Yangshuo Painting Fan (Fuli Painting Fan)

The Yangshuo painting fan, also called the Fuli painting fan, is made in Fuli town of Yangshuo county and is a folk handcraft handed down there for generations. Fuli was honoured by the Ministry of Culture as "China's First Town of Painting Fans"; the fans use bamboo for ribs and paper for the face, painted with the landscapes of Guilin and Yangshuo and with flowers, birds, fish and beasts, finely made, and as Yangshuo tourism grew they became a keepsake prized by visitors.

The making of the fans runs through choosing bamboo, fashioning the ribs, mounting the paper, laying the ink, applying colour and finishing, with painters using the brush of Chinese painting to set landscapes and auspicious motifs onto the face, the fans large or small, folding or round, at once a thing to cool oneself with and a portable little landscape to carry away.

The Yangshuo painting fan carries the scenery of Guilin outward in a portable form and represents the marriage of local folk art with tourism culture, offering a reference for the study and contemporary transmission of northern-Guangxi folk painting and handcraft.