Why it belongs in ORBIS
In Fenshuiling, a small town outside Luzhou in Sichuan, the Bi family has made oil-paper umbrellas for six generations, a lineage now carried by Bi Liufu, a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage inheritor for oil-paper umbrella craft and a Guinness World Record holder for hand-made oil-paper umbrellas.
In Fenshuiling, a small town outside Luzhou in Sichuan, the Bi family has made oil-paper umbrellas for six generations, a lineage now carried by Bi Liufu, a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage inheritor for oil-paper umbrella craft and a Guinness World Record holder for hand-made oil-paper umbrellas. His company, formally established in 2011 as successor to the old Fenshui Oil-Paper Umbrella Factory, still works from Fenshuiling town, where roughly 95 staff — nearly half of them trained technicians — carry an umbrella through cutting, rib-splitting, paper-cutting, plate-making, stone-block printing, edge-netting, mounting, tung-oiling, threading, and binding across a claimed 108 separate steps. Bamboo ribs, hand-cut paper, and tung oil remain the base materials; decoration ranges from hand-painting and stone-block printing to pressed botanical specimens, with thousands of pattern and size combinations sold or made to order. Fenshui's oil-paper umbrella entered China's national intangible-heritage list in 2008. The workshop's umbrellas have traveled beyond Sichuan: featured in the state television program 'Intangible Heritage in China,' demonstrated at Tsinghua University and Beijing's International Intangible Heritage Week, and licensed for a tie-in with the mobile game Fantasy Westward Journey.