What is Zeya and where is it? What is the Paper Mountain? What is the thousand-year-old Paper Mountain? What is the thousand-year-old Paper Mountain culture? For a long time, Zeya is “obscured” by a lack of standard place names, administrative territories and written historical materials. To outsiders, Zeya has always been looked upon as a mystery, and many are keen to crack open the secrets of the “living fossil” of mankind’s natural and cultural history.

For a decade, Zhou Rongguang has traveled in and out of the Zeya mountain area, culminating in nine books totaling 5.1 million words. Zhou's greatest wish is to publish and promote these books on the Paper Mountain culture in Wenzhou's Zeya area.

Thanks to an 86-year-old retiree, more people will now get to know about Zeya and its mysterious Paper Mountain culture. For more than a decade, Zhou Rongguang, a retired official from Ouhai district in Wenzhou city, has been dedicated to one single goal: to write about the Zeya mountain area and its papermaking tradition. The result? A series of six books, including The Paper Mountain Culture and the Natural Laws, A Study on Wenzhou’s Screen Paper Prints, The Four Treasures of the Paper Mountain and Journeys to the Paper Mountain, which have been published recently by Xinhua Publishing House, Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, China Nationality Culture Press and China Book Publishing House.

When it comes to the origins of Zeya and the Paper Mountain, and the significance of the Paper Mountain culture, there seems no standard answers readily available, which has become the historical mission for the local Zeya people to find out.

Zhou Rongguang

It has taken Zhou Rongguang a full sixty years to know Zeya. In 1952, the first time that Zhou had ever set foot in the Zeya mountain area, he was there calibrating the local agricultural land. In 1962, he was put in charge of the poverty alleviation campaing in the Zeya mountain area. Twenty years later, Zhou was finally able to reunite with his family in Shanghai, but poverty alleviation in Zeya was never far from his mind. In September 1987, he asked to return to Zeya and stayed there for another six years.

From the very beginning, Zhou has been fascinated by the enigmatic Zeya. For one thing, he found that the name of the place is a puzzle in itself. While a temple inscription dating back to the year 889 in the Tang dynasty (618-907) shows that humans had long been settled in the area, no specific names were recorded, except for the general designation “mountains in the west of Yongjia [as Wenzhou has been historically known]”. It wasn’t until the late Qing (1616-1911) period that the name “Zhaixia” was found in the local annals. Zhaixia, literally meaning “under the mountain village”, is pronounced Zeya in the local dialect.

After Zhou Rongguang returned to Zeya, he became the head of the then Zeya Area. He immersed himself into the place, vowing to be a genuine “Zeyan”. Soon he covered more than 80 villages in the area, had heart-to-heart talks with the locals and got to know the details of every household, every hill, every river. He concluded that Zeya, located in the Oujiang River tributary, has a thousand years of papermaking history, which started in the Tang and Song (960-1279) dynasties and prospered in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties. The place has historically known as the “Paper Mountain”. Indeed, throughout the millennium, the way of producing paper in this area remains unchanged.

Zhou Rongguang and paper farmers from the Zeya mountain area examine the raw paper materials used for making the screen paper prints.

For Zhou, the Paper Mountain culture is a paper agricultural culture in the mountainous areas of east China’s coast. It is a unique regional culture in China and a branch of the agricultural culture of the ancient Ouyue culture. He defined it as “a special regional with the thousand-year-old Paper Mountain culture as its core, born in the primitive ancient landscape culture”. Now, it has become a “Paper Mountain Culture Museum” without walls.

The Zeya people’s unique way of production and life is described as human-oriented, taking nature as the source. They build houses on flat ground and till farmland on the hillside; they plant bamboo along the mountains and build water hammers alongside the rivers; they soak fresh bamboo in lime water and mash it through water hammers; they carry goods with shoulders and hands, and walk barefooted; they make tools out of stones and bamboo; they sell paper outside of the mountain area whiling living inside; and the whole family works and provide for themselves. The temperament of Zeya people is considered to be natural and ingenuous.

Over the years, Zhou had stayed in the Zeya mountain area, traversing there, sleeping there, eating there, mesmerized in particular by the age-old Paper Mountain culture. He was determined to bring the Paper Mountain culture to a much wider audience in his lifetime.

The “paper farmers’ dishes”, a subject that Zhou Rongguang has studied on.

In 2010, on the second day of the Chinese New Year, the then 75-year-old Zhou, accompanied by his wife, who doubled as his “secretary”, and his daughter, who served as his “chauffer”, hit the road for his first project on the Paper Mountain culture: the local cuisine. In the next five years, he collected over 100 cooking utensils and 1,082 dishes, which he then put into 23 categories and 120 series. In addition, he also obtained more than 30 snacks, 10 acholic drinks, 10 soft drinks as well as 18 dietary therapy dishes and their cook methods, apart from wedding banquet customs. He personally spent one million yuan and published with the Zhonghua Book Company the first ever book series in China on “paper farmers’ dishes”.

The Wenzhou Screen Paper Prints.

The screen paper prints are another project that Zhou worked on. Based on the Zeya screen paper, the traditional screen paper prints, often used as paper charms, have been lost in recent decades. However, after Zhou examined Wenzhou’s movable type printing craft, its traditional paper charm printing craft and the screen papermaking craft in Zeya, he not only helped revive the practice of screen paper prints, which is now called “Wenzhou Screen Paper Prints”, but also published a monograph — again China’s first — on it.

In another of Zhou’s book, Four Treasures of the Paper Mountain, he recounts the origins, development and significance of the four treasures in Zeya. The paper farmers’ dishes are seen as the essence of the local food culture and a mirror of Zeya’s unique regional culture, while the screen paper prints are regarded as a historical art form given new life.

On the other hand, the “Zhou’ao Hanging Lanterns”, observed on the 13th of the first lunar month for the past 600 years, is one of the largest and best-preserved lantern traditional fairs in Southern Zhejiang, and it is also an intangible cultural heritage protected at the provincial level. The fourth treasure, the Siliandui Papermaking Workshops, mainly consisting of workshops in Shiqiao village, Hengyang village and Tangzhai village in the Zeya mountain area, is the “living fossil” of China’s ancient papermaking craft.

On top of the above works, Zhou has studied on Zeya’s economic, industrial, employment and resources structure, offering advice and formulating plans for its future development. He has also composed essays (collected in the Journeys to the Paper Mountain) and even lyrics for Zeya.

Paper Mountain Culture and the Natural Laws , a book in the series.

While often self-deprecatingly calling himself an incompetent writer, Zhou has published 22 books and some 100 papers in the past four decades. In July 2020, even when he was diagnosed with liver cancer and had to undergo operation, Zhou still insisted on finishing writing on Zeya and the Paper Mountain culture. The six books on the history of Zeya and the Paper Mountain are valuable records on this unique culture, and on the natural beauty and social customs of the Oujiang River area. Their publication is also a testament to Zhou’s perseverance and his love for Zeya.  

Editor: Li Qiaoqiao