Enlarged wood engravings of poems composed by late Chairman Mao Zedong were completed recently in Wenxi County, Shanxi Province. They are now being sent to Mao's hometown of Shaoshan in Hunan Province for future preservation and exhibition.
According to a report of China News Service, a villager named Zhu Yuanchun carried out the work. He has loved calligraphy since his childhood, and has won many awards in national contests.
Since 1990, he spent three years writing the new edition of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume I to Volume IV, with a brush in one-square-inch block characters. The finished work is 6,024 meters long and totals 1.072 million words. After being displayed in the Military Museum of China in Beijing, it was sent to General Shao Hua, daughter-in-law of Mao Zedong.
Zhu was praised for setting a new record in writing works of famous persons in one-square-inch characters.
But he cherished another dream: To fully and systematically display Mao's handwriting by means of a woodcut. So he started the new work three years ago. First, he amplified Mao's handwriting on a certain scale. Then he selected specially treated white poplar to do the carving. Through another 10-odd procedures including painting, coloring and polishing, the poems were put into frames one after another, of which the largest one is 5.2 meters long and 1 meter wide.
The work has now become a kind of art treasure.
(CIIC 12/22/2000)
