Discovering Wuzhen Through Micro-Carving
An Interview
Junlin Yang
I thought I knew Wuzhen inside and out. After all, I’ve been returning to the same place every single year with my family for the theatre festival since 4th grade. If you blindfolded me, I could point out each and every alleyway as if I were giving a tour of my own home.
However, I realized that everything I knew about Wuzhen was only at the surface level. For all these years, I had never talked to a local.
When I came this time, I wandered through the area filled with small shops, ranging from handmade shoes to a store where visitors could DIY their own phone cases. I had never paid too much attention to this specific alley, but today I stopped in front of an inconspicuous shop: micro-carving? I had never heard of anything like this before.
The shop was tiny, probably barely fitting more than 10 people, yet there was something calming and attractive about it. The shop was managed and owned by one woman alone. Her eyes seemed to glow as she saw me walk in.
The shop owner was a Wuzhen local, and she had spent almost her entire life here. She introduced me to the concept of “micro-carving,” a skill that she learned from her grandfather. She is now the third-generation inheritor of this tradition, and began practicing as a child and has continued this craft for several decades.
Micro-carving involves condensing traditional Chinese calligraphy, paintings, and poetry into carvings on jade. It is recognized as an intangible cultural heritage and remains a highly niche craft.
When I first walked in, she was carving one of the many unique jade stones displayed on her desk.
The Chinese characters engraved on each stone were delicately small, so small that you could barely read each individual character. Most visitors would need to use one of the magnifying glasses on her table to understand the poems she engraved onto them. I was completely shocked by her skill. How could she write all of these tiny characters, seemingly taken out of a miniature world, with such accuracy and delicacy? The words looked as if they had been printed instead of handwritten.
Something even more impressive was that the entire carving process is completed with the naked eye, without magnifying glasses, on a jade piece no larger than a fingertip. As the carvings become smaller, the characters become increasingly difficult to see, requiring coordination between the “heart, hands, brain, and eyes,” as she said.
Each piece she completes reveals years of cultural accumulation and technical refinement. Daily production of these carvings are extremely limited because every stone is personally selected by her, carved by her own hands, and each carving is unique. There is no second piece of any stone anywhere in the world.
For most people, this craft may appear boring and repetitive. How could someone spend hours every day repeating such precise movements on such a small piece of jade? Her husband once attempted to learn the craft but eventually gave up because of its extreme difficulty. Yet, she has continued for decades because of her intense passion for culture and art. Seeing someone dedicate her entire life to such a demanding craft was truly incredible.
I also asked her how she marketed her work and found her customers. To my surprise, she does not deliberately market on social media or sell her pieces online. She mainly relies on walk-in customers and word-of-mouth. A travel blogger once purchased one of her pieces and shared it on Rednote, a Chinese social media application, generating significant attention and helping her attract more visitors.
This was the first time I had met a local Wuzhen resident, so I knew I had to ask her more about the town itself. I was curious about Wuzhen’s development since its opening, as I wanted to research its success as a Chinese heritage town. It was also surprising to me that she chose to stay in Wuzhen and continued practicing this craft instead of moving to a city to pursue a more “modern” career. In an era where many traditional craftspeople leave rural towns for new opportunities and higher incomes, her decision showed a meaningful connection to both her craft and the place where it originated.
She explained moving into the area during the early development of Dongzha (East Scenic Area) and later relocated to her current location after Xizha (West Scenic Area) was developed. She has operated her business in Wuzhen for 23 years, witnessing the town’s entire transformation process
Something that stuck with me even now was her description of the core philosophy behind Wuzhen’s unified management, which is to “release the greatest goodwill to every visitor.” The shop owner herself once helped a visitor whose clothes had fallen into the water by drying them with a hair dryer. She described drying a little girl’s soaked clothes for nearly an hour so they could continue their trip, as if it were simply what anyone in Wuzhen would do.
Through her story, I realized that Wuzhen’s success wasn’t only based on preserving its traditional architecture, but it's also through the small details that shaped visitors’ experiences and reflected the town’s values.
After hearing her describe Wuzhen and how much she adored the town, as well as how much it had developed over the years, I continued observing her shop filled with her micro-carving gems.
The shop displays various micro-carving works, including famous poem quotes such as:
“Flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, cool breezes in summer, and snow in winter.”
A line from The Peony Pavilion: “Without entering the garden, how could one know how beautiful spring is?”
An excerpt from Xunzi’s Encouragement to Learning: “Accumulating soil forms a mountain... with perseverance, even metal and stone can be carved.”
I decided to purchase one of her customized micro-carving pieces as a symbol of good fortune before entering my senior year. She selected a famous text, Xunzi’s Encouragement to Learning (Quan Xue), because of its connection to motivation and academic perseverance.
She also expressed willingness to create an exclusive customized piece and register this design as a special Dragon Boat Festival edition, as the following day was the Dragon Boat Festival.
I watched as she focused on a piece of jade, using all of her concentration to carve the most delicate words onto a carefully selected stone. It was even more shocking to see her complete an entire customized piece in under three minutes, with every character remaining precise and clear.
To ensure I could read the words without a magnifying glass, she even kindly wrote the lines of the poem on a separate sheet of paper that she would place inside the jade’s box. She also wrote my Chinese name and drew a blue book to represent studying and hard work.
I took away much more than I was expecting from this conversation. I gained knowledge about an intangible cultural heritage, but more importantly, I learned about the real Wuzhen, the Wuzhen hidden behind the real people who have shaped this place, like her. I also learned the significance and difficulty of slow craftsmanship and meticulous work in a fast-paced digital world. Watching her dedicate decades of her life to perfecting such a delicate craft reminded me that it is okay to take things slowly, as the meaning of life often comes from patience and time invested into something you truly care about to create something meaningful.
I also think I learned to listen to more people’s voices after this experience. Learning about Wuzhen through her changed many of my perspectives. I had learned beyond the scenery that was presented to me, beyond the architecture and alleyways, and toward the people who created meaning for these places in the first place.
Valuing easily overlooked voices is so important. After all, they are the ones who reveal what a place truly values.
