Print Artists Village

This guide to Print Artists Village in Shenzhen opens in October 1936, when Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, spent an afternoon with young printmakers at a Shanghai gallery in one of his last public appearances. Among them was Chen Yanqiao, who had grown up in these very Hakka lanes before leaving in 1931 to join Shanghai's radical woodcut movement. You'll hear how the two exchanged more than twenty letters and how Lu Xun championed Chen's work in his own anthology. Along the way the guide traces the stone diaolou watchtowers the Hakka built for protection, long before any of this village's artists were born.