An afternoon with a Miao silversmith in Kong Bai

The road into Kong Bai narrows past the last of the rice terraces and gives up on asphalt somewhere above the river. We arrived a little after one in the afternoon, the heat heavy enough that the cicadas had gone quiet, and found Wu Shifu sitting on a low stool in the doorway of his workshop, sorting through a tray of half-finished butterflies. Each one was no larger than a thumbnail, hammered from a sheet of silver thinner than rice paper. He did not look up. He was counting, and the count mattered more than the greeting.

The workshop is six generations old, which in Kong Bai means it predates the road, the electricity, and most of the houses on the lane. Wu's great-great-grandfather worked here; so did his father, who is eighty-one and was asleep in the back room when we arrived. The building itself is unremarkable, two storeys of weathered fir, a packed-earth floor darkened by decades of charcoal dust. What gives it away as a silversmith's studio is the sound, even before you step inside: a doubled, slightly off-beat hammering, as if two clocks were keeping different time in the same room.

Wu's apprentice, his nephew Long, was at the anvil when we sat down. He is twenty-four, has been hammering full-time since he was sixteen, and was working a length of silver wire into the spiral base of a hairpin. The rhythm was not the steady tap one expects. It was three quick strikes, a pause, two heavier ones, another pause, then a long roll of light taps that sounded almost like rain. Wu told us, without turning from his butterflies, that the rhythm is how the silver is taught to bend in the direction you want. Hit it the same way every time and it stiffens. Vary the beat and it stays alive.

We had come to ask about the headdress. A full Miao festival headdress from this part of eastern Guizhou weighs, on average, ten kilograms in pure silver. Wu's workshop produces perhaps four a year, each one commissioned for a specific daughter in a specific village, and each one composed of somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and forty separate components: the crown of phoenix and buffalo horns, the curtain of small bells, the rows of butterflies and fish and peach blossoms, the chains that fall along the cheekbones, the chest plates that descend to the waist. None of these pieces is decorative in the way a Western viewer might assume. Each one records something.

“The headdress is, in this sense, a savings account that is also a costume that is also a genealogy.”

Wu showed us a finished crown that was waiting to be collected by a family in the next valley. The two large horns curving up from the brow, he explained, marked the girl's clan; the smaller phoenix between them, her mother's clan. A row of nine fish along the lower band counted the generations the family had lived in Kong Bai. The butterflies, which we had assumed were ornamental, were arranged in a specific order that traced the marriages between her grandmother's line and her grandfather's. To read the headdress correctly, an elder from a neighbouring village could, in principle, recite three hundred years of her family history without ever speaking to her.

The casting is done in the back room, where the father sleeps. Wu uses lost-wax for the larger pieces, the horns and the central phoenix, and hand-hammering for everything flat. The wax models are carved from a yellow beeswax he buys from a beekeeper two valleys west, mixed with pine resin to harden it enough for fine detail. He showed us a wax buffalo horn, no longer than his palm, with feather-fine ridges scored along its length using a sharpened bicycle spoke. The mould, when it is ready, will be packed in clay from the riverbank and fired in a charcoal kiln behind the house. A single horn takes him about four days. The headdress, start to finish, takes between eight and fourteen months.

We asked about the weight. Ten kilograms is heavy enough that most daughters cannot wear the full headdress for more than a few hours; at the lusheng festival, where she will dance in it, she will need her mother and an aunt walking beside her to steady her neck when she turns. Wu said the weight is the point. A daughter's headdress is also her dowry. The silver is not symbolic wealth; it is wealth. If the family falls on hard times, pieces can be sold or melted. If she divorces, the headdress goes with her. If her own daughter is born, parts of it will be reworked into a smaller version for the child. The headdress is, in this sense, a savings account that is also a costume that is also a genealogy.

This is the part of the conversation where we expected him to lament that the young are losing interest, that the festivals are smaller, that the silver is going into museums instead of onto heads. He did not say any of this. He said that the commissions had actually increased in the last decade, that families who had moved to Guiyang or Guangzhou for work were sending money home specifically to have their daughters' headdresses made in Kong Bai rather than buying machine-stamped versions from the county town. The weight, he said, is how you tell the difference. A machine-stamped headdress weighs perhaps three kilograms. You can feel the lie in your hands.

What is changing, he said, is the silver itself. His grandfather worked with silver coins, Mexican dollars and old Republican-era yuan, melted down and re-hammered. Wu now buys ingots from a refinery in Kunming, ninety-nine point nine percent pure, which is softer and easier to work than the alloyed coin silver but takes a different kind of patience. He misses the coins, partly because each one had a history you could feel under the hammer, and partly because the refinery silver requires him to alloy in a small amount of copper himself to give the headdress the structural rigidity it needs to hold its shape over a dancing daughter's head.

Long, the nephew, joined the conversation only once. We had asked whether he would inherit the workshop, and Wu had answered for him, saying yes, of course. Long looked up from his hairpin and said, in the local dialect that his uncle then translated, that he would inherit the workshop but he was not yet sure he would inherit the count. The count is the part of the craft that Wu has not finished teaching him: which butterfly goes where, in which order, for which clan, for which marriage. There are no written records. Wu carries it in his head, and his father carried it before him, and the transfer happens slowly, headdress by headdress, over the years that remain.

We left in the late afternoon, when the light through the workshop door had turned the colour of weak tea and Long had moved on to a second hairpin. Wu walked us as far as the lane and pointed out the house where the next headdress would be delivered, in the spring, in time for the girl's seventeenth birthday. He said her name; we did not write it down. The hammering started again behind us before we had reached the end of the row, three quick strikes, a pause, two heavier ones, the silver being taught, once more, in which direction to bend.