Chinese Ceremonial Papers
Many hundreds of varieties of prayer sheets used to be produced by specialist ma-chang printers all over China. Many of the limited range made today are the cheapest offset-litho jobs on the cheapest machine-made papers, but the designs still imitate the original woodblock prints.
Modern Taiwanese sheets of cash, made from recycled paper, sold very cheaply by weight in Taipei.
Mock money and other ceremonial papers for religious ceremonies will be gathered in "bowls" of crude papers, usually made of a mixture of rice-straw and bamboo fibers.
The simplest form of mock money is made traditionally with thin layers of tinfoil affixed to the center of a small piece of bamboo paper, although in contemporary production the cheapest grades of machine-made paper will be used instead, and in Taiwan and Malaysia metallic inks may be used instead of tinfoil.
Here's a piece of mock money in traditional colors with auspicious designs, and tinfoil brushed over with a dye from the pagoda tree to make it resemble gold.
Contemporary Taiwanese ceremonial paper.
Another variety of gold mock money, with inscriptions and symbols for good fortune building up the design, usually still quite well printed from woodblocks on fairly good quality paper, but sometimes now mass-produced by offset lithography.
Contemporary ceremonial paper printed letterpress on a stout machine-made paper in Hong Kong. The yellow coloring might have been brushed on by hand, but otherwise production of these attractive sheets has been mechanized completely.
At the Feast of Hungry Ghosts many large sheets of paper with pictures of all the clothes one's ancestor could need are burned. Although images of the paraphernalia of modern life like cell phones and computers might be printed on these papers, the clothing is always of traditional style.
Red paper envelopes with good luck symbols have been used for many years to enclose gifts of money made at New Year. They may be found wherever any ceremonial papers are sold; today usually with elaborate and eye-catching gold-stamping.
Decorative Sunday
The examples shown here are original paper samples included in Roderick Cave's (1935-2019) two-part article on "Ceremonial Papers of the Chinese" published in Matrix 12 (Winter 1992, pp. 51-66) and Matrix 13 (Winter 1993, pp. 161-177), printed at the John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in Risbury, Herefordshire, England.
In these articles, Cave, a noted print historian, librarian, and educator, discusses the history, manufacturing, printing, distribution, and uses of Chinese ceremonial papers used in rituals, celebrations, and festivals associated with the gods and the ancestors.
Our copies of Matrix are a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.
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