of them are about people. Barbola pays much attention to posture and the details of human figures, and values the arrangement of silks and satins of different colors. It features an exquisite touch amid roughness, gives prominence to its major subjects, has vivid colors and forms a strong contrast. Barbola is an innovation in embroidery art, combining embroidery and embossment.

3. Sculpture

Sculpture, which holds an important position among Regong art, mainly includes clay sculpture, woodcarving, brick engraving and so on, among which clay sculpting is the most popular. The art of clay sculptures had matured from the mid-17th century to the early 19th century when the sculptures were exquisitely carved and were lifelike, with smooth clothing lines, a sense of reality and a strong contrast in colors that were arranged harmoniously.

The clay sculptures in Regong were combined with monastic architecture to express the wide-ranging contents related to the architecture. The range of subjects is also very wide. Besides the sun, moon and stars, mountains, flowers and trees, birds, beasts, fishes and worms and other patterns used as decorations and foils, different colors and other various images also appear in sculptures. These include the bizarre motley Buddhist guardians, Buddha's warrior attendants with horrifying features, horse-headed and red-haired gods, and so on.

In addition, woodcarving and brick engraving can also be found in many places. Woodcarving is mainly employed to make decorative patterns on door lintels and chapiters of a house, as well as wooden josses. Brick carving is mainly seen in such forms of architecture as decorative patterns, dragons and phoenixes and pairs of lions on the ridge of a house, beasts on flying roofs and basso reliefs on walls.

4. "Magnificent Spectacle of Color Paintings about Chinese Tibetan Culture and Arts"

Planned and designed by famous painter Zongzhe Lajie and jointly painted by about 400 artists, this huge scroll painting was completed in August 1999 after four years of painstaking efforts.

With a length of 618 meters and a width of 2.5 meters, it is the longest painting scroll in the world. The whole scroll covers more than 1,500 square meters and weighs over 1,000 kilograms. Its contents involve the history, culture, folk customs and arts of the Tibetan ethnic minority, including the formation of the world, the origin of the Tibetan ethnic minority, past Tibetan kings, the story of Sakyamuni, different sects of Tibetan Buddhism, historical celebrities, medicine, astronomy, literature, architecture, as well as scenic spots and historical sites in Tibet, festival scenes, costumes, articles for daily use, weapons, decorative patterns, and so on. Thus, it can be regarded the encyclopedia of Tibetan history and culture.

All of the pigments used to paint the scroll come from the nature, such as the mineral pigment made from gold, silver, coral, agate, pearl and diamond, and plant pigments made from saffron, madder, and rhubarb.

Inheriting the techniques of traditional Tibetan paintings, the work also assimilates the skills used in western paintings, bringing viewers a new and fresh aesthetic experience. The whole scroll features an exquisite touch and depicts many lifelike human figures. The densest places on the scroll contain more than 300 human figures or 30 palace rooms per square meter - that's more than 2,480 mural images on each square inch, which can only be achieved using a brush with a neb of a single hair. Many subminiature images can only be detected with the help of a magnifying glass.

After its completion in August 1999, the scroll made its debut in the Longxing area of Huangnan Prefecture in Gansu Province from September 30-October 4 that year. In the same year, the work won the "Record of the Great World Genesis."


The last "living master"

Wutun Village of Longwu Town, located 6.4 kilometers north of Tongren, is the most famous throughout Tibet for its beautiful artworks of thangka. As the center of Regong art, Wutun alone boasts more than 100 Tibetan families of artists. The skillful application of gold powder, cinnabar and azurite gives their paintings a strong decorative effect. The style and techniques have been passed down through several generations of local families, normally on the male side.

Because of boasting two monasteries, the village is divided into Upper and Lower Wutun. Living within the two monasteries are about 50 famous thangka artists. The two villages are full of monks and laypeople turning out masses of Buddhist art for monasteries as far away as western Tibet. The monastery in Upper Wutun, or Sengeshong Yago in Tibetan, is magnificently decorated, and the surface of the entire assembly hall has been carved and painted with traditional Regong designs.

The most celebrated painter from Upper Wutun is Shawu Tsering (Chinese: Xiawucailang), one of Tibet's last "living masters" and "saviours" of the art of thangka painting. At the ripe old age of 80 this amazing man is still painting, though sometimes aided by his son. He was formally trained in his youth, and obtained his inspiration from many sources including the famous frescoes of the Dunhuang caves, the Ajanta frescoes of India, Central Asian painting and many others. He won international fame early in his painting career and has left many classic works for thousands of monasteries. He had passed on his knowledge of the proper iconography, an element so important to thangka painting, to many young talented artists of this area.

Lower Wutun, or Sengeshong Mago, is just about 10 minutes' walk from the upper village. It boasts a much livelier monastery as the location for ceremonies and festivities that draw crowds of local worshippers. Also important in terms of Regong art, this monastery has exquisite carvings and murals that are unequalled elsewhere.


Longwu Monastery

Arriving at the town of Longwu, which means agriculture section in Tibetan, visitors would never miss the Longwu Monastery which is a good example of the influence by Regong art.

Located in the south of town, it is one of the six biggest monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism in Qinghai Province with 500 monks. The local Tibetans are very proud of the Longwu Monastery as it is only next to the Labrang Monastery in Gansu Province and the Ta'er Monastery in Qinghai Province in terms of scale, status, and influence.

It was initially built by the Sakya Sect in 1301 of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). In the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the Xiaricang Living Buddha system was formed here and the monastery changed into Gelukpa Sect. From then on, it dominated the region in religions and politics for about 200 years. The architecture of the Scripture Hall and other halls in the monastery is majestic with gorgeous decorations, boasting rich historical relics.

Every inch of its interior -- pillars, door lintels, beams and walls -- is bursting with vibrant color, design, images and stone-carvings. In the main hall are enormous gilded statues of Sakyamuni, Avalokite shvara, Bodhisattva Manjusri, Buddha's warrior attendants and the four deva-kings. The statues are almost engulfed by tiers upon tiers of spectacularly beautiful murals and thangkas. Each painting seems to be more gorgeous than the last -- the colors glowing and illuminated by generous touches of gold. Skillfully carved and painted niches and brackets divide the different murals, each illustrating a tale from Buddhist lore and pictorial lessons.

Regong Art Museum
Within walk distance from the Longwu Monastery is the Regong Art Museum. It is a palace of Regong art treasures, collecting and exhibiting various masterpieces of thangka, barbola, sculpture, and sand table design. Here, you can systemically learn the main types of Regong art and how the gorgeous arts take shape.

Regong art goes global

In the villages of Tongren, many locals have opened their own shops selling Buddhist art along the roadside, attracting tourists both from elsewhere in China and overseas, such as the United States, Japan, and France. Their artworks sell well not only on home market, but also are hits in overseas markets.

Over the last several centuries, Regong artists have traveled far and wide, from Qinghai to Gansu, Sichuan and Tibet in China, and to as far as Mongolia, Nepal, India, Thailand, and America. They have put the word out that Regong art has something to offer the world.

http://www.chinaculture.org