He Zhiben
Lineage & School of Heritage
At the age of twelve, He Zhiben began studying the Dongba scriptures, papermaking, and the painting of sacred images, sacred route maps and wooden plaques under the guidance of his maternal uncle; he is the sixth-generation inheritor of the family tradition of the Dongba.
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
A man of Naxi ethnicity, he was born in 1928 in the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan. A national representative bearer of Dai Naxizushougongzaozhijiyi (the handmade paper making craftsmanship of the Dai and Naxi peoples), a first-batch national intangible cultural heritage project, and a senior folk artist of Yunnan Province. During the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to interrupt his study of and research into papermaking. In 1983, He Zhiben was invited to Lijiang to attend a symposium on Dongba culture, after which he took up his brush and papermaking tools once again and resumed his research into and study of the ancient papermaking techniques of the Naxi people. In 1993, with the support of the township government, He Zhiben formally revived Dongba papermaking; since the Dongba papermaking tradition passes the craft to men but not to women, he taught it only to his own son and nephew. The versatile He Zhiben also painted sacred images, sacred route maps and wooden plaques in his spare time; this form of expression, both calligraphic and pictorial, embodies the history and folk culture of the Naxi people and is highly praised by scholars in China and abroad.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。