Size: 5.5 x 5.5 x 10cm

Material: Clay from Huishan

Huishan Clay Figure comes from the culture and custom of Wuxi, Jiangsu province, and is one of the most popular art in China for its succinct design. The typical product is "Da A Fu", a plump smiling little boy holding a fish or a peach which symbolizes fortune,happiness and wealth, it is a good gift to buy for friends or for own house decoration.

The history of Huishan Clay Figure can trace back to 500 hundreds years ago in Ming Dynasty. There is a fairy tale regarding "Da A Fu", it said about 500 years ago, there lived a kink of lion with green hair at the foot of the Hui Mountain. The lion feed it self with babies. To get rid of the beast and live a happy life, local people prayed to god for blessing ,then god disguised themselves as boy and girl attendants of fairies and managed to subdue the monster. To memorize god, local people took the shape of cute boy and girl and respectively named Fortune and Happiness.

Another typical product of clay figure is masks of Peking Opera. Peking Opera is an important part of the Chinese culture. Idols crafted for replicating the characters, or the scenes in Peking Operas are known as "the hand crafted opera figures". Those opera figures are famous for capturing the best parts of operas, expressions of actors and bringing the main themes of the operas.

The raw material of Huishan Clay Figure is one kind of special dark clay which can only be found in the rice fields near the Huishan Mountain. The Clay figurines from outlining to dyeing, from molding to finishing, the whole process of making clay sculpture is purely manual, after shaped it will be painted in detail by sculptors, and heated to firm in kilns for days. It was the continuous 800’C high temperature in the kiln that provides the figurines with a bright and solid colour. In old times the heat was maintained by mountains of burning wood and now replaced by gas kilns.

The artists created various of human and animal shapes through hand-labor, every clay craftwork is unique and shows the honest, lively and unpretending charm, and also reflects the deligence and wisdom of Chinese folk artists.