The family that kept a new-year print alive

Dong Ho is a village in the Bac Ninh area, north of Hanoi, that gave its name to a style of folk woodblock painting. For generations, northern Vietnamese families bought the prints before Tet and hung them in the home as decoration and as good-luck wishes. Scenes of rural life, animals and proverbs are typical subjects. Each print is made from a series of carved blocks, one for the outline and others for each colour, pressed by hand on to paper.

Reporting from Vietnamese outlets describes how the craft shrank from a trade shared by many clans in the village to just a few families. The Hanoi Times, in September 2014, profiled artisans Nguyen Dang Che and Nguyen Huu Sam as among the few remaining practitioners, and reported that Che's family had invested more than three billion dong in a centre to preserve and show the craft. Coverage by Vietnam News Agency and other outlets also describes Che persuading relatives in the mid-1990s to return from other work to printing, and a younger family member coming home from Hanoi to carry on.

The reporting emphasises tradition. Pigments are described as natural, drawn from plants, shell and charcoal, and the family aims to follow the older processes rather than industrial shortcuts. That commitment is also what makes the craft hard to sustain, because it is slow and the market is small.

If you visit near Tet or at another time of year, buy directly from the workshop, ask how a print was made, and treat the price as reflecting hand labour. A few prints, framed at home, are a better souvenir than a drawer of mass-produced copies.