Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

The Fireworks Man was versatile. He was the village Lacquer Man as well. As crude as his craft was, what he did impressed me deeply.

Some of the eating utensils his family used were crafted by the Lacquer Man. They were made not of china or baked clay but of grass and lacquer. The bowls, pitch black, gave off a gloss in daylight.

On the hillsides around my home village grew the lacquer tree. Most folk dreaded it. Some individuals, who happened to touch its bark or leaves or twigs, would develop a terrible allergic reaction. The skin would go fiery and itchy, and the inflammation would not be gone for weeks or months. The sufferer ended up with a rash of blisters all over. That was painful. One year, Mother suffered from this ordeal.

The Lacquer Man did not shrink from the plant. Instead, with a large bowl in hand, the master paid regular calls on all the lacquer trees scattered about the farm, as if they were his kids. Because of the hazardous nature of this particular species, the craftsman never worried about his trees being robbed of the prized product by other countryfolk. After a slit was carved in the trunk, a sticky milky sap trickled out and was collected in the bowl. The sap was brought home and mixed with tung oil, which was extracted from seeds of the tung tree.

The lacquer that the man thus made from the sap was applied over his furniture, and as mentioned earlier, their bowls and dishes were made from grass and lacquer. A grass, locally dubbed ‘dragon beard’, was woven into a bowl frame, which was coated repeatedly with the black liquid over some time. Neither their furniture nor bowls looked inviting, for the blackish colour always gave me goose pimples. Coffins at funerals in the farming community were of the same sinister tone. Very likely they were brushed with the organic lacquer too.

The Lacquer Man probably sold his ware, but it was such a long time ago that I do not have the haziest recollection of it. One detail that I am sure of is that his lacquer was indeed applied to coffins, because at the time no artificial synthetic varnish was accessible to the villagers.