China has an ancient history of creating fireworks

By Nathan Smith

Yu County is way out there. It’s is a hub of villages in remote agrarian China. The farmland is irrigated by the yearly flooding of a river too small to be on the map.

Each village has a communal donkey, grazing dried corn stalks in a field. However, the seven-hour bus journey into the desert was worth it. I was there to see Da Shu Hua—fireworks made of molten iron.

Local villagers, wearing only a sheepskin vest and wide-brimmed hat for protection, toss molten iron at the town gate. When the metal hits the cold stone, it explodes.

The bus dropped me in Yuxing—the largest town in the county. My taxi driver was a retired military man who quickly became my guide and friend. His name was Jian and he was a proud communist—the first and only I met in China. China is a communist country, but only 10% of the population hold party membership.

The Abandoned Fortress

I asked him to take me to Xidaping Fortress. The first thing he said was, “there’s nothing special about that place.”

Xidaping is a Ming Dynasty fortress build atop a desert mesa. I overheard two locals speaking of it en route to Yu County.

Despite Jian’s doubts, we left Yuxing, but an hour later paused in a three-hut village. Jian needed directions. Tourists don’t go to Xidaping.

Xidaping is made of mud and stone—a giant adobe fortress. The floor of the entranceway fell in long ago. Jian—being a spritely man in his 60s—scurried along the ledge and hopped across the gaping holes.

Me—being a clumsy, jetlagged travel-writer—tried not to fall in and die.

Inside, the fortress was empty—plundered hundreds of years ago. All that’s left are the fortress walls and hearth. Jiansong and I climbed the wall and looked across the desert.

I once climbed a lonesome Mongolian mountain and felt like I was the only man in the world. Here, I felt something similar. I was seeing something few ever do—an abandoned fortress in a desert populated by agrarian villages. I was the first foreigner some of those villagers ever saw.

Traditional Chinese Paper Cutting

Jian then took me to shop for jianzhi in Nuanquan. (The village in Yu County where Da Shu Hua is performed.) Jianzhi is a traditional form of Chinese paper cutting similar to papel picado in Mexico.

Think of the paper snowflakes you made as a kid, but far more intricate. Artists cut red paper with an Xacto knife. They place it flat on a cutting board, use heavy paperweights, and cut freehand. There’s a design for each Chinese zodiac and every lucky symbol.

The finished work is fragile—it rips at the slightest touch. Toilet paper is the closest analog to its thinness.

Jian said the villagers in Nuanquan have been making Jianzhi for 1,000 years. Traditionally, it is hung over doorways during the Lunar New Year. If you’ve ever had Chinese neighbors, you’ve probably seen jianzhi. They usually hang it over their doors around February.

I picked out a few pieces to purchase. When the shopkeeper quoted the price, Jian coughed and said, “don’t cheat the foreigner.”

The shopkeeper slashed the price to a quarter of the original.

The Fireworks Made of Molten Iron

When I asked Jian about Da Shu Hua, he said the story began 500 years ago. In the 16th century, Nuanquan was too poor to afford New Year’s fireworks.

The local blacksmiths devised a daring replacement. They gathered scrap iron from around the village, melted it down, and threw it at the town gate.

The result was fireworks more thrilling than the traditional black powder rockets.

Today, only four blacksmiths are left to carry on the tradition. They wear nothing more than a sheepskin vest and wide-brimmed hat. No goggles, no fireproof suits.

As the sun set, Jian took me to where they perform the fireworks. Three men came out to the town gate. One carried a wooden soup ladle, the other two carried a stone cauldron of molten iron. Sparks jumped from the pot.

The man with the ladle was fast, which I imagine you have to be when tossing molten iron over your shoulder. He dipped into the cauldron and flung spoon-full after spoon-full at the gate.

Jian said he knew the blacksmith performing. “Once, he told me he accidentally swallowed a spark of the iron. He now performs with his mouth closed.”

Even from a distance, I could feel the metal’s heat. It’s like a metal foundry with a man at the center. A constant explosion of iron splashed all around him. It smelt metallic, like a machine shop. The sparks shot forty feet into the air. I could hear the solid iron tears clatter to the ground.

Once one pot was exhausted, the other blacksmiths brought a fresh one. The man with the ladle threw iron at the wall for twenty minutes without slowing.

That was when I saw it—the reason it’s called Da Shu Hua. 打树花 translates as “big tree flowers.” The iron crackling against the wall makes the tree and the fizzling sparks, the flowers. 

Nathan Smith is a travel and nature writer currently working in The Balkans. You can see more from Nathan at nathansmithbooks.com. Be sure to join his mailing list for a free copy of his book on China, The Middle Kingdom.