She began to carve, very carefully. Immediately a few curvy lines appeared upon the wood piece she was holding.

"These are the hairs of a dragon," explained Zu, 21. "The dragon will be perched on top of the corner tower of the Forbidden City."

Like Zu, each of her 30-odd colleagues in the austere workshop has about 100 different kinds of carving knives at their disposal. Each works with a piece of red sandalwood - "the gem in the wood," or with ebony, poplar, boxwood, mahogany and the extraordinary Dalbergia oderifera (ghost eyes).

In their dexterous hands, the pieces of hardwood are turned into flowers, birds, deer, dragons, phoenix...

When the pieces are assembled, they become gilded screens and thrones, cabinets, Buddha niches, mirrors and an array of other full-size furniture pieces that can only be found in the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City in Beijing.

They are also pieced together into scale reproductions of corner-towers of the Forbidden City and siheyuan (traditional courtyard houses), all built without using a single nail.

They have also created 12 screens, each 2.7 meters long and 1.77 meters tall, which depict hundreds of people going about their business along the banks of a river in the prosperous capital of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1279) on the day of the Qingming, or Mourning the Dead. The total work weighs 5,397 kilograms.

The workers, almost all from rural carpenters' families across China, take great pride in their craft with their collection of artistic handiwork on permanent display near their workshop at the Chinese Red Sandalwood Museum, located by the Jingtong Highway at Gaobeidian in Beijing. The museum is one of China's heritage listed sites.

The person responsible for gathering the rural carpenters and turning them into one of the leading collectives of contemporary hardwood artisans in China is Chan Laiwa.

Lifelong passion

Chan, 62, a Hong Kong resident now living in Beijing, is a renowned Chinese business figure, having made the Forbes' rich list of China for the last two years.

Of her several multi-million-dollar ventures, she has treasured most the Chinese Red Sandalwood Museum, built with her investment of 200 million yuan (US$24 million).

"In terms of quantity and concentration (of Ming and Qing dynasties red sandalwood furniture), it seems no other place is able to rival Red Sandalwood Museum," said Wang Shixiang, renowned for his research into ancient Chinese cultural history, especially Ming Dynasty furniture.

Under Chan's curatorship, the museum has a fine collection of some 200 pieces of original Ming and Qing dynasty antique furniture.

Meanwhile, hundreds more exhibits have also come out of the joint work of herself and her artisans.

"Red sandalwood is my life," she said in an exclusive interview with China Daily.

A descendant of the Manchu imperial family who established the last feudal dynasty of the Qing and ruled China between 1644 and 1911, Chan spent her childhood years in the Summer Palace in Beijing.

Almost all the furniture that accompanied her early years was made of zitan, as red sandalwood is called in Chinese.

"Ever since then, I cannot part with the zitan because it has given me beauty and health and invigorated my life," said Chan, who continues to sleep in a red sandalwood bed and whose nine-storey mansion behind the red sandalwood museum is largely furnished with zitan hardwood furniture.

Zitan is an incredibly rare wood famed for its density, tight straight grain and rich color. Growing only in tropical areas, it takes about 300 years before a tree can acquire the right density, even then up to 80 per cent of the wood quarried will be rendered useless because of insects and viruses.

With her passion for red sandalwood, Chan, who moved to Hong Kong in the 1970s, spent money and energy collecting the fine wood.

Following China's period of reform and improved access to the outside world, Chan shipped her entire collection of red sandalwood to Beijing.

While investing in real estate, hotel, trade and food sectors from Beijing through South East Asia and to Australia, over the years Chan also opened small workshops in the suburbs of Beijing, traveling to nearby villages known for their traditional skill in carpentry to hire skilled workers, men and women alike.

"I want to remake every piece of the red sandalwood furniture that I saw in my childhood," Chan said.

Why? Because "every piece of it embodies the centuries' old ingenuity and artistry of us Chinese and I don't want the heritage to be lost," Chan said.

Her passion to recreate traditional Chinese zitan handicraft and her pursuit for perfection has moved curators from the Palace Museum. Chan and her colleagues have been allowed to look carefully at the treasures kept at the museum so that they will be able to make similar treasures out of red sandalwood.

Today, she has employed about 1,000 farmer-artisans, who come from all over the country, both northern and southern parts of China.

"The carpenters from the south are more ingenious with the small decorations while those from the north have a sense for the loftiness of the works," she said.

She has had her own way of training her workers.

"I work with them," she said.

To be able to study the ancient structure, Chan and her workers dismantled piece by piece the exquisite zitan wardrobe she had inherited from her parents as a wedding gift. She had done that during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) so she was able to hide and preserve some of the ancient treasure from the Red Guards, although she also witnessed other pieces taken away.

She has also tried her hand at every working process, from penciling out the designs on paper to chiselling, carving, engraving to even putting wax on to the wood.

She is never too pushy about the speed. Instead, she asks her workers to take their time.

"She always tells us that we should do our utmost to put together works that are unparalleled in the world," said Zheng Zhonghua, 37 and from Hebei Province, who joined Chan's zitan workshop 10 years ago.

What are unparalleled works? "The works, or the engraved flowers, birds and animals should come alive with the right mood," Chan said.

Chan encouraged her workers to observe flowers in the early morning and watch the movement of the petals, as she had done quite a number of times herself.

"The flowers look the most beautiful in the autumn at sunrise when the petals and leaves start stretching after savoring the morning dewdrop," she said. "I ask my workers to capture that moment of the flowers."

Chan is also very strict. She won't allow any sloppiness, such as a tiny crack in between the mortise and the tenon, which holds together the traditional hardwood furniture as well as the building structures.

"She would drop a piece hard on the floor to test if the mortise and the tenon are tightly fitted," said Chen Peilin, director of Chan's Fu Wah HK (Beijing) Furniture Enterprise Co Ltd. The pieces break if there are tiny cracks.

"She has a sharp eye for any slight blemishes," Dong Guoliang, 58 and from Hebei Province, recalled. "She was the one who spotted a dark bean-sized dot upon a huge screen."

After about 20 years' effort, Chan and her workers have created a few hundred pieces of traditional furniture and home decor.

Although each one of them is considered a piece of art, Chan hasn't sold a single piece.

She is now negotiating to bring some of the new zitan works to Germany for an exhibition and a possible auction.

"I want people from the entire world to see the full range of the traditional hardwood artistry of the Chinese," she said.

(China Daily January 22, 2003)