Yesalihai
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, of Bonan ethnicity, born in April 1973 in Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County, Gansu Province. A representative bearer of Bonan waist-knife forging craftsmanship, a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. He is a technician of Bonan waist-knife forging. He was born into a Bonan waist-knife forging family. From 1981 he studied the making of Bonan waist knives under his father, Ye Gubai, a national-level representative bearer, and became thoroughly proficient in the more than eighty production processes and techniques of the traditional Bonan waist knife. By the age of 16 he could complete every process independently and had mastered the making of traditional Bonan waist knives of the shiyangjin (assorted brocade), boriji and yawuqi types, being especially skilled in forging the fish knife handed down within his family. He is given to innovation and, building on the traditional zhehua waist knife, created new varieties of his own, including the zhehua green-bamboo sword, the new-style zhehua Tang sword and the zhehua fish knife. In 2009 his award-winning work at the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Traditional Skills Exhibition was collected by the Chinese National Academy of Arts.
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。