Books with traditional binding on show in Mile City

An exhibition featuring the classic books bound in a traditional Chinese method is going at the Dongfengyun tourist town in south Yunnan’s Mile City. The classics included A Dream in Red Mansions, Vajracchedika Sutra and others.

Showcasing the skills of Longlinzhuang book binding, the artistic works were created by Zhang Xiaodong, inheritor of intangible cultural heritages. Highly creative, Zhang’s works have been exhibited in the US, Italy, the Republic of Korea and others.

Longlinzhuang literally means the dragon-scale binding, where the pages of a book are fixed one by one on a long piece of paper, with the first page placed rightmost.

The general layout of the pages looks like scales on an auspicious dragon in traditional Chinese legends. Popular in the Northern Song Dynasty, the Longlinzhuang books represent a transition between the former scrolls and the latter volumes.

Source: Yunnan Daily; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue