(Source: Zaoyi Biography)
Dot Cui tian-tsui
Also known in English: kingfisher feather art. ）
For two millennia, China has used the kingfisher's blue feathers as inlaid exquisite artwork and decorations, from hairpins, headdresses, and fans to screens. While Western art collectors are concentrating on other areas of Chinese art, including porcelain, lacquerware, carving, cloisonné, silk, painting, kingfisher art is unfamiliar to people abroad.
Cui, that is, cui feather, the feather of the kingfisher. Diancui is the perfect combination of China's traditional metal craft and feather craft, first with gold or gilded metal to make a base with different patterns, and then the bright blue feathers on the back of the kingfisher are carefully inlaid on the seat to make a variety of jewelry utensils.
Unlike most animals with fluorescent, electrochemical colors, such as the wings of the butterfly, the intense color of kingfisher feathers does not come from the feathers themselves, but from the rainbow color refracted by light, like a triangular prism that breaks down white light into a rainbow color of its spectrum. The feathers formed by these microstructures are called photonic crystals.
Modeling under a photonic crystal microscope.
The most expensive dot kingfisher works use kingfishers from Cambodia. Such a large export demand made the feather export trade a means of amassing wealth for the Khmer Empire to finance the construction of temples such as the magnificent Angkor Wat.
The finest works of Diancui were collected and used by the royal family or high-ranking Chinese government officials (known as "Chinese (bureaucrats)"). Sadly, the use of kingfisher feathers has led to mass slaughter of many kingfisher species.
Diancui art eventually withered away in the 1940s-1950s, during the Cultural Revolution after the founding of New China.
Now there is a partial restoration of the imitation of the process of point cui, but the imitation raw materials are not real jade feathers after all, it is impossible to have both form and god.
Xiaobian also lamented that this kind of craftsmanship is exquisite at the same time, but also with how much interest and slaughter came.
How much of human beings' pursuit and worship of beauty is in harmony with nature and with moderation?
I remember that I once watched an African documentary, and a local indigenous tribe will also use the green feather as an ornament and decoration for major festivals, but the indigenous people have special bird catchers, and it is not over-hunting. Because they know that nature, animals, plants and humans, are in harmony.