China · Funerary Painting; Relief Gilding
彩绘棺木 (cǎihuì guānmù); 棺材画 / 棺绘 (guān huì); 画棺材 (huà guāncai); Lanzhou dialect: 老房, 寿材 (shòu cái)
In parts of Gansu Province a coffin is painted by a specialist. The surface is leveled with putty, a base color is laid, and figures, auspicious emblems and inscriptions are painted to a fixed scheme, with outlines often raised in piped paste and gilded (沥粉描金). The scheme depends on who died: age, standing and the manner of death decide whether the coffin gets a dragon-and-crane relief, the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, a hundred 'longevity' characters or only plain red. In Lanzhou the pattern is traced by local tradition to the Ming official Peng Ze, with a python at the head and a crane at the foot; the rarest technique, 'floating' (漂活), fastens figures modeled from cardboard and wire onto the coffin. The craft belongs to a long Chinese tradition of painted coffins attested in archaeology from the Warring States onward, but this record covers the living folk practice in Gansu, which has collapsed in Lanzhou under cremation rules and continues in some rural districts of Dingxi.
Risk level: Endangered · Not listed by UNESCO. Designated Lanzhou municipal intangible heritage in 2011 (Sixth Tone, 2018). Dingxi city-level lists include 'Zhang County painted coffin art' (2nd batch, 2009) and 'Anding coffin-making technique' (5th batch, 2016). Not found in the readable part of the Gansu provincial list (to 31 December 2024; Lanzhou entries checked in full, other prefectures partly truncated). No national listing found.
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