Hefeng Divine Statue Carving

Name and category

According to the public notice of January 2024, Hefeng Divine Statue Carving is one of the new inscriptions in the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level intangible cultural heritage items, in the traditional fine-art category. The other fine-art items in this batch are Lishui Traditional Flower Arrangement Craft and Cloisonné Enamel Craft.

Applicant and place of transmission

The applicant unit named in the notice is the Hefeng Town People's Government. The item title carries the name Hefeng, so the place of transmission is presumably within Hefeng Town; the notice gives no specific village or workshop.

A May 2024 activity report by the Hefeng Town People's Government lists the Statue Carving craft alongside the town's Wufan festival, Lishui white-tea making, the Yiqidun story and the trumpet lantern as the town's ICH items, which confirms the locality. The report gives no batch or level and no village or workshop, and the conferring of plaques at that event is not the same procedure as inscription on the list.

Carved deity images in Hefeng's Cishan worship

Chenguo village, Wucunqiao, Hefeng Town, holds its Wufan festival from the seventh to the ninth day of the fourth lunar month, and one rite is the "bringing out of the deity". The deity carried is the Cishan Emperor. A media report of May 2025 describes the image as having two parts, a red-faced, long-bearded mask face and a crown nearly two metres high, weighing more than 150 jin and "carved from camphor wood", with the crown inlaid with images of over a hundred generals from the Three Kingdoms, Sui, Tang and Song periods.

This is the only concrete record in this library of a carved wooden deity image within Hefeng Town. The report gives no carver, workshop, place of making or date, and no source in this library establishes whether this image is the "deity image" named in the project title. The Wufan festival to which the image belongs is a folk-custom item, a different matter from this traditional fine-art item.

Wording of the item name

The name uses a word for images of deities. Which pantheon those images belong to is not stated in the notice. This entry follows the wording of the notice without rewriting it.

Points in doubt

First, the notice does not state which pantheon the "deity images" belong to, and this library has found no source describing the subjects, sizes or uses of the project's images.

Second, the link between the wooden Cishan Emperor image and this project is unproven. The report records only its material and form, not its carver or place of making, so the image cannot be taken as a product or representative work of this item.

To be added

• the timber used and the criteria for selecting it;
• the steps of roughing out, carving, smoothing, lacquering and gilding;
• the subjects, sizes and uses of the statues;
• the line of transmission, the workshops and the safeguarding measures.

All of the above remain absent after searching this library's seven source layers, namely official web pages, published notices and lists, the local-gazetteer system, academic papers, classical full texts, media reports and maps; this entry adds nothing by conjecture.