The dragon boat flower with fine lines in Yueqing, also known as "Yueqing Fine Line Carving Paper", inherits the skills of "hollowing out" and "carving, picking, carving and cutting" in Chinese paper-cutting art, and the earliest written record is in Dade period of Yuan Dynasty. In Yueqing Arts and Crafts, it reads:
There is a big song in the club, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony is held for the citizens to have fun with them.
In the Ming Dynasty, a kind of dragon lantern named "Jewel Dragon" appeared in Liushi, Yueqing, Zhejiang Province, and the custom of "dragon boat race" gradually took shape. One of the main decorations on "Dragon Boat Lantern" is paper engraved with fine lines, so Yueqing paper engraved with fine lines is commonly known as "Dragon Boat Flower". In this way, Yueqing fine line engraving paper has a history of seven or eight hundred years.
Because an important criterion for folk to judge the beauty of "Dragon Boat Flower" is to see whether its pattern is fine and neat. At that time, several paper-cut artists made great efforts to make "fine lines" and compare whose patterns were fine and delicate. Knife is becoming more and more exquisite, tending to be "finely carved", completely breaking away from "cutting", completing the sublimation of "engraving paper" and pursuing "nuance".
Dragon Boat Flower not only maintains the essence of paper-cutting art, but also enhances the artistic appreciation of folk paper-cutting. Folk artists can carve dozens of thin lines on a piece of paper half a foot square. The pattern is as thin as hair, and the subtlety of the knife is amazing.
There are many kinds of fine lines, such as one-way lock, two-way lock, diagonal line, tianjiaotian, orthographic grid, fish scale pattern and so on.
The dragon boat flower with fine lines in Yueqing, Wenzhou is known as "micro-carving paper-cutting" and "a must in China". Due to the development of Youlong, dragon boat flowers with fine lines are constantly brought forth new ideas, forming strong regional characteristics.