Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence during which NPR’s worldwide group shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.
Matryoshka dolls are a Russian folks artwork custom relationship again over a century. These hole picket collectible figurines, formed like squat bowling pins and painted ornately, are available in units that nest neatly one inside one other.
On a current go to to northeastern China, I realized that many nesting dolls are made in a single small township right here — Yimianpo. It is about 125 miles from the border with Russia.
Within the late nineteenth century, when the Russian Empire began constructing rail strains to broaden eastward, Yimianpo was a key cease. The matryoshka — or tao wa, as they’re referred to as in China — adopted.
A workshop proprietor invited me into his carving store. There, amid thigh-high piles of wooden shavings, I watched an artisan hammer a block of linden wooden from a close-by forest onto a lathe. Wielding gouges and chisels that appeared like diabolical hearth pokers, he formed the wooden right into a rounded silhouette. Then he carved one other. And one other.
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